This post is based on a recent General Conference talk that I like called "Remembering in Whom We Have Trusted" by Elder Allen D. Haynie. I would like to share with you some highlights while reading the talk. Elder Haynie mentioned,
"Before we came to this earth, we participated as spirit sons and daughters of God in a grand council. Each of us was paying attention, and none of us fell asleep. In that council our Father in Heaven presented a plan.
Because the plan preserved our agency and required that we learn from our own experience and not just from His, He knew we would commit sin. Because Heavenly Father loves His children,
He presented a plan that included a Savior, someone who could help all become clean no matter how dirty they have become. Jesus Christ suffered, both body and spirit, so all could return to their loving Father.
“What does He ask us to do in return?” he asked. “He simply pleads with us to confess our sins and repent so that we will not have to suffer as He did. He invites us to become clean so that we are not left outside of our Father in Heaven’s house.”
What does matter is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, suffered “pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind” so “that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people.” What does matter is that He was willing to condescend, to come to this earth and descend “below all things”and suffer “more powerful contradictions than any man” ever could.
What does matter is that Christ is pleading our case before the Father, “saying: Father, behold the sufferings and death of him who did no sin, in whom thou wast well pleased; wherefore, Father, spare these my brethren that believe on my name, that they may come unto me and have everlasting life.” That is what really matters and what should give all of us renewed hope and a determination to try one more time, because He has not forgotten us.
I testify that the Savior will never turn away from us when we humbly seek Him in order to repent; will never consider us to be a lost cause; will never say, “Oh no, not you again”; will never reject us because of a failure to understand how hard it is to avoid sin. He understands it all perfectly, including the sense of sorrow, shame, and frustration that is the inevitable consequence of sin.
Repentance, of necessity, is not easy. Things of eternal significance rarely are. But the result is worth it. As President Boyd K. Packer testified in his last address to the Seventy of the Church: “The thought is this: the Atonement leaves no tracks, no traces. What it fixes is fixed. The Atonement leaves no traces, no tracks. It just heals, and what it heals stays healed.”
And so it is that our hope to live again with the Father depends on the Atonement of Jesus Christ, upon the willingness of the one sinless Being to take upon Himself, notwithstanding the fact that justice had no claim on Him, the collective weight of the transgressions of all mankind, including those sins that some sons and daughters of God unnecessarily choose to suffer for on their own.
As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we attribute greater power to the Savior’s Atonement than most other people because we know that if we make covenants, continually repent, and endure to the end, He will make us joint heirs with Him and, like Him, we will receive all that the Father hath. That is an earth-shattering doctrine, and yet it is true.
He who suffered for our sins, who is our Advocate with the Father, who calls us His friends, who loves us unto the end, He ultimately will be our judge. One of the often overlooked blessings of the Atonement of Jesus Christ is that “the Father hath committed all judgment unto the Son.”
In your free time, you read this whole talk. Here's the link to the talk below.
www.lds.org/general-conference/2015/10/remembering-in-whom-we-have-trusted
"Before we came to this earth, we participated as spirit sons and daughters of God in a grand council. Each of us was paying attention, and none of us fell asleep. In that council our Father in Heaven presented a plan.
Because the plan preserved our agency and required that we learn from our own experience and not just from His, He knew we would commit sin. Because Heavenly Father loves His children,
He presented a plan that included a Savior, someone who could help all become clean no matter how dirty they have become. Jesus Christ suffered, both body and spirit, so all could return to their loving Father.
“What does He ask us to do in return?” he asked. “He simply pleads with us to confess our sins and repent so that we will not have to suffer as He did. He invites us to become clean so that we are not left outside of our Father in Heaven’s house.”
What does matter is that Christ is pleading our case before the Father, “saying: Father, behold the sufferings and death of him who did no sin, in whom thou wast well pleased; wherefore, Father, spare these my brethren that believe on my name, that they may come unto me and have everlasting life.” That is what really matters and what should give all of us renewed hope and a determination to try one more time, because He has not forgotten us.
I testify that the Savior will never turn away from us when we humbly seek Him in order to repent; will never consider us to be a lost cause; will never say, “Oh no, not you again”; will never reject us because of a failure to understand how hard it is to avoid sin. He understands it all perfectly, including the sense of sorrow, shame, and frustration that is the inevitable consequence of sin.
Repentance, of necessity, is not easy. Things of eternal significance rarely are. But the result is worth it. As President Boyd K. Packer testified in his last address to the Seventy of the Church: “The thought is this: the Atonement leaves no tracks, no traces. What it fixes is fixed. The Atonement leaves no traces, no tracks. It just heals, and what it heals stays healed.”
And so it is that our hope to live again with the Father depends on the Atonement of Jesus Christ, upon the willingness of the one sinless Being to take upon Himself, notwithstanding the fact that justice had no claim on Him, the collective weight of the transgressions of all mankind, including those sins that some sons and daughters of God unnecessarily choose to suffer for on their own.
As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we attribute greater power to the Savior’s Atonement than most other people because we know that if we make covenants, continually repent, and endure to the end, He will make us joint heirs with Him and, like Him, we will receive all that the Father hath. That is an earth-shattering doctrine, and yet it is true.
He who suffered for our sins, who is our Advocate with the Father, who calls us His friends, who loves us unto the end, He ultimately will be our judge. One of the often overlooked blessings of the Atonement of Jesus Christ is that “the Father hath committed all judgment unto the Son.”
In your free time, you read this whole talk. Here's the link to the talk below.
www.lds.org/general-conference/2015/10/remembering-in-whom-we-have-trusted
Stay Tuned until next time.
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