Choice and Accountability

Families grow stronger when parents teach the fact that there is accountability for every choice. We all have agency and freedom to do many things. We can choose what we want to do without any problem in many instances, but we must also understand that we cannot choose the consequences for those choices.

President Calvin Coolidge (1873-1933) said, "We demand entire freedom of action and then expect the government in some miraculous way to save us from the consequences of our own acts…. Self-government means self-reliance."

Our Constitution was written for a religious and moral people. People who expect the government to always be there to bail them out of trouble are dead weights on our system. We can strengthen our nation by making right choices in order to receive the consequences that we desire.

Free to Choose

For this Freedom Friday, I want to revisit the topic of moral agency. After I published my last post on this topic, I prepared a lesson for the five-year-old children that I teach each Sunday and realized that I had missed the most important reason why we should use our moral agency wisely. That reason is that it makes us happy to choose the right. Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ love us. Because They love us, They want us to be happy. One way that we can be happy is to have the opportunity to make choices. This is why Heavenly Father gave us the great gift of moral agency long before we came to earth. With the gift of moral agency, we have the right to choose how we will live our lives. Because we are able to make choices, we are responsible for our actions. When we make the right choices, our agency becomes stronger and our power to make right choices increases. One thing that we need to remember is that even though we have the power to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions. In Matthew 5:6 it says, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness…." To "hunger and thirst after righteousness" means to choose the right. Making right choices helps us to make more right choices. Choosing wisely brings peace of mind and freedom from feelings of guilt and remorse. Using our moral agency wisely brings happiness. If we want to truly be free, we must learn CTR - Choose The Right!

Agency

I want to wish everyone a very Happy and Prosperous New Year. I hope that we all have a great year! On this Freedom Friday I want to discuss the foundation of freedom and liberty. That foundation is moral agency - the freedom to choose. We had agency when we lived as spirits in heaven before we came to this earth. While we lived with our Father in Heaven, He presented His plan for our happiness. He explained that He had prepared a new home for us where we would receive physical bodies and learn many things that we couldn't learn in heaven. He told us that we would have the ability to choose how we wanted to live our lives on earth. He said that we would one day return to live with Him if we made good choices. After Father in Heavenly presented His plan, another plan was presented to us by Lucifer. Lucifer's plan would insure that we all returned to heaven. To do this, our agency would be taken from us - and we would be forced to be good. There was a war in heaven (Revelation 12:7) because those who chose to follow Lucifer's plan wanted to force everyone else to choose it also. Those who wanted to keep their agency - the freedom to choose - won the war in heaven and were allowed to come to earth, receive bodies, and learn new things. Those who wanted to use force were cast out of heaven without bodies. Among those who came to earth are some people who think they are so intelligent that they want to tell others how to live their lives. These people are sometimes called social engineers. They like to use the force of the government to change mankind and to cause them to fit a master plan. These plans are very much like the plan we rejected in heaven. Many different programs are used to change mankind through the force of the government. Progressives are currently trying to gain control of the citizens in this nation by forcing some of these programs on our nation under the guise of health care reform, climate change, cap and trade, etc. Previous programs in other countries fell under the titles of Nazism, fascism, socialism, and communism. They were all administered under the control of a dictator such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, etc. We fought a war in heaven over agency. Heavenly Father considered agency to be so important that He allowed one-third of the hosts of heaven - His children - to rebel and to choose to live another way. Our nation was founded on liberty - the freedom to use our God-given agency to make choices. Our Founders fought a war that we might have liberty. Now we are in a war to see if we can retain our liberty. The words agency, freedom, and liberty all describe the Right to Choose. Let's keep this Right and fight against any body and every body that wants to take away our agency!