Pondering

I found these quotes from a Religion class I took at BYU. They made me ponder the state of our country, the world... fortunate and unfortunate.

The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.

- President Ezra Taft Benson, A Witness and a Warning, p. 64

"Who are you?" You are all the sons and daughters of God.

You are now born into a family to which you have come, into the nations through which you have come, as a reward for the kind of lives you lived before you came here.

[People] will accept without any question the belief that each one of us will be judged when we leave this earth according to his or her deeds during our lives here in mortality. Isn't it just as reasonable to believe that what we have received here in this earth [life] was given to each of us according to the merits of our conduct before we came here?

- President Harold B. Lee, Conference Report, October 1973, pp. 7-8

God gave his children their free agency even in the spirit world, by which the individual spirits had the privilege, just as men have here, of choosing the good and rejecting the evil, or partaking of the evil to suffer the consequences of their sins. Because of this, some even there were more faithful than others in keeping the commandments of the Lord. Some were of greater intelligence than others, as we find it here, and were honored accordingly...

The spirits of men had their free agency, some were greater than others, and from among them the Father called and foreordained his prophets and rulers. Jeremiah and Abraham were two of them. (Jer. 1:5; Abra 3:23)

...the spirits of men were not equal. They may have had an equal start, (Alma 13:5-7) and we know they were all innocent in the beginning; (D&C 93:38) but the right of free agency which was given to them enabled some of them to outstrip others, and thus, through the eons of immortal existence, to become more intelligent, more faithful, for they were free to act for themselves, to think for themselves, to receive the truth or rebel against it.

- President Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, 1:58-59