In case you are wondering what it means to "give a talk," I will fill you in briefly. Unlike most Christian religions, Mormons have a "lay" clergy, which is to say that almost all tasks performed are volunteer. Instead of having a "sermon" every week, people who are part of the Congregation are assigned a topic and asked to speak for anywhere from 5-30 minutes. A week or two ago, a member of the Bishopric called and asked me to speak today on: Jesus Christ is my Savior, and He atoned for me.
I have been asked to give quite a few talks at church over the years, and some of those topics have been odd, boring or kind of hard for me to wrap my head around, but I have never had a topic I felt was so important, so all encompassing, and frankly, so overwhelming. Where to even begin??
I decided to just try and follow in the footsteps of the men who have been tasked to be Special Witnesses of Christ. See, we believe God restored the gospel to his prophet Joseph Smith and that we still have a true and living prophet today to whom God speaks and reveals/clarifies things. We believe God can speak to each of us through personal revelation with the help of the Holy Ghost, but He has chosen one person to lead His church, and for now, we believe that is the Prophet Thomas S. Monson.
I thought I'd start with a basic explanation of that the Atonement is. I pulled this quote from LDS.org.
The Atonement is the sacrifice Jesus Christ made to help us overcome sin, adversity, and death. Jesus’s atoning sacrifice took place in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross at Calvary. He paid the price for our sins, took upon Himself death, and was resurrected. The Atonement is the supreme expression of the love of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ.
Then that same page linked me to a talk by our prophet, President Monson. You can listen to, or read the whole thing here. He spoke about the Savior's life and discussed that ever since Adam and Eve "fell", or left the Garden of Eden, two main things took place. The first is that mankind is mortal, or subject to death. The second is that mankind is "separated" from God by sin. Both those things needed to be reconciled before we could return to our Father in Heaven, which is all part of God's plan. So, we needed a Savior.
Jesus Christ was born to earth to be that Savior, and he lived a perfect life, and began his ministry. All of that is just full of beauty, wonder and so much learning for us, but I am going to skip over it today, and get to the beginning of the atonement, which took place in the Garden of Gethsemane. Christ had to sacrifice, he had to pay the price of our sins, and He had to do that alone. Elder Holland in a conference talk in April of 2009 discussed this concept. You can listen to or read that entire talk here. In it, he discusses several groups of people who left Jesus, one by one.
At the beginning, while Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane, bleeding from every pore, his own disciples could not stay awake while He suffered. They had not left Him, but I imagine He felt very alone. The first betrayal came from the Jewish leaders, Annas and Caiphas. They sentenced Jesus to death. The second came from the Gentile leaders, Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas. They refused to commute the sentence and although PP tried to "wash his hands" of the whole thing, the fact was, he knew Christ was innocent and he sent Him to His death anyway. The third betrayal came from the masses. The general public voted to save Barabas, a horrible villian, instead of Jesus Christ. They spit upon him, and booed him and mocked Him during His suffering. They turned their faces away while the Son of God was crucified. The fourth, and certainly most painful up to that point, was the betrayal of his own Apostles. Judas sold him for 30 silver pieces, and even Peter denied him. Jesus knew that was coming, but it still had to hurt.
But by far the hardest, and the worst departure was by His Father. Honestly, this is something I hadn't really thought much about in the past. I will quote Elder Holland here, because what he has to say is so beautifully written and profound.
Now I speak very carefully, even reverently, of what may have been the most difficult moment in all of this solitary journey to Atonement. I speak of those final moments for which Jesus must have been prepared intellectually and physically but which He may not have fully 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 hast thou forsaken me?”
The loss of mortal support He had anticipated, but apparently He had not comprehended this. Had He not said to His disciples, “Behold, the hour … is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me” and “The Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please him”?
Oh how it must have hurt for Jesus, who had never been without His father's presence, because He always did what pleased His father, to be alone, to be without that constant reassurance. Elder Holland continues and explains even a little more about the importance of this final departure.
With all the conviction of my soul I testify that He did please His Father perfectly and that a perfect Father did not forsake His Son in that hour. Indeed, 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 of 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 feel 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.
Oh how grateful I am for a loving Heavenly Father and a Savior, Jesus Christ, who went through this difficulty, who died and then was reborn. I am so grateful He was willing to endure so He could feel how I feel when I make mistakes.
I have felt hopelessly alone.
I have felt abject. I have felt truly abandoned.
Have you?
