Called to Greater Works
The minister, the mission, and the disciple's agency in this hour.
Friend —
Let me declare the invitation now, before any of the doctrine arrives, because this letter is no good to you unless you can see the destination from the first step:
Step into the work the Father sent you to do. Use the gifts He has given you. Tap the inexhaustible source. And do greater works than these — not in spite of the Savior, but because of Him.
That is the call. The rest of this letter is the architecture that makes it credible — and the doctrine that makes it possible.
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The promise no one quite believes
The Savior said it on the night before Calvary, surrounded by the men who had walked with Him for three years and were about to scatter:
Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. (John 14:12)
Read it twice. Greater works than these. Greater than healing the blind, raising the dead, walking on water, feeding the multitudes from a boy's lunch. Greater than what the Son of God did in a body, with His own hands, in the meridian of time. That is the standard the Savior set for the disciple who comes after Him. It is not a metaphor. It is not a flourish. It is a doctrine — and most of Christendom has spent two thousand years explaining it away because the plain reading is too much for them to bear.
The plain reading is the right one. He meant it.
The reason He could say it is named in the same verse: because I go unto my Father. He was about to finish the atonement and ascend to the right hand of the Father. From that throne, He would do something He could not do in mortality — pour out the Holy Ghost upon every covenant disciple in every generation, in every nation, in every hour, simultaneously, without limit. The single Christ in Galilee becomes the indwelling Christ in millions of disciples, and the works multiply by the number of laborers.
You are one of those laborers. He meant it about you.
The minister, not the magician
Most modern Christians, if they think about Jesus's mortal ministry at all, think about the miracles. The water into wine. The stilling of the storm. The raising of Lazarus. They imagine that greater works must mean greater miracles — and since none of them are stilling storms or raising the dead, they conclude that the verse must be metaphorical, or referring only to the apostles, or limited to some past dispensation.
This misreads the Savior's mortal life entirely.
Jesus was not a magician. He was a minister. He spent thirty years in obscurity in Nazareth, three years in ministry, and the whole arc of those three years was people. Healing them. Teaching them. Feeding them. Listening to them at wells, on hillsides, at the homes of tax collectors. The miracles were the smaller part of His ministry. The larger part was the patient, daily, one-by-one ministering to the souls in front of Him. When He commissioned His disciples, He did not say go do bigger miracles. He said go and make disciples. He said feed my sheep. He said whatsoever ye do unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me.
Greater works are greater ministering. And greater ministering is what every covenant disciple is positioned to do in this hour, in their own stewardship, with the channels the Lord has placed in their hand. The schoolteacher who shepherds her students through trials of faith their parents cannot see. The father at the dinner table whose questions open a child's heart to the Spirit. The colleague who asks the hard question in the meeting and changes the room. The writer whose words travel further in a year than Paul's epistles traveled in a generation. The grandmother whose prayers reach a grandson she has not seen in a decade.
The Savior healed thousands in a body. The covenant disciple, walking in the Spirit, can reach millions through the channels of this hour — and one yielded laborer at a time, the kingdom comes.
The math that makes it possible
There is a piece of arithmetic that has to land before any of this becomes credible to a serious disciple, because the natural man cannot believe that an infinite atonement is operating in real time on his behalf. Write it on a napkin if you like — many of us already have:
Infinity, plus or minus you, equals infinity.
Add a unit to infinity; the total does not change. Subtract a unit from infinity; the total does not change. Infinity is — by definition — the magnitude that cannot be exhausted by addition or subtraction. That is the kind of love the Father has poured into the atonement of the Son. That is the kind of grace that flows from the throne to every covenant disciple in every hour. You cannot exhaust it. You cannot deplete it. You cannot divide it among the heirs and leave a smaller share for the next. The infinite atonement is the constant in every equation of redemption, and the disciple's life is the variable.
If this is the architecture I unpack in The Napkin Equation (Pillar 1) — and the way the yoke transmutes the wearer is unpacked in The Alchemy of the Yoke (Pillar 2) — and the mechanism by which the connection is made and the cure flows is unpacked in The Capsule, the Covenant, and the Cure (Pillar 3) — then this fourth pillar is about what the disciple does with the math, the alchemy, and the cure once they have been received. The first three pillars deliver the doctrine. The fourth pillar sends the disciple into the work.
