Moroni, the last of the Nephites, ended his father Mormon's record with the following exhortation:
Moroni 10:32-33
32 Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God.
33 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.
I ran the above text through the following Clojure code to confirm a hunch I had about the main ideas:
(as-> come-unto-christ $
(str/lower-case $)
(str/replace $ #"," " ")
(str/replace $ #"\." " ")
(str/replace $ #";" " ")
(str/replace $ #"\n" " ")
(str/split $ #"\s" -1)
(frequencies $)
(dissoc $ "")
(sort-by second $)
(reverse $)
(vec $)
(clojure.pprint/pprint $))
This code simply counts the number of occurrences of each word in the text. Here are the top twelve most frequent words:
[["of" 10]
["the" 9]
["and" 8]
["in" 7]
["ye" 7]
["christ" 6]
["grace" 5]
["god" 5]
["deny" 4]
["by" 4]
["all" 3]
["perfect" 3]
...]
As you would expect, words like "of", "the" and "and" dominate the top results. Removing those filler words yields the following results:
[["christ" 6]
["grace" 5]
["god" 5]
["deny" 4]
["all" 3]
["perfect" 3]
...]
"Christ", "grace", and "God" are obvious main ideas (original hunch confirmed). The word I didn't expect to see in the above list was "deny", which appears four times. Re-reading these verses with this concept in mind reveals an interesting 'if-then' relationship:
if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness...
ye can in nowise deny the power of God...
What I've learned from this little exploration is that the more we 'come unto Christ', the more effective we will be at removing sinful patterns and tendencies from our lives, and the more we will recognize God's power everywhere around us.