Jeffrey R. Holland was president of Brigham Young University when this
devotional address was given at Brigham Young University on 13 January 1987.
This is a long talk, but I promise you it is a great talk that will help you in some way!
The Duration of the War
In the final few weeks of 1944 I was bundled up and taken, at about six
in the morning as I recall, down to the Big Hand Cafe on the corner of
Main Street and Highway 91 in St. George, Utah. That's where the
Greyhound bus stopped in our little town, and that morning my Uncle
Herb, all of seventeen years of age, was leaving for San Diego,
California--wherever that was. Apparently in 1944 there was a war on
somewhere, and he was now deemed old enough to go and do his part. He
had joined the United States Navy, and we were there to say goodbye.
Actually, I had a rather formal part in this bus stop program. I had
practiced and was now supposed to sing in my four-year-old solo voice a
little ditty that celebrated sailors with lyrics beginning "Bell-bottom
trousers / Coat of navy blue. / She loves her sailor boy / And he loves
her too." However, as with other assignments later in my life, I
panicked in the public eye and went stone silent. I refused to sing a
note.
But my silence seemed to work out all right anyway because my mother and
my grandmother and my aunts were all crying and nobody cared much
whether I sang or not. I asked why they were crying, and they said it
was because Uncle Herb was going to war. I asked, "How long will he be
gone?"--not knowing then that some of the boys were never coming home.
Through her tears my grandmother said, "He will be gone as long as it
takes. He will be gone for the duration of the war."
Well, I had no idea whatsoever of her meaning. "As long as it takes to
do what?" for crying out loud--which is exactly what they were doing.
And what was "the duration of the war"? I was totally confused and very
glad I didn't sing my song. That would only have added to the confusion,
and the Big Hand Cafe never could stand much confusion.
As you might suppose, I have thought a lot more about my grandmother's
words later in my life than I ever thought about them in my youth.
Lately they have been on my mind again, and I hope they might have some
significance for you this morning.
The longer I live the more I come to realize that some things in life
are very true and very permanent and very important. They are, I
suppose, matters that might collectively be labeled "eternal" things.
Without listing a whole catalog of these good and permanent possessions,
let me say that all of them are included collectively, in some way or
another, in the gospel of Jesus Christ. As Mormon told his son, "In
Christ there . . . come[s]" every good thing" (Moroni 7:22). So, as time
goes by, we ought--as a matter of personal maturity and growth in the
gospel--to spend more of our time with and devote more of our energy to
the good things, the best things, the things that endure and bless and
prevail.
This is why, I believe, family and true friends become increasingly
important the older we get, and so does knowledge and so do simple acts
of kindness and concern for the circumstances of others. Peter lists a
whole handful of these virtues and calls them "the divine nature," and
he promises us "divine power" in possessing and sharing them (see 2
Peter 1:38). These gospel qualities and principles, as I understand
them, are the most important as well as the most permanent of life's
acquisitions. But there is a war going on over such personal
possessions, and there will yet be a bazooka shell or two falling into
your life that will prompt--indeed, will require--careful examination of
what you say you believe, what you assume you hold dear, and what you
trust is of permanent worth.
When difficult times come upon us or when temptation seems all around,
will we be--are we now?--prepared to stand our ground and outlast the
intruder? Are we equipped for combat, to stay loyal for as long as it
takes, to stay true for the duration of the war? Can we hold fast to the
principles and the people who truly matter eternally to us?
It is, I suppose, this quality of your faith, the determination of your
purpose, that I wish so much to stress this morning. I am asking you to
reexamine and more clearly understand the commitment you made when you
were baptized not only into Christ's church, but into his life and his
death and his resurrection, into all that he is and stands for in time
and in eternity. Nearly 98 percent. of this audience are baptized and
confirmed members of the LDS Church. Virtually that same percentage of
the men are also ordained priesthood bearers, and many of the men and
women here have already taken upon themselves the highest covenants and
holiest ordinances available in mortality--those of the holy temple.
