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"Remember Lot's Wife" (Holland)

As a scriptural theme for this discussion, I have chosen the second-shortest verse in all of holy scripture. I am told that the shortest verse—a verse that every missionary memorizes and holds ready in case he is called on spontaneously in a zone conference—is John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” Elders, here is a second option, another shortie that will dazzle your mission president in case you are called on two zone conferences in a row. It is Luke 17:32, where the Savior cautions, “Remember Lot’s wife.” Hmmm. What did He mean by such an enigmatic little phrase? To find out, I suppose we need to do as He suggested. Let’s recall who Lot’s wife was. The original story, of course, comes to us out of the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, when the Lord, having had as much as He could stand of the worst that men and women could do, told Lot and his family to flee because those cities were about to be destroyed. “Escape for thy life,” the Lord said, “ look not behind thee  . . . ; escape to the mou

A fitting tribute to the pioneers.

On 28 July 1847, four days after his arrival in that valley, Brigham Young stood upon the spot where now rises the magnificent Salt Lake Temple and exclaimed to his companions: "Here [we will build] the Temple of our God!" (James H. Anderson, "The Salt Lake Temple,"  Contributor  [The Young Men's Mutual Improvement Associations of Zion], no. 6, April 1893, p. 243). Its grounds would cover an eighth of a square mile, and it would be built to stand through eternity. Who cares about the money or stone or timber or glass or gold they don't have? So what that seeds are not even planted and the Saints are yet without homes? Why worry that crickets will soon be coming--and so will the United States Army? They just marched forth and broke ground for the most massive, permanent, inspiring edifice they could conceive. And they would spend forty years of their lives trying to complete it. The work seemed ill-fated from the start. The excavation for the basement require

Love. Healing. Help. Love. (Holland)

Prophecies regarding the last days often refer to large-scale calamities such as earthquakes or famines or floods. These in turn may be linked to widespread economic or political upheavals of one kind or another. But there is one kind of latter-day destruction that has always sounded to me more personal than public, more individual than collective—a warning, perhaps more applicable inside the Church than outside it. The Savior warned that in the last days even those of the covenant, the very elect, could be deceived by the enemy of truth. 1 If we think of this as a form of spiritual destruction, it may cast light on another latter-day prophecy. Think of the heart as the figurative center of our faith, the poetic location of our loyalties and our values; then consider Jesus’s declaration that in the last days “men’s hearts [shall fail] them.” 2   The encouraging thing, of course, is that our Father in Heaven knows all of these

be grateful that God is kind (Elder Holland)

“There are going to be times in our lives when someone else gets an unexpected blessing or receives some special recognition. May I plead with us not to be hurt—and certainly not to feel envious—when good fortune comes to another person? We are not diminished when someone else is added upon. We are not in a race against each other to see who is the wealthiest or the most talented or the most beautiful or even the most blessed. The race we are  really  in is the race against sin, and surely envy is one of the most universal of those. … So be kind, and be grateful that God is kind. It is a happy way to live.” Elder Jeffrey R. Holland -“The Laborers in the Vineyard,”  Ensign ,  May 2012, 31–32

Satanic sucker-punch (Holland)

“You can change anything you want to change and you can do it very fast. That’s another Satanic sucker-punch—that it takes years and years and eons of eternity to repent. It takes exactly as long to repent as it takes you to say ‘I’ll change’—and mean it. Of course there will be problems to work out and restitutions to make. You may well spend—indeed you had better spend—the rest of your life proving your repentance by its permanence. But change, growth, renewal, repentance can come for you as instantaneously as it did for Alma and the Sons of Mosiah.” Elder Jeffrey R. Holland -“For Times of Trouble,”  New Era , Oct. 1980, 11–12; quoted in  Ensign , Feb. 2008, 57

building Zion (Brigham Young)

 "When we conclude to make a Zion," said Brigham Young, "we will make it, and this work commences in the heart of each person" ( JD  9:283). "I have Zion in my view constantly," he said. "We are not going to wait for angels, or for Enoch. . . to come and build [it], but we are going to build it [ourselves]" ( JD  9:284). quoted by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, BYU Devotional, September 11, 1984 http://speeches.byu.edu/?act= viewitem&id=858

the ministry of angels as taught in the Book of Mormon (Holland)

One of the things that will become more important in our lives the longer we live is the reality of angels, their work and their ministry.  I refer here not alone to the angel Moroni but also to those more personal ministering angels who are with us and around us, empowered to help us and who do exactly that (see 3 Ne. 7:18; Moro. 7:29-32, 37; D&C 107:20)...  I believe we need to speak of and believe in and bear testimony to the ministry of angels more than we sometimes do.  They constitute one of God’s great methods of witnessing through the veil, and no document in all this world teaches that principle so clearly and so powerfully as does the Book of Mormon.  Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, "For a Wise Purpose,” Ensign , January, 1996, 16-17

an acquaintance with the divine attributes of the Father and the Son (Holland/Joseph Smith)

The Prophet Joseph Smith taught in the  Lectures on Faith  that it was necessary to have "an acquaintance" (that's his phrase) with the divine attributes of the Father and the Son in order to have faith in them. Specifically he said that unless we believe Christ to be "merciful and gracious, slow to anger, long-suffering and full of goodness," that unless we can rely on these unchanging attributes, we would never have the faith necessary to claim the blessings of heaven. If we could not count on "the excellency of . . . character" (that is also his phrase) maintained by the Savior and his willingness and ability to "forgive iniquity, transgression, and sin," we would be, he said, "in constant doubt of salvation." But because the Father and the Son are unchangeably "full of goodness" then, in the words of the Prophet, such knowledge "does away [with] doubt, and makes faith exceedingly strong" ( Lectures on Faith  

