To view Elder Clarke and Brother Christensen’s talks please go to http://www.mediafire.com/ysasummit
Thanks to all of you for coming to the 2011 YSA Summit. It was a remarkable event. Over 1600 participated on Friday and Saturday August 5th - 6th, and there were 2000 at the Tabernacle Fireside.
We look forward to seeing you next year. If you have comments or suggestions please follow the "contact us" link to give us your thoughts.
To view Elder Clarke and Brother Christensen's talks please go to http://www.mediafire.com/ysasummit.
Thank you !!
Fireside in the Tabernacle with Elder Don Clarke
Elder Clarke was sustained as a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on April 2, 2011. He previously served as a member of the Second Quorum of Seventy since April of 2006.
Elder Clarke’s work to improve the quality of life in the rural village of Seamay, Guatemala was featured in a front page article in the Deseret News on July 10, 2011. Elder Clarke was assigned to oversee the work of the church in seven Latin American countries as a member of the First Quorum of Seventy. In Seamay, Elder Clarke set in motion the projects that helped the members of the church there, and all of the other villagers, to bring clean drinking water to their homes and build a school for their children.
In October of 2006 Elder Clarke spoke in general conference on becoming instruments in the hands of God. He explained that a person does not need a calling or even an invitation to help to be an instrument in God’s hands to make great things happen. At the time of his calling to serve in Second Quorum of the Seventy, he was serving as a member of the high council in Buena Vista Virginia Stake at the time of his call to the Seventy. His career included senior executive positions in several retailing companies.
Keynote Speaker - Clayton Christensen
I really am grateful that I can meet with you. There is nothing I would rather do with my life than to spend my time in building the Kingdom of God. And I hope some of my thoughts will be useful to you.
I have spent a good portion of my professional life trying to understand why success is so hard to sustain. From the point of view of Kuppenheimer, almost all companies who at one point were highly regarded as unassailably successful, a decade or two later you find them in the middle of the pack, and often at the bottom of the heap. Success is just very difficult to sustain. And occasionally as I do that study on that side of my life, I turn around and put on the lenses of my research and examine the Church and see with some alarming frequency, the same thing at work in church that happens in other organizations, and that is: The very fact that we are successful sows the seeds of trouble. I’ll just give you one simple example. In fact, I want to talk to you today about building the Kingdom of God. At one point, I thought, “Why would I ever come to Salt Lake City to talk about building the Kingdom of God? Hasn’t the Kingdom already been built?” But I see some things going on that make me greatly worried, and I see the same thing in Boston in a sense.
We moved to Boston in 1977. Within about six months of our arrival, I was a graduate student, and I had been drafted into the bishopric of our ward. It was a tough ward to lead, on many different dimensions. And the reason why they called me to the bishopric was because they had nobody else available. And it was a great opportunity for me to grow as they gave me that responsibility.
Some people believe the Kingdom of God in Boston has grown dramatically. What was one ward is now a stake, comprised of 12 wards. And the strength in each of those 12 wards is strong enough that when somebody comes to be a graduate student in the same program that I was in, there is no way in the world that they would now ever give a call to a grad student to serve as a member of the bishopric because there are now older people with wisdom and spirits who would do a better job than a young graduate student. They don’t give opportunities like that as a result of the fact that the Church has grown and become strong.
Joseph Smith said that “A religion that doesn’t require the sacrifice of all things never has the power sufficient to provoke or produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.” Does the Church nowadays require of the young, single adult members the sacrifice of all things to build the kingdom of God? I asked people who I know here, “What do you do in the Church?” One of them said, “There are four of us. One of us types the program on Sunday and copies it; two of us hand it out to people as they arrive at Sacrament meeting, and the fourth one picks them up off of the pews after the meeting is over.” Another one said, “I teach Relief Society once a month.” A third said, and this is the killer, he was to knock on everyone’s door on his dorm floor on Sunday morning to get them out of bed in time for Sacrament meeting. To knock on 24 doors once a week on Sunday, that was his calling.
While it is certainly true that teachers and Relief Society presidents and some members are frightfully busy in the Kingdom, the average member of the Church in most strong wards, including their home or visiting teaching assignments, spends about three hours every week serving in the Church. An objective outsider would say that a key reason why the building of the Kingdom of God is slowing down in places around the world is that when wards are strong, our religion in these times, in fact, doesn’t require the sacrifice of all things and therefore is losing the power sufficient to produce the faith necessary for life and salvation.
