Farewell Talk: The Living Christ

There were a lot of new announcements during General Conference in October, but the one that stuck out to me the most was the age change for missionaries.  Boys can go out at 18 instead of 19 and girls can go out at 19 instead of 21.  I turned 19 exactly one week after that announcement so you can imagine how excited I was.  I have been assigned to the Chile Osorno Mission which covers the southernmost part of Chile.  I will be teaching the Chilean people in the Spanish language.

Since General Conference we have talked about how the work is hastening and I think we will definitely see that through missionary service.  Our goal as missionaries is to bring people to Christ.  We want people to partake in His gospel and the blessings that come from it.

One of the most fundamental principles of the gospel is that God loves us and we are His children.  Because God loves us He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to be Savior of the world.  He was sent here to redeem us and save us from our sins so that one day we can return to God again.  Christ is the foundation upon which the principles of this gospel are built.  He is our example of perfection and our goal as Latter-day Saints is to become more like Christ.

In Preach My Gospel there is a list of Christlike attributes we are asked to work on and I would like to share those with you.  The first of those is faith in Christ.  It says “faith is a principle of power.  God works by power, but His power is usually exercised in response to faith.”  So without faith we can’t expect much.  The second is hope, or “trust in God’s promises” which ties right into faith.  The way we use hope is different than what it means here.  We say things like, “I hope it rains today.”  Hope doesn’t mean you are wishing for it happen, you are waiting for it to happen.  You have faith that blessings and promises will be fulfilled. 

The third Chirstlike attribute listed is charity and love and I personally think that this is one of the most important characteristics a missionary should have, and that we should all have.   Jesus Christ is so filled with compassion for us and His love for us goes unbounded.  He healed the sick, raised the dead, he taught saint and sinner alike, and he died for us.  Charity is the pure love that Christ has for us and as imperfect as we are if we can have charity for our fellow man we are truly emulating Christ and showing our love for Him by showing our love to others.

The fourth attribute is virtue which keeps us spiritually clean and pure.  Preach My Gospel reads “Virtue originates in your innermost thoughts and desires.”  If we want to have the companionship of the Holy Ghost to guide us and protect us, protecting our virtue is essential.  The fifth attribute is knowledge.  D&C 131:6 says “It is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance.”  We have been commanded to seek knowledge, not just of a spiritual nature but of a temporal nature as well.  We have been given so much to learn from we need to make an effort.

Sixth is patience, “the capacity to endure delay, trouble, opposition, or suffering without becoming angry, frustrated, or anxious.”  That is a hard one.  Sometimes I say things like, “Well I am trying to patient, but you are making it difficult.”  Of course it is difficult that’s the whole point, and honestly with all our frailties as mere mortals I would think it must be difficult for Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ to be patient with us, but they are and we need to be patient with others and with ourselves.   Seventh is humility, which is our willingness to submit to the Lord.  And I think that submissiveness, putting ourselves in the Lords hands to do His will, will help us to do all things.  Eighth is diligence to be steady and unwavering and to press forward with faith.  Ninth is obedience, which is an act of faith.  We don’t always know why we are asked to do something, but we have to submit ourselves to the Lord and do as He commands.

When Christ was on the earth He established His church, He instituted the Sacrament, He taught a message of peace and of our purpose here on earth.  His mortal ministry was full of love and compassion.  When Lazarus died Mary came to Jesus with the news weeping saying “Lord if though hadst been here, my brother had not died.  When Jesus …saw her weeping…he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled.”  He wept with Mary and with Martha and with all of those that mourned the passing of Lazarus.  He must have known that he could and would raise Lazarus from the dead, but His nature is one of compassion.  Christ mourns when we mourn, He is happy when we are happy, He is always what we need him to be, He is always our friend.  He knows us and He loves us.  What a wonderful blessing that is.

In the pre-mortal existence Satan’s plan was to deprive of us our agency but our agency is essential to our purpose here on earth.  It is how we prove our willingness to follow the Lord and how we progress as individuals.  However, Heavenly Father knew that we would fall, that we would succumb to temptation and that we would sin; but His plan was not for us to be lost.  His purpose is to bring about the “immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39) so by providing us with a Savior that purpose can be fulfilled.  Jesus was foreordained to be the Savior.  He was the only one capable of fulfilling God’s plan for us.  Without the Atonement our souls would be lost.

As selfless and as perfect and as long-suffering  as He was in His mortal ministry, Jesus came to earth to redeem us.  The word “redeem means to purchase out of slavery.”  Christ was sent to redeem our souls from the bondage of sin.  He did so and because of that we can be saved we don’t have to be in bondage.

