Our Perpetual Debt
Joseph Fielding Smith
General Conference
April 1944
OUR RESPONSIBILITY TO PREACH THE GOSPEL
Now there are many debts which we owe to the Lord. There is the debt of preaching this gospel to a wicked and a perverse generation (Alma 9:8), and those are the words of the Lord, so do not accuse me of calling the world wicked. It is. I can testify to that from what I have seen of it, and I have seen of the wickedness but a small part, I assure you. But the world today is filthy, drunken, saturated and stinking with tobacco. The world is full of immorality. It is a fallen world; it has been a fallen world since Adam was driven from the Garden of Eden, and yet we are in it, and the Lord has given us the mission of assisting Him, of being His agents in this world, to regenerate it, as far as it is possible to bring to pass that regeneration. It will never be fully accomplished, so far as we are concerned; we are not going, by our preaching, to save very many souls.
The Lord has given unto men their agency. They may act for themselves (2 Ne. 2:26), they can choose to do good, or they can choose to do evil with the rewards which are coming, and most men choose to do evil. The Lord said that men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil (John 3:19). Yet our mission, I say, is, so far as it is within our power, to regenerate, to bring to repentance, just as many of the children of our Father in heaven as it is possible for us to do. That is one of our debts; that is an obligation the Lord has placed upon the Church, and more particularly upon the quorums of the priesthood of the Church, and yet this obligation belongs to every soul.
It is the duty of every member of this Church to preach the Gospel by precept and by example. Brother George F. Richards quoted from the scriptures this morning, where the Lord said it is our duty to warn the world, and it is the duty of every person so warned to warn his neighbor, and if he will warn the neighbors, then they are left without excuse, and their blood is upon their own heads (D&C 88:81-82). It is our mission to warn. That is one of our obligations, and we owe this debt to the world.
