Good Morning, Everyone! It feels so good to be back home in Maryland. Before I begin my talk, I just want to introduce myself since it’s been nearly 2 years since I’ve been here.
My name is Gina Stephens and I am the daughter of John and Kaylene Stephens. For those of you who know Lynsey, she would be very disappointed if I failed to mention that she is my super awesome little sister. For the past year and a half I’ve been serving a full time mission for the Lord in the Arizona Mesa mission. And in April I will be returning back to school at BYU-Idaho to complete my education as an English major.
But I am so excited to speak to you all today on a topic perfect for a returned missionary. My topic today is on Developing Christlike Attributes. I LOVE this topic because one of the lessons I learned on my mission is when you serve a mission, you are learning exactly what it means to be like Christ. Your purpose is to help others to accept and come unto Him. However, never in your life will you understand more that the Lord’s purpose in accepting your service is more so for your benefit than anyone else’s. How better can we come unto Christ than by aligning and immersing our entire self in the Lord’s work and his eternal purposes? Moses teaches us that the Lord’s purpose is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. PMG teaches us that a missionary’s purpose is to help others come unto Christ by helping them receive the restored gospel through faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, baptism, receiving the Gift of the Holy Ghost and enduring to the end.
Now. Developing Christlike attributes is a huge topic to speak on. So I decided to zero in on one particular attribute. In the Arizona Mesa mission we have what we call our mission culture. There are 5 points in it. (1) We love God and Others, (2) We baptize, (3) We are exactly obedient, (4) We work, work, work!, and (5) We expect and facilitate miracles. It is point number 3 that I want to speak on.
(3) We are exactly obedient.
Throughout my mission, I often wondered what it means to be exactly obedient and how do I achieve exact obedience? I found the best way to answer this question was to turn to our ultimate example of exact obedience.
In Mosiah 15, we see one of my favorite examples of Christ’s obedience. In verse 7 it says, “Yea, even so shall he shall be led, crucified, and slain, the flesh becoming subject even unto death, the will of the Son being swallowed up in the will of the Father.” I love this scripture because it shows what our attitude needs to be in order to be exactly obedient. It says that the savior’s will was swallowed up. What was the savior’s will?
We can find the answer to this question as we read of the savior’s atonement in Luke 22:42. As Christ prays to the Father, he says “if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” Here, Christ displays two wills. The first is a temporal will, a carnal will: “If thou be willing, remove this cup from me”. It was not Christ’s desire to suffer pain and sorrow on behalf of the world. Pain and sorrow hurts. It is not a natural desire that one seeks. So Christ did not want to suffer-- except that that was what the Father required of him in order for salvation to be made available to all of us. So Christ does not end the prayer there. My religion professor at BYU-Idaho says that the next word is the most important word in the history of mankind: “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done”. It is here that Christ’s second will is made manifest. His spiritual, his eternal will was to do what the Father wanted of him. The savior made a choice. He chose to perform the atonement. To suffer. To bleed. And to die for us. His will was swallowed up in every sense of the word.
I love this because sometimes we are asked to do things that we just don’t want to. Perhaps you receive a calling. Or even something as simple as sacrificing time to read the scriptures and to pray and come to church. It is during these times that we need to remember what it means to be obedient. What it means to let our wills be swallowed up in the will of the Father’s. Sacrificing a year and a half of my life for the Lord is probably one of the most profound events in my life that has allowed me to grow in ways that never would have been possible otherwise.
So being obedient means to allow our wills to be swallowed up in the will of the father and then following through with His commandments.
So how do we align our wills with God’s? How do we become EXACTLY obedient?
Fortuantely, the answer is simple. In 2 Nephi 31, Nephi teaches what is called the Doctrine of Christ. It is the avenue by which we become and internalize the teachings of Jesus Christ. It is summarized in 5 steps that I am positive you are all very familiar with. (1)Have faith in Jesus Christ, (2) Repent, (3) Be baptized, (4) Receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, and (5) Endure to the end.
PMG teaches that “When you have faith in Christ, you believe in Him as the Son of God, the Only Begotten of the Father in the Flesh. You accept him as your Savior and Redeemer and follow His teachings. You believe that your sins can be forgiven through His Atonement. Faith in Him means that your trust Him and are confident that He loves you.”
One of the most effective ways I learned to gain faith was to pray. During a very difficult companionship, I sought counsel from my mission president. During this discussion he told me to give it all to Christ. I struggled so much to understand what it meant to give it all to Him. Then I decided to apply another lesson I had learned on my mission. Early in my mission I read in the Bible dictionary under prayer. One sentence stood out to me. It says, “The object of prayer is not to change the will of God, but to secure for ourselves and for others blessings that God is already willing to grant, but that are made conditional upon our asking for them.” After reading this I thought to myself, well, I don’t know what blessings are conditional upon me asking for them so I decided that I was going to ask God for everything with the attitude that if God says no, then it’s for the best and at least that desire was not granted for lack of my asking. I LOVE this principle. I never realized just how many things God is willing to give me if I just ask. My faith and testimony that the Lord knows and loves me has grown so much by just saying more effective prayers.