Elder Holland gave a wonderful talk about Christ during Easter and I would like to read a part of that.  It focusses on Christ’s incomprehensible suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane.

“Now I speak very carefully, even reverently, of what may have been the most difficult moment in all of this solitary journey to the Atonement.  I speak of those final moments for which Jesus must have been prepared intellectually and physically but which He may not have anticipated emotionally and spiritually—that concluding descent into the paralyzing despair of divine withdrawal when He cries in ultimate loneliness, ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’

“The loss of mortal support He had anticipated, but apparently He had not comprehended this…it is my personal belief that in all of Christ’s mortal ministry the father may never have been closer to His Son than in these agonizing final moments or suffering.  Nevertheless, that the supreme sacrifice of His Son might be as complete as it was voluntary and solitary, the Father briefly withdrew from Jesus the comfort of His Spirit, the support of His personal presence.  It was required, indeed it was central to the significance of the Atonement, that this perfect Son who had never spoken ill nor done wrong nor touched an unclean thing had to know how the rest of humankind—us, all of us—would fell when we did commit such sins.  For His Atonement to be infinite and eternal, He had to feel what it was like to die not only physically but spiritually, to sense what it was like to have the divine Spirit withdraw, leaving one feeling totally, abjectly, hopelessly alone.”

I think that for all of us at some point, no matter how lucky we are, life can get pretty dreary and in those moments sometimes we feel angry or scared or alone and abandoned.  And a lot of people just give up, and they say it’s not worth it.  Life is hard and there are a lot of bad things that happen in this world, and I couldn’t always tell you why except that Heavenly Father knows what he’s doing and he knows what we can handle.  I want to share an excerpt from Sister Okazaki’s book Lighten Up.  This passage has really increased my understanding of the Savior.  This is what she says:

“Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It’s our faith that he experienced everything—absolutely everything. Sometimes we don’t think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don’t experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what if felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism. Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profounder level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, ‘And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’ (Matt 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your 5 year old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your 5th grader, when your daughters calls to say that the new baby has Down Syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your 2 year old, when someone gives your 13 year old drugs, when someone seduces your 17 year old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your 50th wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that, He’s been there, He’s been lower than all that. He’s not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don’t need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He’s the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He’s not embarrassed by us, angry at us or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief.” (Chieko Okazaki, Lighten Up! [Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1993], 174)

How wonderful it is to know that somebody has experienced everything that I have experienced.  I don’t understand how it all works, but I know that Christ’s sacrifice and love for us is infinite, that the Atonement is real, and that it is for us—each of us individually.  He overcame death so that we might also live.

It is important for us to recognize that while the Atonement is infinite, it is not unconditional.  We can’t just turn away from God with an unrepentant heart and expect to be saved.  We have work to do, we have to follow his commandments.  And after all that we have been given can we really say, “No it’s too hard.”  Can you imagine how sad that must make Heavenly Father and Jesus?  The Lord does not need or want fair weather followers.  He commands us to follow Him, to be servants of the Lord.  It is a message for all, but we have to accept it.

In 2000 the Apostles wrote down their testimony of Christ in a document called, “The Living Christ.”  The last of two paragraphs of that document say this:

“We testify that He will someday return to the earth.  ‘And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.’  He will rule as King of Kings and reign as Lord of Lords, and every knee shall bend and every tongue shall speak in worship before Him.  Each of us will stand to be judged of Him according to our works and the desires of our hearts.

“We bear testimony as His duly ordained Apostles—that Jesus is the Living Christ, the immortal Son of God.  He is the great King Immanuel, who stands today on the right hand of His Father.  He is the light, the life, and the hope of the world.  His way is the path that leads to happiness in this life and eternal life in the world to come.  God be thanked for the matchless gift of His divine Son.”

We have been given a miraculous gift and it is so important for us to share that with other people.  We want people to know of the blessings of the Atonement, to be baptized in Christ’s name by the proper authority, to take Christ’s name upon them and covenant with God to always remember Him, to partake of the Sacrament each week, to enter God’s holy temples.  God wants all of His children, not some of them, all of them.

I want to share my humble testimony with you that Jesus is the Living Christ.  He is the way.  His church and Priesthood have been restored and Joseph Smith saw Jesus Christ standing on the right hand of God.  I know that this is Christ’s church and Thomas S. Monson is our current prophet today, called of God to lead and guide us.  I know that the Book of Mormon is true.  It is written for our day and it testifies of Christ.