One day, while perusing my scriptures, I noticed that when I marked passages that were interesting to me, I didn’t usually mark entire verses, but phrases within a verse. Sometimes I would only mark two words, or three words at a time. Sermons don’t have to be long, sometimes they can be as brief as a sentence. Here is one of my favorite “Sermons in a Sentence:”
And Alma cried, saying: How long shall we suffer these great afflictions, O Lord? O Lord, give us strength according to our faith which is in Christ, even unto deliverance. – Alma 14:26
Part of trusting in God is trusting in His timing. Patience is hard. Waiting for the Lord to intervene can be excruciating. Job cried out “how long?” and so did David (see Job 7:19; Psalm 6:3). John the Revelator saw the martyrs throughout the ages who “cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6:10). In our day, the Prophet Joseph Smith cried out from Liberty Jail, “How long shall thy hand be stayed,” and, “How long shall they suffer these wrongs and unlawful oppressions . . . ?” (D&C 121:2–3). The Lord responds to all of these petitions, and to each of us who has ever asked the same question, out of His infinite perspective: “My son, peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment” (D&C 121:7). Incredible as it may seem in the middle of our adversity, the Lord’s promise is that one day, all of our current “how longs” will be remembered as “small moments.”
You’ve been reading an excerpt from the book, “Sermons in a Sentence.”
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