Our experience on Judgment Day (Holland)

My beloved brothers and sisters, I am not certain just what our experience will be on Judgment Day, but I will be very surprised if at some point in that conversation, God does not ask us exactly what  Christ  asked Peter: “Did you love me?” I think He will want to know if in our very mortal, very inadequate, and sometimes childish grasp of things, did we at least understand  one commandment, the first and greatest commandment of them all—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.” 13  And if at such a moment we can stammer out, “Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee,” then He may remind us that the crowning characteristic of love is always loyalty. “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” 14  Jesus said. So we have neighbors to bless, children to protect, the poor to lift up, and the truth to defend. We have wrongs to make right, truths to share, and good to do. In short, we have a life of devoted

The First Great Commandment (Holland)

My beloved brothers and sisters, I am not certain just what our experience will be on Judgment Day, but I will be very surprised if at some point in that conversation, God does not ask us exactly what Christ asked Peter: “Did you love me?” I think He will want to know if in our very mortal, very inadequate, and sometimes childish grasp of things, did we at least understand  one  commandment, the first and greatest commandment of them all—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.” And if at such a moment we can stammer out, “Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee,” then He may remind us that the crowning characteristic of love is always loyalty. “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus said. So we have neighbors to bless, children to protect, the poor to lift up, and the truth to defend. We have wrongs to make right, truths to share, and good to do. In short, we have a life of devoted disciple

Christ watches over us (Holland)

One last piece of counsel regarding coming to Christ. It comes from an unusual incident in the life of the Savior that holds a lesson for us all. It was after Jesus had performed the miracle of feeding the five thousand from five loaves of bread and two fishes. (By the way, let me pause here to say, Don't worry about Christ running out of ability to help you. His grace  is  sufficient. That is the spiritual, eternal lesson of the feeding of the five thousand.) After Jesus had fed the multitude, he sent them away and put his disciples into a fishing boat to cross over to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. He then "went up into a mountain apart to pray" (Matthew 14:23). We aren't told all of the circumstances of the disciples as they set out in their boat, but it was toward evening, and certainly it was a night of storm. The winds must have been ferocious from the start. Because of the winds, these men probably never even raised the sails but labored only with

the pure love of Christ (Holland)

Life has its share of some fear and some failure. Sometimes things fall short, don’t quite measure up. Sometimes in both personal and public life, we are seemingly left without strength to go on. Sometimes people fail us, or economies and circumstance fail us, and life with its hardship and heartache can leave us feeling very alone. But when such difficult moments come to us, I testify that there is one thing which will never, ever fail us. One thing alone will stand the test of all time, of all tribulation, all trouble, and all transgression. One thing only never faileth—and that is the pure love of Christ. “I remember,” Moroni cries to the Savior of the world, “that thou hast said that thou hast loved the world, even unto the laying down of thy life for the world. … “Now I know,” he writes, “that this love which thou hast had for the children of men is charity.” ( Ether 12:33–34 .) Having watched a dispensation die and an entire civilization destroy itself, Moroni quotes hi

It will be all right in the end (Holland)

"Don’t you quit. You keep walking. You keep trying. There is help and happiness ahead. Some blessings come soon, some come late, and some don’t come until heaven. But for those who embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ, they come. It will be all right in the end. Trust God and believe in good things to come." —Jeffrey R. Holland, " An High Priest of Good Things to Come ",  Liahona and Ensign , November 1999

"Abide in Me" (Holland)

Christ  said, “I am the true vine, and … ye are the branches.”   2   “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.”   3 “Abide in me” is an understandable and beautiful enough concept in the elegant English of the King James  Bible , but “abide” is not a word we use much anymore. So I gained even more appreciation for this admonition from the Lord when I was introduced to the translation of this passage in another language. In Spanish that familiar phrase is rendered “permaneced en mi.”  Like the English verb “abide,”  permanecer  means “to remain, to stay,” but even gringos like me can hear the root cognate there of “permanence.” The sense of this then is “stay—but stay  forever. ” That is the call of the gospel message to Chileans and everyone else in the world. Come, but come to remain. Come with conviction and endurance. Come permanently, for your sake and the sake of all the generation

help for the journey (Holland)

To those who may feel they have somehow forfeited their place at the table of the Lord, we say again with the Prophet  Joseph Smith  that God has “a forgiving disposition,”    that Christ is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, [is] long-suffering and full of goodness.”    I have always loved that when Matthew records Jesus’ great injunction, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,”   Luke adds the Savior’s additional commentary: “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful”   19   —as if to suggest that mercy is at least a beginning synonym for the perfection God has and for which all of us must strive. Mercy, with its sister virtue  forgiveness , is at the very heart of the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the eternal plan of salvation. Everything in the gospel teaches us that we can change if we need to, that we can be helped if we truly want it, that we can be made whole, whatever the problems of the past. Now, if you feel too sp

Paying tithing is not a token gift we are somehow charitably bestowing upon God...(Elder Holland)

Paying tithing is  not  a token gift we are somehow charitably bestowing upon God. Paying tithing is discharging a debt. Elder James E. Talmage once described this as a contract between us and the Lord. He imagined the Lord saying: “‘You have need of many things in this world—food, clothing, and shelter for your family … , the common comforts of life. … You shall have the means of acquiring these things; but remember they are mine, and I require of you the payment of a rental upon that which I give into your hands. However, your life will not be one of uniform increase … [so] instead of doing as mortal landlords do—requir[ing] you to … pay in advance, whatever your fortunes or … prospects may be—you shall pay me … [only] when you have received; and you shall pay me in accordance with what you receive. If it so be that in one year your income is abundant, then … [your 10 percent will be a] little more; and if it be so that the next year is one of distress and your income is not what i