Good evening, Brothers and Sisters. I am grateful to be here with the administration, faculty, families, friends, and, most importantly, the members of the BYU-Idaho Class of 2016. It is an honor to participate with you in these commencement exercises.
I have great respect for President Clark Gilbert and his wife Christine, as well as Elder Kim Clark and his wife Sue. Elder Clark and I became friends many years ago when we were undergraduates together. The Gilberts and Clarks have been marvelous leaders of this university. We admire the work being done at BYU-Idaho to educate young men and women--and we are proud of each one of you. Congratulations on your noteworthy accomplishment.
As you leave the comforts of BYU-Idaho to face "the world," it is natural to wonder what lies ahead. The most certain thing we know is that we live in uncertain times--times the scriptures say when "all things shall be in commotion."[1] The recent presidential election in this country brought a record amount of commotion and is still on our minds. Who ever thought we would face such a political season?
A few weeks before the election, my wife and I were assigned to participate in the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple dedication. On Friday evening, we were having dinner with President Henry B. Eyring who was assigned to dedicate the temple. The course of our conversation turned to the upcoming election. The campaign seemed to reach a new low in its ugliness. Many people, on both sides of the political spectrum, expressed their distress at what was occurring and their fears about what would take place if the other side prevailed. We asked President Eyring what he thought about it.
He responded that he was not particularly concerned. God was still in charge, America still had a divine destiny, and the Lord would prevail over all obstacles. I don't think I talked to anyone during the election process who was calmer about the future than President Eyring. It caused me to step back and think about how caught up everyone, including me, had become in the events of the day. President Eyring knew the truth of this scripture: "My name is Jehovah, and I know the end from the beginning; therefore my hand shall be over thee."[2]
As you face your own future, you need to know how to build a life that is strong enough to withstand the uncertainties that lie ahead. Given all that we cannot foresee or control, what reliable foundation can you build your life upon?
Helaman's advice is as good today as it was long ago:
"And now, my sons [and my daughters] remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless woe, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall."[3]
Unfortunately, I can promise you that the mighty storms and the shafts in the whirlwind will come into your life and beat on you. How will you withstand them?
In the Pearl of Great Price, Jesus says, "I am Messiah, the King of Zion, the Rock of Heaven . . . whoso . . . climbeth up by me shall never fall."[4] Did you notice the similar promises? "A foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall," and "Whoso climbeth up by me shall never fall." How can you take advantage of such a promise? I would like to share some thoughts with you about ways to build a life on the rock of Jesus Christ.
The first way is make Christ your exemplar, your ideal--the standard by which you measure your own life. People look to various sources for role models today. In some cases, they choose sports figures, or celebrities, or accomplished leaders. However, they all have their flaws and drawbacks. The only one who does not is Jesus Christ. Said He to His disciples in the new world: "What manner of men ought ye to be? Verily I say unto you, even as I am."[5] He is the ultimate role model.
It would be easy to dismiss this as impractical. How can we really be like Him? After all, His world was so different than ours. And in an important way we can't be like Him since He was perfect and we are not. We are all too aware of our shortcomings when compared to His perfect life. Yet there must be a right way to live out this injunction to be like Him or Christ wouldn't have said it. In what way did He mean for us, fallen men and women, to be as He was?
Certainly the first step is to keep before us continually the virtues and qualities of character that Christ demonstrated in his life; to read and reread the stories in the gospels and 3rd Nephi until we are quite familiar with the mortal Jesus, whose name in prophetic foretelling was Immanuel, or "God with us." Though He was the mighty God Jehovah of the Old Testament, He nonetheless entered fully into an ordinary, normal human life, having human relatives, friends and neighbors, walking and talking with them, sharing meals with them, attending their weddings, and sharing the common lot of man. As such, the scriptures tell us, he was "tempted in all points like as we are" so that he could be "touched with the feeling of our infirmities."[6]
Thus, we come face to face with the amazing condescension of God, his willingness to come down and become one of us. At the time, however, people did not recognize him as the promised Messiah because He came without all the expected trappings of power. He "came unto his own," said the apostle John, "and his own received him not."[7] The question for all of us is: Will we receive Him? Our hearts are moved by His mighty sacrifice and we feel to promise Him that we won't be like His uncomprehending countrymen, but that we will come to Him and truly seek to know Him.
This process will take our conscious effort. It is the great pursuit of the Christian life, and temporary setbacks are to be expected when our goal is to emulate the Son of God. The constant refrain of repentance in the gospel message is a recognition that we will fail repeatedly and need to continue trying to do better. Each time we stumble, the Lord is calling to us to get back up and try again.
