Deny—stemming from a multi-generational collusion?

 

In the small book of 4th Nephi (which has only a single chapter), in the 27th verse, we read:

And it came to pass that when two hundred and ten years had passed away there were many churches in the land; yea, there were many churches which professed to know the Christ, and yet they did deny the more parts of his gospel, insomuch that they did receive all manner of wickedness, and did administer that which was sacred unto him to whom it had been forbidden because of unworthiness.

By “deny” we are to understand that they chose to or refused to follow Christ’s Gospel or keep all of His commandments—chose to do something other than to follow in Christ’s footsteps exactly or simply decided to leave-out essential parts or practices of the Gospel... Which we are always in danger of doing, not as a church, but as we individually follow our Lord—we might choose to NOT do the thing(s) that is/are hard for us to do or replace it with something else; add our own little ritual or covenant/commandment-breaking practice. It’s easy to do and hard to recognize it and admit that it’s not following Christ or His church, especially when we learned it from a trusted loved-one...

Part of the reason that it's so difficult to not fall into the trap of not doing (omission) or doing (commission) what we've been taught or shown to do by Jesus the Christ is because we've learned or grown-up doing one thing or another over and over and it's become a tradition.  It's something we've always done or something we've always seen done and now it's just the way that one acts, right?

It's easy to not do something that we've never seen done (by our mother and/or father or older siblings, not to mention our grandfather or grandmother...) and so don't feel it's expected of us to do it, even though we've read about it in the scriptures and heard about it over the pulpit.  We almost feel like it's really all right by the examples we've continually and constantly seen.  It's become a multi-generational collusion--almost like all involved have said, by their looks and winks and "understandings" that, "I won't do it" or "Will do it" if you won't do it or will do it, and then neither of us will say anything to anyone about it and act like it never happened!

Hello, Gadianton robbers!  Hello, Large and Spacious Building dwellers!  Deniers...

 

JPS