Come Follow Me 50: Articles of Faith and Declarations 1 and 2

 Come, Follow Me Lesson 50: Articles of Faith and Declarations 1 and 2

 Come, Follow Me Lesson 50: Articles of Faith and Declarations 1 and 2

Introduction:

Personal reading beginning on 13 December 2021

Bob and I read and discussed this lesson on Sunday afternoon, 12 December. He had some good insights to share. We had previously read the sections, and I am finishing them on my own two.

Yesterday we watched the video found in the lesson link, “Break the Soil of Bitterness.” Julia Mavimbela was an incredible black sister who had much influence in the church and the community in South Africa. A very touching story of what the people had to deal with in and after apartheid, and of the healing that the gospel brings. I’m thankful to the two very white missionaries who taught her.

I still have to read the Declarations on my own as well as other lesson links. I am very grateful for the gospel study that has increased my testimony this year. Come, Follow Me has been a blessing to our family.

12-21 I read the two Declarations this morning and the Articles of Faith; I read about Jane Elizabeth Mannning James and also about James M. Flake and Green Flake and other early black members who were priesthood holders.

The Manifesto took place 6 years before Utah obtained statehood.

Revelation is ongoing with the prophets of God and with His Saints. The Restoration is still in progress.

Jane Manning James was faithful her whole life, but she had to wait in this life and the next until 1979 to receive her temple blessings and be sealed with her family.

James M. Flake and Washington N. Cook were two of the early church brethren who were ordained as Elders. (From diary of John Brown) Elder Brown also baptized two of brother Flakes servants who were black, Allen and Green.

Black male members were a vital part of the pioneer trek. Green drove the first wagon into Immigration Canyon. Green planted crops and built cabins before other saints arrived.

Green passed away in 1903. The Deseret Evening News said at the time of his death that “Bro. Flake had reached the honorable age of 76, which means, to all who knew him, 76 years of honest, hard work for the betterment of humanity, and for an exaltation in his Father’s kingdom.”

Sixty years earlier, when Green joined the church, a black seventy named Elijah Abel had just returned from a mission, and members of the Quorum of the Twelve were promoting Joseph Smith’s proposal to free all the slaves in the United States. Despite this change, Green lived out his life in full faith.10 He carved a gravestone for his wife that he ultimately shared with her in the Union Cemetery. Above his name is etched in now weather-worn and barely legible text: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”  This invocation echoed the sentiments Joseph Smith preached the day Green was baptized: "There [are] many mansions in my father’s Kingdom. What have we to console us in relation to our dead? We have the greatest hope in relation to our dead of any people on earth. We have seen them walk worthy on earth and those who have died in the faith are now … gone to await the resurrection of the dead, to go to the celestial glory." Not long after Green arrived in the Great Basin, however, church leaders began to exclude black men from the priesthood, a change that also limited black members’ access to the temple.

There are still more historical spiritual stories that I have not yet read.