So surely we have as a congregation already thrust ourselves into the
most serious and most eternal of issues. The war is on, and we have
conspicuously enlisted. And certainly it is a war worth waging. But we
are foolish, fatally foolish, if we believe it will be a casual or
convenient thing. We are foolish if we think it will demand nothing of
us. Indeed, as the chief figure, the great commander in this struggle,
Christ has warned us about treating the new testament of his body and
his blood trivially. We are told emphatically
not to pilfer and
profane, prevaricate and fornicate, satiate ourselves in every
indulgence or violation that strikes our fancy and then suppose that we
are still "pretty darn good soldiers." No, not in this army, not in
defending the kingdom of God.
More is expected than that.
Much more is needed. And in a very
real sense eternity hangs in the balance. I truly believe there can be
no casual Christians, for if we are not watchful and resolute, we will
become in the heat of battle a Christian "casualty." And each of us
knows some of those. Perhaps we ourselves have at sometime been wounded.
We weren't strong enough. We hadn't cared enough. We didn't stop to
think. The war was more dangerous than we had supposed. The temptation
to transgress, to compromise, is all around us, and too many of us, even
as members of the Church, have fallen victim. We partook of Christ's
"flesh and blood unworthily," and we ate and drank damnation to our soul
(3 Nephi 18:2829).
Some of us may
still be taking such transgression lightly, but at
least the Master understands the significance of the side we say we
have chosen. Let me use just one example."
"Are Ye Able?"
At the conclusion of his Perean ministry, Jesus and the Twelve were
making their way back to Jerusalem for that last, prophetically foretold
week leading up to his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. In that most
sober and foreboding sequence of events, the Savior who singly and
solitarily alone knew what lay ahead of him and just how difficult the
commitments of his final hours would be--was approached by the mother of
two of his chief disciples, James and John. She rather
straightforwardly asked a favor of the Son of God. She said, "Grant that
these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on
the left, in thy kingdom" (Matthew 20:21).
This good mother, and perhaps most of the little band who had faithfully
followed Jesus, were obviously preoccupied by the dream and expectation
of that time when this, their Messiah, would rule and reign in
splendor, when, as the scripture says, "the kingdom of God should
immediately appear" (Luke 19:11). The question was one more of ignorance
than impropriety, and Christ uttered not a word of rebuke. He gently
answered as one who always considered the consequence of any commitment.
"Ye know not," he said quietly, "what ye ask.
Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of? "
(Matthew 20:22; emphasis added). This startling question did not seem
to take James and John by surprise. Promptly and firmly they replied,
"We are able." And Jesus's response to them was, "Ye shall drink indeed
of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with"
(Matthew 20:23).
Without any reference to the glory or special privilege they seem to
have been seeking, this may strike one as a strange favor the Lord was
granting James and John. But he was not mocking them by offering the cup
of his suffering rather than a throne in his kingdom. No, he had never
been more serious.
The cup and the throne were inextricably linked and could not be given separately.
I am sure that you and I, being not only less worthy than Christ but
also less worthy than apostles like James and John, would leave such
troublesome issues alone if they would only leave us alone. As a rule we
usually do not seek the bitter cup and the bloody baptism, but
sometimes they seek us. The fact of the matter is God
does draft
men and women into the spiritual warfare of this world, and if any of us
come to genuine religious faith and conviction as a result of that--as
many a drafted soldier has done--it will nevertheless be a faith and a
conviction that in the first flames of the battle we did not enjoy and
certainly did not expect. (See A. B. Bruce,
The Training of the Twelve [New York: Richard R. Smith, 1930].)
Stand Firmly By Your Faith
I am asking this morning that we put ourselves in the place of James and
John, put ourselves in the place of seemingly committed, believing,
faithful Latter-day Saints, and ask ourselves, "If we are Christ's and
he is ours, are we willing to stand firm forever? Are we in this church
for keeps, for the duration, until it's over? Are we in it through the
bitter cup, the bloody baptism, and all?" And please understand that I
am
not asking if you can simply endure your years at BYU or serve
out your term as gospel doctrine teacher. I am asking questions of a
far deeper and more fundamental sort. I am asking about the purity of
your heart. How cherished are our covenants? Have we--perhaps beginning
our life in the Church as a result of parental insistence or geographic
happenstance--have we yet thought about a life that is ultimately to be
tempted and tried and purified by fire? Have we cared about our
convictions enough and are we regularly reinforcing them in a way that
will help us do the right thing at the right time for the right reason,
especially when it is unpopular or unprofitable or nearly unbearable to
do so?
