Steve Clark, a professor in the Religious Education Department at BYU-Idaho, was the devotional speaker on July 31. The title of his talk was, “The Family Must Prevail: Why and How.”
Clark told BYU-Idaho Radio he decided to speak on the topic of family after seeing the struggles families are facing right now.
“Watching how difficult it is to pull off a family in this world, I thought that this is probably as important as anything I could say so if we can save the family we can save the world,” Clark said. “I think that we have been distracted by so many things, and everything else seems bigger than marriage,” Clark said.
He said this world was created for families and even with the struggles we are facing, families must prevail.
“This world was created for family and cannot continue its existence without family --upon all of whom the long night of barbarism without family will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall,” Clark said.
Prior to giving his devotional talk, Clark asked students in the discussion board which was more important, church or family.
“I wanted them to try and visualize whether the families purpose to strengthen the church, because sometimes we think that,” Clark said. “It is an amazing thing how many of the brethren have said that the thing we are exalting and making eternal are not bishops or stake presidents because those calls are temporary. When someone is sealed then that is a permanent calling if they fulfill their covenants.”
He said families are basic units of the universe and the purpose of the Church is to provide growth and the necessary ordinances that we need to be an exalted family.
“Indeed ‘The Great plan of Happiness’ is to be sealed in the temple and to then create an eternal family,” Clarke said. “God is in the business of creating and exalting families.”
He continued his talk by talking about the advice President Kim B. Clark, former BYU-Idaho president, gave about memorizing the proclamation on the family, and shared a way to be able to memorize it.
“First we take the first letter of each word in the 1st four paragraphs. We get the word wait,” Clark said. “Then we take the first two words from each of the next three paragraphs: we declare, husband and wife, the family. So together: wait! We declare husband and wife the family. That summarizes the proclamation.”
He said he hopes the main message people take away from his devotional is to have people realize the purpose of why we came to Earth.
“My biggest hope is that we realize that we came here to create an eternal family and Christ is the only way we can pull that off,” Clark said.