Welcome And Theme Set-Up

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Welcome to Hear Him Heal You with Morgan and Joel. This podcast is for those who are imperfect and rough around the edges, but are still wanting to come under Christ. Essentially, it's for everyone. So join us to get yourself out of the mental mire, find meaning and emotion, and leave that behind. This is where we hear him to be healed. Welcome back, little flock, to another great episode.

A New Lens On The Fall

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Um this one I'm really excited for. It's something I learned specifically in my own study of Come Follow Me. I usually don't like um try to follow Come Follow Me when it comes to like ideas that I have, but this one was like a very novel idea to me. And probably for some of you that will listen to this, it might not be, which is totally fine. Um But um it really has to do with the fall. And the reason why I feel like the fall took on a different meaning for me this time around when I was studying it is I feel like I just got a little bit deeper or a little bit more understanding than I than I had before. And those are always my favorite experiences when I've read something over and over again. And then it's just like I get one little more piece of the nugget, right? And um the reason I say this is um a while back I made an episode about the creation. Because the creation was actually a really hard like topic every time I went to like the temple or whatever it read, I was like, why do we need to know this? Like, cool, the earth was made, but how does that apply to my salvation? And like, how do I like connect to the creation on a daily basis besides just being alive, you know? And um, it wasn't until I realized that the creation was actually a metaphor for Christ's role in our lives. Christ is the creator. He's not just the creator, though, because he made the earth. That's partly why he got that title. But the real reason he's the creator is he's the creator of our current worlds. He is creating our little tiny worlds each and every day. And so that's kind of what that podcast was. And it kind of because I was in that mindset as I've been reading about the creation and the fall, it kind of helped me look at the fall from a different lens. And um, when you guys go to read this, like the name of this is miniature falls. And something that I think is really important is to under start to apply the scriptures to yourself day in and day out.

Listing The Effects Of The Fall

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And that's how we actually connect with them. That's how we actually learn. Because the scriptures are meant to guide us in this in our daily lives. And so I guess um, first things first, like we all know about uh Adam and Eve and what kind of happened. They were placed in the garden, they were tempted by Satan, they partook of the fruit, and because I was against God's commandments for them, they were cast out, right? And they enter a fallen world. And as I was studying Come Follow Me, they asked this question of essentially what they were asking is when you're reading through this, what are some of the effects of the fall that you you read? So I was reading in like Moses four, um, I think in Genesis three or four as well, and then Moses five. And this is the list that I came up with as I was reading, like what were the effects of the fall? The first one, we all know, they they spiritually, or not spiritually, they physically died. Or they could physical death would enter the world essentially. But then they were also died spiritually, they were separated from God's presence, and that's what sin does to us. We when we sin, we're separated. So, in a sense, we're spiritually dying when we sin. The other part is they also gain the knowledge of good and evil. Along with that, those are like the ones that everyone throws out. The ones that I feel like it breezed over there are like the individual like consequences for Eve, and then the individual consequences for Adam. And in the scriptures, it talks about how like Eve would know sorrow in childbirth, uh, meaning she would have pain in it. And then it talked about how like Adam would have to toil for his food and that he would be that thorns and thistles would pester him and he would have to eat by the sweat of his brow all the days of his life. And then finally, they also talk about a few other ones as like when they were cast out, they were given clothing. They were clothed in skins for when they left the garden. And then they also had to start offering sacrifices after they left the garden. Like God commands them to start offering sacrifices. But then again, another consequence of the fall is they were commanded to repent and basically turn back towards God whenever they sinned. But along with thought came good consequences too. God said they would know joy and that they would have seed. So they would have an increase of happiness because of the fall. But then they would also be able to have a family. And so these are kind of the list of things and consequences of the fall. And as I was reading it, my my mind kind of went back to um like like parts of the temple where we were told to view ourselves as like Adam and Eve, um, because we learn more about the creation in the temple. And um, as I was thinking about this, I was thinking about like putting myself into their shoes. And the first thing I realized, and the thing I hadn't seen this before, is I've always thought of the fall as just something that physically happened to Adam and Eve and to us. Like the reason we sin or the reason we die is because of the fall. But I never took it to also mean that there were these things applied spiritually. Obviously, I understood that like sin meant we would be separated from God, and like I understood that's that spiritual sense. But as I started relating myself to Eve and Adam, I realized there was more to be learned about the spiritual effects of the fall. Um, so kind of just going back to the first effect, though, I kind of want to touch on this before I go down the individual parts of the fall, is the first one is because of Adam and Eve, we do experience a spiritual death. Just like how Adam and Eve could, when they were partaking of the fruit, they could they could die. Because if they would have remained in the Garden of Eden, they would have never known death or had that threat of death upon them.