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You are an agent
The Lord chose a particular word for the disciple's relationship to His work, and the word matters more than most readers notice:
Wherefore, as ye are agents, ye are on the Lord's errand; and whatever ye do according to the will of the Lord is the Lord's business. (D&C 64:29)
Read it slowly. Whatever ye do according to the will of the Lord is the Lord's business. The verse erases the false partition between spiritual life and the rest of life. The disciple who has bound the Lord by covenant does not have a secular life remaining. Whatever he does — at the desk before dawn, in the kitchen with his children, on the commute, in the conversation with the stranger at the gas pump — if it accords with the Father's will, it is the Lord's business. He is always on the errand. He is never off the curve.
Think of the disciple as the Father's agent in the way an insurance agent represents the company. The agent does not own the company. He represents it. He acts on its behalf. His authority comes from the company, his work serves the company's purposes, his commissions accrue to him because he is bringing the company's protection to people who need it.
The disciple, as a son or daughter of the Most High, is the Father's agent in exactly that sense. He does not own the kingdom; he represents it. He does not bring his own gospel; he brings the Father's. His authority is the priesthood. His work is on the Father's errand. And the policy he is delivering — the only policy in the universe that pays out eternal life — was paid for in full at the cross. The premiums are not asked of the buyer. Only a yielded heart, the keeping of covenants, the daily walking of the prime numbers.
The disciple is the Father's agent for eternal life, bringing brothers and sisters who have been in bondage to a Christ who has already paid the price of their freedom and is waiting for them to come.
The prayer you have been praying without knowing it
The goal of the agent's work is named in the most-quoted prayer in Christendom — the prayer the Savior taught the disciples Himself:
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:10)
Most Christians have prayed those words their whole lives without realizing what they are praying. The Lord's Prayer is not a pious wish. It is a commission. The disciple who prays thy kingdom come is enlisting himself as the means by which the kingdom comes. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven is the disciple offering himself as the bridge between the two.
The Father pours; the disciple delivers; the kingdom arrives one yielded laborer at a time, on earth, in real time, in this hour, through agents on the Lord's errand. The disciple who has read this far has been praying the Lord's Prayer his whole life without understanding that he himself is the answer.
Now he understands. And the Lord is asking him — in his own conscience, by the Light of Christ, in the prompting that has not yet stopped — to be the answer his whole life has been praying for.
The unflinching word
There is a hard truth that has to be named before this letter ends, because the stakes are real and the gospel is not soft about them. The Lord defined sin in the Restoration with a vocabulary the world's religion has lost:
The whole world lieth in sin, and groaneth under darkness and under the bondage of sin. And by this you may know they are under the bondage of sin, because they come not unto me. (D&C 84:49–50)
Sin is not coming unto Christ. Sin is hearkening not unto His voice. Sin is the bondage produced by the absence of His presence. The whole world lies in this state by default — not because of unusual wickedness, but because the coming has not been done. And the Apostle James named the same truth in plainer language: to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin (James 4:17). And again: be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves (James 1:22).
To not use your agency is sin. To hear His voice and not hearken is sin. Hearing without doing is sin. The hearer-only is in bondage even while sitting in his pew.
Every prompting from the Light of Christ is, at its root, an invitation to come. To suppress it is to refuse the coming. To refuse the coming is to remain in bondage. The disciple in this hour has been shown the way out, and the way out is to do.
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The math is a guarantee
But the disciple who keeps coming has been given a guarantee that ought to be heard for what it is. Nephi named the operating prayer of the climbing disciple:
Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life. (2 Nephi 31:20)
Press forward. Feast. Endure. Ye shall have eternal life. The promise is unconditional in its conditioning — the disciple who walks the path is guaranteed the destination. And the same Lord who promised it has bound Himself to deliver: I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise (D&C 82:10).
The disciple who walks the prime numbers daily — prayer, scripture, fasting — and presses forward feasting on the word of Christ has bound the Lord. Not by exercising power over Him, but by being fully aligned with Him (D&C 18:18). The Spirit becomes his constant companion (D&C 121:46) by covenant. The asymptote climbs by guarantee. The math is exact. The math is a guarantee. The math closes the case.
