Two thousand stripling warriors

The young women will be studying D&C 25 and Proverbs 31.

The young men will be studying the Stripling Warriors in Alma chapters 53 and 56.

Each group will be asked to read these scriptures looking for attributes that lead to virtue and truth.

And as I was watching another podcast, Grace Freeman made an observation that I hadn't noticed before concerning these two different sets of scriptures.

A carpenter might true up a doorframe.

In accounting, to true up the books means to reconcile them against the actual numbers.

related to true as an adjective is the phrase i'm sure you've all heard before that the arrow flew true or the phrase to stay true to your word this means aligned with a mark or a standard so a wheel doesn't wobble because it's a bad wheel it wobbles because it drifted away from center and it just needs some small steady adjustments to bring it back into center the gospel is the center or the standard the gospel is our covenants and that's what we need to keep coming back to as we true ourselves daily choices like prayer scripture study repentance these are the small adjustments that true us to the gospel of jesus christ they help us stay true being true at all times in the sense that we're reading it in alma 53 20 describing the stripling warriors means that they are aligned with the standard that they had been taught by their mothers.

Even when their mothers were not around, and even when they were under a lot of pressure, they were true to the standards that they had been taught.

It's the journey of becoming and living a good life.

And what I think is really cool is the two stories that this pulls from is Proverbs 31 and the Stripling Warriors.

And I am the most intrigued about these two stories because of this very beginning.

In Proverbs 31, it says, the words of King Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him.

And she's going to go ahead and she's going to teach him what a virtuous woman is.

And then when you go to the Stripling Warriors, it says, and this is one of the most famous verses when it talks about the Stripling Warriors, is the lessons they learned, they learned from their moms.

And what I think is really cool is that virtue is best learned, I think, from wisdom of someone who is virtuous, right? We can sit here and we can hypothesize all we want, but there's some level of value that comes from learning what it looks like to live a good life from someone who is good, from someone who became good.

And when we look at the Stripling Warriors today, when we look at the Proverbs 31 women, I want you to read it like I read those letters from my grandma.

They knew that I was, uh, uh, a man of integrity because I've stayed true to those covenants and promises that I'd made.

And Alma 53, it doesn't say that the stripling warriors were brave once the fighting started, right? It says that they were true at all times in whatsoever thing they were entrusted, just like you were when you were at home or when you were at the fire station.

It means that, that the, the training happened, they were ready for it even on days when nothing happened.

I'm sure there were days at the fire station where nothing happened, but you still had to be ready-

Correct

... to go out and do, to save lives and to, to battle the fires.

Um, but these stripling warriors, there were no battles, there were no tests, and they were just the regular, ordinary days at home that made it so they were ready when the time came.

Right.