Miniature Falls And Spiritual Distance

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And so once again, sin, the the fruits of sin are out there in our world. We can go partake of them. And as a consequence of partaking of that fruit, we will know spiritual separation from God, which is our spiritual death. It's a literal miniature fall from God. And day in and day out, we have these miniature falls. And because when we sin, we feel distance, we feel guilt, we feel a darkness come over our life. And that's kind of what I assume felt for Adam and Eve. Like in the garden, they were very close to God's presence. They probably spoke and walked with him all during that time. They had very easy access to him. But after the fall, they definitely felt that distance. And they probably felt extremely guilty. Even just like darkness to me means loneliness. Like a lot of times when I'm in a dark point in my life, I feel very lonely and I feel like there's not a whole ton of excitement or light in my life, right? And so I'm sure they felt the same way. And so, really, what I think we take away from this is we can all see ourselves in Adam and Eve by the mistakes we make and the lessons we learn from those mistakes. Because Adam and Eve gained knowledge from partaking of the fruit. They gained that ability to learn. And then they also we we also take away lessons from when we sin and we make mistakes because we don't want to like live through those hard parts again. We don't want to constantly be falling down and getting back up, falling down. Our goal is to probably stay on our feet as much as possible to a spiritual sense, right? And so I think one of uh the best things to understand about the fall is whenever we experience our own miniature falls where we sin, it's meant to humble us. It creates empathy between us and others and between us and Christ as well. And the only way we can get back up is because of Christ. And so we learn this dependence. We learn this faith in Christ through sinning because we know it's only in Him when we trust in Him can we really overcome the effects of the fall as well. And one thing that I think is really important, I guess my key takeaway from this effect of the fall, spiritual death and knowing good from evil, is our daily sins aren't just failures. They're part of a mortal pattern of learning good from evil. And so sometimes it's really easy to just get down on ourselves when we sin. But moreover, what I want to like, I want this is where the shift I want to make, instead of just always beating myself up when I make a mistake, I think what I would want to take away is like, no, this is part of me learning. Every time I fail, I have the chance to learn from that. And then I also have the chance to learn what it means to come back to Christ. And as I continue that pattern where I'm always inevitably gonna fail, and I'm always inevitably too, hopefully, gonna come back to Christ. Hopefully, the frequencies of falls will not happen as much. And so that's one of the big effects of the of this story that I wanted to touch on. The next one, which I actually, this is where I get to like this is the cool part, is um viewing ourselves in Eve. So Eve was told she would experience sorrow and childbirth. And as I was sitting there thinking, I realized that we too experience sorrow or pain in our spiritual rebirth through Christ. So what we need to learn is when we sin, we get hurt, and the process of repentance is tough, it's embarrassing, it is never ending, and because what really that teaches us, like the path to forgiveness is fraught with pain

Learning Through Failure And Mercy

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and hard truths that we have to learn. And so whenever we have failed, it's our chance to be spiritually reborn, which is comes with that pain. And so this is something that I think is really powerful because sometimes people are like, why is living the gospel so hard? Like, well, it's because it's it was meant to be that way. We had to experience the pain of working for our spiritual rebirth. And I'm not saying like our actions mean that we deserve to be forgiven, like we can't work out our own salvation, but we do have to work on turning towards Christ. That is a constant choice. And the only way we can turn towards Christ is by showing our actions that we would take to turn towards him. And so essentially, what that means is we have to come before Christ with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, which are the fruits of repentance. We feel this guilt, we feel this desire to change. And as we do so, it means we're being honest with ourselves. We're facing the truths of what we or like the fact, like we're coming face to face with with what we've done. And then we're also having to go through this process of letting go of pride, being like, I need help, I need to acknowledge what I've done, I need to confess, right? And letting go of that pride, because pride is the original sin, means we're turning away. We're I mean, we're turning towards God because pride is enmity, meaning pride is opposition to God. So when we sin, we're putting ourselves in an opposite state of God. And so when we let go of pride, that's exactly how we turn back towards him. And then

