Putting It All Together

I used to love getting gifts that you had to put together.  For the 30 minutes to an hour of putting things together I could barely contain my excitement. One thing I realized is that if you don't look at the instructions, that will last even longer! One time for my birthday, I got a model truck. I thought it would be fun to figure it all out for myself. As I would struggle to figure out where things are supposed to go, and how things are supposed to look, I would have to go back to the instructions. Sometimes I would just look at one or two instructions, and disregard the rest. I could get it mostly put together doing this, but down the road I would find out something didn't work how it should (like the door that should have opened wouldn't). The only way that I could get it put together in the right way and have everything work the way it should was to read ALL the instructions.

I see people all over who do this same thing! I think everyone has an aversion to instructions. They like to pick a couple things and build the rest how they think it should be. Often people will only look at a few verses of scripture in a chapter. When they disregard the next verses, they put things together wrong. A good instance of this is in John Chapter 3 starting in verse 16:

"16  For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God."

This would seem to say that all you have to do is believe in Christ to be saved. If you read on however, it says:
"19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved."

We can see from this that those who "doeth evil" bring condemnation upon themselves. When we read the whole instructions we realized that we HAVE to believe in Jesus Christ, but we also HAVE to have good deeds or works. If we want to find the truth then we have to use all the instructions. I know that this is one reason we have a prophet here today. He has seen salvation put together before, because of this he can help us do what we read in the instructions.