Hello on Shake and Saints, welcome back, I'm Jared Halverson, and I had to dust off the white shirt and tie today, because we're talking church.

I feel like a missionary again, I'm out there serving, checking out wards and branches and seeing how things are going and hoping that we can help build

the kingdom a little bit closer to the way it was originally designed by the King of Kings.

If you remember from last week we finished Mosiah 29 and then Alma 1-2-3-4 and where Alma-4 ends the

church is a mess. Some of you are probably thinking okay so not much has changed.

Maybe your ward is struggling.

Maybe there are some issues there that you wish that you could change or at least some

cultural things going on in the church that you wish were different. Okay?

If that's the case, then you're in good company because Alma feels exactly the same

by the time Alma Chapter 4 ends.

If you remember, there was Pride, the Universal Sin, the one that's going to lead to so many other problems.

There is materialism so that there's the haves and the have-nots within the same congregation.

You are seeing conflict within that congregation, you're seeing persecution of those outside the church.

If you remember the language, the church was setting a bad example to those outside of the faith,

and it had become a stumbling block. The church itself

had kind of stalled in its own progress. That's an internal problem but also

externally they were being a negative example and causing problems among those outside the

faith.

And if you remember where we finished, that was when Alma, who had been wearing two hats, decides to take off the political one, to focus full-time

on his religious ministry, knowing that if he could cleanse the inner vessel and make sure that

the leaven, think about that, salt of the world, salt of the earth, light of the world, the light is now dimming and so he's going to have to do everything he can to get it to shine more brilliantly.

The salt has lost much of its savor. Therefore it's

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