056: Trials, Failure, and Purpose. D&C and Church History 27

“They Must Needs Be Chastened and Tried, Even as Abraham”

This lesson doesn’t waste any time striking to the heart of difficult issues.  This lesson will discuss such important topics as:

• What role does God play in our “chastening” and trials? In what ways is the idea that God “chastens and tries us” helpful? In what ways is it harmful? Let’s examine this theology.
• How are we supposed to understand the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac, anyway?
• Zion’s Camp
• How Zion’s Camp is talked about at Church
• How do we deal with choices and sacrifices that don’t work out as we expect?
• Persecution then and now
• What we can learn from the early Saints’ efforts to build Zion
• How we can build Zion today

Recurring Donation:

$5   $10   $25   $50

One Time Donation:

$10   $25   $50   $100

Class Member Reading: D&C 101; 103; 105; Our Heritage, pages 27–29, 37–45; 35686_000_029D&C 95:1; Helaman 12:3; Acts 14:21–22; 2 Nephi 2:11; Mosiah 24:13–16; D&C 50:5; D&C 58:2

Additional Teacher Reading: D&C 57:1–3; D&C 63:24, 36; Hebrews 12:11

Join Andrea, Kaimi, Sandy and Jared for a challenging, powerful, and important discussion of vital topics such as the nature of God, suffering, the interpretation of scripture, and learning from failure.

You can access my Reading Notes here.

You can access my Lesson Notes here.

Resources

• A BYU Studies article about women and children in Zion’s camp
• Elder Maxwell, Enduring Well
• Selections from Kierkegaard’s classic Fear and Trembling
• Jacob Baker writes about dealing with tragedy in the scriptures
• TED talk about the subjective and interpretive nature of happiness 
• A blog post about the problematic scriptures we use for obedience 
• A blog post outlining the provocative theory that in an earlier source, Abraham actually does kill Isaac
• A Dialogue article about horrifying passages in scripture and what we do about them 
• Three TED talks on making mistakes
• A TED talk on the need to embrace failure to learn effectively

Many thanks to Devin Roth for the beautiful bumper music. Check out his arrangement of hymns and other work at DevinRothMusic!

Thanks to James Estrada of Oak Street Audio for his diligent post-production.