Knowledge That Becomes Love

Core thought: Christlike knowledge begins in humility, sees people mercifully, and proves itself in love.

I last had the opportunity to speak in church back in 2022, when I was on the cusp of my first wedding anniversary. It’s a testament to the rapid nature of life that four years have already passed us by, bringing with it the natural highs and lows of an ordinary mortal life. By virtue of the recent combination of wards, I wanted to briefly introduce my family to y’all. My name is RyanDavid Burningham, I also go by Rylee or RD. My wife Emily and I were married on April 17th, 2021, after meeting online in March of 2020, a mere week before the pandemic interrupted everyone’s life on earth.

Together, we have seven children, six girls and one boy. And before you think, “That poor boy”, there’s no one luckier on earth to have lived with such amazing women. So lucky, he married one of them.

And before you get too grossed out by that, context is key; my oldest son married Emily’s oldest daughter. It’s a polarizing statement, but far more normal than first glance ever gets credit for. They first met on our wedding day, remaining true to themselves as bratty independent teenagers who wanted no truck with our second marriage. Lucky for them, and for us.

Because of their marriage, Emily and I have our first grandchild, and we have the bizarre and unlooked-for opportunity to see, without all that unnecessary mucking about with pregnancy, what a child of ours may have actually looked like.

Brother Weitz sent me a text message just over two weeks ago, asking me to speak in sacrament meeting today about the Christlike attribute of knowledge. He went on to say that the topic could obviously be taken in several directions, for the which I am grateful, as I am nothing without my rabbit holes and diversions. I promptly answered, "Of course, my friend.", in my usual overly confident-while-texting bravado. As per usual, that is where my confidence remained, as life continued unabated after the invitation.

Unusually tight deadlines at work caused me to work close to 80 hours a week lately. So by the time I actually sat down to prepare this talk, there was no part of me that felt wise or spiritual. What I did feel was tired and behind. I felt acutely aware of my own limits and what I could produce. As it turns out, that was just the right place to begin.

Humans tend to speak about knowledge as though it were possession. For me, it feels like facts I have collected, or maybe a doctrine I can explain tidily, or a ready answer I can give a child.

But a Christlike attribute is not something Christ calls a possession. Rather, it is part of His nature. So Christlike knowledge must be more than having correct information. It must describe a way of seeking truth, a way of seeing people, and a way of living in response to what we learn.

My central thought today is this: Christlike knowledge begins in humility, sees people mercifully, and proves itself in love.

Doctrine and Covenants chapter 93 says that truth is "knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come." To me, that means truth is not merely knowledge of things as I would prefer them to be. It is not the version of events that protects my pride or leaves my existing beliefs undisturbed. Truth asks us to receive reality as it is and what it will become. That requires humility, because no one sees the whole of reality.

The same section of the Doctrine and Covenants describes Jesus Christ in mortality as receiving "grace for grace" until He received a fullness. Luke likewise says that Jesus "increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man." Even the Savior's mortal life included growth. Preach My Gospel teaches that becoming like Him is a gradual, lifelong process.

If the scriptural account of Christ's mortal life includes increase, growth, and grace for grace, then we should not be ashamed to be learners. The willingness to learn is itself one of the ways we become like Him.

For much of my life, I treated spiritual knowledge almost like a final examination. Every statement seemed to come with two circles: TRUE and FALSE. I thought my truest self should be able to circle TRUE immediately, confidently, and permanently. If I hesitated, hesitation was a failure. Thank heaven I do not experience faith quite that neatly anymore.

My own knowledge gaps are not small. They concern history, revelation, pain, and the explanations we receive are inadequate to that pain. Others concern what we do when God feels absent and prayer does not bring clarity, or when an old answer no longer seems satisfactory enough for the question. I mention these gaps because I suspect I am not the only person who has sat in a church pew, loving the gospel yet finding that some things no longer fit together neatly.

As mentioned before, I have given talks from this very place and from others like it, during different eras of my life. For example, a much younger version of myself inferred how a faithful person was supposed to look. So, I wore the white shirt and navy suit. I repeated words that made me recognizable to the lay clergy. At my core, I wanted to belong, to be seen as worthy, and to feel safe. At 19, I went on a mission faithfully. Yet, I came home six months later. I then married young, believing I had found stability and managed to escape the shadows of my childhood home. But in reality, I carried those shadows with me. Over and over, I brought fear, anxiety, and unnamed wounds into relationships with people who carried histories of their own.

