What are the ways we can bless the people in need as we live the law of consecration?
"44 And all that believed were together, and had all things common;" (Acts 2: 44)
"3 And they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift." (4 Nephi 1: 3)
"18 And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them." (Moses 7: 18)
"30 And behold, thou wilt remember the poor, and consecrate of thy properties for their support that which thou hast to impart unto them, with a covenant and a deed which cannot be broken.
31 And inasmuch as ye impart of your substance unto the poor, ye will do it unto me; and they shall be laid before the bishop of my church and his counselors, two of the elders, or high priests, such as he shall appoint or has appointed and set apart for that purpose.
32 And it shall come to pass, that after they are laid before the bishop of my church, and after that he has received these testimonies concerning the consecration of the properties of my church, that they cannot be taken from the church, agreeable to my commandments, every man shall be made accountable unto me, a steward over his own property, or that which he has received by consecration, as much as is sufficient for himself and family.
33 And again, if there shall be properties in the hands of the church, or any individuals of it, more than is necessary for their support after this first consecration, which is a residue to be consecrated unto the bishop, it shall be kept to administer to those who have not, from time to time, that every man who has need may be amply supplied and receive according to his wants.
34 Therefore, the residue shall be kept in my storehouse, to administer to the poor and the needy, as shall be appointed by the high council of the church, and the bishop and his council;
35 And for the purpose of purchasing lands for the public benefit of the church, and building houses of worship, and building up of the New Jerusalem which is hereafter to be revealed—
36 That my covenant people may be gathered in one in that day when I shall come to my temple. And this I do for the salvation of my people.
37 And it shall come to pass, that he that sinneth and repenteth not shall be cast out of the church, and shall not receive again that which he has consecrated unto the poor and the needy of my church, or in other words, unto me—
38 For inasmuch as ye do it unto the least of these, ye do it unto me.
39 For it shall come to pass, that which I spake by the mouths of my prophets shall be fulfilled; for I will consecrate of the riches of those who embrace my gospel among the Gentiles unto the poor of my people who are of the house of Israel.
40 And again, thou shalt not be proud in thy heart; let all thy garments be plain, and their beauty the beauty of the work of thine own hands;
41 And let all things be done in cleanliness before me.
42 Thou shalt not be idle; for he that is idle shall not eat the bread nor wear the garments of the laborer." (Doctrine and Covenants 42: 30-42)
"Small efforts collectively make a big impact, magnifying the many individual things we do as disciples of Jesus Christ.
This cookie made of phyllo dough and pistachio nuts is a thank-you. It was made by the Kadado family who, for decades, owned three bakeries in Damascus, Syria. When war came, a blockade stopped food and supplies from reaching their part of the city. The Kadados began to starve. At the height of this desperate situation, Latter-day Saint Charities and some very courageous staff at Rahma Worldwide began serving a daily hot meal, along with milk for the little children. After a difficult time, the family began their life—as well as their bakery—once again in a new country.
Recently, a box of cookies arrived at the Church offices with the following message: “For more than two months, we managed to get food from the Rahma–Latter-day Saint [Charities] kitchen. Without it we would [have] starve[d] to death. Please accept this … sample from my shop as a small token of thanks. I ask God the Almighty to bless you … in everything you do.”
A cookie of gratitude and remembrance. It is meant for you. To all who prayed after watching a story on the news, to all who volunteered when it was not convenient or who kindly donated money to the humanitarian fund trusting it would do some good, thank you.
Divine Responsibility to Care for the Poor
The Church of Jesus Christ is under divine mandate to care for the poor. It is one of the pillars of the work of salvation and exaltation. What was true during the days of Alma is certainly true for us: “And thus, in their prosperous circumstances, they did not send away any who were naked, or that were hungry, or that were athirst, or that were sick, or that had not been nourished; and they did not set their hearts upon riches; therefore they were liberal to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, whether out of the church or in the church, having no respect to persons as to those who stood in need.”
The Church responds to this charge in a wide variety of ways, including:
the ministering we do through Relief Society, priesthood quorums, and classes;
fasting and the use of fast offerings;
welfare farms and canneries;
welcome centers for immigrants;
outreach for those in prison;
Church humanitarian efforts;
and the JustServe app, where it’s available, that matches volunteers with service opportunities.
These are all ways, organized through the priesthood, where small efforts collectively make a big impact, magnifying the many individual things we do as disciples of Jesus Christ.
Prophets Have Stewardship for the Whole Earth
Prophets have charge for the whole earth, not just for members of the Church. I can report from my own experience how personally and devotedly the First Presidency takes that charge. As needs grow, the First Presidency has charged us to increase our humanitarian outreach in a significant way. They are interested in the largest trends and the smallest details.
