While I was studying the scriptures this morning, I was thinking about the promises that the Lord made to His people. They can be categorized in to two general categories, which I'll call rewards and punishments, or positive and negative promises. Rewards being those things that the Lord gives for righteous behavior, and punishments for sin. To delve in to it even further, there are active and passive ways for each. This applies individually and collectively as well, but the collective is merely the sum of it's parts.
Passive:
I believe God's grace is good to us if we try honestly to live good lives and avoid doing wrong. Conversely, there are things that we offend Him in if we don't make any effort.
Active:
Obviously, any active sin is going to lead us away from God and make it harder to heed to Holy Spirit. The purpose of my post today is to look at active obedience for which the scriptures spell out specific blessings. One example would be the Beatitudes in Matthew chapters 5-7. "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." (Matt 7:7). This basic premise of "condition then blessing" is repeated throughout the scriptures. From an LDS perspective, we have the promise of "I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say, but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise." (D&C 82:10)
I now want to define and catalog the references where there is a specific promise tied to added obedience to a spiritual principle. Certainly, some will be more obvious than others.