In a more tender light, I can see each version of me was sincere. They were proof of my own survival. And they were yet a more preparatory truth; I spent much of my life carrying an impossible burden: the burden of proving that my life was under control.

Because isn’t it a fact that a good missionary endures? Certainly, a loving and faithful husband keeps his marriage intact. An attentive father provides stability. A life-long Church member knows what he believes. And a good sacrament speaker stands at the pulpit and makes the story coherent. I may get there today ;)

Symbolically, that old era is dying. But I have not figured everything out. These are not admirable confessions, and I am not claiming that I no longer care what anyone thinks. What is dying is the person who believed that caring for others required controlling every possible response to his presence.

I still want to speak carefully and accept responsibility for what I say. But I am learning that I can care about another person's response without shrinking in an attempt to control their response.

To button up this portion of my story, I know that age and context do not absolve me of the ways my fear, avoidance, anxiety, or unexamined wounds have affected others. But accountability does not require me to flatten my entire life into a guilty verdict either. To know more fully is not to excuse. It is to tell my truth with greater precision.

Alma chapter 32 offers a humane description of that kind of knowledge. When the seed begins to grow, Alma says, "your knowledge is perfect in that thing." Those final words matter: in that thing. He does not say that one spiritual experience settles every historical, doctrinal, or personal question. We can know something real without claiming to know everything. A measured testimony is still a testimony. Honest faith is not inferior faith.

Maybe this is sometimes what faith looks like: not knowing exactly where to go, but refusing to lie about where we are, and continuing to turn toward Christ.

There is a story near the end of Luke. Two disciples are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus after the Crucifixion. Their understanding of everything that has happened is broken. Jesus draws near and walks with them, but they do not recognize Him.

Of course Jesus already knows what has happened. He knows who He is. He knows the tomb is empty. Yet He asks them what they are talking about.

They stop. Luke says they are sad. They tell Him about the prophet they believed would redeem Israel. They tell Him about the Crucifixion, the empty tomb, and the bewildering report of angels. They possess many of the facts, but they do not yet know what those facts mean. Then they say, “But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.”

We trusted.

Their hope shifted into the past tense. They are speaking of redemption to the Redeemer as though redemption has already failed. They are mourning the loss of Christ while the living Christ walks beside them. And He lets them speak.

Christ does not reveal Himself immediately and He does not interrupt their grief with the triumphant ending. He listens as they tell Him an incomplete account of His own story.

Nor does He wait in Jerusalem for them to return with corrected theology. He joins them on the road they are already walking—even though, for the moment, it is a road leading away from the place where they expected redemption to occur.

He walks with them. He opens the scriptures. He accepts their invitation to remain. And at the table, He takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them.

Only then are their eyes opened.

Only then do they recognize that the person they believed they had lost had been accompanying them all along.

Not Christ waiting at the end, after they finally understand.

Christ drawing near and going with them.

That brings us to the part of Christlike knowledge that feels central to me.

Alma chapter 7 says that Christ would suffer "pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind." He would take upon Him the pains, sicknesses, death, and infirmities of His people.

Alma goes on to tell us why, explaining: "that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities." Replace the word infirmities with any mortal experience you want.

The next verse creates an undeniable tension, which is exactly what wrestling with the word means: "The Spirit knoweth all things; nevertheless the Son of God suffereth according to the flesh."

The tension is introduced because Christ is described as already possessing divine knowledge. But his mortal ministry was essential, He entered the body. He suffered. His knowledge is not remote observation. It is knowledge according to the flesh.

And what is that knowledge for?

To succor. To run toward. To support. To accompany. Christlike knowledge is not merely the power to describe another person's pain correctly. It is the willingness to meet that person where they are, on the road to Emmaus, when they believe their Savior is lost.

In John 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well. He knows her complicated history, but He does not reduce her to it. He asks her for a drink. He speaks with her seriously about worship, truth, and living water. While other disciples marvel that He is speaking with her at all, she becomes a witness who brings others to Him.

Christ’s knowledge meant he knew the whole of her story without letting the hardest and most obvious part of it define how he saw her.

Then, in the parable of the good Samaritan, a lawyer asks Jesus a knowledge question: "Who is my neighbour?" A priest sees the wounded man, as does a Levite. Both pass by. Then comes the Samaritan, but he allows what he knows to materialize into responsibility. He crosses the distance between observation and love.

Those two Samaritan stories teach me that information is not the same as understanding. We can know something about a person and still be deeply wrong about them. Christlike knowledge asks: What has this person lived through? What are they carrying that I cannot see? What part of their story have I not yet earned the right to hear? And then: What does what I know ask me to do?

