Francis Harper Message for 3/22/2019

---- Forwarded Message -----
From: Francis Harper
wbfrmsup@iowatelecom.net


Francis Harper Message for 3/22/2019

Dear Ones,

A few years ago a group of salesmen went to a regional sales convention in Chicago. They had assured their wives that they would be home in plenty of time for Friday night’s dinner. In their rush through the terminal, with tickets and briefcases, one of these salesmen inadvertently kicked over a table which held a display of apples. Apples flew everywhere. Without stopping or looking back, they all managed to reach the plane in time for their nearly missed boarding.

ALL BUT ONE!!! He paused, took a deep breath, got in touch with his feelings, and experienced a twinge of compassion for the girl whose apple stand had been overturned.

He told his buddies to go on without him, waved good-bye, told one of them to call his wife when they arrived at their home destination and explain his taking a later flight. Then he returned to the terminal where the apples were all over the terminal floor. He was glad he did.

The 16 year old girl was totally blind! She was softly crying, tears running down her cheeks in frustration, and at the same time helplessly groping for her spilled produce as the crowd swirled about her, no one stopping and no one to care for her plight.

The salesman knelt on the floor with her, gathered up the apples, put them back on the table and helped organize her display. As he did this, he noticed that many of them had become battered and bruised; these he set aside in another basket.

When he had finished, he pulled out his wallet and said to the girl, Here, please take this $40 for the damage we did. “Are you okay?” She nodded through her tears. He continued on with “I hope we didn’t spoil your day too badly.”

As the salesman started to walk away, the bewildered blind girl called out to him, “Mister. . . .” He paused and turned to look back into those blind eyes. She continued, “Are you Jesus?”

He stopped in mid-stride, and he wondered. Then slowly he made his way to catch the later flight with that question burning and bouncing about in his soul”

“Are you Jesus?” Do people mistake you for Jesus? That’s our destiny, is it not? To be so much like Jesus that people cannot tell the difference as we live and interact with a world that is blind to His love, life and grace. If we claim to know Him, we should live, walk and act as He would.

Knowing Him is more than simply quoting scripture and going to church. It’s actually living the Word as life unfolds day to day.

You are the apple of His eye even though we, too, have been bruised by a fall. He stopped what He was doing and picked you and me up on a hill called Calvary and paid in full for our damaged fruit.

Pray for divine encounters and divine appointments.

My Love to All,

Francis Harper


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The Call Is Unto Perfection

“And when Abram was ninety and nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said unto him, I the Almighty God give unto thee a commandment; that thou shalt walk uprightly before me, and be perfect” (Genesis 17:1).

Jesus calls all of us to be perfect: “ye are therefore commanded to be perfect, even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:50 IV; 5:48 KJV).

During his visit with the “more righteous” people in Meso America, the Lord challenged them to be perfect: “I would that ye should be perfect even as I, or your Father who is in heaven is perfect” (3 Nephi 5:92).

In what has been called “the other Lord’s prayer” in John 17, Jesus prayed for us: “. . . I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from evil . . . . Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they also may be one in us; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. . . . I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one” (John 17:13-23).

Would Jesus command us to be perfect if perfection is impossible for us to attain? Will his prayer that we “may be made perfect in one,” be answered?

Nephi wrote: “I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them” (1 Nephi 1:65). God sent his Son, Jesus, as the way whereby we can attain perfection. Moroni wrote: “Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his strength sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ . . . And again, if ye, by the grace of God, are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father, unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy without spot” (Moroni 10:29-30).

Our ultimate goal as saints should be to come forth in the First Resurrection or the Resurrection of the just. This resurrection will occur at the time of the Lord’s second coming. See Doctrine and Covenants 76:5. Those who have been valiant in testimony will come forth in the First Resurrection.



In his letter to the Philippians, Paul wrote of his greatest desire: “If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the just. Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect; but I follow after . . . I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Let us therefore, as many as [would be] perfect, be thus minded . . .” (Philippians 3:11-15).

John, the apostle of love, wrote: “We know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2). If we are not like him when he comes it is very unlikely that we will be caught up to meet him when he comes! See 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17. And every man that hath this hope [to be like him] in him purifieth himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:14).

Jesus said to Philip: “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). Who of us can say: he that hath seen me hath seen Jesus? We can say with Paul: “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect; but I follow after” (Philippians 3:12).