Recently, we brought to them one of the protective medical gowns that Beehive Clothing sewed for hospitals to use during the pandemic. As a medical doctor, President Russell M. Nelson was highly interested. He didn’t want to just see it. He wanted to try it on—check the cuffs and the length and the way it tied in the back. He told us later, with emotion in his voice, “When you meet with people on your assignments, thank them for their fasting, their offerings, and their ministering in the name of the Lord.”
Humanitarian Report
At President Nelson’s direction, I am reporting back to you about how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is responding to hurricanes, earthquakes, refugee displacement—and even a pandemic—thanks to the kindness of the Latter-day Saints and many friends. While the more than 1,500 COVID-19 projects were certainly the largest focus of the Church’s relief over the last 18 months, the Church also responded to 933 natural disasters and refugee crises in 108 countries. But statistics don’t tell the whole story. Let me share four brief examples to illustrate the smallest taste of what is being done.
South African COVID Relief
Sixteen-year-old Dieke Mphuti of Welkom, South Africa, lost her parents years ago, leaving her to care for three younger siblings on her own. It was always daunting for her to find enough food, but COVID supply shortages and quarantines made it almost impossible. They were often hungry, scraping by only with the generosity of neighbors.
On a sunny day in August 2020, Dieke was surprised by a knock at her door. She opened it to find two strangers—one a Church representative from the area office in Johannesburg and the other an official from South Africa’s Department of Social Development.
The two organizations had teamed up to bring food to at-risk households. Relief washed over Dieke as she glimpsed the pile of cornmeal and other food staples, purchased with Church humanitarian funds. These would help her to sustain her family for several weeks until a government aid package could begin to take effect for her.
Dieke’s story is one of thousands of such experiences taking place across the world during the COVID pandemic thanks to your consecrated contributions.
Afghan Relief at Ramstein
We have all seen recent images in the news: thousands of evacuees being flown from Afghanistan. Many arrived at air bases or other temporary locations in Qatar, the United States, Germany, and Spain before continuing to their final destinations. Their needs were immediate, and the Church responded with supplies and volunteers. At Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the Church provided large donations of diapers, baby formula, food, and shoes.
Some of the Relief Society sisters noticed that many Afghan women were using their husbands’ shirts to cover their heads because their traditional head coverings had been ripped off in the frenzy at the Kabul airport. In an act of friendship that crossed any religious or cultural boundaries, the sisters of the Ramstein First Ward gathered to sew traditional Muslim clothing for Afghan women. Sister Bethani Halls said, “We heard that women were in need of prayer garments, and we are sewing so that they can be [comfortable] for prayer.”
Haitian Earthquake Relief
This next example shows you do not have to be wealthy or old to be an instrument for good. Eighteen-year-old Marie “Djadjou” Jacques is from the Cavaillon Branch in Haiti. When the devastating earthquake struck near her town in August, her family’s house was one of tens of thousands of buildings that collapsed. It’s almost impossible to imagine the despair of losing your home. But rather than giving in to that despair, Djadjou—incredibly—turned outward.
She saw an elderly neighbor struggling and began taking care of her. She helped others clear away debris. Despite her exhaustion, she joined other Church members to distribute food and hygiene kits to others. Djadjou’s story is just one of many powerful examples of service carried out by youth and young adults as they strive to follow the example of Jesus Christ.
German Flood Relief
Only a few weeks before the earthquake, another group of young adults was giving similar service across the Atlantic. The floods that swept through western Europe in July were the most severe in decades.
When the waters finally receded, one shopkeeper in the riverside district of Ahrweiler, Germany, surveyed the damage and was utterly overwhelmed. This humble man, a devout Catholic, whispered a prayer that God might send someone to help him. The very next morning, President Dan Hammon of the Germany Frankfurt Mission arrived on the street with a small band of missionaries wearing yellow Helping Hands vests. The water had reached up to 10 feet (3 m) on the shopkeeper’s walls, leaving behind a deep layer of mud. The volunteers shoveled out the mud, removed the carpet and drywall, and piled everything in the street for removal. The overjoyed shopkeeper worked alongside them for hours, amazed that the Lord had sent a group of His servants to answer his prayer—and within 24 hours!
“Well, I Pray That He’ll Use Us”
Speaking of the Church’s humanitarian efforts, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland once remarked: “Prayers are answered … most of the time … by God using other people. Well, I pray that He’ll use us. I pray that we’ll be the answer to people’s prayers.”
