So when I woke up to an email from the second counselor yesterday asking if I'd be willing to fill in at the last minute for someone who was unable to give a sacrament meeting talk, I should have said, "I'm really sorry, but I'm doing ten million other things this Sunday. Could I speak some other time?" Should have.
The topic I've been given is Matthew 22:17-21, which is oddly difficult for a last-minute talk. As a first step in my preparation, I copied the phrase "render therefore unto caesar the things which are caeser's and unto god the things that are god's," and pasted it into the general conference address search, hoping for some guidance from, say, an apostle or prophet. The phrase turned out no search results whatsoever, though. Lds.org, trying to be helpful, asked me:
Did you mean render therefore unto césar the things which are cougar’s and unto god the things that are god’s?
Nope. Not at all what I meant.
(For the record, lds.org's suggestion doesn't turn up any search results either. I kind of wish it had.)
(And as an addendum to the record, narrowing my search down to just "caesar" brings the grand total to a mere three conference talks, only one of which actually makes reference to this particular scripture. Briefly. This isn't exactly a popular theme. Anyone have any faith-inspiring personal stories about rendering to Caesar and to God?)
(And as a postscript to the addendum to the record, I'll bet that by distracting myself from talk preparation to write a blog post, complete with image montage, I might not be following the second injunction of that scripture so much. Back to work.)
3 comments:
I'm giving a talk tomorrow too! Let me know if you want me to email you a copy. We have different topics but you could make it work:)
Those verses are in the Gospel Doctrine lesson for tomorrow too. I don't have a profound insight, but I have two things: (1) Don't use this in your talk. Just for a fun fact: "What is referred to as a penny was no doubt the current Roman denarius with the image of Tiberius or possibly Augustus." -Howard W. Hunter from the institute manual. Some countries like Jordan still use that unit of currency, dinar. Also where the Spanish word for money, dinari comes from. (2) This may be important. This is my thought. Let's not forget that Jesus could say what He said because what is Cesar's and what is God's are all in the end His. However, I'm a Cesar, it's not mine, just as the 9 out of 10 as well as the 1 out of 10 are all God's.
I was pointed out by the members in my class that the Spanish word is dineros.
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