And the doctrine of perfections is plural, not singular. Lectures on Faith name the Father's character, perfections, and attributes — many qualities, many growing edges, never finished in mortality. Light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day (D&C 50:24). The disciple in mortality approaches forever and never quite arrives. He is not failing. He is climbing. The Lord does not measure how close. The Lord measures the trajectory.
Are you still climbing?
If yes, the curve will meet the line. The math is a guarantee.
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The witness that converts
There is one last thing the body of work has to name before it sends the disciple out, because most disciples do not understand how the witness actually flows from a sanctified life. The personal-development tradition — Hill, Allen, William George Jordan, Emerson — found the form of godliness. They mapped the laws of finite achievement with rigor that puts most modern Christians to shame. But they could not supply the power. The gospel of Jesus Christ supplies the power. And the power, when it operates in a covenant disciple, does something neither psychology nor philosophy has ever been able to manufacture.
Parley P. Pratt named it in Key to the Science of Theology, in a passage that has not been improved upon in the 170 years since he wrote it. The disciple, in his nature, is an intelligent being, in the image of God, possessing every organ, attribute, sense, sympathy, affection, of will, wisdom, love, power and gift, which is possessed by God Himself — though in rudimental state, in embryo, gradually developed, as a bud opens into bloom and produces, by progress, the mature fruit, after its own kind. And the gift of the Holy Spirit, when received through the lawful channel of the priesthood, quickens all the intellectual faculties... is, as it were, marrow to the bone, joy to the heart, light to the eyes, music to the ears, and life to the whole being.
Read that slowly. The Spirit's work in a sanctified disciple is not metaphorical. It is physiological. The eyes brighten. The ears quicken. The countenance changes. The atmosphere of the disciple shifts. And Pratt named what the watching world feels in such a person's presence: Their very atmosphere diffuses a thrill, a warm glow of pure gladness and sympathy, to the heart and nerves of others.
Strangers feel it. The non-believer who sits next to such a disciple on a plane, who buys coffee from one in line, who passes one on the street — feels something he has no name for. That nameless feeling is the seed of his own conversion. The hesed flows not as words alone but as atmosphere. The witness that converts is the disciple's own physiology, refined by the Spirit, glowing with the rays of a sunbeam Pratt watched with his own eyes in his own day.
This is the harvest of the prime numbers in mortal flesh. This is what greater works actually look like in a sanctified life. Not stunts. Not platforms. The disciple who has been so transformed by the Spirit that strangers feel the thrill of glad sympathy in his presence, and the kingdom of God arrives in the room without being announced.
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The invitation, reissued
You have read this far, which means you are not the casual visitor. You are the laborer the Lord has placed in this stewardship for this hour, with the channels in your hand for this season, with the gifts He has already given you for the work He has prepared for you to do.
The math is a guarantee. The Lord is bound. The river is pouring (D&C 121:33). The scepter is being handed (D&C 121:46). The Father's whole work and glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man (Moses 1:39) — is your becoming, and the becoming of the souls you are positioned to reach.
Aim celestial. Not terrestrial good-and-honorable. Celestial. As Father is, the disciple is becoming. Celestial thinking. Celestial becoming. Celestial habits. Celestial being. Celestial doing.
I witness that the source is real. I witness that the gifts have been given. I witness that the mathematics holds — infinity ± 1 = infinity — and that you cannot exhaust the love of Christ by spending it. I witness that the Father is more eager for you to step into the work than you are eager to be sent.
The fields are white. The laborers are few. He has prepared you for this hour.
Now go forth and do greater works than these.
— Kent
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Read alongside this letter:
— The Napkin Equation — the math of grace and the yoke that activates it
— The Alchemy of the Yoke — what the yoke does to the one who wears it
— The Capsule, the Covenant, and the Cure — how the connection is made and the cure begins to flow
For the full doctrine — the doctrinal stack, the prime numbers, the agent doctrine, the mathematical seal, and the architecture in its complete form — see the booklet: Called to Greater Works: The minister, the mission, and the mathematics of infinity. Available in PDF and spiral-bound print at bookstore.dogreaterworks.com.
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Friend of Christ. Husband. Father.
Writing from one laborer to another —
laboring for Zion, in His Yoke daily.