Try as you may, you cannot put the Lord in your debt. For every time you try to do His will, He simply pours out more blessings upon you.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that our efforts to serve God do not create a debt or obligation, but instead result in greater blessings from Him.
Ezra Taft Benson's quote highlights the principle that no matter how diligently one attempts to serve or fulfill God's will, they cannot place God in a position of indebtedness. Instead, the more effort contributed towards living a righteous life and following divine guidance, the more continuous blessings and gifts from God are poured into one's life, illustrating a relationship of grace rather than transaction.
In practice
During a sermon discussing the nature of divine grace, one might quote this to illustrate the abundance of God's blessings.
Humility responds to God's will-to the fear of His judgments and to the needs of those around us. To the proud, the applause of the world rings in their ears; to the humble, the applause of heaven warms their hearts. Someone has said, "Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man."
Physical well-being is not only a priceless asset to oneself-it is a heritage to be passed on. With good health, all other activities of life are greatly enhanced. A clean mind in a healthy body enables one to render far more effective service to others. It helps one provide more vigorous leadership. It gives our every experience in life more zest and more meaning. Robust health is a noble and worthwhile attainment.
If you really want to receive joy and happiness, then serve others with all your heart. Lift their burden, and your own burden will be lighter.
Our parents deserve our honor and respect for giving us life itself. Beyond this they almost always made countless sacrifices as they cared for and nurtured us through our infancy and childhood, provided us with the necessities of life, and nursed us through physical illnesses and the emotional stresses of growing up.
We are an overfed and undernourished nation digging an early grave with our teeth.
Every man eventually is backed up to the wall of faith, and there he must make his stand.
A man who worships in Spirit and Truth no longer honors the Creator because of His works, but praises Him because of Himself.
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
None but those who have learned the art of subjecting their senses as well as reason to hypothetical systems can be persuaded by the most specious rhetorician that the lots of life are equal; yet it cannot be denied that every one has his peculiar pleasures and vexations, that external accidents operate variously upon different minds, and that no man can exactly judge from his own sensations what another would feel in the same circumstances.
If you can see the terrorists as a relative who's dangerously sick and we have to give them medicine and the medicine is love and compassion. There's nothing better.
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
No matter how hard we try words simply cannot express the horror, the shock, and the revulsion we all feel over what took place in this nation on Tuesday morning. September 11 will go down in our history as a day to remember.
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