Indeed, you may one day be released as the glamorous gospel doctrine
teacher and be called to that much vacated post of gospel doctrine
believer and obeyer. That will test your strength! Surely our sometimes
clichéd expressions of testimony and latter-day privilege don't amount
to much until we have had open invitation to test them in the heat of
battle and have in such spiritual combat found ourselves to be faithful.
We may speak glibly in those Sunday services of
having the truth or even of
knowing the truth, but only one who is confronting error and conquering it, however painfully or however slowly, can properly speak of
loving the truth. And I believe Christ intends us someday to truly, honestly
love him--the way, the truth, and the life.
Tragically enough, the temptation to compromise standards or be less
valiant before God often comes from another member of the Church. Elder
Grant Bangerter wrote of his experience years ago in the military
shortly after he had returned from his mission. "I realized," he
concluded, "throughout those years that I was considered different. . . .
[But] I never found it necessary to break my standards, to remove my
garments, or to apologize for being a Latter-day Saint." Then came this
very telling observation.
I can honestly say that no nonmember of the Church has ever tried to induce me to discard my [LDS]
standards.
The only people I remember trying to coerce me to abandon my principles
or who ridiculed me for my standards have been non-practicing members
of [my own]
Church. [Wm. Grant Bangerter, "Don't Mind Being Square,"
The New Era, July 1982, p. 6]
What a painful observation if we were to apply it at a place like BYU,
where the temptation to compromise may come from a "practicing" member
of the Church.
Even here--maybe especially here, because we have been given so much--we
must be prepared to stand by principle and act on conviction, even if
that seems to leave us standing alone. Remember these lines from
Paradise Lost:
I alone
Seemed in thy world erroneous to
dissent
From all; my sect thou seest. Now learn to late
How few sometimes may know, when thousands err. [Book VI, lines 14548]
I do not think thousands err at BYU, but some do, and I believe that you will leave here to work and live in a world where
many do,
more than
Milton's thousands. So my call--especially while we are in an
environment that requires and expects it--is to live by the highest
principles and to stand firmly by your faith. I ask it however difficult
or lonely that may seem, even at a place as beautiful as BYU. You may
be tempted, you undoubtedly are tempted. But be strong. The cup and the
throne are inextricably linked.
Our Christian Challenge
I think perhaps so far I have made you think only of the rather obvious
transgressions young Latter-day Saints face, the temptations Satan never
seems to keep very subtle. But what about the gospel-living that isn't
so obvious and may be of a higher order still? Let me shift both the
tone
and the temptations just slightly and cite other examples of our Christian challenge.
On the night of March 24, 1832, a dozen men stormed the Hiram, Ohio,
home where Joseph and Emma Smith were staying. Both were physically and
emotionally spent, not only from all the travails of the young Church at
the time but also because on this particular evening they had been up
caring for their two adopted twins, born eleven months earlier on the
same day that Emma had given birth to--and then lost--their own twins.
Emma had gone to bed first while Joseph stayed up with the children;
then she had arisen to take her turn, encouraging her husband to get
some sleep. No sooner had he begun to doze than he heard his wife give a
terrifying scream and found himself being torn from the house and very
nearly being torn limb from limb.
Cursing as they went, the mob that had seized him were swearing to kill
Joseph if he resisted. One man grabbed him by the throat until he lost
consciousness from lack of breath. He came to only to overhear part of
their conversation on whether he should be murdered. It was determined
that for now he would simply be stripped naked, beaten senseless, tarred
and feathered, and left to fend for himself in the bitter March night.
Stripped of his clothing, fighting off fists and tar paddles on every
side, and resisting a vial of some liquid--perhaps poison--which he
shattered with his teeth as it was forced into his mouth, he
miraculously managed to fight off the entire mob and eventually made his
way back to the house. In the dim light his wife thought the tar stains
covering his body were blood stains, and she fainted at the sight.