Brothers and sisters, through your ministry, donations, time, and love, you have been the answer to so many prayers. And yet there is so much more to do. As baptized members of the Church, we are under covenant to care for those in need. Our individual efforts don’t necessarily require money or faraway locations; they do require the guidance of the Holy Spirit and a willing heart to say to the Lord, “Here am I; send me.”
The Acceptable Year of the Lord
Luke 4 records that Jesus came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up, and stood up in the synagogue to read. This was near the beginning of His mortal ministry, and He quoted a passage from the book of Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
“To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. …
“… This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.”
I testify that the scripture is being fulfilled in our own time as well. I testify Jesus Christ is come to heal the brokenhearted. His gospel is to recover sight to the blind. His Church is to preach deliverance to the captive, and His disciples across the world are striving to set at liberty them that are bruised.
Let me conclude by repeating the question Jesus asked His Apostle Simon Peter: “Do you love me?” The essence of the gospel is contained in how we answer that question for ourselves and “feed [His] sheep.” With great reverence and love for Jesus Christ, our Master, I invite each of us to be a part of His magnificent ministry, and I pray He’ll use us. In the sacred name of Jesus Christ, amen." (I Pray He’ll Use Us By Sharon Eubank First Counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency)
"“We have received the laws of the Kingdom since we came here,” Joseph Smith wrote to Martin Harris in February 1831, “and the Disciples in these parts have received them gladly.”
Joseph had been in Ohio less than a month when he wrote those words to Martin Harris, who was still in Palmyra, New York. Prior to Joseph’s own move from New York, the Lord gave him a commandment to gather the Church in Ohio and promised: “There I will give unto you my law.” Shortly after Joseph’s arrival in Kirtland, he received the promised revelation, which in early manuscripts was entitled “The Laws of the Church of Christ.” It is now canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 42:1–73.
The Church’s need for the revelation at this time was acute. When he arrived in Ohio, Joseph found the Saints there to be sincere but confused about the biblical teaching that early Christians “were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common” (Acts 4:32).
Many of the Church’s converts in Ohio were members of “the Family,” a communal group that shared the home and farm of Lucy and Isaac Morley in an effort to be true Christians. While their intentions were in keeping with the account Joseph himself had recently received of Enoch’s Zion, where the people had achieved the ideal “of one heart and one mind” and completely eliminated poverty (Moses 7:18), the Prophet found the Ohio converts following practices that undermined personal agency, stewardship, and accountability—though they were “striving to do the will of God, so far as they knew it.” As a result, the converts were, in the words of Joseph Smith’s history, “going to destruction very fast as to temporal things: for they considered from reading the scripture that what belonged to a brother belonged to any of the brethren.”
Very shortly after Joseph arrived in Ohio, the Lord revealed that “by the prayer of your faith ye shall receive my law that ye may know how to govern my Church.” A few days later, Joseph gathered several elders and in “mighty prayer” asked the Lord to reveal His law as promised.
“Consecrate of Thy Properties”
The revelation Joseph received in response upheld the first great commandment, loving God wholeheartedly, as the motivation for keeping all the others, including the law of consecration, suggesting that love for God is the reason for the practice. To consecrate, the early Saints were taught, meant to make their property sacred by using it for the Lord’s work, including purchasing land on which to build New Jerusalem and crowning it with a temple. The law revealed that consecration was as much about receiving as it was about giving, since the Lord promised that each faithful Saint would receive “sufficient for him self and family” here and salvation hereafter.
The law clarified that consecration did not envision communal ownership of property. Rather, it required the willing to acknowledge that the Lord was the owner of all and that each of the Saints was to be a hardworking “Steward over his own property” and thus accountable to the actual owner, the Lord, who required that the Saints freely offer their surplus to His storehouse to be used to relieve poverty and build Zion.
The Ohio converts’ faith in Joseph’s revelations led them to align their practices with the Lord’s revealed plan. As Joseph’s history put it, “The plan of ‘common stock,’ which had existed in what was called ‘the family,’ whose members generally had embraced the ever lasting gospel, was readily abandoned for the more perfect law of the Lord.”
As time went on, Bishop Edward Partridge implemented the law as best he could, and willing Saints signed deeds consecrating their property to the Church. But obeying the law was voluntary, and some Saints refused. Others were untaught, and many were scattered. Some rebellious Saints even challenged the law in court, leading to refinements in its language and changes in practice.
Other early Saints understood that the eternal principles of the law—agency, stewardship, and accountability to God—could be applied in changing situations, as when Leman Copley decided not to consecrate his farm in Thompson, Ohio, sending the Saints gathered there on to Missouri to live the law, or again when a mob drove Church members from Jackson County in 1833, ending the bishop’s practice of giving and receiving consecration deeds but not the law itself. Just as the law of consecration, though revealed in February 1831, did not begin then, it did not end when some refused to obey and others were thwarted in their attempts. President Gordon B. Hinckley taught that “the law of sacrifice and the law of consecration have not been done away with and are still in effect.”
