Your Potential Revealed

Seeing Yourself as God Sees You

Your Patriarchal Blessing is your personal scripture. God is talking only to you. In it He will reveal your own unique potential. In our searching for these things, God will continue to bless us with increased understanding of who we really are and see ourselves as God sees us.

SCRIPTURE: “And ye must give thanks unto God in the Spirit for whatsoever blessing ye are blessed with.”   –Doctrine and Covenants 46:32

Remember to begin this reading of your patriarchal blessing 

for your potential with a word of prayer

MY QUESTION FOR YOU: Does your patriarchal blessing tell you about your strengths, weaknesses and spiritual gifts? It does, but it requires careful reading. The strengths, weaknesses and spiritual gifts mentioned there are uniquely yours. Of course, we are all part of the human family and thus share many of these things, however it is our mission to “know ourselves and know who we really are” and then set about doing what the Lord wants us to be doing. This doing  may be different at each stage of our lives. As a young person just entering college and preparing for an occupation and finding an eternal companion it will have a different emphasis than for the grandparent at the end of life making physical adjustments and refining spiritual gifts.

MY SUGGESTION: Make a list of the specific blessings in your patriarchal blessing. These are fairly easy to find when they start our with, “I bless you that…”  Then there are the promises of blessings made to you by the Lord that may be more subtle. In my next blogs I will talk about admonitions of the Lord and how to discover what weaknesses are listed in you patriarchal blessing; these are the weaknesses that the Lord wants you to turn into strengths.

            Now, take that list of blessings and compare them with the spiritual gifts that the Lord gives liberally to his children that obey his commandments.

            Here is a list of the spiritual gifts that we are asked to seek after that are listed in

1 Corinthians 12:4 and Doctrine and Covenants 46:13:

1.   To know Jesus is the Christ by the gift of the Holy Ghost and that he was crucified for the sins of the world

2.   To believe on the words of others

3.   To know the differences of administration

4.   To know the diversities of operations (whether they be of God)

5.   Wisdom

6.   Knowledge (that all may be wise and taught and to have knowledge)

7.   Faith to heal

8.   Faith to be healed

9.   Working of miracles

10. To prophesy

11. Discerning of spirits

12. To speak with tongues

13. Interpretation of tongues

The purpose of these gifts is, “for the benefit of the children of God.” –D & C 46:26

QUOTE:

This above all:

To thine own self be true,

for it must follow as dost the night the day,

thou canst not then be false to any man.

 - Shakespeare (Hamlet) inspired by Socrates (Know thyself)

In the Doctrine and Covenants 59 the Lord tells us how as faithful saints in Zion we shall be blessed.

In verses 4-6 Heavenly Father says:

“4. And they shall be crowned with blessings from above, yea, and with commandments not a few, and with revelations in their time—they that are faithful and diligent before me.

“5.Wherefore, I give unto them a commandment, saying thus: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy might, mind and strength; and in the name of Jesus Christ thou shalt serve him.”

In verse 6 He gives us this commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Do you love yourself? How can you love others if you don’t love yourself? In order to love others we must come to know those things that are loveable in ourselves. Of course, this sounds a bit egotistical. However, if we take this seriously we come to realize that you have to be comfortable in your own skin before you can reach out to others with charity, the pure love of Christ.

Charity             

Joseph A. Cannon, Editor of the Deseret News, wrote in the Sep 9, 2006 issue of The Mormon Times a series called "The Gospel in Words," and  he quoted these scriptures about charity:

"And though I have all faith, and have not charity, I am nothing." (1 Corinthians 13:2)

" Let thy bowels also be full of charity towards men." (Doctrine & Covenants 121:45)

          Cannon goes on to say that when we use the word "charity" we are usually referring back to the Greek word "agape" So often we think charity means giving to the poor or helping someone . "This is an aspect of charity, but if that is what we focus on we miss the much larger and deeper meaning of charity, or love. Another problem in thinking about the words "charity" and "love" is a tendency to think that it requires affection. While having the affection for another person makes it easier to be charitable toward them, focusing on affection again tends to cause us to miss the mark of what charity/love means.

         "For example, we are required to love (agape) our enemies and to pray for them. Does this require us to have affection for them? Recently I came across a volume of radio addresses given by C.S. Lewis in 1942 on "Christian Behavior." What follows is an extensive quote from his discussion on charity.

         "Charity means 'Love, in the Christian sense.' But love in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people. Our love for ourselves does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish for our own good. In the same way Christian Love (or Charity) for our neighbors is quite a different thing from liking or affection. It is a duty to encourage our affections--to 'like' people as much as we can, not because this liking is itself the virtue of charity, but because it is a help to it. But through natural likings should normally be encouraged, it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings. Some people are 'cold' by temperament; that may be a misfortune for them but it is no more a sin than having bad digestion is a sin; and it does not cut them off from the chance, or excuse them from the duty, of learning charity."

In the end we love or wish ourselves good (this is a state of will) and we should come to learn what is the best in us; this self knowledge begins right in our patriarchal blessings.