Clean House

Why can’t we just confess Jesus and be saved?

There is a T.V. show called Clean House. It is a relatively interesting show about a talented crew of designers who are in search of the messiest homes in America. They remove the messy people from the home and then they clean and remodel the house. When they have finished, the messy people are returned to a clean home. It is inevitable that those homes will become messy again in short order because the nature of the problem was not addressed: messy people. If this was my show I would forget about cleaning the house.  I would take the people and teach them how to be clean, then I would put them back in the messy house and it would become clean as a matter of course because clean people would live there.

A few years ago I was teaching a discussion alongside the missionaries. When I got to the Word of Wisdom the woman defensively declared that, “God will not send [her] to hell for smoking!”  Her statement illustrates an all too common and backward understanding of the commandments. God is not standing at the judgment bar looking for a reason to hit the trap door switch. He loves us. He created this Earth for us to learn how to master ourselves.  If we fail to do so, how can he endow us with even greater freedom and power that comes in the next life? It would be a disaster.  So, it is not that he will send us to hell for smoking, it is that we will not have learned the nessessary self control that we need to handle even greater things.

This Earth is the clean people show. He sent us here armed with the commandments to learn how to master ourselves and become clean people; so that we can return to live with him in his clean house. You must view the commandments of God as a gift; a tool to teach us how to become a clean people. Not a reason to condemn us.

I love and respect our Christian brothers and sisters, but to say that we need only confess Jesus to be saved is like taking messy people, cleaning their house and then returning them as if it was the house’s fault. In such a scenario it is the house that was cleansed not the person.

3 Nephi 27:19 And no unclean thing can enter into his kingdom; therefore nothing entereth into his rest save it be those who have washed their garments in my blood, because of their faith, and the repentance of all their sins, and their faithfulness unto the end.