Answers to Various Questions
In addition to expounding the law of consecration, the revelation answered many questions of importance to the Church at that time. Joseph and the elders who gathered in February 1831 in pursuit of the revelation first asked if the Church should “come to gether into one place or continue in separate establishments.” The Lord answered with what are now essentially the first 10 verses of Doctrine and Covenants 42, calling on the elders to preach the gospel in pairs, declare the word like angels, invite all to repent, and baptize all who were willing. By gathering Saints into the Church from every region, the elders would prepare for the day when the Lord would reveal the New Jerusalem. Then, “ye may be gathered in one,” the Lord said.
The Lord then answered a question that had troubled Christianity for centuries: was Christ’s Church an orderly, authoritative institution or an unfettered outpouring of the Spirit and its gifts? Some people made extreme claims to spiritual gifts, and others responded with an equal and opposite reaction, stripping away the spontaneity of the Spirit, completely in favor of rigid rules. This dilemma existed in the early Church in Ohio, and the Lord responded to it with several revelations, including His law. The law did not envision the Church as either well ordered or free to follow the Spirit; rather, it required that preachers be ordained by those known to have authority, that they teach the scriptures, and that they do it by the power of the Holy Ghost.
Other portions of the law restated and commented on the commandments revealed to Moses and included conditional promises of more revelation depending on the Saints’ faithfulness to what they had received, including sharing the gospel.
“How,” the elders wondered, should they care for “their families while they are proclaiming repentance or are otherwise engaged in the Service of the Church?” The Lord answered with what has become verses 70–73, then elaborated further in later revelations, now found in Doctrine and Covenants 72:11–14 and 75:24–28. The concept was further clarified in the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants.
Early versions of the law also include short answers to two additional questions: Should the Church have business dealings—especially get into debt—with people outside the Church, and what should the Saints do to accommodate those gathering from the East? The answers have been left out of later versions of the text, perhaps because Doctrine and Covenants 64:27–30 answers the first question, while the answer to the second is so specific to a past place and time that it may have been considered unimportant for future generations.
“How to Act upon the Points of My Law”
During that same month (February 1831), Joseph received what became Doctrine and Covenants 43, which commanded him to assemble a counsel to “instruct and edify each other, that ye may know how to act, and direct my church how to act upon the points of law and commandments, which I have given.” With that commandment in mind, Joseph convened a meeting of seven Church elders to determine how to act on disciplinary cases regarding the law of chastity revealed in the law and how the Church should enact the law in situations ranging from murder to meanness. These additional regulations were added to published versions of the law and now comprise verses 74–93 of Doctrine and Covenants 42.
The law, together with the Church’s founding “Articles and Covenants” (now Doctrine and Covenants 20), organized the rapidly growing Church under one set of regulations and unified the various budding congregations in their teaching and practice. It shows how the Lord has revealed, does reveal, and will yet reveal His will to the Saints. From clarifying parts of the law given to Moses and specifying how the Saints in 1831 should apply it in their circumstances, to promising further revelation as sought and needed in the future, this living document continues to serve as a law of the Church of Jesus Christ." (The Law D&C 42 Steven C. Harper)
Aืnd here's the commentary entitled: “Remember the poor.” :
"As part of the law revealed in section 42, the Lord taught His Saints how they could, like the followers of Christ anciently, have “all things common” (Acts 2:44; 4 Nephi 1:3), with “no poor among them” (Moses 7:18). What do you learn from Doctrine and Covenants 42:30–42 about how the Saints lived the law of consecration? (To consecrate means to set something aside for a sacred purpose.)
Although we don’t have “all things common” today, in temples Latter-day Saints covenant to live the law of consecration. How can you consecrate what God has given you to bless people in need? Perhaps singing a song like “Because I Have Been Given Much” (Hymns, no. 219) can give you ideas.
See also Sharon Eubank, “I Pray He’ll Use Us,” Liahona, Nov. 2021, 53–56; “The Law,” in Revelations in Context, 93–95.
Christ and the Rich Young Ruler, by Heinrich Hofmann"
In the temple we all covenant to live the law of consecration regardless of our economic status. We all have opportunities to consecrate what God has given us to bless people in need. We can consecrate what God has given us by remembering the poor in different aspects of life. To those who are poor emotionally and socially, we can extend our love and friendship by simply being there, listening, and caring. To those who are poor in skillset we can share with them our knowledge and mentor them. If we focus on what we have, we can always find something God has given us which we can consecrate.
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