Charity: The Confidence of Generosity

You know what takes a lot of practice? Like - a lifetime - and from the looks of mine, longer than that?

Charity, that's what.

President Nelson invited members of the church to take intentional steps to develop greater virtue and charity (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2025/04/57nelson?lang=eng).

Charity is the quality we develop as we practice honoring the second great commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves. To love the way the Savior loves us is a high bar for humans - A. Because humans are fallen and fickle and flawed; and B. Because humans are weird. There, I said it.

It's easy to think we're becoming charitable when we "practice" on our families - WEIRD THOUGH THEY MAY BE - or with the not-so-weird - or with people who get us and whom we get - or with people who are like us, or think like us, or look like us. The suspicion of Otherness must run very deep in human nature, because it doesn't seem to come very naturally to any of us to even tolerate Others outside the safe, ordered, predictable parameters of Sameness - much less LOVE them.

But that is the assignment. That is the project of this lifetime. And weird and different as every human creature surely is, the Savior came into the world to love them all. His life showed how to do it, and His atoning sacrifice punctuated the assignment - A. That He really means it; and B. To give the assignment by essentially inviting us: "If I will go to this length to rescue all of you, can I get you on board to help me with the rescue mission?"

This assignment is connected to developing virtue - the quality we develop when we honor the first great commandment to love God. In the essay on virtue (https://www.laureensimper.com/post/virtue-the-confidence-of-self-mastery), I referred to one of the seminal gospel teachers in my life, Brother David Christensen. He teaches that when God showed Abraham the noble spirits whom He would make His rulers (see Abraham 3:23), we were among them. The human family was shown to Abraham as the spirits who were to come to the earth to learn to rule over themselves - His children who would have agency to choose to grow.

God gave each of us our own little kingdom - consisting of intelligence - and a spirit that had been begotten and carefully raised and nurtured by Him over eternity - and a body, heart, and mind made of what Elder Ballard's grandfather, Melvin J. Ballard, once called "unredeemed earth" (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/1984/03/struggle-for-the-soul?lang=eng). That's the unruly part that needs to be tamed.

The first part of our test in this life was to learn to rule - ourselves.

As I've pondered this idea of ruling over ourselves, I've considered that this desire to rule over, have dominion, or control - is very godlike. It only makes sense that our Eternal Father would endow His children, through spiritual genetics, with a quality He possesses. It makes sense to me that we come from our heavenly home with the desire to order things, to be in charge of something, so we can do this important work of learning to be in charge of ourselves.

It's here where the destroyer and imitator can pervert and confuse. In a fallen world, if we're not careful, instead of doing the work of mastering ourselves, we're tempted to turn our attentions to others, and meddle in their work.

The purpose of this life is to learn to obey God - to follow His eternal, fixed, and unchanging law. We cannot learn this for someone else. Everyone has to do it for himself. We violate others' agency when we try to force, intimidate, bully, browbeat, or even more subtly, manipulate, or put on a guilt trip. Any aggression or subtlety we use to wangle our will upon the will of another child of God is unrighteous dominion.

Father paid the high price of the life of His Son to afford agency to His children and give them the chance to learn from their choices. We can help Him in honoring each other's agency by working to provide the optimum conditions for others to learn to obey as well. It's the condition we all lived in while we lived in Father's presence for the eternities before we came to this earth. It's the quality we are told throughout the scriptures will qualify us to live in His presence after this life, and is the second important thing we are here to learn. Mormon describes it in Moroni chapter 7:

"But charity if the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.

"Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons of God; that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as he is pure...." Moroni 7:47-48)

So. Our mission on this earth isn't just to gain a body - it's to tame that body! Virtue. We are here to rule and reign over the tiniest of kingdoms, to see if we can be trusted with anything greater. And since God forces none of His children, our corresponding mission is to learn to have influence upon our brothers and sisters with the only thing that our Father uses to influence us - love. Charity.

Now that's not to say we aren't influenced by other forces in this universe. We are absolutely influenced when we brush up against the natural, immutable laws of the universe, be they gravity, entropy, or chastity. But when we are battered and bruised by our encounters - whether they're a result of our own disobedience to natural law, someone else's, or inevitable fallout from living in a fallen world - I've come to learn from my own experience that the only influence God will use to teach us about our unwise encounters with natural law is His mighty, all-encompassing love. He is the ultimate Father of the natural consequence, and waits - arms open - to receive us, comfort and nurture us, and teach us a better way - as soon as we're ready. Oh, the room He gives us while we learn.

It can be difficult to fully comprehend how the filth of this world offends the glory of God - is wholly incompatible with it - how we must be made clean to develop the capacity to abide in it - tolerate it (see D&C 88). When we can more fully comprehend what it means to become clean before God, in the midst of the pollution of this earth, only then can we begin to comprehend the generous gift that has been given to us in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

This is grace.

We can have confidence before God as we take seriously our assignment to master ourselves, and to provide our brothers and sisters with charity - the optimum environment they need to learn to master themselves.

Charity is the condition that makes a person feel safe, and you need to feel safe to do the scary work of killing the natural man, or as C.S. Lewis called it, allowing the great Physician to perform the surgery on our hearts that will cut out all that is impure and unholy in us.

When we've felt the relief of grace for ourselves, we better understand what a generous gift it is. We better recognize how much room Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have afforded us in our own weirdness while we learn.

When we've felt grace, we're far more inclined to offer grace. Our grace isn't the same as the Savior's atoning sacrifice which sanctifies. Our grace to others is the generosity of giving them room to be weird. Flawed. Imperfect. A work in progress. Growing.

Otherwise, we're the petty debtor Jesus speaks of in Matthew 18:23-34 - who niggles over a debt a fraction of the size of his own forgiven debt.

The more we appreciate the generosity offered to us, we'll be more than inclined to offer it to others. We'll be compelled.

"Oh, to Grace, how great a debtor - daily, I'm constrained to be..." ("Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing," Hymn #1001, verse 3)

We need to practice virtue in order to practice charity. The more we tame ourselves, the more we can fully appreciate this lengthy process of becoming that all of us are undergoing. When we can generously offer this to everyone taking the test, we really will be like Him.

The greatest way to stand confident in the presence of God is to feel the peace of working on ourselves - practicing virtue - and giving others the safety to do the same - practicing charity.

And since practice is a daily thing - we can feel confident that we're about our Father's business right now - in all our beautiful weirdness.