Friends spent the entire night scraping and removing the tar and
applying liniments to his scratched and battered body. I now quote
directly from the Prophet Joseph's record:
By morning I was ready to be clothed again. This being the Sabbath
morning, the people assembled for meeting at the usual hour of worship,
and among them came also the mobbers [of the night before. Then he names them.]
With
my flesh all scarified and defaced, I preached to the congregation as
usual, and in the afternoon of the same day baptized three individuals. [
HC 1:264]
Unfortunately, one of the adopted twins, growing worse from the exposure
and turmoil of the night, died the following Friday. "With my flesh all
scarified and defaced, I preached to the congregation as usual"! To
that slimy band of cowards who by Friday next will quite literally be
the murderers of your child? Stand there hurting from the hair of your
head that was pulled and then tarred into a mat, hurting right down to
your foot that was nearly torn off being wrenched out the door of your
own home? Preach the gospel to that damnable bunch of sniveling
reprobates? Surely this is no time to stand by principle. It is daylight
now and the odds aren't twelve to one anymore. Let's just conclude this
Sunday service right now and go outside to finish last evening's
business. It was, after all, a fairly long night for Joseph and Emma;
maybe it should be an equally short morning for this dirty dozen who
have snickeringly shown up for church.
But those feelings that I have even now just reading about this
experience 150 years later--and feelings I know that would have raged in
my Irish blood that morning--mark only one of the differences between
me and the Prophet Joseph Smith. You see, a disciple of Christ--which I
testify to you Joseph was and is--always has to be a disciple; the judge
does not give any time off for bad behavior. A Christian always stands
on principle, even as old Holland is out there swinging a pitchfork and
screaming an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth--forgetting, as
dispensation after dispensation has forgotten, that this only leaves
everyone blind and toothless.
No, the good people, the strong people, dig down deeper and find a
better way. Like Christ, they know that when it is hardest to be so is
precisely the time you have to be at your best. As another confession to you, I have always feared that
I
could not have said at Calvary's cross, "Father forgive them for they
know not what they do." Not after the spitting, and the cursing, and the
thorns, and the nails. Not if they don't care or understand that this
horrible price in personal pain is being paid for them. But that's just
the time when the fiercest kind of integrity and loyalty to high purpose
must take over. That's just the time when it matters the very most and
when everything else hangs in the balance--for surely it did that day.
You and I won't ever find ourselves on that cross, but we repeatedly
find ourselves at the foot of it. And how we act there will speak
volumes about what we think of Christ's character and his call for us to
be his disciples.
Tested in the Heat of Battle
Yes, our challenges will be a lot less dramatic than a
tar-and-feathering; certainly they won't involve a crucifixion. And
maybe they won't even be very personal matters at all. Maybe they will
involve someone else--perhaps an injustice done to a neighbor, a person
much less popular and privileged than yourself.
In cataloging life's little battles, this may be the least attractive
kind of war for you, a bitter cup you especially don't wish to drink
because there seems to be so little advantage in it for you. After all,
it's really someone else's problem, and like Hamlet you may well lament
that "time is out of joint; O cursed spite, / That ever [you were] born
to set it right!" (William Shakespeare,
Hamlet, act 1, sc. 5,
lines 18788). But set it right you must, for "Inasmuch as ye have done
it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me"
(Matthew 25:40). And in times of such Doniphan-like defense, it may be
risky, even dangerous, to stand true.
Martin Luther King once said,
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of
comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and
controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and
even his life for the welfare of others. In dangerous valleys and
hazardous pathways, he will lift some bruised and beaten brother to
a higher and more noble life. [Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Strength to Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1963)]
But what if in this war it is neither a neighbor nor yourself at risk,
but someone desperately, dearly loved by you who is hurt or defamed or
perhaps even taken in death? How might we prepare for that distant day
when our own child, or our own spouse, is found in mortal danger? One
marvelously gifted man, a convert to Christianity, slowly watched his
wife dying of cancer. As he observed her slipping away from him with all
that she had meant and had given him, his newfound faith about which he
had written so much and with which he had strengthened so many others
now began to waver. In times of such grief, C. S. Lewis wrote, one runs
the risk of asking:
Where is God? . . .
