Patterns

The Pursuit of Excellence pamphlet, published by the Church, says members of the Church “should so closely pattern [their lives] to the sacred and enduring example of the Savior, Jesus Christ, that the basic principles of gospel living will be incorporated into [their lives] for eternity.”

I want to immerse myself in gospel learning. I often overlook study of a particular basic topic (like prayer, or prophets, etc) by a misguided impression that I know the “basics” and I should focus my study on more “complicated” or “deep” doctrines.

The thing is – the gospel is basically simple. In fact, it is very simple. There are really no “deep” doctrines. There are implications of basic principles – but if I think about the things that I’ve learned in the temple, or the things that I have learned simply by reading some other books by apostles of the Lord (such as Jesus the Christ) there is nothing “deep” or significantly different in that information than the basic principles of the gospel. There are perhaps broader, more far reaching applications of the basic gospel principles – but I believe that is something that I will learn with time and experience. And I will only learn it if I am immersing myself in basic gospel principles.

We learn line upon line, precept on precept – but that doesn’t mean that once we learn the first line we can forget that line when we move to the next one. I think that we need to be continually reinforcing the first line, the first precept. And each on that we add – needs to be reinforced.

That’s probably how I got so far off track. I was “checking off” gospel principles, instead of immersing myself in the principles. Gospel learning is not like climbing a ladder – we don’t climb up the rungs. “Prayer, got it. Next! Faith. Got it! Up we go… baptism, got it!” It’s more like cooking – we add more and more ingredients until we have the finished product (which we won’t have until we become perfect in Christ).

You don’t take ingredients out of a recipe. You are usually just adding more and more ingredients until you have them all.

So in our gospel learning, we should not check off our knowledge of a gospel principles. We should add it to our “gospel knowledge soup” and keep going!

Brigham Young University (my alma mater), one of the expected outcomes of an education at the university is that our time there will lead to “lifelong learning and service.”

So – here’s to lifelong learning!

Thankfully I haven’t forgotten everything I knew, so it will just be a matter of refreshing my memory. In fact, a lot of things are coming back already. I just need to keep working at it.