Our son, Brigham, played water polo in high school and had an outstanding coach who had been a college All-American. Often, when our son had the ball on offense, Coach Purcell could see he had a potential scoring opportunity and would yell, "Shoot it!" If Brigham missed, the coach would laugh and say "Shoot it better next time." I think the Lord has a similar approach as he watches and encourages us along life's path.
We lean on Christ's example, trying to reach for something better--striving to be better. When we seek to be the way Jesus was, it has the practical impact of both humbling us and of subtly working on us until we slowly begin to actually change and take on the qualities that were once beyond us. We need to practice being like Christ. Over and over again. The apostle Paul taught that we should use the "measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" as the yardstick to gauge our own character development.[8]
Jesus spoke often of the need for humility and said of himself, "I am meek and lowly in heart."[9] One of his most profound sermons on this subject is found in the book of Luke, the 22nd chapter. It begins when Christ notices the all too human predisposition of his disciples to jockey for position and recognition. The scripture says "there was a strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest." (Luke 22:24)
Before we are too hard on the young apostles, let us make plain the obvious. No one can begin to be humble until he recognizes just how much of common, ordinary, self-centeredness and pride he has. These men recorded their own foibles in the pages of scripture so that we might learn from them. Christ, hearing his disciples squabble, began to teach them the profound principle that greatness in the Kingdom of God derives from service and humility. Here is what he says in Luke 22, verses 25 through 27, in a modern amplified translation:
"Jesus said to them, "The Gentile kings lord it over their people, and powerful rulers love to be known as benefactors to get attention and make themselves feel good.
But it is not to be this way with you; on the contrary, the one who is the greatest among you must become like the least important and the leader must become like the servant.
For who is more important: the one sitting at the table or the one waiting on him? Isn't it the one sitting at the table? But I am among you as one who serves."[10]
In my professional life as a health care executive, I attended many impressive banquets in hotel ballrooms. If you were to look around on these occasions, it would be easy to pick out the most important people in the room. They would be seated on a dais or at a head table. One's position in the organization could be quickly ascertained by where you were assigned to sit. The most important people sit at the front of the room, the newcomers and less noteworthy people at the back. And of course, in the view of the world, the least important of all would be the waiters. Dressed in black in order to blend in and become almost invisible, they would move about the room, serving dinner, pouring water and clearing plates away. These were usually people at the lower end of the economic scale, often immigrants with limited skills.
After years of attending these banquets, I thought back on those experiences in the context of this Luke scripture. In Luke's account, Jesus, the most exalted person who ever lived on this earth, identifies himself not with the people at the head table but with the waiters, silently moving about the room, serving others. He was among us as one who served.
You will find in life that there are these two ways to live. The first is the world's way. It seeks attention, applause, recognition, glory. Its purpose is to exalt oneself. This is a natural thing to do. We like to win, to get awards, to be noticed, to be the assistant to the president. We see that even Christ's apostles began with their fair share of the natural man's native pride.
But if we would build a life on the rock of Christ, we must do as He says and try to be like Him. That means the very opposite of what the world promotes. We must die to self and let Christ live through us as we serve others. We must live to glorify Him and not ourselves. This is not easy, but it is a deeply rewarding way to live, and the only way to live if we want to hear the Savior say to us, "Well done thou good and faithful servant." What are your desires--to be at the head table receiving the recognition of others or, like the Savior, to be among your fellow men as one who serves?
I once read an account of a man who had what we call a 'near death experience' as a young 18-year-old recruit at the beginning of WWII. He had died in a flu epidemic that swept the barracks of his training camp. At one point his spirit met--one might say had an interview with--a personage of light he identified as Jesus Christ. This Being asked him, "What have you done with your life?" There ensued a review in which his whole life passed before his mind's eye. This young man searched frantically among his memories for something he could show Jesus, and finally he said, "I was an Eagle Scout." The Being of light smiled, and said gently, "This you did to glorify yourself. What have you done to glorify me?"[11]
What if you live your life assuming that someday you will hear a similar question: "What have you done to glorify Me?" If you learn to follow Christ's example of servanthood and humility, you will be building upon the Rock. Those of you who hold the Priesthood after the order of the Son of God must learn to be humble servant-leaders and never Priesthood dictators.
Another way to build your life's foundation on the rock of Christ is to come to know His redeeming power. Let me illustrate with a story. The first section of the Doctrine and Covenants says, "Knowing the calamity which should come upon the inhabitants of the earth," the Lord established his church through the prophet Joseph Smith, "that faith might increase in the earth and that his everlasting covenant might be established."[12]
Surely one of the calamities that has come upon this earth was the terrible genocide in Rwanda in 1994. That tragedy resulted in somewhere between 500,000 to 1 million people--men, women and children--being slaughtered simply for belonging to the Tutsi tribe. Those of us who were alive at that time remember the horrible pictures of thousands of bodies floating down the rivers.
