The Duty to Warn and the Power to Save

It is not uncommon to hear an impatient parent deliver an ultimatum to a willful child, perhaps with the familiar threat: “That’s the last time I’m going to tell you.” What is to follow may be specified or left to the imagination, but the note of finality is there. Weariness and impatience often drive us to do or to say things we don’t fully mean, and it is highly probable that it isn’t the last time the parent in question is going to tell the child in question. Children have a way of needing to be told often, and parents have a way of telling them often, far beyond that so-called “last time.” From this common experience, it would not be difficult to imagine a justifiable impatience on the part of our Father in heaven who has so long labored with His children and who has so often caused to be repeated the great truths of life, by His own voice, and by the prophets He has raised up, and by the written record. And yet generation after generation, His children are as heedless as some of ours sometimes seem to be. But the office of parenthood is not so much one of issuing ultimatums as it is one of long-suffering striving and teaching, to the end not that children will be warned and disowned, but rather to the end that they will be loved and nurtured into being what they should be. It is relatively easy to say “Do this, or else”but suppose they choose “or else”? Warning a man and letting him take the consequences is a grim though sometimes necessary way of doing one’s duty, but persuading him to conduct himself so that he won’t have to take the consequences is the real measure of success and satisfactionwith parents as to their children, with men as to all other men. Indeed, the avowed purpose of God is to “bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”5 And surely man himself can have no greater purpose with respect to himself, his children, and to all mankind. To warn is a solemn obligation, but to save is a godlike achievement.