Sabbathought: We are as the man in the brown leather jacket when we neglect the doctrine

A famous surgeon got a phone call late at night. It was his colleague at the hospital: "Get here as fast as you can; we have a small boy here who is dying; he needs your skills if he is to stand any chance of survival. Hurry!"

The doctor got up, got dressed, and sped off to the hospital in his fast car. He had to pull up at a stop sign. The passenger door of his car swung open and a man in a brown leather jacket slipped inside. He had his hand in his pocket and pointed the pocket at the doctor. "Get out!" said the desperate man, and kicking the surgeon out, sped off into the night in the doctor's car.

The doctor was stranded but ran and hitchhiked his way to the hospital. The colleague who had summoned him met him at the front door. "What took you so long! We just lost the little boy . . . . All we can do now is go comfort the boy's father in the waiting room."

And there in the waiting room was the man in the brown leather jacket. . . .

Lacking the big picture, thinking only of our own desperate and urgent need, we often prevent the very thing we need from getting through. We are as the man in the brown leather jacket.

Such a reaction is typically characteristic of natural man in his lost and fallen condition. The one solution, the only solution for our desperate fallen state is the redemptive powers found in one place: in the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Please note: The Savior is not the best solution, He is the only solution. He is the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world. The Creation---Fall---Atonement are the grand doctrinal pillars holding up the great plan of the eternal God for the tutoring and salvation of His children. It is all set up on a deliberate and foreordained basis.

This is the message of the Book of Mormon.

But just try telling natural man he is in a lost and fallen state and needs a redeemer. He will resent the message and shoot the messenger. Thus we see that denial is not just a river in Egypt! Denial of our lost and fallen state and our need for a redeemer is the prime characteristic defining natural fallen man! You cannot conceive of a greater irony than this denial.

"Wherefore, all mankind were in a lost and in a fallen state, and ever would be save they should rely on this Redeemer", we find on the seventeenth page of the 531-page Book of Mormon. This basic message appears in both bold, clear terms and by implication on nearly every page thereafter. But it is possible for natural man to miss this message in the book. In fact it is natural and easy for him to miss it. Such is the nature of his forlorn state and his reluctance to trust his salvation to a third party. "I can go it alone!" he proclaims proudly.

We have labored the point before that this is not a doctrinal era in the Church. My son-in-law, Barry, once said to me, "When you speak so much about doctrine, most people are put off by it; they think you are referring to some obscure passage somewhere in Leviticus."

And yet the message of the Book of Mormon---and of the New Testament, and of the whole Old Testament---is the message of Christ and His coming and His Atonement: the doctrine of Christ. We even have a modern book of scripture from Him, entitled Doctrine and Covenants. Surely there must be something more to this doctrine business than we first thought . . . !

Please consider: the word doctor originally meant one who taught doctrine. . . . For doctrine heals, doctrine cures, doctrine lasts, doctrine saves. Jesus Himself taught doctrine ("and they were astonished at his doctrine"), for He was the Master Physician.

Our job is to recognize this and not prevent, as so many men in brown leather jackets, the Doctor and His doctrine from getting through to the needy, which consist of all the family of Adam and Eve---you and me---the whole family of mankind.

Doctrine, doctor, dogma, orthodox, dexterous, document---all are from the same family of words. Our job is to learn the doctrine, teach it diligently, and unleash the power that is found only in the very points of the doctrine of Christ. Given the tumultuous times we find ourselves in, any other approach in our teaching will not work. We must put aside the weak doctrine and the false doctrine we have embraced in our indolence and focus on the power of the doctrine of Christ.

In this way we shall put on robes of righteousness and discard our brown leather jackets.

More on this later.

Steve