The evidence? Look around you in your ward tomorrow. For every person that you see in Sacrament meeting, there are at least two people who are not in church. And look at the gender of the people in your Sacrament meeting. Where are the men who will go to the temple with the women? There is so much to be done in building the Kingdom of God in these valleys and in Boston and everywhere else.
If you think that your calling in your ward is all you are called to do—whatever your calling is—you really have mismanaged what God wants you to do. I want to call to you this morning, and invite you to step up to the plate, and call yourself as missionaries. There is so much that has to be done in helping those who are not here to come here. I want to promise you that if you do this, you will become the great men and women that the organizers of this conference wish you to be.
What I’d like to do now is describe just two things about how to do the assignment I just gave you. It’s a difficult rule. If we in the Church see someone who is not magnifying his calling, on occasion they are not magnifying their calling because they’re just not motivated, but most of the time they don’t magnify their calling because they haven’t been taught how to do it. I think that applies to why do we, as members of the Church, do on average a crummy job of sharing the Gospel with those who need it. That is, we haven’t been taught how. I want to share with you two thoughts on this. I ask you as members what the Lord meant in Isaiah:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
And if we share the gospel in a way that is consistent with God’s ways and His thoughts, we can be very successful in what God wants us to do in sacrificing to build the Kingdom of God here.
The first one relates to the story in the book of Alma in the Book of Mormon that we call the “cycle of prosperity.” And if you remember, starting in Alma, chapter 32, it points out that there were a group of people who were in poverty, and because of their poverty, they were humble and they were, therefore, open to accepting the gospel. And then, as you watched what happens as they followed God’s teachings, they become prosperous, and prosperity leads to pride, and when they are proud, they don’t need God anymore, and the church runs into trouble, missionary work doesn’t go well, and it plunges them back into poverty and they go through the cycle again. We know that. It happens in the Book of Mormon over and over again.
To some degree, we see that happening in our world today. Wherever in the world a society becomes prosperous, they become proud, and we just don’t baptize as many people there in those nations as we did when they were in poverty. So at one level, you could say: “Well, there is just nothing you can do about it. People become prosperous. This is the result.” But I don’t think that is the case. If we actually follow what God wants us to do, we can bring many people into the kingdom if we follow God’s thoughts and his ways. When people are in poverty, the pitch—and in many ways our missionaries are salespeople for the gospel, and salespeople always have a pitch—the pitch is “You know, if you’ll just take the time to learn about our church and be baptized into our church, it is going to make you a better person and a happier person.” When they are in poverty, that just connects with what they are looking for in life, and so baptism goes well. But when they become proud, the pitch we make is, “You know, if you’ll just take the time to learn about our church and be baptized into our church, it is going to make a better person and a happier person.” When they are in prosperity, it just doesn’t click. They feel like they are plenty happy and very comfortable. And so our message doesn’t connect and we see that our missionary efforts don’t go as well.
Let me just tell you four stories to illustrate a point, which is that when people in a society become prosperous, they don’t need a church that will help them be better, but they have a deep need to help other people become better people, because they have the spirit of Christ in their lives.
I was raised in the Rose Park portion of Salt Lake. When I was a little guy, my dad was assigned as the home teacher of a man in our ward named Phillip Strong. Phillip was a roofer by profession. He had been baptized as a young man but just hated the Mormon church. My faithful dad would take me or one of my brothers as his home teaching companion every month, and he’d knock on Phillip’s door. Phillip would come out with a scowl on his face and demand my dad to get off of his property, and if he ever came back, he would call the police. My wonderful dad would leave, but next month my dad would knock on the door again, only to be ordered off Phillip’s property.
One day in November, a big storm came through Salt Lake with driving rain, and it blew off a big chunk of the roof of Welfare Square. Because our ward was in the proximity, they called my dad up because he was a counselor in the bishopric and said, “Bob, we need you to get a crew down to fix the roof of Welfare Square.” So my dad left early from work and went door-to-door, asking people if they could help. He came to Phillip’s door and passed it up. Then he thought, “No, I’ve got to ask this man.” So he knocked, Phillip came out, started to order my dad off his property, and my dad said, “Phillip, I don’t want you to ever come to church, but we just need your help.” He explained what had happened, saying, “I’ve got a group of men who are willing to go and fix the problem, but you’re the only guy we know who is a roofer. Could you just come and supervise the project?” Phillip said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.”