PMG then continues to teach that faith leads to action. Or, as Brad Wilcox says, we get to learn heaven. Learning heaven consists primarily of step number 2- Repentance. According to the Bible dictionary, Repentance is “a fresh view about God, about oneself, and about the world.” In teaching about repentance I used the letters ABCD to help the individuals I taught remember the steps of repentance. A- acknowledge the sin. B- Be sorry that you’ve distanced yourself from God by sinning. C-Correct and Confess your sins to God, to those you’ve wronged, and if necessary to your designated priesthood leader. D- Don’t do it again.
I love repentance. That’s not to say it’s easy or even fun. But it feels good! And to see someone change and align their lives with what God wants for them is incredible. One investigator that I taught was a recovered drug addict. She had been kicked out of her home months ago because of her addictions and her parents wanted nothing to do with her. However, one of the blessings that God promises to those who obey and come unto him is that families are blessed. And as this young woman learned about the gospel and began to repent, the family began to take a role in her life again. They saw the positive change and they accepted it. I know that it happened because of her decision to choose Christ and follow Him. I love her so much!
In the process of this change of heart, a desire develops in our hearts to follow Jesus Christ always and to take His name upon ourselves. Moroni speaks of this in Moroni 8:25. He says, “And the first fruits of repentance is baptism; and baptism cometh by faith unto the fulfilling of the commandments ; and the fulfilling the commandments bringeth remission of sins”. It is explained here that baptism is an act of faith as we fulfill God’s commandment to be baptized and it is a direct result to that change of heart that occurs through repentance.
In teaching about baptism, I love to talk about Christ and his ultimate example. In 2 Nephi 31 it is explained why Jesus Christ, the only being to live perfectly on this earth, went and was baptized himself. His answer was simple. He teaches it was to fulfill all righteousness. It wasn’t until I was on my mission that I began to understand what that meant-“to fulfill all righteousness”. In the Doctrine and covenants 56:3, we read “Behold I, the Lord, command; and he that will not obey shall be cut off in mine own due time, after I have commanded and the commandment is broken.” Here we learn the importance of obedience. Christ did not have any sins to be washed away but according to His perfection, he was obedient in all things, including the commandment to be baptized. If he had not obeyed the commandment to be baptized, he would not have been fulfilling all righteousness.
In D&C 130:21 it says, “And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.” This is such a great scripture. I love it because this is where the fourth step, the Gift of the Holy Ghost comes in. So when we are baptized, we are obeying one of God’s laws; and a direct blessing that comes from being baptized is the opportunity to receive the Gift of the Holy Ghost.
In teaching about the gift of the Holy Ghost, we helped those we taught to understand the many roles He has. His main purpose is to testify of truth. President James E. Faust said “The gift of the Holy Ghost comes after one repents and becomes worthy… The holy Ghost bears witness of the truth and impresses upon the soul the reality of God the Father and the Son Jesus Christ so deeply that no earthly power or authority can separate him from that knowledge.” Along with his role as a witness of God and Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost also serves as a sanctifier and cleanser of our spirits, a comforter, a guide, and a teacher. He also warns us of danger and even “provides the power by which we teach and learn” (PMG).
Throughout my mission, there were numerous times when I saw the Holy Ghost work in my companions and me and with those we taught. One time my companion and I were walking back to our car with a young man named Jono that we were teaching. We had just finished a lesson with him in a member’s home and were doing a lot of light talking when he told us that God answered one of his prayers. This is one of those moments when we weren’t sure how to react because naturally we want to be excited, but this time Jono seemed a little discouraged. SO we asked him what happened expecting the worse.
To do a little background to this dilemma that Jono had been praying about, Jono had been debating on moving to one of the Dakotas where he had a good chance of working to get lots of money in a short amount of time before he went back to school. He would be doing hard labor, but by doing this, he wouldn’t have to take out loans for his education. However, he would not be in a position where he would be able to go to church, so this was obviously huge concern to us because lack of church attendance would lead to a lack of progression. So with that being said, you can imagine our happiness when he came across Jacob 2:18 during his personal scripture study. “But before ye seek for riches, seek ye for the kingdom of God.” This was an answer to our prayers as well as his, and the cool thing is that we knew this would be a decision that he needed to make and the only thing we could do for him was pray. So the Lord answered our prayers by allowing the spirit to touch Jono’s heart and teach him where his priorities needed to be. Today Jono is an active member of the church who now has the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost in his life.
The final step in learning how to be exactly obedient is by enduring to the end. Everyone has heard of the saying “practice makes perfect” and that’s all that enduring to the end is. It is a constant striving to put into practice all of the things that we have learned in our lives. So. What do you do? You continue to have faith in Jesus Christ, you continue to repent, you renew your baptismal covenants weekly by taking the sacrament, and as you do these things, the Holy Ghost will teach you, lead you and guide you as to what you need to improve in your life. This process repeated over and over is how we become perfect one step at a time. The lord does not expect perfection overnight, but he does expect progression. Why did we come to the earth? To gain experience and to progress in becoming more like our father in heaven. And all the while long, through the grace of Jesus Christ and his tender mercies, we are able to become and stay clean so that we may enter the presence of God again someday. This is the path to becoming exactly obedient. Faith, repentance, baptism and then partaking of the sacrament, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and finally enduring to the end by repeating steps 1-4.
In conclusion, I have been asked to share my testimony. ________________________________
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In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
