Category Archives: Standards

The Power of the Sacrament

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I wrote an essay several years ago on my old blog that still gets a lot of hits even though I retired that blog and transferred everything over here. I’m glad I kept the old blog up because occasionally I get a comment there that inspires me to write something profound. Well, I think it’s at least inspired and uplifting. I felt impressed to share it here. It starts with the comment from Samantha:

Hello,

I recently started meeting with my Bishop to repent for other sins that I had committed. I was almost ready to get my Temple Recommend when Satan came at me with full-force. I began to engage in watching pornography and masturbation.

My Bishop is a wonderful man, but I am far too scared to tell him of the addiction that I am faced with. It is not a daily habit, but it is still a problem. I have prayed, and I have come to realize I cannot overcome this on my own.

I feel so awful and depressed after engaging in these behaviors. I want to be clean; I want to go to the temple.

Is there anything else that I can do that would be sufficient for the repentance process? I don’t want to tell my bishop, at all. I do want to overcome this addiction immediately though. Or at least be able to refrain from such atrocities.

Please help.

And my response:

Hi Samantha,

Much love your way. Thanks for reading and adding your comment. I commend you for your desire to increase your self-mastery. That’s a big deal. Some people are not bothered by viewing porn or masturbating. “It’s normal,” they say. In fact, we’re looked upon as being weird because we want to adhere to a higher moral standard commanded by the Lord and his servants.

I recommend visiting the sites I linked to at the end of the original essay. There is a lot of good advice to be found in those pages. Most of the comments I have added here over the years are intended to give hope and encouragement. I want to continue that in responding to your plea for help. I think I wrote this previously but I’ll share it again. This trial can bring you to the Lord.

I feel impressed to share something that may or may not be applicable to you. Perhaps it will be helpful to future readers. It has to do with responsibility and accountability. Going to the temple is a big deal. The temple is a place of revelation. When I go there I always come away knowing more about myself, what I really want out of life and what I want to do with my free time.

I’ll bet like most people who have written me about this problem, you’re fine as long as you keep yourself busy. If you’ve got a regular schedule of work or school or both, you do well in that structure. The difficulty usually comes when there are no pressing demands on your time and nobody waiting for you to do something for them – a teacher, a co-worker or a family member.

That’s usually when your thoughts turn to yourself and what you want. Those are the defining moments of life. Satan knows that, which is why temptation seems to strike hardest when you are pondering something like going to the temple. We grow and advance in our lives when we go to the temple. We come closer to fulfilling our purpose in life as we attend the temple regularly.

The best advice I can offer is to partake of the sacrament and ponder the promises found in the sacramental prayers. The key phrases are “always remember him” and “have his spirit to be with them.” I know you’ve probably heard this in every public prayer and perhaps you offer it your own private prayers – to have his spirit. But do we focus as much on “always remember him?”

There’s something special and wonderful in the Sacrament that even after more than fifty years I still don’t fully understand. No, it’s not magic. We don’t believe in that. But it is powerful and it is real. I feel hopeful after partaking of the sacrament with real intent. I want it to work in my life and because I want that, believe that it can, it does. My power is strengthened by the Sacrament.

At the end of every Sabbath day I feel empowered, partly through offering service but mostly because I have partaken of the sacrament and have pondered how I can better remember the Savior during the week. I think ahead to the moments when I know I will have down time and think what I can do to show the Lord that I do remember him and want his spirit to be with me.

For me, there is something of a miracle that takes place in those quiet moments. Because I have asked, the Lord reveals to me what I will be doing during those quiet moments during the week. I can see myself working on some writing project or some other activity that will be helpful to me and to others. No, it’s not guaranteed that I will do exactly that, but it’s clear that it can be so.

My desire to do good things and be good is strengthened. I am in a partnership with the Lord to make something special out of my life. It is in the quiet moments that my life really develops. But it doesn’t work unless I make the effort to remember the Lord. Every time I do, he gives me special sacred feelings that encourage me and help me feel like I can do all I’m asked to do.

I hope this helps. There is no easy answer. It’s not like you can turn off a switch. Sorry. You’ve got hormones and that’s a good thing. Without them you’ve have no drive or ambition in life. Well, I’m speaking from a man’s point of view. For a woman I suppose that without hormones you would have no desire to nurture and strengthen relationships. I thank God for the sex drive.

Please don’t be so hard on yourself. I have a theory about why we feel depressed or hopeless when participating in pornography or masturbation. I’ve shared it elsewhere. It has to do with the influence of unclean spirits – those who have no hope or light of Christ in their lives. It’s just a natural result of allowing them to use you, even for just a moment. You feel what they feel.

