The endowment we receive from the Lord is not just for the temple but to help and bless us throughout our lives in a troubled world.
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"I am extremely grateful and humbled to be with you and to have the chance to speak at this last devotional of the semester. This invitation is especially meaningful to me because I have three members of my immediate family who are current students at BYU: a daughter who is a freshman and a daughter who is a sophomore; the third student is my wife, Cindy, who is graduating in a few weeks with her master’s degree from the BYU Marriott School of Business. I am so proud of her, and I love her with my whole heart and soul, and that’s why I affectionately call her my Sweat-heart.
I want to speak with each of you today as if you are my own family members about a subject of great importance, and I pray the Spirit can be with us as I do so.
I am fortunate enough that a major part of my work on campus is teaching the cornerstone religion course called Foundations of the Restoration. I love teaching that class, and I love exploring the marvelous restored gospel with many of you. At the end of every class, I have a little call-and-answer tradition that I like to do with my students.
As they get ready to leave, I call out to them, “The Restoration continues!”
And as I point to them, they answer back in unison, “Let us continue in it!”
But we all know it is easier said than done to continue in the ongoing Restoration-especially in our day. We are living in a wonderful yet difficult time, one that I think future historians will discuss as among the most spiritually challenging eras in the history of the restored Church. And not just for our church. There is abundant evidence that faith in organized religion in general is noticeably slipping, particularly in America. A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that while in 2007 only 16 percent of Americans did not have a religious affiliation, today it is 29 percent. In fact, the fastest growing religious affiliation in America is no religious affiliation at all.1 And much of the growth of the non­religious has come from the rising generations. The Pew Research Center reported that younger adults are less likely to identify with any religion than older adults, particularly in North America and Europe.2
People have been leaving faith and returning to faith in all generations and dispensations, but what is notable is the rate at which it seems to be happening right now and the amount we hear about it because of amplified social channels. Today, losing faith feels fast and loud.
An Endowment from God
So how do we meet the spiritual challenges of our day and continue in the ongoing Restoration? While I don’t believe there’s any one easy answer to solve every important and complex issue related to modern faith challenges, I do believe there is something that can empower us to successfully navigate and overcome the current tests we face if we will better understand it, seek it, and receive it.
Do you want to know what it is? Good!
In order to do that, we need to go back to the year 1835 in Kirtland, Ohio. Close your eyes and mentally travel down some dirt roads. Put on your bonnet or grow your beard (you have permission to do so momentarily!), and picture yourself in a meeting in which the Prophet Joseph Smith is teaching the recently formed Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Unlike today’s quorum, this first group was relatively young and inexperienced in the Church. The oldest apostle was only thirty-five, and four of the apostles were in their early twenties, similar in age to many of you students here today. Now you might think that everything was spiritually great at this time in American history and in the Church. The Kirtland Temple was almost completed, and converts were flocking to Ohio. Sounds pretty good, right? Well, think again. In the recorded remarks of his sermon to the Twelve, Joseph noted that “darkness prevails at this time [the same] as it was at the time Jesus Christ was about to be crucified.”3
Does that sound familiar?
Joseph then proceeded to instruct them on something that he said was “calculated to unite our hearts, . . . that our faith may be strong, so that Satan cannot overthrow us nor have any power over us.”4
What was this?"