So they went down about 5:30 after the sun had set, and it was still driving rain and very high wind. They had to go up three levels to get onto the roof and they lighted it to see what they were doing. It took until 11pm to fix the problem. My dad felt that every time he hammered a tack into the tarp paper he felt like he was putting a nail into Philip Strong’s spiritual coffin because it was so miserable.
When they were done and walking back to their cars, Phillip came up to my dad and put his arm around my dad’s shoulder and said, “Bob, I haven’t felt this good in 20 years.” Two weeks later, Phillip Strong showed up at church and became a magnificent member of the kingdom of God. He and his family influenced the path of an unnumbered group of people in Rose Park, because as long as the pitch was “You need the church,” it didn’t connect. But when the pitch was “We need you,” he had this need to help others.
Some time after we arrived in Boston, I was assigned as a home teacher to an elderly woman, Julia. And when July came, it was the kind of reason you never wanted to go to Boston. It was at least 95 degrees and 95 per cent humidity. Just miserable. I decided I’d better go check to see if Julia was doing OK. When I walked into her house, I said, “Julia, there is something dying here.” It was just awful. It turned out she had lost her ability to smell in her old age. So we followed the smell down to the basement and it turned out that her son, who lived in Florida, about a year ago had brought a case of grapefruit to her and had stuck it in a fridge in her basement, then forgot about it. Several months later, she heard an advertisement that said if you weren’t using an appliance that you should unplug it so you wouldn’t waste electricity. So she pulled it, and, oh my gosh, this grapefruit had molded and rotted and gotten into all the insulation. I said, “Julia, we’ve got to get this out of your house. It’ll kill you!”
So I wrote down a list of all the elders in our ward, and none of them was available, but then I remembered I had a friend who was not a member of the church, a guy named Don. I had tried to get this guy interested in our church ten or twenty times over the prior several years, and he had absolutely no interest in religion at all. But I explained the problem, and I said, “Don, could you help me out?” He said “Sure. I love to do stuff like this.”
So it took over two hours to get this fridge out of her basement. The home was over 100 years old, and had stairs that took two right turns. We had to take the rail off the stairs; we had to take the door off the fridge. It was built by a company named Crosby which made its fridges out of cast iron. So we had this thing on the second level where we paused to regroup, and Don said, “So tell me about the Mormon church,” and I said, “Frankly, Don, this is the Mormon church.” I described how I was her home teacher and described all the things I did for Julia over the course of a year, and explained that we have home teachers that take care of us in similar ways. Don said, “That’s amazing. I go to Mass every Sunday and I sit there. I don’t know anybody there who needs my help, and they have no idea if I need their help. I love to help people. Could you just promise me the next time you Mormons do something to help somebody, sign me up!” Which I did. A couple of months later, we were talking about it and he said, “Could you tell me a little bit more about your church?”
And the reason why Don asked is that, you know, when you and I serve in the church, we feel this spirit as we serve others, because as we serve others, we serve the Lord. And God did not say that the only people who could feel this spirit when they serve are people who are members of this church. That feeling, that spirit, is available to all of God’s children if they will serve others in the way Christ has asked us to serve. It turns out if you are a Mormon 24/7, there are opportunities to help other people. As a consequence, we take that as something that just happens. But most people don’t know how to help other people. They are not in the context in which opportunities to help are nourished. As soon as Don started to feel the spirit in his life, he realized that although he was prosperous and happy and comfortable, there was something wrong that he had been missing.
Another story. I met Paul a couple of years ago. Turned out he liked to play ball; I liked to play ball. We had a game at the church going on every Saturday at 7 am. The theory was, we could go to church, play our game, and get back before our wives woke up. We invited Paul to come play with us, and he said he’d love to do it. He loved the game; he loved the guys. About three months into it, I said to him, “Paul, we love having you come here, and at any point if you have any interest in learning about what causes the Mormon church to make us tick, we’d love to have you come to our home to explain just a little bit about who we are. Paul said, “I have a question for you. Do I have to be a Mormon in order to play ball?” I said, “No, we’d love to have you.” And Paul said, “Good. I’m not interested.”
