We are not meant to wander in existential uncertainty and doubt.
For a minute it seemed that he was trying to direct his remarks especially to the seed of Lehi.
Dear brothers and sisters, the story is told of a Primary child learning to pray. “Thank you for the letter A, the letter B, … the letter G.” The child’s prayer continues, “Thank you for the letters X, Y, Z. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for the number 1, the number 2.” The Primary teacher worries but wisely waits. The child says, “Thank you for the number 5, the number 6—and thank you for my Primary teacher. She’s the only person who’s ever let me finish my prayer.”
We must be patient and perceptive to allow people to grow and worship as they need at the time.
When we come to God’s great commandments to love Him and those around us by covenant, we do so not as stranger or guest but as His child at home. The age-old paradox is still true. In losing our worldly self through covenant belonging, we find and become our best eternal self—free, alive, real—and define our most important relationships. Covenant belonging is to make and keep solemn promises to God and each other through sacred ordinances that invite the power of godliness to be manifest in our lives. When we covenant all we are, we can become more than we are. Covenant belonging gives us place, narrative, capacity to become. It produces faith unto life and salvation.
Divine covenants become a source of love for and from God and thereby for and with each other. God, our Heavenly Father, loves us more and knows us better than we love or know ourselves. Faith in Jesus Christ and personal change (repentance) bring mercy, grace, forgiveness. These comfort the hurt, loneliness, injustice we experience in mortality. Being God, our Heavenly Father wants us to receive God’s greatest gift—His joy, His eternal life.
To reach our full potential we must follow someone capable of seeing it full potential, not simply someone who can theorize about our full potential.
God’s ordinances and covenants are universal in their requirement and individual in their opportunity. In God’s fairness, each individual in every place and age can receive saving ordinances. Agency applies—individuals choose whether to accept offered ordinances. God’s ordinances provide guideposts on His path of covenants. We call God’s plan to bring His children home the plan of redemption, plan of salvation, plan of happiness. Redemption, salvation, celestial happiness are possible because Jesus Christ “wrought out this perfect atonement.”
That is so well said, everyone can receive precisely the best gifts for their personal progress.
First, covenant belonging centers in Jesus Christ as “mediator of the new covenant.” All things can work together for our good when we are “sanctified in Christ … in the covenant of the Father.” Every good and promised blessing comes to those who remain faithful to the end. The “happy state of those that keep the commandments of God” is to be “blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual,” and to “dwell with God in … never-ending happiness.”
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Second, the Book of Mormon is evidence we can hold in our hand of covenant belonging. The Book of Mormon is the promised instrument for the gathering of God’s children, prophesied as a new covenant. As we read the Book of Mormon, by ourselves and with others, whether silently or aloud, we can ask God “with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ,” and receive by the power of the Holy Ghost God’s assurance that the Book of Mormon is true. This includes assurance that Jesus Christ is our Savior, Joseph Smith is the prophet of the Restoration, and the Lord’s Church is called by His name—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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The Book of Mormon invites each of us, in Alma’s words, to enter “into a covenant with [the Lord], that [we] will serve him and keep his commandments, that he may pour out his Spirit more abundantly upon [us].” When we want to change for the better—as one person put it, “to stop being miserable and to be happy being happy”—we can become open to direction, help, and strength. We can come by covenant to belong with God and a community of faithful believers and receive the blessings promised in the doctrine of Christ—now.
Restored priesthood authority and power to bless all His children is a third dimension of covenant belonging. In this dispensation, John the Baptist and the Apostles Peter, James, and John have come as glorified messengers from God to restore His priesthood authority. God’s priesthood and His ordinances sweeten relationships on earth and can seal covenant relationships in heaven.
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Finally, the blessings of covenant belonging come when we follow the Lord’s prophet and rejoice in temple-covenant living, including in marriage. Covenant marriage becomes supernal and eternal as we daily choose the happiness of our spouse and family before our own. As “me” becomes “we,” we grow together. We grow old together; we grow young together. As we bless each other across a lifetime of forgetting ourselves, we find our hopes and joys sanctified in time and eternity.
Our Savior declares, “I am Alpha and Omega, Christ the Lord; yea, even I am he, the beginning and the end, the Redeemer of the world.”
With us at the beginning, He is with us, in all our covenant belonging, to the end. I so testify in the sacred and holy name of Jesus Christ, amen.
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