When you are happy. . . [you]
turn to Him with gratitude and praise, [and]
you will be. . .
welcomed
with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all
other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face,
and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that,
silence. You [might]
as well turn away. The longer you wait, the
more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the
windows. It might be an empty house. . . . [Yet he was once there.]
What can this mean? Why is [God]
so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble? [C. S. Lewis,
A Grief Observed (New York: Seabury Press, Inc., 1961), pp. 45]
Those feelings of abandonment, written in the midst of a terrible grief,
slowly passed, and the comfort of Lewis' faith returned, stronger and
purer for the test. But note what self-revelation this bitter cup, this
bloody baptism, had for him. In an obligation of quite a different kind,
he, too, now realized that enlisting for the duration of the war is not
a trivial matter, and in the heat of battle he hadn't been so heroic as
he had encouraged millions of his readers to be.
"You never know how much you really believe anything," he confesses,
until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to
you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long
as you are merely using it to [tie]
a box. But suppose you had
to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover
how much you really trusted it? . . .
Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief. [Lewis, p. 25]
. . .
Your [view of] . . .
eternal life. . .
will not be [very]
serious if nothing much [is at]
stake. . . .
A man. . .
has to be knocked silly before he comes to
his senses. [p. 43]
. . . I had been warned
--[indeed,]
I had warned myself. . . . [I knew]
we were. . .
promised sufferings. . . . [That was]
part of the program. We were even told, "Blessed are they that mourn," and I accepted it. I've got nothing that I hadn't [agreed to]. . . . [So]
if my house. . .
collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which "took these things into account" was not [an adequate]
faith. . . .
If I had really cared, as I thought I did [care],
about the sorrows of [others in this]
world, [then]
I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came. . . .
I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered. . . . [And when it indeed mattered, I found that it wasn't strong enough.]
. . .
You will never discover how serious it [is]
until the stakes are raised horribly high; [and God has a way of raising the stakes] . . . [sometimes]
only suffering [can]
do [that]. [pp. 4143]
[So God is, then, something like a divine physician.]
A cruel man might be bribed--might grow tired of his vile sport--might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have [temporary]
fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a [wonderfully skilled]
surgeon whose intentions are [solely and absolutely] good. [Then],
the kinder and more conscientious he is, [the more he cares about you,]
the more inexorably he will go on cutting [in spite of the suffering it may cause. And]
if
he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was
complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. . . . [pp. 4950]
[So I am, you see, one]
of God's patients, not yet cured. I know there are not only tears [yet]
to be dried but stains [yet]
to be scoured. [My]
sword will be made even brighter. [p. 49]
God wants us to be stronger than we are--more fixed in our purpose, more
certain of our commitments, eventually needing less coddling from him,
showing more willingness to shoulder some of the burden of his heavy
load. In short, he wants us to be more like he is and, if you haven't
noticed, some of us are not like that yet.
The question then, for all of us milling around the Greyhound bus depot
about to report for duty, is: When gospel principles get unpopular or
unprofitable or very difficult to live, will we stand by them "for the
duration"? That is the question our experiences in Latter-day Saint life
seem most determined to answer. What do we really believe, and how true
to that are we really willing to live? As university students--bright
and blessed and eager and prosperous--do we yet know what
faith--specifically, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ--really is, what it
requires in human behavior, and what it may yet demand of us before our
souls are finally saved?
May I close by telling you how much I love you and how much I care about
what you become at BYU and beyond. I think about you day and night, and
I pray for your brightest possible future. My testimony to you this
morning is that God does live and good does triumph. This
is the
true and living Church of the true and living Christ. And because of him
and the restored gospel and the work of living prophets--including
President Ezra Taft Benson--there is for each of us individually and for
all of us collectively, if we stay fixed and faithful in our purpose, a
great final moment somewhere when we will stand with the angels "in the
presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all
things for [our] glory are manifest, past, present, and future" (D&C
130:7). That is a triumphant day for which I dearly long, and for which
I earnestly pray for all of you. To earn the right to be there may we,
as Alma said, "stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things,
and in all places that [we] may be in, even until death" (Mosiah 18:9),
I pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