Recently Elder Dale G. Renlund and his wife, Ruth, were in an airport in Africa traveling on Church business. They began speaking with a man who, it turned out, was from Rwanda. This man asked them what they were doing in Africa, and they explained they were there serving for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At this information a shadow passed across his face.
"There is no God," he said. "Why didn't God help us when the genocide took place? If there is a God, why didn't he do something?"
Sister Renlund answered him: "He did. He did do something. He sent His son Jesus Christ to earth to suffer and die for our sins, so that this atoning sacrifice would redeem us from all the terrible things like you have been through. Then He sent the prophet Joseph Smith to restore his true gospel to earth, and to restore the sealing power that allows us to bless our families." What a great answer she gave!
The Lord Jesus Christ is the answer for both the calamities of nations and the calamities of our individual lives. Because of Him, "even our deepest trials and most profound struggles have meaning and purpose."[13] Because He took upon himself all our sin, pain and suffering--He can redeem anything that comes into our lives and turn it to our eternal good.
I had occasion to learn this lesson in a deep and personal way. About 10 years ago, a serious autoimmune disease struck me out of the blue, causing intense pain in every joint of my body. I began losing weight and became so physically debilitated that I was home-bound for 18 months. My body went spiraling downward until I had to stop working and be released from my Church calling as an Area Seventy. I lost so much weight and strength that I could only walk a short distance. The doctors could not say what caused the disease nor could they tell me what the future held. As one of them said to me, "You will either die or get better. We can't know which until one or the other of those two outcomes happens."
Things looked bleak and I was discouraged. Much of my self-worth had been based on the things I was able to accomplish. I was a doer, I suppose. At the lowest point in my mental journey, my wife and I decided to start a gratitude journal, focusing on the daily things by which we could see the hand of the Lord working in our behalf. We knew that Christ's atonement was real and the Savior was the fountain of all blessings. It became our quest to look for and appreciate those blessings each day, no matter how small.
If someone was kind and came to visit, we wrote that in our gratitude journal. If we learned of someone's prayers in our behalf, we wrote that down. If we learned of a friend's successful battle against a similar health challenge, we took courage and wrote that down. Early on I wrote in my gratitude journal that I was grateful for the faith of my wife, who believed so completely and relentlessly in my ultimate recovery. If I received a priesthood blessing, I wrote that in my gratitude journal--all of these things as evidences of the Lord's love and tender care despite the facts of my illness.
Every day I weighed myself and watched my body wasting away. Then, after 18 months, my weight stopped dropping and I went for several months without it changing. I thanked the Lord for that. One day, I weighed myself and saw that I had gained a pound-- one pound-- and I wrote it in my gratitude journal. Very, very slowly the pain began to diminish and my weight and strength began to return. It took many months. I became strong enough to walk around the block. I wrote down how grateful I was to be able to walk around the block. Eventually, I was healthy enough to return to work and to service in the kingdom.
I do not know why I became sick and I do not know why I got better. But I do know, like David of old, that the Lord was my shield and my high tower, my rock and my refuge in the day of my trouble.[14] The blessings of the atonement are real. For each of us this means that any calamity, any tragedy whether personal or national, can be redeemed through the power of Christ to lift and to heal if we are built upon that rock.
Build your life, consciously and purposefully, on the foundation stone of Jesus Christ, the Rock of Heaven. Be as one who serves. If you stay rooted in Him, you be able to withstand the mighty storms and the shafts in the whirlwind that will beat upon you.
Never get discouraged because it is hard. Failure is one more avenue for growth and learning. Pick yourself up and try again tomorrow. And so, my brothers and sisters, take with you the great wisdom of Helaman on life's journey: "Remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, that ye must build your foundation...a foundation whereon if men [and women] build they cannot fall."
I bear you my witness of the Savior's ability to do that for you, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes
[1] Doctrine and Covenants 23:25; 88:91
[2] Abraham 2:8
[3] Helaman 5:12
[4] Moses 7:53
[5] 3 Nephi 27:27
[6] Hebrews 4:15
[7] John 1:11
[8] Ephesians 4:13
[9] Matthew 11:29
[10] Luke 22:25-27
[11] Return from Tomorrow, George Ritchie,
[12] D&C 1:17, 21-22
[13] Dean Gordon Smith, quoted in https://www.iclrs.org/content/blurb/files/Scharff's%20Forum%20Address%2010.22.16.pdf
[14] Psalm 59:16 and 2 Samuel 22:3