Of course if you don’t believe in the existence of evil or unclean spirits you’re going to think this is crazy. That’s OK. As I wrote at the beginning of my essay, I’m not writing this to those who are unbelievers. My experience in life has settled the question for me. They are real and I know of their existence through experiences too sacred to share. But let’s not dwell on that aspect.

Focus on the Savior. Focus on building hope. Believe that you can eventually master yourself. Be happy that you even want to. God bless you in your efforts. Nobody can do this for you. In the temple we learn all ordinances are personal, performed one at a time for each individual. No answer fits everyone, but I have found this plan has met with success time after time in others.

Good luck and God bless. You can do it.

Living up to ideal value standards

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As we go through life, we embrace high ideals as standards that we value. I am confident that most of us do not perfectly live up to those high value standards. That can cause difficulty in our lives and can be a major form of stress. How do we deal with the discrepancy of a life lived at a level below what we would like it to be?

More aptly asked, how do we live up to those high value standards that we have accepted as being desirable and believe to be achievable? Is it even possible? The Savior taught, “Be ye therefore perfect.” Modern prophets have defined specific standards of behavior that help us reach for that perfection in our day and age.

For example, the Mormon Church has one of the highest standards of sexual purity both before and after marriage, than any other organization of which I know. The standard is total abstinence before marriage and complete fidelity after marriage. Failure to adhere to these standards is a cause for disciplinary action in our church.

Mortality means being less than perfect

Instead of focusing on the formal disciplinary aspect of failing to live up to the standards of sexual purity, I’d like to address the spiritual aspect of what it does to our souls when we find ourselves weak in this area. In particular, I would like to discuss what happens to our feelings of self-worth when we yield to temptation.

Obviously I cannot address this perfectly and include a woman’s point of view because I am a man, so I’ll stick with what I know. I especially want to deal with the idea of being virtuous in our thoughts in order to be worthy of the Lord’s approbation in connection with our efforts to exercise the priesthood as found in section 121.

I am an experienced sinner. I also like to think that I am fairly knowledgeable about repentance. Like just about every other human being, I awoke one day as a teenager to discover that I had entered puberty. No surprise there, but what was very surprising to me was the discovery of the power of hormones in my life.

Virtue and purity bring personal power

Although I don’t recall my parents discussing the idea of virtue with me when I was young, I do recall many lessons in Sunday school, Seminary and especially Aaronic priesthood classes that made it clear what the Lord’s standards are. I can say that I clearly understood that virtue and priesthood power go hand in hand.

I think it is wonderful that the Young Women’s organization in the church has added virtue to the list of Young Women values. I don’t know how it got left out of the original list when it was formulated. It was probably just an oversight. If there is anything that is needed in our youth today, it is an understanding of virtue.

So I can say that before I entered puberty and began to experience the powerful pull of raging hormones for myself that I understood clearly, at least intellectually, that I needed to control myself, to resist certain behavior and to focus on creating virtue in my life. That was a relatively easy thing until my body started to change.

Dealing with temptation

One day in school I was surprised to discover that when one of my friends brought pictures out of his wallet that he had cut from a men’s magazine, I found myself interested in seeing them. Whenever this had happened before I had always turned away in disgust. It surprised me when that disgust turned to very strong curiosity.

Now girls probably won’t understand this, or maybe they do better than I realize, but men are visually stimulated and aroused. It’s just the way we are made. So I found myself viewing these pictures along with the rest of my friends, yet all the while knowing that what I was doing was wrong and that I should turn away.

Over the years, I have come to realize that it is a rare man who is not interested in viewing the naked female form, or that can turn away when presented with such a sight. It takes discipline to resist what is only natural to the natural man (Mosiah 3:19). I knew that it was wrong but I couldn’t tell you exactly why at the time.

The effect of sin on our soul

No amount of lecture from a parent or teacher can prepare you for the feelings of guilt that are experienced the first time you do something that you believed you would never do. Perhaps I am just overly sensitive to guilt, but I experienced it big time that day. I felt miserable. I felt terrible. I could barely function in school.

And yet, what bothered me most was the fact that the images I had viewed kept coming back into my mind at the most inappropriate times, like when I was talking to a girl, or the next day in Seminary class while trying to study the scriptures. This was a new phenomenon, one that I was not familiar with, and it bothered me.

I also noticed that I was strangely argumentative and ornery with my family, and especially with my mother, as if I had a chip on my shoulder. Mother and dad looked at each other knowingly, but I didn’t get it. I did not understand why I was so miserable and did not connect it with viewing pornography the previous day.

