While reading in the Book of Mormon yesterday, I came across something Jacob said while expounding on Zenos’ allegory.
“[After] ye have been nourished by the good word of God all the day long, will ye bring forth evil fruit . . . ?” (Jacob 6:7)
This statement/question posed by Jacob caused me to reflect on the role the scriptures could play in our lives.
It is not any wonder that I seemed to be at a different spiritual level on my mission; that I seemed to have more good works than I do now. While I was not literally immersed in the scriptures throughout each day, I certainly spent more time in them than I am now.
I am left to wonder what sorts of things I could accomplish spiritually as a Christian if my job and other temporal things didn’t take up so much of my time.
well you probably would be a lonely man.. yup you would have all the time in the world to immerse yourself in your scriptures as you did on your mission but you would lose out on having a wife and family. I would think that would be the greater of the two.
I disagree with Sally. We should be reading the sciptures WITH our family. While I doubt that it would be easy to return to reading the scriptures the same as on the mission, but we can all certainly make more time. I know I can.
Ian I never meant to imply that Kim should pick one or the other. He had commented that his time spent on scripture study was a great deal less then say when he was on a mission and if his life would be better or different if he wasn’t so caught up in the ways of the world.
Your focus in the “real world” as opposed to the mission world is completely different. Your full time job is teaching gospel which studying scriptures is a huge part of that. In the real world a big part of your life is going to work, coming home, working at home taking care of your family and home. You can certainly study scriptures in the morning as personal, a couple or as a family or in the evening or even at work but the time left over for you to do it full time is greatly diminished once you leave your mission and begin a family.
I raised our family reading scriptures with them when they were little, as teens etc and I don’t know about your family but there was no way they would sit still for a lengthy scripture study. It was all we could do to get them to take turns to just read them out loud.
Now I spend a lot of my time reading and studying my scriptures but I don’t have a full time job or children at home that take up my time. Actually to be completely honest a big part of my scripture study comes from Kim’s posts and my reading them thinking out loud where did he get that thought from??? Then I have to go research it lol.
At no time should we use our family and work lives as an excuse to NOT read/study our scriptures. The more we study the more we learn the more we get blessed.