Well, I will promise you that if you don't want to, you don't need to feel that way again, not for long anyway, not if you will follow Christ's plan and accept His gift. There are two ways we can avoid this feeling. We can pray and invite the Spirit in, and we can also reach out to members of our church family. There's a reason God restored His gospel, and established a church support system. It's so that He can work through us to help the others around us. So my point here is two sided. Don't wallow in feeling lonely, but reach out to God and to your friends and family, and also, when you see someone feeling sad, lonely, or desperate, reach out to them. Follow the Spirit and do what it tells you. It's our duty as disciples of Christ to do no less.
Now, my final point. (Phew, my talk was really long!) I wanted to talk about how I have come to apply the Atonement in my life a little bit. After Jesus Christ was betrayed, was left alone, and was hung on the cross, He forgave every single one of those people. He forgave His tormentors, He forgave His disciples, He forgave His crucifiers. Almost everyone has heard the famous utterance, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
So what does our Savior ask of us in exchange for this beautiful gift of forgiveness for all our sins? Here's where my story comes in. I was married before and it was not a good marriage. I went through a miserable divorce and my ex-husband spent a lot of time talking to my brothers up in Dallas. When I began to date my husband, Whitney, we made an effort to go up and see my family there. Every time we went, it hurt my feelings to hear that my brothers were still in contact with him. He would tell them things that weren't true, and he would insinuate things, hurtful things. He was the quintessential manipulator. Later, my husband Whitney and I were sealed in the Seattle, WA temple. Afterwards, we continued to make the trip to Dallas. I wanted to build a relationship between my brothers and my husband. I wanted our family to be strong and happy.
No matter what I did, this same issue kept coming back. I began to move from hurt and frustrated to angry. My anger built. One weekend, after a trip out there, things came to a head. I had asked my brothers to stop talking to him to no avail. They insisted he "needed friends" and they didn't feel they could, in good conscience, cut him off. I called my ex and begged him to stop talking to them. He refused. I went to sacrament meeting with my older brother that Sunday morning, and on the way, Whitney and I talked. We decided that it was making us too angry, it was hurting my feelings too badly. We decided to stay away. We would not come out to visit again until such time as they agreed to cut off contact with my ex.
In sacrament meeting that morning, I glanced down at my scriptures and began to read. I was fuming, and I was hurt. My feelings were raw and I wasn't in a very good mood. Let me say here, that I have never been the kind of person who could have a problem, open the scriptures to a random page and find the answer. Any time I tried to do something like that, my finger would inevitably land on the verse, "and they dwelt in a tent" or something equally unhelpful. So imagine my surprise when the very verses I read that morning were from Matthew 6:14-15. "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."
This was exactly what I needed to hear. I am a sinner. I need my Savior's atonement every single day and twice most days. (Okay, more.) All He required of me was this small payment, this small thing in return for His vast bequest. I had to forgive my brothers (and everyone else in my life) and for that small thing, I would be forgiven. I wrote the word, "quid pro quo" next to the verse to remind me that if I wanted to be forgiven, I had to forgive in turn. I let go of my anger that morning, and I let it go again and again and again over the time that followed and I never let that issue turn into a stumbling block thereafter. I won't say it was easy, but I am glad I did it.
I didn't realize until this week that while I understood a small part of that verse so many years ago, I missed the most important part of it. I just didn't comprehend the point of it completely. I thought that to receive the Savior's gift, He required something of me, a payment of sorts.
That was so, so, so wrong.
Our Heavenly Father, our loving Savior, they don't require that we forgive because we must pay for the gift Christ freely gave. Not at all. In fact, it's not for them that they require us to forgive. My forgiveness only benefits one person.
Me.
When we let go of our anger, our resentment, our sense of mistreatment, entitlement, and frustration, when we forgive, we open our hearts and allow Christ's atonement to free us of our sin. We allow our hearts to become purified. In John 14:27, Jesus says, "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you."
It was for ME all along, and not for my Savior, that I was required to forgive. This is not quid pro quo, but just another in a string that goes on throughout eternity, of gifts from my God.
I conclude my blog today with a promise for all of you. If you will forgive, if you will open your heart, I promise you that Christ's atonement will work a miracle for you. Don't wait. Do it today. All of this took place in my life in the Fall of 2006. I let it go that day and over and over afterward.
My little brother Jesse passed away suddenly in March of 2007.
If I hadn't forgiven and moved on, I would have been deprived of the time we spent those last few months. I would have denied my husband of the relationship he developed with my beloved brother. Our Heavenly Father and our older brother Jesus Christ know us and love us. They want us to have the most joy, the most peace and the most love that we can find in this life. Don't wait. Forgive today, and be forgiven in return.
What a wonderful talk - thank you for sharing it again in print form.
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