Continually Converting ourselves to Jesus Christ

I spoke in church again today. Here is my talk. It’s a little all over the place but I hope its a good read for you all!

Have a great week!


Good afternoon, brothers and sisters. It seems most members of our ward whom I asked to speak today are out of town or otherwise unable, so you're stuck listening to me. It's my prayer that the Holy Ghost can guide me and deliver the message that our Heavenly Father has for each of your hearts individually. I know many of you. Some of you I know very well—you are my best friends. Some of you are like family to me. Others I do not know well, and there may even be a face or two in our congregation that is new to me. I've been praying and pondering all month on what I can share and what the Lord would have me say. Neither I nor the other members of the bishopric can see all that each one of you is going through, but our Father in Heaven does. He knows your heart. Each of you has unique challenges, and I pray that I may be inspired to say the words that He would have you hear.

It's a great blessing for me to be able to speak. Writing out talks is a means of personal revelation for me, and I have felt an abundance of the spirit and the grace of God in preparing what I have to share today. The preparation is only a fraction of the blessing of speaking in sacrament meeting; there is something sanctifying and purifying to the soul when bearing testimony of Jesus Christ, of His mission, of His Gospel, and of His Church. The greatest blessing of the sacrament meeting is that of the Holy Spirit, which we collectively feel and experience together—we are spiritually fed one-by-one while simultaneously having our hearts "knit together in love and unity" through our shared experience. I hope we can all have such an experience now, with the highlight and focus being the sacrament and the Savior.

I have entitled my remarks, "Continually Converting Ourselves to Jesus Christ." This principle of continual conversion has become particularly important to me over the last few weeks and months. The idea for this talk and its title came from Alma 5:45-46. In these verses, Alma is telling the Nephites of his conversion story and how he knows the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be true. Here's what he said, "Do ye not suppose that I know of these things myself? Behold, I testify unto you that I do know that these things whereof I have spoken are true. And how do ye suppose that I know of their surety? Behold, I say unto you they are made known unto me by the Holy Spirit of God. Behold, I have fasted and prayed many days that I might know these things of myself. And now I do know of these things of myself. And now I do know of myself that they are true; for the Lord God hath made them manifest unto me by his Holy Spirit; and this is the spirit of revelation which is in me."

As a young man, Alma was hardly a Christian. He went about seeking to destroy the church and rile up the people into wickedness until he was one day visited and rebuked by an angel. From this experience, he was placed in a spiritual coma and repented. However, this experience with the angel, the subsequent coma, and even his repentance is not his conversion—his conversion comes from continual prayer, scripture study, and ultimately from manifestations from the Holy Ghost over years of effort.

I have come to know that many of the doctrines of the restored Gospel are true just as Alma, through fasting and prayer, and there are more doctrines which I am learning to be true by that process. When I have failed to pray, fast, study the scriptures, and keep the commandments, my life gets more difficult, less joyful, and more confusing.

Believing the gospel and practicing it are two different things. I have met many people who believe but do not practice, and I have met many others who practice but do not believe. Do you believe but do not practice? Do you practice but do not believe? "There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated—And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated." Belief in Jesus Christ will bless us, but until we are obedient to the laws of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and practice His teachings in our lives, and follow His prophets to the absolute best of our ability, we will not receive all the blessings of heaven. This is why covenants are so important, and why we are encouraged to make them as soon as we understand them and are capable of keeping them, regardless of our personal lifestyle preferences.

We often talk of covenants as a two-way promise between us and God. This is a true statement. He said Himself, "I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise." To see covenants as only a two-way promise between us and God is a limiting view, however. God is God because He is true. We don't need to be contractually bound to Him in order for Him to be good for His word. We also do not need to be bound to Him in order for Him to have a desire to bless us, for God is love. I do not believe covenants exist so that God can bless us as He'd like to in a contractual sense. Blessings are gifts because they are freely and abundantly given. Receiving a reward as the result of a contract, to me, does not seem very loving. Gifts demanded are hardly gifts at all. No, I know God to be our loving Heavenly Father, and I believe that covenants allow Him to bless us because we enter into a framework within which we can operate our lives, and live the laws requisite for our happiness, our growth, and our peace. Covenants provide us with a framework for us to become holy. Holiness is joy and peace eternal. If you have made covenants with the Lord, keep them. If you have yet to go to the temple, I would invite you to pray about going and get yourself ready to go as soon as you are able. If you are wondering how to have more peace, more joy, and more order in your life—make and keep covenants with our Father in Heaven.

If you are practicing the gospel but are finding it hard to believe or trust, please keep going. You are not alone. I have been there. Every great prophet, saint, and disciple who has ever lived has been there. Remember this promise the Lord delivered to us through the prophet Alma, "But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words."

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I hope also to speak today of the truth that Jesus Christ walks with us and to make some sense of the suffering we experience in mortality, both the suffering caused by our distancing ourselves from God when we sin, and the suffering that is thrust upon us as the result of living in a fallen world and how we can best reconcile with our suffering as Alma did, by continually converting ourselves to Jesus Christ.

