We are living the covenant in part. We pay our tithing. We give our fast offerings. We serve in our callings. We consecrate our time and our effort as we are asked. That is real, and it is not nothing. But it is not the full law we promised, and our lives are not arranged so that we could keep that promise if He asked it of us today. That is the gap. Not rebellion. Not breaking faith on purpose. A quiet, enormous distance between what we covenanted and what our lives actually look like.

But What If You Have Nothing to Give?

Here is where most people stop reading, because this is where it starts to feel hopeless. The truth is that the great majority of members are nowhere near out of debt. There are faithful families crammed into a small apartment with no realistic hope of ever owning a home. Gas costs what it costs. Rent climbs every year. The price of simply staying alive keeps rising. For a family like that, the full law of consecration can sound like a door that was shut before they ever reached it.

It was not. And this is the part I most want you to hear.

This covenant was never measured by the size of your gift. It is measured by the willingness of your heart. When the widow dropped her two small coins into the temple treasury, the Lord said she had given more than all the wealthy men with their heavy purses, because they gave out of their abundance and she gave all she had. King Benjamin said it even more plainly, speaking directly to the poor who have nothing left to give.

“And again, I say unto the poor, ye who have not and yet have sufficient, that ye remain from day to day; I mean all you who deny the beggar, because ye have not; I would that ye say in your hearts that: I give not because I have not, but if I had I would give. And now, if ye say this in your hearts ye remain guiltless, otherwise ye are condemned; and your condemnation is just for ye covet that which ye have not received.” (Mosiah 4:24–25)

If you would give it all if you had it, you have already kept this covenant in the only place it finally matters, which is your heart. You remain guiltless. The poor woman with an open hand and a willing heart may be living this law more truly than the rich man who hands over a fraction and clings to the rest.

So hear me clearly. The reason a faithful family is crammed into that apartment with no hope of a home is not that they failed the covenant. It is that the whole world is built on the opposite of the covenant. Their struggle is not the evidence of their unworthiness. It is the fruit of a system that runs on grasping, where those who could lift others are clinging instead.

Where the Weight Really Falls

So the weight of all this does not land on the family doing their best with too little. It lands on those who have been given much.

“For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves. Therefore, if any man shall take of the abundance which I have made, and impart not his portion, according to the law of my gospel, unto the poor and the needy, he shall, with the wicked, lift up his eyes in hell, being in torment.” (D&C 104:17–18)

There is enough and to spare. The scarcity that crushes so many families is not because God came up short. It is man-made. It is abundance held in too few hands that will not open.

I have watched people build fortunes, millions and even billions, and pour them into bigger mansions, private theaters, a full bowling alley inside the house, the glamour of being seen as a tremendous success. Now imagine if even some of them, after caring for their own and settling their affairs, had taken that abundance and laid it on the altar exactly as they covenanted to do. That is not a small thing. That is the difference between thousands of families lifted out of bondage and thousands left to drown. Those fortunes could have helped build Zion. Instead they built monuments to Babylon.

That is the real tragedy here. Not that the poor cannot give. That those who could give, will not.

We Promised the Opposite of What the World Is Chasing

Now look at the spirit of the age. Everyone wants to be a millionaire. Then a billionaire. We have now watched the world produce its first trillionaire, and the headlines treated it as the summit of human achievement.

“But it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin.” (D&C 49:20)

The whole world lieth in sin. Not because wealth itself is evil, but because the grasping heart is. Hugh Nibley spent a career warning us about this very thing, that we cannot serve both God and Mammon, and that Zion runs on an economy the natural man cannot stomach. I have carried that book with me for forty years.

And we, the covenant people, promised the opposite. We stood in the temple and pledged to hold everything as stewards, ready to give it all back to the Lord. Then we spent our years doing exactly what everyone else does, accumulating, protecting, borrowing to get more, until we are so tangled in possessions that the covenant we made is the one thing we could not keep.

The Part You Cannot Do at the Last Minute

So keep storing your food and your water. Get out of debt where you can, not because debt makes you a failure, but because a person free of it can move and give when the Lord calls. Build the skills. Every one of us can do better than we are doing right now. Faith without works is dead, and the preparation is real and required.

But the food is the part you can still go and get. The readiness that finally decides everything is a different kind, and it is the kind you cannot run out and buy when the moment arrives.

“And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.” (Matthew 25:10)

Five of those virgins thought they were ready. They had lamps. They simply did not have enough, and when the moment came they could not borrow it and could not buy it in time. The wise did not become ready in that instant. They were already ready. That readiness is a heart fully turned to God, a heart that has already loosened its grip on Babylon long before the call comes. You cannot manufacture it at the door. You build it now, in the years before, by every small surrender, every gift given without expecting anything back. The poor widow had it. The man clutching his fortune does not, no matter how full his cellar.

What Zion Would Actually Look Like

Here is what almost no one sees. The hunger for fairness in the world right now is real, and it is not wrong. People look at one man becoming a trillionaire while families cannot make rent, and something in them cries out that this is not right. They are correct. The Lord said the same thing.

The tragedy is that so many of them, having never seen the real answer, are reaching for a counterfeit. They are turning to systems that promise fairness by force, that take by compulsion what was never freely given. But fairness imposed by force is not Zion. It is the old plan that was rejected before the world began, equality bought at the price of freedom.

Zion is the opposite. Zion is fairness freely chosen.

“And they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift.” (4 Nephi 1:3)

They were all made free. No rich and no poor, and yet no compulsion. Everyone working, everyone provided for, everyone lifted, and every soul still free. That is the society every poet and every prophet has dreamed of, and it is not a fantasy. A whole people lived it for generations. It can be lived again.

And here is the part that should stop us cold. If we actually lived what we covenanted, if the willing hearts and the real abundance were finally joined, Zion would stand. And the very people now drifting toward force and compulsion, looking for fairness in all the wrong places, would see a people living free and fair and happy, and many of them would come. We would pull millions out of Babylon, not by winning an argument, but by showing them the real thing. The whole world would change. We are not there, because we are not living it. We could be.

The Choice In Front of Us

Zion is not a distant dream. It is about to be established, and the events now unfolding across the world are part of how the Lord is bringing it to pass. I have written about all of it at length, and I will not lay it out here. But the door is closer than most people believe.

I have no priesthood authority to tell you what to do, and I will not. I am not going to tell you to sell your home or make some rash change. If you are facing a major decision, take it to the Lord, and counsel with your bishop or your stake president. They hold the keys for that guidance. I do not. What I am giving you here is how I read the scriptures, one man’s study of what God has shown us about the days ahead. Nothing more.

But I will say this much without hesitation. The bunker will not save you. The fortune will not save you. The covenant will. And it does not matter whether you have much or nothing at all. What matters is whether your heart is turned to God and your hands are open. Almost none of us are ready to live it. Every one of us, rich or poor, can begin today.