So he played with us for another couple of months, and he just seemed to enjoy it so much that I invited him again if he would be interested to learn a little bit more about us, and he said, “Have you changed the rules?” “What rules?” I asked. He said, “You said I don’t have to be Mormon to play ball.” I said, “You don’t.” He said, “Well, then I’m just not interested in your religion.”
A few months after that, I noticed we had a couple of missionaries that served in our ward, and I realized that the younger missionary had been in Massachusetts nearly four months and had never taught anybody beyond the first discussion. There was a discussion in our ward council about whether we should have opportunities for the missionaries to teach the members so that this young missionary might learn how to be a better teacher. I said, “Don’t do that. I’ve got this buddy named Paul.”
So I called Paul up and I said, “Paul, I know you’re not interested in religion, and that’s fine, but I’ve got a problem.” I explained that I had been a missionary for our church in Korea, and whenever we met someone who was interested, we had these lessons we had to teach them to answer their questions. “We’ve got this poor guy that got sentenced to Boston. And everybody here is a hardened Catholic who just isn’t interested in our message, but someday, somebody might be. Is there any way you might just let him practice teaching these lessons to you, even though I know you are not interested. I want you to be obstreperous with his training.” And he said, “Sure, I’d love to help.”
So I told the missionaries this guy’s not into it for anything, but was just doing it as a favor. “He’s going to be hard on you, and you need to be hard and clear with him.” So I went to the first lesson to make sure everybody followed the rules, and that sweet missionary picked up a copy of the Book of Mormon and said, “Brother Paul, will you read this book?” and Paul said, “Yeah, I’ll read your d___ book.” And they were baptized, and have been a wonderful family that has just been a key part of our ward. And again, when I told him he needed the Church, it didn’t connect, but as soon as I said, “We need your help,” he was right there.
I have a friend whose name is Nancy, who teaches the nine-year-olds in Primary. She wanted to be a missionary. She saw that the lesson two weeks down the road was on the Good Samaritan. She realized she had a friend who has no religious affiliation, who—in Nancy’s judgment—was the best Good Samaritan she had ever known. So she called her friend and said, “I’ve got a problem. I teach these 9-year-old kids in our church. They’re jumping off the walls, and we’ve got the most important lesson of the year on the Good Samaritan. Turns out you are the best Samaritan I’ve ever known. Is there any way you could come on that Sunday and help me teach this great lesson to these kids?” And her friend said, “Sure. I’d be happy to help.”
So they got together and planned their lesson, and Nancy told her what it is like to teach young children in our Primary. When they had the plan laid out, Nancy said, “There is something you need to know. In our church, if you are giving a talk or a lesson, it is our practice to bear our testimony at the end about the topic we have addressed. We just tell them from our heart that we believe the things we have said are true. I just wonder, would it be all right at the end of the lesson after I give my testimony, could you give your testimony to those children about the principle of the Good Samaritan? I think it would help those kids.” And she said, “If it will help, I’ll do it.”
And so on that Sunday they gave the most magnificent lesson to those kids. The kids paid attention. And at the end, Nancy gave her testimony, and then her friend stood up and gave her testimony about the principles they had taught. As she bore her testimony, she started to cry. Then they closed with prayer and the kids walked out. Her friend said, “Nancy, that never happens to me. I never lose control of my emotions. Why did I cry?” Nancy said, “It happens, because God, through the Spirit, just told you the things you just taught are true.”
I could go on with numerous examples of the basic principle which is articulated in Mark, chapter 8, verse 35: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.”
We are surrounded in this valley with people who just have never had the opportunity to lose their lives for the sake of the Savior, and we have such great opportunity in this prosperous setting to invite people to join with us in serving the Lord. As they serve with us, many of them will realize, as they feel the spirit, that there has been something missing in their lives.
I have developed a habit that whenever I meet somebody, in the back of my mind I’m thinking: “How can I help the Church need that person?”
