The Farewell

Okay so this is my farewell talk, i was asked to speak on the grace of God, and it's about 20 minutes long so...its kind of long haha. Also i realized some mistakes in my talk so it was changed a little bit when i was at the pulpit but this is the closest copy i have so ENJOY!

            Hi brothers and sisters, I’m Becca Redd. I think I know most of you, but if I don’t its probably either because I’ve been at school for the past year or because while living in this ward for 6 years I some how managed to fly under the radar enough to only have to give one talk in the whole time. I now realize that streak is over, since Ill be leaving for my mission in about a week, and I’m pretty sure ill be doing a lot of talking once out there. But I’m glad that I get to end this steak here and have the opportunity to talk to you all this afternoon.

So as I said I’m leaving for my mission in about a week. When people find out that I am leaving, there is almost always one question they’ll ask me and it is something along the lines of  “what made you want to serve a mission?” and I think almost every time someone asks me this I give a different answer, because there are so many reasons I want to serve a mission, but if I were to pick one reason. It would be so that I can share the knowledge we have of the grace of God with those who haven’t been as blessed as us to have to gospel in their lives.

Now thanks to Brother Taylor we have a great understanding of what exactly grace is how when we combine grace with faith and our own effort, God provides us with strength and knowledge to over come any struggle we are facing. But now id like to talk about how we can ensure we always have God’s grace in our every day lives. So I realize some of this will repeat what brother Taylor has talked about, but this is a really important topic and if it can be mentioned over 200 times in the standard works. I don’t think it will hurt anything if we discuss it more then once in one sacrament meeting.

             In a general conference talk Elder Cook spoke to the church on the grace of god. In this talk he gave us 5 principles to help us to better include God’s Grace in our everyday lives. They include faith, repentance, humility, keeping the commandments and doing our part. Before I elaborate on these 5 principles though, I’d like to add one more principal that we need to include in our lives before we can do any thing else. This extra principle id like to add, is a Desire to allow God’s grace to be in our lives. Before we can do anything else, we have to want for God to help us.

            We often are faced with struggles in our lives, and I know that I personally often think something along the line of this is so small and trivial, I can handle this, or I shouldn’t bother Heavenly Father with something so insignificant. But we can’t do this.

            In D&C 88:33 it says:

            “For what doth it profit a man if a gift is bestowed upon him, and he receive not the gift?”

Like it says here, God has given us this gift and we should use it every time we get the chance because if we don’t there wasn’t really a purpose for God to give it to us.

            So now back to the 5 original principles. The first one is faith.  We have to have faith in order to access grace and the support from god that it gives us. If we remember the story of peter walking across the water to Christ, we see that when peter has faith he can do anything, even walk on water. However the moment he began to have doubt, he no longer had god’s strength on his side, and this is exactly the same in our lives. We need to have faith that when we need it, god will be there for us, and provide us with what we need in some way or another. But when we doubt the power God has in our lives, it is taken away from us. So we need to find that faith and hold tight to it, because there is no way to obtain God’s grace with out it  

            The next principle Elder Cook gives us is repentance. We all know that no clean thing can be in the presence of God, and this same idea applies to the receiving the grace of God because in order to receive the enabling power of grace, we need to be worthy of it, so when we make mistakes we need to repent.

I found a quote, and forgot to write down where it was from, but I think that it sums up how important repentance is in receiving grace in our every day lives.

It reads….

            A repentant heart and good works are the very conditions required to have grace restored to us. When someone pleads fervently in prayer for an answer, the answer may be more conditioned on repentance of personal sins than on any other factor.

Repentance directly affects how involved God can be in our lives, and by repenting we become worth of the gift of grace and allow him to strengthen us and be with us all the times.

            The third principle we’re given is Humility. In James 4:6 it specifically says

“Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.”

We need to be humble enough to ask god for his help and to give us strength. General authorities time and time again have warned us of the consequences of being proud, and tell us how important living a humble life is. IN countless conference talks, they mention how the humble people in their lives seem to be the strongest, and the closest to God, and it is easy to see why when considering grace in our lives. The humble people are the people who willingly ask God for help and the ones diligently following his commandments so that they may be worthy of his help and because of this we can see exactly why Humility is so essential to gaining the divine assistance of grace.

