Stand

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:”

Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. —Ephesians 6:13

We use the word stand and many of its forms in our religious discourse: Stand, standards, take a stand, stand up for your beliefs, and stand for something or you’ll fall for anything! To stand is to represent something, to stay in a fixed position, to be unmoved. The opposite of standing is falling, buckling, wilting, or compromising. When Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes asked President Gordon B. Hinckley how he accounted for the rapid growth of the Church, President Hinckley responded using the word stand, or a form thereof, three times: “We have standards that we expect them to live by and to uphold. It is demanding. And that is one of the things that attracts people to this Church. It stands as an anchor in a world of shifting values. They feel they have something solid that they are standing on while the ground is moving beneath them” (in Sheri L. Dew, Go Forward with Faith [1996], 540–41).

(Excerpt from Sermons in a Sentence, 9).