A calm that displaces doubts

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Sunday Morning Session of the April 1983 Conference.

This week I liked a quote from Victor L. Brown's talk, Finding One's Identity. He was quoting George T. Boyd:

Scripture reading enables [man] to see life, not alone from the human point of view, but in some degree from God’s. 

This perspective fills two of man’s important needs—a sense of individual worth and a feeling of self-subordination. Either of these are achievable alone. But how easy it is for a sense of personal worth to turn to an intolerable egoism and self-conceit—or a sense of self-subordination—to turn into a false humility or morbid self-depreciation. 

In the scriptures man finds that he belongs to a whole, of which God is a part. Belonging to such a whole gives him a sense of the value of his own soul, but seen in relation to God reveals his dependence and hence his subordination. … Thus, a devout use of the scriptures nourishes the spiritual life with a calm that displaces the doubts and anxieties which paralyze mankind.

Doesn't that sound lovely? "A calm that displaces doubts and anxieties." I do find that the scriptures give me this sense of peace and calm.


Other posts in this series:

Repentance and Free Agency—by G
Shifts that refocus our lives on Christ—by Jan Tolman