The fourth principle that elder Cook gives us is keeping the Commandments. If we look at this it’s pretty simple why keeping the commandments is so important. When we ask for God’s grace in our lives we’re essentially asking for his help. Now God gives us commandments not because he wants to restrict us but because he knows better then any person what is best for us. So why would we ask God to help us and to strengthen us if we are going to ignore the ways he has already shown us to succeed. Relating it back to the previous analogy that brother taylor used of the mom and the piano lessons ( changed on the stand, ill read this again later), God asking us to keep his commandments is this asking the Child to practice. The mom knows that practicing will help the boy, just like God knows that the commandment will help us, but if we don’t keep the commandments, God begins to take away the power of his grace, much like the mom would stop paying for lessons if the child stopped practicing. If we look at D&C 93 verse 20 and 28 it says…

             20 For if you keep my commandments you shall receive of his fulness, and

Be glorified in me as I am in the Father; therefore, I say unto you, you shall

Receive grace for grace.

             28 He that keepeth his commandments receiveth ^btruth and ^clight, until he is glorified in

truth and ^dknoweth all things.

And we see here stated in the scriptures that it is only after we can follow God’s commandments, that we will be given his grace and his strengthening power.

            This brings us to the fifth principle in helping us obtain grace in our every day lives.

In 2 Nephi 25: 23 it says, “For we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.”

So the fifth principle is doing everything in our power to overcome our trials or problems. We cannot expect god to do all the work for us, we first need to do our part, and only after that can God assist us.

Now this is the principle I struggle the most with, and I’ve always had a hard time understanding how exactly how our work fits into Christ’s sacrifice for us, and the analogy brother Taylor used by Brad Wilcox in a BYU devotional  explains the concept really well, so ill read it again. He compares Christ’s arrangement with us as similar to a mom providing music lessons for her child.

He says that the Mom pays the piano teacher. Because Mom pays the debt in full, she can turn to her child and ask for something. What is it? Practice! Does the child’s practice pay the piano teacher? No. Does the child’s practice repay Mom for paying the piano teacher? No. Practicing is how the child shows appreciation for Mom’s incredible gift. It is how he takes advantage of the amazing opportunity Mom is giving him to live his life at a higher level. Mom’s joy is found not in getting repaid but in seeing her gift used—seeing her child improve. And so she continues to call for practice.

For me this analogy really helped me to understand how important our work really is to God and to obtaining his gift, but it can still be a really hard thing to put into practice. I know there have been many times where I find myself doing something like planning a lesson 10 minutes before relief society and ill sit down and pray that the lesson will go really well, and then after I say it I realize that its kind of a last ditch effort because I decided to watch a movie or something like that instead of plan a lesson and I realize that I the lesson isn’t going to magically go really well or really invite the spirit because it ends up that I don’t show God the appreciation and thankfulness that Brad Wilcox talked about, because while God can do anything, he needs to know that were trying and putting forth effort before he will continue to strengthen and help us.

Another thing that I find to be hard to put into practice is knowing that what I can do will be enough because I will worry that because someone else is doing more or is better at something that my best wont be enough to show god that I really want to be doing the right thing and I want to have his grace in my life, but if we read 2 Corinthians 12: 9, we see God saying “My ^agrace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in ^weakness.” And basically what he is say is that whatever we lack, God will make up the rest for us, but WE have to make that first initial effort and show that we want God’s grace in our lives.

Now I know that these principles, are easy principles to understand, and you all are probably thinking that these are things we have been learning since we started going to church, but its not as easy to actually go out and apply them in our lives, and that’s is why I wanted to talk about them today. I know that once we learn how to apply them into our lives however, we will be blessed, and that we will be provided with the divine means of strength, or the enabling power, also known as Grace.

Brad Wilcox said the grace of Christ is sufficient, sufficient to cover our debt, sufficient to transform us, and sufficient to help us as long as that transformation process takes. The Book of Mormon teaches us to rely solely on “the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah” As we do, we do not discover—as some Christians believe—that Christ requires nothing of us. Rather, we discover the reason He requires so much and the strength to do all He asks. Grace is not the absence of God’s high expectations. Grace is the presence of God’s power.

Knowing this I don’t know how we could not do everything in our power to have God’s grace with us in our everyday lives, and I know that these 6 principles can help us achieve that.

Id now like to take the opportunity to quickly bear my testimony, that I know with out a doubt that God can give us strength when we feel like we cant succeed, and I know that I wouldn’t be able to leave my family and friends for 18 months if I didn’t know with a surety   that God would be helping me. I want to say that I know Christ sacrificed his life for us, and that he and our heavenly father know and love us each individually, I know that they have a plan for each and everyone of us and that right now, my plan includes me serving the people of California I know that Joseph Smith and all the church leaders who followed him receive divine revelation and truly are prophets of God. I know that this Church is true and I am so thankful That God has given me the opportunity to share what I know with the people around me, and I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.