Learning about repentance

Of course, I also had an intellectual understanding of the principle of repentance. I knew that when one sinned, one could repent, or turn away from that behavior, and the Lord would take away the feelings of guilt associated with that sin. Although I had sinned before, I had never felt the need to repent up to this time in my life.

Perhaps it was the nature of the sin. We are taught in the church that sexual sin is one of the most serious, although it takes personal experience to really understand why. What I intellectually understood about sin now became a reality as I felt the guilt, shame, embarrassment and sorrow over having put those images in my mind.

Everyone has different levels of tolerance for sin before they notice how it affects them. I have come to discover that my tolerance is very low. I wanted the pain of that sin gone from my life. I was especially contrite and humble as I partook of the sacrament the next Sunday. I swore in my mind that I would never do that again.

Summary and conclusion

And you know what? I felt an immediate relief after partaking of the Sacrament. I felt happy, light and relatively care-free again, at least as care-free as a young man just entering puberty can feel. I had a long ways to go before I learned to master myself, and in fact, I still deal with the pull of the flesh every day as we all do.

The response of many in the world to what I have described here will be to shake their heads in amazement. The viewing of porn is not looked upon as a problem and especially not as a sin. They do not value the standard of sexual purity and it does not mean to them what it means to us: virtue is the source of personal power.

The world does not have the high standards that we do. We have taken upon us ideals that are difficult to achieve, and in some cases almost impossible. It is the Lord that has set these standards and it is the Lord that makes it possible for us to repent each time we fail to live up to them. Forgiveness truly is a miracle.

Related content: Healing from pornography addiction

Standards make so much more sense now

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When I was much younger and first heard the word ‘standards’ used in the church I confess that it sometimes had a negative connotation for me. It used to be that when I thought of standards I would think of commandments and then I would think of ‘things I can’t do’.

In Mutual we had ‘standards night’ in which we were reminded again of the need to watch the way we talk, the kind of music we listen to, the movies we went to see, our language, hemlines, necklines, tight-fitting sweaters, pornography and of course strict observance of the Word of Wisdom.

I never used to associate standards with safety, security, confidence and happiness, all words that come to mind today. Perhaps I can provide an example that will help explain how living certain standards contributes to true happiness. It has to do with my personal experience in listening to a certain kind of music when I was a teenager. I hope it is not offensive to anyone.

When I was about 11 years old, my brother went in the Marines. I think the discipline of the military helped him a lot in his life and allowed him to succeed in areas which he needed help. One of the things he enjoyed for the first time in his life is a regular paycheck and no major expenses. So my brother invested in cameras, stereos and a large collection of music.

When he went overseas he needed a place to store all his stuff and it ended up in my room. So I inherited an eclectic collection of music that was way beyond my own limited exposure at that point in my life. One of the types of music he had that I began to listen to was heavy metal, now a standard part of rock but new in that day (late 1960′s and early 1970′s).

My family did not like the music so I began to listen to it on headphones. I can tell you from personal experience that it is not good for a 13 year old boy to listen with headphones to Black Sabbath songs like War Pigs, Paranoid and Iron Man. It does weird things to the spirit. It’s difficult enough that the hormones of puberty were setting in at that age.

I was too young to recognize it but my family did. I began to be depressed and angry at the same time. I was no longer the sweet young boy I used to be and I couldn’t figure out why. It’s easy to see now in hindsight that the music I listened to then played a big part in my misery. I wish I had heard and understood Boyd K Packer’s talk on worthy music and worthy thoughts.

“Young people, you cannot afford to fill your minds with the unworthy music of our day. It is not harmless. It can welcome onto the stage of your mind unworthy thoughts and set a tempo to which they dance and to which you may act. You degrade yourself when you identify with those things that at times surround extremes in music – the shabbiness, the irreverence, the immorality, the addictions. Such music is not worthy of you.”

Today we are blessed with clear and concise direction from prophets and apostles on the standards we should use to guide our lives. The booklet, For the Strength of Youth, give sage advice, “Choose carefully the music you listen to. Pay attention to how you feel when you are listening. Don’t listen to music that drives away the Spirit, encourages immorality, glorifies violence, uses foul or offensive language, or promotes Satanism or other evil practices.”

Sometimes I wish I could give my learning experience to young people who I see going down the same road I did with the wrong kind of music. But I guess some people just have to learn for themselves after sad experience. But will it be too late when they finally recognize and accept what the prophets have taught us and what so many of us, now older and wiser, understand? There is no doubt in my mind that doom metal and death metal are not helpful to our purpose.

What do you think? Is there anything you can do to help a young person who doesn’t believe or accept prophets and apostles understand how such music can affect their spirit?