This also changes the way I think about Christ as judge. In John chapter 5, Jesus says the Father has committed judgment to the Son and has given Him authority to execute judgment "because he is the Son of man."

Then Jesus says something beautiful: "As I hear, I judge."

As I hear. The judge is also the listener; the one who has entered humanity, who knows according to the flesh, and who gives life to the dead.

Hebrews chapter 4 says that the word of God is a discerner of "the thoughts and intents of the heart" and that all things are "naked and opened" before Him. That image could be terrifying. With nothing hidden, there is no ability to massage the evidence. There is no white shirt or navy suit on earth convincing Him that our lives are more orderly than they are.

But the passage does not end there. It immediately tells us that our great high priest is "touched with the feeling of our infirmities." And then it says, "Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace."

The beautiful irony is that complete exposure should not drive us from Christ. Because the one who sees us in our nakedness is also the one who knows infirmity, we can approach. Because in reality, he has walked beside us in our anxiety.

For a long while, I found comfort in saying, "Christ knows I am trying. He knows my heart. He knows where I have been." And yet I still believe that. But "He knows my heart" is not an excuse I issue to myself. It is my consent to be known and seen beyond my own arguments.

Jesus Christ knows when I was trying. He also knows when I was avoiding or assigning blame. He saw me seeking control, loving sincerely, acting from fear, causing harm, or doing the best I could with capacities I did not yet possess. His knowledge makes both intention and consequence visible at the same time. It dismantles both easy self-exoneration and total self-condemnation. Christ knows too much to permit any of us to distill our lives into either of those resolutions.

Paul warned that "knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth." Doctrine and Covenants 121 places "pure knowledge" beside persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, love unfeigned, and kindness. Christlike knowledge does not use truth as ammunition. It becomes humility, repentance, compassion, and service. It becomes love.

There is one question I carry in my mind almost constantly, and it’s this: Which version of myself have I judged from partial evidence?

And while time travel is not possible, I can reach behind me within the landscape of my own mind. I can reach toward the 19-year-old missionary who came home after six months, believing failure had become his name; the young person searching for a perfect Latter-day Saint marriage because he wanted a home without the shadows of the one in which he grew up; the husband who blamed outward because inward examination felt unbearable; the divorced father who mistook survival for miraculous healing; and the newly remarried man who stood at a pulpit four years ago trying to convince himself and the people he loved that his life was under control.

I do not want to reach back to my younger selves to correct them, or to say that they did nothing wrong. That person, that version of me, made choices. Those choices caused harm. Those versions of me were also frightened, sincere, loving, limited people who did not yet have all the words they needed.

I want to guide them home. I want to bring them with me. And when I imagine Christ in those memories, I no longer imagine Him waiting at the end of my understanding, ready to receive whichever version of me finally figures everything out.

I see Christ beside the frightened and overwhelmed missionary. Jesus beside the young husband reaching for certainty by repeating what they saw others do. Christ beside the person assigning blame because he did not yet know how to look inward safely. Christ beside the father being carried through stormy weather. Christ beside the exhausted person speaking today without knowing who they will become.

Not Christ as the reward for finally producing an accurate account of myself. Christ as the companion who can withstand every revision.

Christ remains the ultimate goal. I no longer believe I must arrive as Christ in mortality before I am permitted to walk with Him. Perhaps becoming like Him begins here: when I stop issuing final judgments from partial knowledge about the stranger, the person who hurt me, the person I hurt, and the unfinished person I meet in the mirror.

Today I cannot offer a testimony made impressive by the absence of questions. I can offer something more honest: I know enough to continue.

I know grace is real because I have needed it. I know that repentance is not simply punishment because I have felt the relief of turning again toward God. I know that when I try to see another person through the eyes of Christ, my heart changes. I know that the teachings of Jesus continue to reveal hardness in me and invite me to become gentler.

I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Redeemer of the world. I believe His Resurrection means that death, grief, failure, and estrangement will not have the final word. I believe He knows us completely; our faith and our fear, our devotion and our contradiction, the questions we can articulate and the ones we can only feel. And He does not turn away.

Our knowledge can become more like Christ's: humble enough to keep learning, honest enough to receive truth as it is, merciful enough to see a whole person, and brave enough to become love. Jesus Christ knows us and loves us. Because He knows us, we can come to Him without disguise. Because He loves us, we do not have to remain as we are. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.