Deny...One Way Or The Other

“Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God. And again, if ye by the grace of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy, without spot.” (Moroni 10:32-33). Moroni lays out two possible choices for us. We can choose to deny ourselves of all ungodliness. Or, we can choose to deny the power of God. It can be hard to deny ourselves of all ungodliness. If it were easy, then it wouldn’t be a denial. I really don’t like mangoes. So, if someone came up to me and told me that, for health reasons, I have to deny myself of anything that has mangoes in it, I’m not going to fight them too hard on that. I’m doing it already. But I love chocolate. Dark chocolate especially. If someone told me I had to deny myself of chocolate, that would be a true denial. It would hurt. I would try to find ways of rationalizing or justifying not denying myself from the thing that I like so much. See, most of us are on board with denying ourselves of some, maybe even most, forms of ungodliness. But until we have the faith to make the sacrifice and deny ourselves of all ungodliness - the easy parts and the hard parts, the things we hate and the things we love, the temptations that we never fall for and the temptations which do so easily beset us - until we can deny ourselves of all of it, then we are denying ourselves of the power of God. But the beautiful thing about our Savior Jesus Christ is that, although we may try to deny Him thrice like Peter did, or even three thousand times, we will not be able to deny Him forever. He will not force us to deny ourselves of any ungodliness, but His grace is sufficient to sanctify and perfect us. Through His unconquerable love and His undeniable power, we will bit by bit love Him with a little bit more of our heart, might, mind and strength. And with each little bit of our heart that becomes converted to loving our Savior, that is one bit less that we have space or capacity or desire to love ungodliness. And we truly become perfect when there is not one spot left that we have reserved for even our seemingly most cherished and indispensable bit of ungodliness. It is hard denying ourselves of the things that amuse or excite or feel important to us, but it is not nearly as hard to deny ourselves of ungodliness as it is to deny ourselves of the power of God. We can make it through life without ungodliness, but we can’t make it without the power of God.