Eve And The Pain Of Rebirth

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from there, because now we're finally humble, we've let go of pride, God can work with us, we can let him into our lives and allow him to change our habits. And that whole process I just outlined is painful. I've experienced in my own life. And this process of coming onto Christ is emotional too. And I think it's that's why this is that's why like this effect of the fall where Eve was told she would know sorrow in childbirth is applicable to us because in this life, we're trying to experience a spiritual rebirth and become a whole new person. But the great thing about the great thing about this though is when we go through this this part of uh this spiritual rebirth, it creates a very powerful bond with Christ. Just like how mothers bond deeply with their children after labor, we bond with Christ because of his labor that he went through to perform the atonement for us so that we could be spiritually reborn. So the bond with Christ is made through the pain of repentance. If if repentance was painless, there would be no reason for us to cling to our the Savior in the same way. Because when we cling to the Savior, when we come to the Savior, we find peace, we find respite, we find calm, and we feel confident once more. And that's why we cling to Him, because it was through coming to Him that all the negative emotions that we felt fell away, and that bond is made strong because we don't want to go back to feeling those things. We want to stay close to the Savior and have that constant reassurance that we are on the right path, that we are doing what we need to be doing. And so, in a sense, we are all Eve when we wrestle through the painful process of becoming spiritually reborn. So just a thought on that part. We just finished with Eve. Let's move over to Adam now. Um so Adam was told he would have to work by the sweat of his brow for his food, for his sustenance, and the ground would produce thorns and thistles that would choke out the the food he would be try to grow, right? And this is something that I think is very indicative of our spiritual life. So in our life, we we will have to work out, we will have to work for our salvation again. This is kind of mirrors what Eve had to go through. Living a dis like a being a disciple of Christ is is labor intensive. It's a daily work that we have to do. Just like when a like if anybody's had a garden or or grown anything, you have to go out there, you have to water it, you have to weed the plants to make sure that the weeds don't overrun the good stuff. So you have to make space for these plants to grow. That way they can be healthy and bring forth fruit and vegetable and sustenance, right? And so, and if anybody knows, like I remember we would go out and we would weed this giant garden when I was growing up. And it would always be during the summertime, and so eventually you'd be sweating, your back would hurt because you'd be bending over the whole time, and you're just like, yeah, this is this is work, you know? And I've come to know that living the gospel is like this too. We have to work for those seeds of faith that we planted to grow. We have to uproot the noxious weeds so that way they give space for these seeds to grow bigger and better and produce the food and fruit that we need, right? And some of these things, some of this labor-intensive work is like we have to pray daily. We have to read our scriptures, we have to be looking through our life and setting goals for the habits we want to change, which is repentance, right? And then we also need to be going outside ourselves and serving others. All those things I just talked about are not passive things. Like living a dis like a disciplined life, uh being a disciple of Christ is not passive. Never. It never comes to you

Adam, Labor, And Daily Discipleship

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passively. And that's the same thing with growing food, is like things just don't like how many of us go out in in our daily lives and we see all this abundance of food and fruit all around us. Like, I mean, like, like it's possible, but like it's not very often we come across a wild strawberry or a bush or like or things like that. We we've always had to work for it. And it's the same thing, like we just don't find spiritual experiences. We have to work for them. We have to do our part. And as we start doing our part, God will open up the windows of heaven and give us the revelation we're looking for, the support we need, the comfort we need. And those are the spiritual fruit we're trying to work for, that we sweat for, that we stress over. And the things that threaten those things are our spiritual thorns and thistles, their temptations. It's having a bad day where things just don't go your way. You get in a car accident, you lose your job, you someone breaks up with you, like someone criticizes you, like there's bad days, and sometimes they're not our fault. And then there's also our mental and emotional struggles where like, man, we just wake up and it's not a good time, you know? And then there's just like annoyances and setbacks where like we're just not getting along with people, and and like, you know, like we bet on something and it doesn't go our way, right? And so I just think those things are part of mortality. That's what was introduced when we because we entered a fallen world, is like we will have bad days. There will be negative things that happen to us, and they're not necessarily always our fault. And so just this is just something that I think we all need to understand is that just like Adam, who had to toil for his food and his sustenance, we are cursed to toil for our spiritual food and sustenance too. And I just want everyone to know the resistance that we feel in this life isn't a sign of that we're failing, it is the soil that we're meant to grow in. And that is one of the effects of the fall. So, really bringing this all together, that's why each and every day we're experiencing our own miniature falls. We fall, we sin, that creates spiritual distance. Because of those trip-ups that we have, we learn from them. We learn what makes us feel good and what makes us feel bad through the spirit. And as we do things that are bad, we have to find our way back to Christ so that we can be spiritual re have and the only way we do that is going through the pain of repentance and change. And as as we get back on that path, as we become a new person, we'll desire to stay in Christ's presence. And staying in Christ's presence means we have to struggle and work through the thorns and thistles of life to stay close to him, to continually eat of the spiritual fruits that he provides, just like Adam did. So, with that said, just like how God is still continuing his creative process with us, we too are constantly going through our small falls and rebirths. So we fall, we struggle, we repent, we grow, we repeat. Even after we've grown a bit. There's going to be a slip up. There's going to be a fall. And we'll have to go back through this process again and again. That's why it's called the refiners process. Each time we go through this, we become a little bit more pure, a little bit more better, a little bit better. More better. That's not a word. But um, we just become closer and closer to Christ. And through it all, Christ is a redeemer of every fall, not just the one in Eden. He is a redeemer of every time we fall. So I hope this was helpful. I hope this

Thorns, Thistles, And Real-Life Setbacks

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gave you guys some perspective on your own little slip ups and sins. And with that said, Lil Flock, remember despair not, build upon the rock, do good, and always hear him.