Work

Learning to work—training and disciplining our minds, bodies, and spirits to exert, produce, achieve, and progress—is a foundation reality of every mortal life. It is one of the ways we become like God and accomplish His purposes on the earth. Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghostall work. Their work and their glory is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). The reality is there can be no glory without work.

Satan is ever alert to destroy the purposes of God and to subvert our mortal experience. To counter the emphasis the Father places on work, the adversary has convinced many in our day that a primary goal in life is to avoid work. In today’s societies, many people concentrate on finding jobs that pay well but require little work, investments or schemes that pay high returns without effort, and programs that pay for what they want at no cost to them. Some seek to avoid work by borrowing and living on money they never intend to repay. They are unwilling to work, budget, and save before they spend. Church leaders have counseled that we should work for what we obtain and “avoid debt except for the most fundamental of needs.”

Another insidious tactic the adversary employs in this generation is to channel men’s natural ambition to work and achieve into virtual dead ends. God placed in young men the desire to compete and achieve, with the intent that they use this ambition to become faithful providers for a family. In our youth, this ambition can be channeled into academic, athletic, or other pursuits that help to teach persistence, discipline, and work. Satan, however, would subtly intercept that ambition and channel it into a virtual world of video games that eat up time and ambition and lead to addiction.

• JANUARY 2016
• REVEALED REALITIES OF MORTALITY

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Revealed Realities of Mortality

By Elder Paul B. Pieper

Of the Seventy