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If you will follow me, I will lead you out of darkness," He promises.
giving even a small place for the promises of God to find a home—that is enough to begin (see Alma 32:27; emphasis added). Just believing, just having a molecule of faith—simply hoping for things which are not yet seen in our lives, but which are nevertheless truly there to be bestowed (see Alma 32:21)—that simple step, when focused on the Lord Jesus Christ, has ever been and always will be the first principle of His eternal gospel, the first step out of despair.
we must change anything we can change that may be part of the problem.
anything we can change we should change, and we must forgive the rest. In this way our access to the Savior's Atonement becomes as unimpeded as we, with our imperfections, can make it. He will take it from there.
in as many ways as possible we try to take upon us His identity,
with that kind of love, we realize our days hold scores of thoroughfares leading to the Master and that every time we reach out, however feebly, for Him, we discover He has been anxiously trying to reach us.
Sometimes we seek heaven too obliquely, focusing on programs or history or the experience of others. Those are important, but not as important as personal experience, true discipleship, and the strength that comes from experiencing firsthand the majesty of His touch.
Whatever other steps you may need to take to resolve these concerns, come first to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Trust in heaven's promises.
Considering the incomprehensible cost of the Crucifixion and Atonement, I promise you He is not going to turn His back on us now.
While his eyes were fixed upon the Lord, the wind could toss his hair and the spray could drench his robes, but all was well—he was coming to Christ.
If you are lonely, please know you can find comfort. If you are discouraged, please know you can find hope. If you are poor in spirit, please know you can be strengthened. If you feel you are broken, please know you can be mended.
If you feel you are broken, please know you can be mended.
"O Carpenter of Nazareth, This heart, that's broken past repair, This life, that's shattered nigh to death, Oh, can You mend them, Carpenter?" And by His kind and ready hand, His own sweet life is woven through Our broken lives, until they stand A New Creation—"all things new."
when we have done all, we can pray. In all these ways we can bless one another
As parents we can hold life together the way it is always held together—with love and faith, passed on to the next generation, one child at a time.
with the goal being authentic religious faith informing genuine Christlike living.
no child in this Church should be left with uncertainty about his or her parents' devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ,
as Elder Neal Maxwell once said to me in a hallway conversation, "There didn't seem to be any problem with conformity the day the Red Sea opened."
me in a hallway conversation, "There didn't seem to be any problem with conformity the day the Red Sea opened."
Parents simply cannot flirt with skepticism or cynicism, the...
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their children expand that flirtation into full-blown romance. If in matters of faith and belief children are at risk of being swept downstream by this intellectual current or that cultural rapid, we as their parents must be more certain than ever to hold to anchored, u...
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No, we can hardly expect the children to get to shore safely if the parents don't seem to know where to anchor their own boat.
we can hardly expect the children to get to shore safely if the
parents don't seem to know where to anchor ...
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I think some parents may not understand that even when they feel secure in their own minds regarding matters of personal testimony, they can nevertheless make that faith too difficult for their children to detect.
some parents may not understand that even when they feel secure in their own minds regarding matters of personal testimony, they can nevertheless
make that faith too difficult for their children to detect. We can be reasonably active, meeting-going Latter-day Saints, but if we do not live lives of gospel integrity and convey to our children powerful, heartfelt convictions regarding the truthfulness of the Restoration and the divine guidance of the Church from the First Vision to this very hour, then those children may, to our regret but not su...
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Some parents . . . seem to feel that they can ease up a little on the fundamentals without affecting their family or their family's future. But," he observed, "if a parent goes a little off course, the children are likely to exceed the parent's example."
a parent goes a little off course, the
children are likely to exceed the pare...
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In matters of religion a skeptical mind is not a higher manifestation of virtue than is a believing
Live the gospel as conspicuously as you can. Keep the covenants your children know you have made. Give priesthood blessings. And bear your testimony! Don't just assume your children will somehow get the drift of your beliefs on their own.
what do our children know? From us? Personally? Do our children know that we love the scriptures? Do they see us reading them and marking them and clinging to them in daily life? Have our children ever unexpectedly opened a closed door and found us on our knees in prayer? Have they heard us not only pray with them but also pray for them out of nothing more than sheer parental love? Do our children know we believe in fasting as something more than an obligatory first-Sunday-of-the-month hardship? Do they know that we have fasted for them and for their future on days about which they knew
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their willingness to accept callings they did not seek in order to preserve a standard of righteousness they did not create? Do those children know that we love God with all our heart and that we long to see the face—and fall at the feet—of His Only Begotten Son? I pray that they know this.
Our children take their flight into the future with our thrust and with our aim. And even as we anxiously watch that arrow in flight and know all the evils that can deflect its course after it has left our hand, nevertheless we take courage in remembering that the most important mortal factor in determining that arrow's destinat...
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God will send aid to no one more readily than He will send it to a child—and
to the parent of a child.
whatever else you do, cherish that role that is so uniquely yours and for which heaven itself sends angels to watch over you and your little ones.
know deep down inside I am doing God's work. I know that in my motherhood I am in an eternal partnership with Him. I am deeply moved that God finds His ultimate purpose and meaning in being a parent, even if some of His children make Him weep.
you—He who resolutely goes after the lost sheep, sweeps thoroughly to find the lost coin, waits everlastingly for the return of the prodigal son.
Jesus' entire being, His complete purpose and delight, were centered in pleasing His Father and obeying His will. Of Him He seemed always to be thinking; to Him He seemed always to be praying. Unlike us, He needed no crisis, no discouraging shift in events to direct His hopes heavenward. He was already instinctively, longingly looking that way.
He knows what you can become through faith in Him.
"Effective teaching is the very essence of leadership in the Church. Eternal life," President Hinckley continued, "will come only as men and women are taught with such effectiveness that they change and discipline their lives. They cannot be coerced into righteousness or into heaven. They must be led, and that means teaching."
How is it that such a lovely voice, which by divine nature is so angelic, so close to the veil, so instinctively gentle and inherently kind, could ever in turn be so shrill, so biting, so acrid and untamed? A woman's words can be more piercing than any dagger ever forged, and they can drive the people she loves to retreat beyond a barrier more distant than anyone would ever have imagined when such a verbal exchange was beginning. There is no place in that magnificent spirit of yours for acerbic or abrasive expression of any kind, including gossip or backbiting or catty remarks.
living—no misfortune is so bad that whining about it won't make it worse.
exemplary missionary work! Asking every member to be a missionary is not nearly as crucial as asking every member to be a member!
There have always been questions about the future. Every young person and every young couple in every era has had to walk by faith into what has always been some uncertainty—starting with Adam and Eve in those first tremulous steps out of the Garden of Eden. But that is all right. This is the plan. It will be okay. Just be faithful. God is in charge. He knows your name and He knows your need. Faith
He expects you not simply to face the future (that sounds pretty grim and stoic); He expects you to embrace and shape the future—to love it and rejoice in it and delight in your opportunities. God is anxiously waiting for the chance to answer your prayers and fulfill your dreams, just as He always has. But He can't if you don't pray, and He can't if you don't dream. In short, He can't if you don't believe.
Unlike the Church in the days of Abraham or Moses, Isaiah or Ezekiel, or even in the New Testament days of James and John, we have a responsibility to prepare the Church of the Lamb of God to receive the Lamb of God—in person, in triumphant glory, in His millennial role as Lord of Lords and King of Kings. No other dispensation ever had that duty.
And so I issue this call to our faith, to the conviction we all must have burning in our hearts that this is the work of God and requires the best we can give to the effort. My first appeal is to each of you individually to nurture your own physical and spiritual strength so
