3 Nephi 14

[At this point, Jesus faced the crowd again.]

Sorry for that digression. A few words about judgment. First rule: don’t do it. Second rule: if you do do it, someone will do it back to you. We all get what we dish out or hold back.

You know, I’ve watched you for … I can’t say how many hundreds of years. (We don’t have time like yours in my country.) And I have one question:

Why do you see a speck in the other guy’s eye and don’t notice the log in your own? Oh, you say, let me help you with that, while you’re about to crush him with the log jutting from your face. The nerve. Yank the log from your eye and then, if anyone cares, you can tend to the other guy’s speck.

If you have something sacred in your life, don’t wave it like meat in front of dogs. Or, how about this: If you have a handful of pearls, don’t throw them to pigs to trip them up. Why not? Because they’ll skitter across them and lunge for your throat. Pigs are smart. And they don’t like to be monkeyed with.

A threefold formula for any kind of acquisition: ask = get; seek = find; knock = door opening. These aren’t sufficient criteria, probably, but all are necessary. If you don’t do anything in front of the equals sign, nothing can happen.

Some of you are fathers, something I haven’t yet had the chance to be, unless you count the whole spiritual network I’ve built. If you are a father, you wouldn’t give your son a rock when he asks for bread. Or a snake when he asks for a fish.

It’s only natural. Or supernatural, if you accept that super-natural means “excessively natural.” So don’t you think God, who is a supernatural father to us all, will excel beyond run-of-the-mill “natural”?

Look at the concept from a different angle: however you want to be treated, treat other people that way. It may not reflect back at you. But you’ll feel better all the time. This is what the law of Moses was trying to get to.

If eternal life has a gate, its posts are narrowly planted. If desolation has a gate, there are no posts at all. My point is this: go for the path of most resistance.

Now I love prophets, as you know. But some of them are frauds. Imagine a wolf dressed up like a sheep. Actually, a wolf dressed up as anything is bogus. But a sheep costume is worse than ironic.

Or think of prophets as trees. Although Adam was good at naming trees, I’m not. So many varieties since his day. But I can tell a good fruit tree by how good the fruit tastes. And certainly a rose bush dressed up like a fig tree is complete horticultural arrogance. Good tree = good fruit, whatever its name is. A bad tree—or a tree in disguise—tastes like the fertilizer it’s dug with. So they’ll eventually get cut down and burned for warmth in winter.

Not everyone who acknowledges my existence,

by the way, or even tries to be my toady, gets into the gate. I know at some far distant date people will say, “Hey, Lord, we’ve gotten huge mileage out of your name. We use it on the devil-possessed and in lots of other circumstances.”

My reply: “Who the heck are you? Have we even met?” And these rhetorical questions will get transcribed and rebroadcast by demons everywhere. I’ll tell them to go home. I’ll already have won, you see.

You listen to me and do what I say and you’ll be like a housebound man whose house is impregnable. No storm can take it down because it’s founded on a good rock bed.

You listen to me and don’t do what I say and you’re like a contractor who built a spec home in the desert. Sand? No way.