Our Peril When We Ignore the Prophets- Monte J. Brough

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Our Peril When We Ignore the Prophets 


Elder Monte J. Brough, of the Quorum of the Seventy 
Given at the LDS Business College, November 14, 2001 



This talk was given less than a month after 9/11.  He compares the current situation with the Book of Helaman.

"What we're facing, brothers and sisters, is not a new situation. I don't know how you've felt as you read the Book of Mormon, but for me the language and literature of Alma has always been my favorite. But I decided after September 11 that I wanted to go back into Helaman. So I've made a study over the last 60 days of the Book of Helaman and can here assert that the events we have before us in 2001 are not new. This has happened before. You don't need to write down these scriptures, just remember the book of Helaman. Go home and study it. Particularly start out at about Chapter 11 and read through the rest of the book and see if, in fact, we don't have a very close tie to what's happening in this world in the year 2001." 

Go to the link and see all the similarities he sees.


Later in the talk, he discusses how America is like the Nephites, casting out the prophets.

"Let's talk about that scenario. We live in days of prophets. We wouldn't cast them out, would we? We wouldn't have ignored them. Let me just mention a couple of things that we might use as an indicator of how we might apply this to ourselves. Three years ago, President Hinckley talked about debt. He talked about the debt that families go into with plastic money, and some of you in this room are spending more than you should. What has the prophet said about it? Stop it. Don't get into debt. Don't spend more than you have. Save a little because you may need some savings. Our neighbor in Kaysville lost his job yesterday. He's an engineer with an MBA. Even with all that education he lost his job. He had no savings at all. They're not prepared at all the weather the storm of their father and husband being out of work. We found through our studies that three years after President Hinckley's talk, people have more debt. There is a higher level of consumer debt in Utah than there was three years ago. What has the prophet said about food storage over the years? He mentioned it briefly in this last conference. Our studies show us that less than 10 percent of active Latter-day Saints along the Wasatch Front have enough to last for 90 days. We don't stone the prophet. We don't kick him out. We just ignore him. 

What does he say about the dress of young people? I don't see anyone here that falls in this category, but he's asked young women not to wear a lot of earrings, to be modest in the one pair they could wear. What about body tattoos? He's asked us not to. I spoke recently to a group of younger students and one raised his hand and said, in effect, "Wasn't that silly for President Hinckley to be worried about such a thing as a tattoo?" We don't cast out the prophets, do we? We just ignore them. I actually found a group of young men who laughed at the idea he would be concerned about young men wearing earrings. Well, we don't cast out the prophet. We just ignore him. 

Now that we've gotten into this mess with our affluence and our comfort and our ease and our strong men over fighting a war and trying to root these people out of the mountains and destroy them if we can, let's go look at the rest of what Samuel said. In the rest of the chapters there's one word that summarizes what has to change among the people back home in order to quit stamping under their feet the Holy One of Israel. If you could judge that one word, what would it be? One word. It's a summary of all the rest of Helaman. The word: ingratitude.

Samuel promises the people that if they will understand and live the law of gratitude they would cease to stamp the Lord under their feet. So how do we live the law of gratitude? One way is observance of the Sabbath day. I used to think the Sabbath day was a day of rest. It's not at all; it's a day of thanksgiving. It's a day of expressing gratitude. It's not a day to lie around and do nothing, and it's not necessarily a day to do studies. It's the kind of thing that we can properly use to express gratitude to our Father in Heaven. "

You'll have to read the rest of the talk to find out all the other ways Elder Brough says we are like the Nephites.  But here is a cute story from Elder Brough about President Hinckley, I can really picture him saying this: 

"I tell you the person that practices the law of gratitude more than anyone I know is Gordon B. Hinckley. He feels that he owes it. He has this great sense of debt to the Church and to the people. Two weeks ago, in our temple meeting he was quite emotional as he expressed his love for the people, for their faith and their goodness. He said, "I'd like to just hug everyone of them. And then I'd like to shake them up." You know what I mean. We all need a little shaking up. "