Seeking Higher Ground

Liz and I have been blessed to be living in Provo for the last 9 months; the Wasatch Front is a such a beautiful place. The only downside to be surround by such awe-inspiring mountains is you tend to become desensitized to their presence. Today I was looking out of living room window pondering the deep things of life (well the first part is true), when I realized how great of a view we have of the beautiful Timponogos Mountain Range. I decided I was going to take a picture, the one you see above, and put it on our blog; the strangest thing happened about an hour later. Liz and I sat down to watch the CES fireside with our bag of popcorn and our homemade orange julius; the speaker was going to be Elder Hales.

Elder Hales gave a wonderful talk about seeking high ground. He started by explaining how prophets of old always sought out revelation in the tops of the mountains. He described how we each need to seek the high ground in our lives and not come down out of the mountains for the temptations of satan. He uses the scriptural story of Lehonti in Alma 47; in this story Amalikiah, who is a Nephite dissenter, takes the Lamanite army to go after Lehonti and his army. Lehonti builds a fortress on the top of a mountain and Amalikiah tries to get him to come down and talk with him. Lehonti says no 3 times but on the fourth Amalikiah makes the offer so good Lehonti goes along with it. The deal Amalikiah makes is that Lehonti will surround Amalikiah and his men and take over the entire army and Amalikiah will be made second in command. Lehonti goes along with the plan and is soon after poisoned to death. The point that Elder Hales makes is that Satan does not easily give up trying to get us to come down from our higher ground. He will continue to makes offers that seem so good; he will make us offers that we think will improve our riches, or our happiness, which they may for a while. Yet in the end, as Satan does, he will leave us broken and unhappy, just as Lihonti.

Here is a beautiful picture of Mount Timponogos. Elder Hales exhorted us to stay on the high ground and never give in to Satan's temptations of glory or false joy.

In the end he reminded us what the top of the mountain is for us today. The temple is the most sacred place on earth where we can receive revelation from God to guide us to real peace and happiness.

This was a great talk and I encourage everyone to read it on the ces website when it becomes available.