My first career, before I became an academic, was founding a company with several different key professors in the Boston area. We had one of our scientists, named Mark—very smart guy, Ph.D. from MIT—and for some reason I could not understand, he had to dig against the Mormon Church at least once in every conversation. He really had something against the Mormon Church. I had an idea. I was the Priests’ leader at the time. I told Mark that every third week of the month we had an event where we tried to teach these young men about different professions. “You are a world-class scientist. I wonder if I could bring the boys here to your lab and have you teach them something about advanced materials.” He said, “Sure, I’d love to help.”
So we showed up, and this man decided he was going to teach our boys how to use an electronic microscope. In order to do that, you have to coat what you are going to look at in gold. So he had killed a fly and covered it with gold, and we spent two hours examining the eye of a fly through an electronic microscope. It was the best Young Men’s activity in the history of the Restoration. This man who had a grudge against our Church was happy to help. He never joined the Church, but boy, he had a wonderful feeling about the Mormon Church.
I think to some degree here in this valley there is more resentment and antipathy towards the Mormon Church than anywhere else in the world. I think a lot of the reason is because within the Church we help each other, and people who aren’t “in” feel “out.” If every one of us, every month, tried to find some way to invite those people to come and help other people, in the context of this Church, much of that antipathy would evaporate, because they would feel what we feel when we do what God wants us to do.
Now, the second point, and that is: Who is not here that I may serve them? When we are at church, there are at least two who are not there. In the Boston area in 1990, we had a ward called the Cambridge Ward. The Cambridge Ward took in Harvard, MIT, and all of the graduate students who come from Utah to do graduate work. Most of them had gone on missions. There were other communities called Revere, Malta, and Chelsea where the education and lifestyle was very different. The people here are blue-collar workers, and because of their humility it is easy to baptize people in those communities, but it’s hard to keep them active in the Church. It’s hard to get to Harvard Square where the church was; those who came would look around and see all the people with experience who came from the west, and these people just didn’t feel they had anything to contribute, and so they would drop out of the church. There were about 500 members of the Cambridge Ward. About 200 of them were from the west, and the others were baptized locally. Most of them were inactive and lived in those blue-collar communities.
Our stake president, Mitt Romney, and our bishop, who was Kim Clark, put their heads together and decided they needed to start something in Malta. It wasn’t big enough to be called a branch so they called it a twig. There was a woman there named Lisa May, and Lisa had not been to church in twenty years. So they visited Lisa and said, “We’ve got a problem. We want to start up a church here in Malta, and you’re the only member who has a living room big enough to hold a lot of people. So, could we do it in your home?” She said, “Sure.”
The first week, twelve people came, the second week, the same twelve people came, and the next week, the same. They were very crowded in Sister May’s living room, so one of them asked President Romney, “Can’t we rent a hall to hold our meetings?” and President Romney said, “If you can get twenty people, we will rent a place.” So the next week they set up twenty chairs. Only twelve were filled, but after church everyone stuck around and scratched their heads and said, “Who else do we know who could have been here today who didn’t come?” They then took assignments to contact those people that day and tell them, “We’ve got a branch right here in Malta. Is there any way you could come? We just need you.”
Within about two months, they filled twenty chairs. And so they rented a hall for each Sunday, but it turned out that was a pain, because they had to take the hymnals, the podium, the sacrament material back and forth from their homes every week. They asked President Romney, “Couldn’t we rent the hall for an entire week?” He told them that if they got forty people to come, they could rent the hall for an entire week. So they set up forty chairs, and kept asking their question at the end of church. “Who could have been here that didn’t come?” At the end of six months, 40 people were coming, and they rented the hall for the whole week long.
Then they started to feel their oats, and the members said, “President Romney, do you think we could ever build a building in Malta?” He said, “Well, the Church won’t let us do it unless you have 80 people coming.” So the next week they set up sixty chairs and kept asking that question after their meetings. “Who could have been here that didn’t come?” The missionaries were part of these discussions, and the missionaries asked themselves what investigators could have been here that didn’t come. Members would get the assignment to go visit them. Within two more years, they filled 80 seats. President Romney asked, “Should we make an application to build a one-phase chapel?” and they asked, “How many do we need to build a two-phase chapel?” “120” was the answer, and so they kept setting up chairs like that, always asking the question, “Who could have been here today that didn’t get here?”
