Sermon Illustrations

POWs in Vietnam Recall Memorized Scripture to Help Themselves Survive

In the prison camps which were opened up following the terrible years of the Vietnam war, a story came out about how men endured six, seven, eight years of prison under the most terrible of conditions: rotten food, isolation, vermin, and, perhaps most devastating of all, no light. Almost total darkness, eking out a bare existence day after day, in the darkness. Some of them in one small cell began to reach down into the recesses of their memories and to reconstruct, as best they could, the words of the Bible. They recited and quoted to one another, they corrected one another’s recall, and day by day, slowly but surely, they reconstructed and committed to one another a sizable amount of the Scriptures – no text to read from, no tapes to play, just the memories each one had stored up from his Sunday School days, These soldiers found that because they had spent some time walking in the light while they still had the light, that when the light failed and faded, when their lives were plunged into misery and darkness, now there was a resource on which they could draw.

It can be that way for you; should the light fade for you, and it will, it surely will, if you have chosen discipline, if you have chosen to persist, if you have chosen to walk in the light while you have the light, then the darkness may come, but it will never overtake you, While you have the light, trust in the light, that you may become children of light.

From a sermon by Joseph Smith, Fading Light, 5/14/2010

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