Champions of Independence

TRANSCRIPT

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So let's look throughout time. What are the reasons why? What are the things that ancient religious groups have done, Israel, the ancient Israel, that was designed by God to separate themselves from the world? They separated from Egypt or from Babylon and Leviticus. The Lord said, "And ye shall be holy unto me, for I the Lord am holy and have severed you from other people that you should be mine."

So when he separated them from Egypt, he's saying, "I severed you, I cut you off from other people, brought you out physically." This idea of being in the world but not of it is not scriptural. They were all taken out of the world and they were to become a holy peoples because they weren't influenced by the world around them. And Ezra says the same thing, "Separate yourselves from the people of the land and from the strange wives."

Now there's a joke in there, I'm sure about strange wives. But the idea is, right? We're not bringing into our society, people that are strangers that will separate ourselves from the culture that we are trying to build, whether it's for liberty or for religious reasons. Because when you start to introduce people of different mindsets, that same thing that Pufendorf talked about of clashing being the natural result, your culture that you're trying to build, the diminishing of that culture is the natural result.

It is the only thing that can and will happen if you start to mix those things together. That's why we're told in Jeremiah to remove out of the midst of Babylon. And in Matthew, we're told that, "And before him shall be gathered all nations and he shall separate them one from another as the shepherd divided his sheep from the goats." You don't have the sheep having a different mindset, right? Amongst the goats, we're like, we're among the goats, but we're not of the goats.

No, they were separated from each other. Second Corinthians again, "Wherefore come out from among them and be separate, say it the Lord and touch not the unclean thing and I will receive you." We cannot be touching the unclean society, otherwise we become unclean. Because just like with friends, we wanna have good friends because our friends should be influences or good influences on us.

They are an influence on us. Hopefully they're a good influence because we are following these principles. But if we have friends that are going to separate us from the things that we're aiming towards, then it's easier to, you know, entropy, the law of entropy of, you know, it's easier to make a mess than it is to clean one. It's easier to, you know, get fat than it is to get muscle, right?

Easier to lose muscle than to gain muscle. Same thing in this idea. If we are surrounded by evil, we are more likely to adopt that evil than we are to make the evil good. We need to be a light. We need to be the salt of the earth. We need to be the light from afar. And those that are willing to adopt to the ways of the light, they will come to you.

You don't come to them because then you start to become like them. And this is exactly what the pilgrims found. And just learning throughout all of our lives through school what is it that we're always told why the founding father, why the pilgrims left the old world and came to America. They always say it was because of religious freedom. We wanted religious freedom. There's nothing else, just religious freedom.

And, you know, religious freedom was a part of it, of course, but not the main part. There was something else that they said themselves as to why they separated themselves, why they had to leave the old world to such an extent to come all the way to America to be able to settle and to build their families. William Bradford, in his "Sunny Reasons for the Removal" from Lennon wrote, "But that which was more lamentable," right?

He's listing all these other reasons. And he says, "But that which was more lamentable." We were complaining about more, more of a problem. "And of all sorrows, most heavy to be born was this, that many of their children by these occasions and the great insidiousness of youth in that country and the manifold temptations of the place were drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses, getting the reins of their necks and departing from their parents."

Even though they were living at home and I'm sure they had a fairly strict lifestyle, that influence around them was still leaving them to depart from the ways of their parents. "Some became soldiers, others took upon them far voyages by sea and others some worse courses, tending to dissoluteness and the danger of their souls to the great grief of their parents and dishonor of God." So their parents understood what it was that they were supposed to be doing.

And even if they lived around and they still went to church, they saw that because they were adopting the ways of the world, how what the way that the culture was going to go. And I laid that out pretty clearly in my book "Invasion Volume One." You can go get it at invasionbook.com. That process of how it happened here in Utah and how we can extrapolate that in other locations wherever you live.

And so we see that same thing happening. So they saw their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and be corrupted. So to prevent that, they said, "We got to separate." They followed what the Bible said. The founding fathers did the same exact thing. We see that over and over again. Saints followed the same principles. These are principles of natural law. They're unchangeable.

No matter when and where you are, these same ideas apply. Brigham Young, when the saints were facing the persecutions and the trials that they were in the Midwest and Missouri and Illinois, he explained this principle. He says that, "You all know and have doubtless felt for years the necessity of a removal provided the government should not be sufficiently protective to allow us to worship God according to the dictates of our own consciences and of the omnipotent voice of eternal truth."

And then he quotes scripture. He says, "Two cannot walk together except they be agreed." Over and over again, we hear the same. You cannot walk together except you be agreed. Otherwise, you're going to clash or you're going to become a person that you did not want to become without even realizing it. Joseph Smith said that to be able to see what they could do about protecting their rights, he said, "They organized into a special council to take into consideration the best policy for these people to adopt, to obtain their rights from the nation and to secure protection for themselves and children and to secure a resting place in the mountains or some uninhibited region where they can enjoy the liberty of conscience guaranteed to us by the constitution of our country."

So they were looking for a place to separate themselves because they were not being allowed to live according to the dictates of their own conscience amongst the society that they were in.