As I watched them do this work, I understood what they were doing: trying to build the Kingdom of God through the methods of God rather than man. Because do you notice? In our meetings, during Sacrament meeting, the clerk goes up and down and counts how many came. But the Savior said, “How think ye? If a man have a hundred sheep and one of them goeth astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine and goeth into the mountains and seek that which has gone astray?”
When the Savior started that scripture by saying “How think ye?,” I think in today’s language we would say, “What in the world are you thinking?” You count how many people came into the fold, and then you put that number in the clerk’s office for safekeeping so they can write a quarterly report accurately, and everybody goes home. The real issue in the Savior’s mind is “Who wasn’t there?”
If business or pleasure ever takes you to Boston, let me invite you to drive north out of downtown Boston on Route 1 for about seven minutes, and when you come to the Shepherd Street exit look on the left. It is the most beautiful church in all of Boston. It is the two-phase home of the Revere II Ward. If you go there on Sunday, they have about 200 people coming to church.
If you go to meetings, let me invite you to do the same thing that the Savior said good shepherds should do. Don’t just count who came, but ask the question, “Who else could have been here today that didn’t come?” Then, don’t just go tell them they need the church, but figure out what you can do with your ward so you can go with credibility and say the church is desperate for you. I promise you that if you do that, it will magnify you.
So, those are two things I hope you will remember in building the Kingdom of God, that when people are prosperous, you cannot say that they are not interested in religion. What they need is something different, and they need to know that we need them. And then, every Sunday—if we follow the principle of the Good Shepherd—we will ask who else could have been here today who didn’t come.
Every young man who fell out of the Church, sometime between when they graduated from high school and today, didn’t come to church one Sunday, and nobody noticed. We have to get them back for the strength of everyone who is here.
Now, a third point about this lesson as you try to shift gears and sacrifice everything you can to build the Kingdom of God, is to not do just the little piece or assignment that is available to you in the traditional organizational structure.
When I got the scholarship to go to Oxford University in England, the first day I was there I went to the Oxford Ward, which is a tiny little ward with about 40 active members. We met in the second level of a pub, and if Lucifer had found a place, this is the one he would pick. It was just awful! We had to get there early and clean it out, and on my first Sunday there, my bishop asked me to be the Young Men’s president. I had never met him before. Clearly, it was desperation, not inspiration. But I said I’d do it, and as I looked around in the Sacrament meeting, there were no young men. So I asked the bishop, “What do you want me to do?” He gave me a list and said, “We’ve got one boy who is occasionally active. Forty-seven are completely inactive, but you’re the president.”
I was in a very active program in my field called applied econometrics, and most people took three years to go through it. I had to finish my program in two years. Then I looked at that list of 47 people and thought how important could I be to that young branch president if I had to finish my program in two years. It was really important that I do well in that program for my subsequent plans. But I prayed about it and felt God wanted me to do good work as the Young Men’s president, so I bought a bike. I made a deal with myself and God that I was going to do applied econometrics until 6pm, then I’d come back to the university and eat, and from 7 until 9:30 I was going to be a good Young Men’s president every day.
I tracked down all 47 of these boys and tried to get to understand them and cause them to need me and to need the church. Ultimately, eight of them began to attend. For the first time, we had to have a priesthood class for young men in the Oxford Ward. The only place available was at the landing at the top of the back stairs where they kept the kegs of Guinness Ale. So we put the kegs in a circle and each of us sat on a keg while we had a lesson. Every Sunday I prayed to the Lord that we would come to that place so that the Lord’s spirit could be studied. Six of the eight young men ended up serving missions.
Now, we had wonderful group of young men, but as a consequence of taking so much time to serve in my calling, as I got into the second year of the program at the university, my tutor said—because you know, I had occasionally talked about the work I had done with these young boys—“It’s clear you’re not going to be able to finish and you won’t be able to pass your final exams here. You’ll have to stay for a third year.” I couldn’t do that, and I didn’t know what to do. That night I had a long talk with the Lord, and I explained I had done everything that I could to magnify my calling in the church, and now it looks like I didn’t do enough to succeed in my program at the university, and I needed His help.
It came to me that what I was supposed to do was go to the library the next day and try to think, “If I were the examiner, what questions would I ask of Clay Christensen to cause him to fail his final exam?” And I did that. I made a list. I fasted, I went there, stood in the professor’s shoes, and thought “What are the screwballs that could come at me?” Then I decided to prepare to answer each of those questions on my list. I wouldn’t focus on anything else, because I didn’t have the time. I only had two months before the final exam.