As I am growing into my twenties there is something critical that I have been learning about suffering—it is unavoidable. And suffering is worse when it is done alone. One of the greatest blessings of the Atonement is that Jesus Christ suffered not only for us but with us. While the sentiment "Jesus suffered for us so we don't have to suffer ourselves" is indeed true, it is incomplete. Jesus suffered for our sins so that we do not have to pay the consequence of eternal spiritual death, eternal physical death, and a lonely eternal damnation.

For "it is expedient that an atonement should be made; for according to the great plan of the Eternal God there must be an atonement made, or else all mankind must unavoidably perish; yea, all are hardened; yea, all are fallen and are lost, and must perish except it be through the atonement which it is expedient should be made."

In the garden of Gethsemane and on the Cross of Calvary, Jesus Christ suffered for more than just our sins. Suffering for our sins is never something that will be asked of us unless we reject the gift of the Atonement, but there is more suffering in our mortal life than the suffering that comes from sin. This is something you all know firsthand. And do not sell yourself short—as one of my favorite axioms says, "Dismissing my pain and sorrow because someone else's are greater is as absurd as saying I cannot be happy because someone else is happier." Your pain, your sorrow, and your suffering are real and are nothing to be ashamed of or taken lightly. It is nothing to be compared to either. Your pain, your sorrow, and your suffering are uniquely yours, and uniquely the Savior's.

I find my personal suffering to be growing in its profundity, depth, and sophistication. I have also discovered that much of the suffering I experience in my personal life seems to be random or at the very least not my fault. While anyone who knows me well knows I have many weaknesses and shortcomings which bring upon me and others pain, I have observed my suffering to come from other sources outside of myself quite frequently. This has been puzzling to me, that such great pain can be amounted upon those that are innocent.

While I cannot explain the suffering I or you or anyone experiences in this life and why it happens, I feel to say that there is purpose to be found in it. I think the wording of this is important. One may go crazy and find heartache in pondering the question, "What is the purpose of suffering?" That's a hard question to answer. A better question I've found to ask

is, "Can I find purpose in my suffering?" I think this is a very important distinction to make because the first question seems to indicate that God has given us suffering expecting a result that is known to Him but unknown to us. Amos of the Old Testament taught us that God surely will do nothing, but He revealeth His secret unto His servants the prophets. If you're struggling to answer the why of your suffering, turn to the words of the prophets and you will find answers. If you find no satisfactory answer is given for your suffering, ask yourself to find purpose in your suffering.

I, like many others in the world right now, have loved the Dune movies and have been reading the books. In the 2021 film adaptation of Dune, the young prince Paul Atreides is found walking with his father, Leto, in a cemetery of their ancestors. Leto, seeing Paul anxious about his future and sensing he is burdened by his own self-doubts, says whatever happens and however you respond, "you'll still be the only thing I have ever wanted you to be, my son." I love that scene. I believe it is the same way with our Heavenly Father. While He has the power to help us leverage our suffering to become even as great as He is, all He has ever needed us to be is His children. Everything else is up to us. Agency is everything. God will let us choose to become like Him. We are not meant to suffer as a means for God to entice us to choose to become like Him. That'd be cruel and manipulative. No, we are meant to decide for ourselves who we will become even in the midst of our suffering. And the best part is, when we choose to follow His path, He will lift our burdens so that we cannot even feel them on our backs, He will walk with us, bound by covenant and bound to all others who have covenanted with Him. And we will all walk back home together.

I'll finish with one last thought. I once had a friend who told me she was grateful for her sins. She tried to prove this statement by saying that it is her sins and the places she's been in life that make her who she is, who she is meaning a Christian. That seemed quite paradoxical to me. Sin is not from God and does nothing to help us grow, so how could she correlate her sin to becoming more of a Christian? Sin attacks and kills the spirit. Sin does not make someone a Christian. The whole world is full of sinners, and many are not Christians. If she is a Christian at all (and I believe she truly is), it is because of Jesus Christ and the purpose and growth He has given her while she has come back from the pain and suffering of her sins. Do not let Satan fool you into believing as my friend did, that sin is for your benefit and is necessary for your growth. It is not. Jesus was raised to exaltation without sinning. We will only be raised to exaltation because the Atonement makes it as though we had never sinned at all. That's the truth. Increased holiness brings happiness, peace, and growth—nothing else does. And the happiness, peace, and growth are given to us by the Savior.

I hope that we can all walk together on this covenant path back home to our Heavenly Parents. I bear my testimony that the Lord loves you and that He has a joyous path prepared before you. I testify that He will not leave you comfortless. I testify that He will heal you and make you whole. I testify that you can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth. I testify that your prayers will be answered and the promises delivered, even the promise of a happy marriage and a happy home. Jesus Christ is the Son of God, He lives, and He guides this church through His prophet, Russell M. Nelson. And I say these things in His holy name, Jesus Christ, amen.