The time for the final exam came, and the exam there lasted for four days, eight hours on four days. I can remember the wonderful experience of going into one of the meadows and kneeling down where nobody could see. I remember saying, “I have done everything I could do to be a good Young Men’s president, and I have done everything I could do to study economics. I have my final exams tomorrow, and I need Your help so I can pass.” The next day when I went there, every one of the questions I needed to answer had been on that list I had prepared two months previously. I passed the exam.
I’ve thought a lot about that experience, and it taught me something. That is, that the Savior said in Matthew, chapter 6, verse 33, “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” For the first time in my life, I understood the ‘causal mechanism’ behind the words, “and all these things shall be added unto you.” To me—and I believe to you—it means that if I want to be successful in my career, the mechanism to do that is to put first the Kingdom of God with righteousness. If you do that, then all these things will be added unto you. In other words, I magnified my calling in the Church, and then the spirit magnified Clay Christensen. I can subsequently say, honestly, I have always put the Kingdom of God first in my life. I believe because I did that, the spirit has magnified Clay Christensen so that I can succeed in my profession in ways that I absolutely could not have hoped to do, if it was just plain old Clay Christensen knocking it out with other people with comparable ability.
I feel to offer the same to you. To the extent that you will magnify your assignment in the Church—and it’s not just the assignment the bishop asked you to do, but it’s being a missionary as well, bringing those who aren’t here now—and if you will do that, the Spirit will magnify you, and you will be able to achieve things in your career beyond anything you have ever imagined for yourself, because “magnify” works in both directions.
Let me just close with a set of promises; not promises from me, but promises from God. A friend of mine, Elder Bob Gay, a member of the Seventies, and I went through the Doctrine and Covenants one time, and we noticed that it was really a handbook for building the Kingdom of God in our day. Every time the Lord, in the Doctrine and Covenants, was speaking to someone who had been called to be a missionary, we wrote down what promises were made to these people who were being sent to be missionaries. I am going to read you these promises. These are not general promises made to anybody; they are promises that God made to people who will share the Gospel. I won’t take the time to give the section and verse, just the promise. If you are interested, I can send this to you.
These are the promises:
• There are several which tell us we will have “power and strength while we serve the Lord.”
• “You shall have the power of God unto the convincing of men.”
• “The gates of Hell shall not prevail against you.”
• “You will receive strength such as is not known among men.”
• “I, myself, will go with you to be in your midst.”
• “Nothing shall prevail against you.”
• “Your mouth shall be filled.”
• “Your arm will be God’s arm.”
• “He will be your shield and your buckler.”
• “He will gird up your loins and put His hands under your feet.”
• “Power shall rest upon you.”
• “You shall have great faith.”
• “The Lord will stand by you.”
• “I will uphold you.”
• “I will bear you up as if on eagles’ wings.”
• “You shall begat glory and honor to yourself and unto the Lord’s name.”
Other of the promises relate to purity:
• You shall stand blameless before God in the last day.
• Your sins shall be forgiven you.
• You will be able to keep God’s laws.
• The Lord will make you holy and will forgive your sins.
• Angels will rejoice over you.
• He will bring salvation to your souls.
• You will be blessed spiritually and temporally.
• You shall be blessed with eternal life.
• Your joys will be many.
• You shall have blessings greater than the treasures of the earth.
• You will be given a testimony of the words of the prophets.
• You shall have revelations.
• Your health shall be preserved.
• “Your words shall be scripture and shall be the will of the Lord, and shall be the mind of the Lord and shall be the voice of the Lord unto the power of salvation.”
• “The Holy Ghost shall shed forth and bear witness of all things that whatsoever you shall do.”
• “There I will be with you, for I will go before your face; I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you to bear you up.”
These are wonderful blessings that are in store for each of us, if we will call ourselves on a mission and try and build the Kingdom of God right here where it is so strong. I give you my testimony, brothers and sisters, that this is true. This really is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. My knowledge that this is the true Church of Jesus Christ is the most useful piece of knowledge I have ever learned, and I am so thankful to have been able to do that when I was in my youth. I promise the Lord will bless you in a similar way. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.