Take it one day at a time. … Don’t look ahead to the pain. Just get through the day.” To worry about what is or may be coming can be debilitating. It can paralyze us and make us quit.

Read, watch or listen to the complete talk

Being 100 percent responsible is accepting yourself as the person in control of your life. If others are at fault and need to change before further progress is made, then you are at their mercy and they are in control over the positive outcomes or desired results in your life. Agency and responsibility are inseparably connected. You cannot avoid responsibility without also diminishing agency. Mercy and justice are also inseparable. You cannot deny the Lord’s justice without also impeding His mercy. Oh, how Satan loves to divide complementary principles and laugh at the resulting devastation!

I invite each one of you to eliminate the anti-responsibility or anti-faith list from your life, even when you are right! It is an anti-happy and an anti-success list even when you are right. It is not a list for the valiant sons and daughters of God who are seeking to become more like Him. It is one of Satan’s foremost tools in controlling and destroying lives. The day a person eliminates the list from their life is the day they regain control over positive outcomes from that point on, and they begin moving forward in the light at an accelerated pace (see D&C 50:24).

Read, watch or listen to the complete talk

None of us are entitled to revelation without effort on our part. Answers from God don't just magically appear. If we want to grow spiritually, the Lord expects us to ask questions and seek answers. "If thou shalt ask," He promised, "thou shalt receive revelation upon revelation, knowledge upon knowledge...."[x] How much clearer can it be? The Lord loves inspired questions asked in faith because they lead to knowledge, to revelation, and to greater faith.

Are you willing to engage in the wrestle? In an ongoing spiritual wrestle?

Read, view, or listen to the full talk

Winner-take-all scenarios are regularly pursued in the culture wars across the country by both sides.

That is unfortunate. Some state legislatures seem intent on making religious freedom so broad that it simply sounds like a license to discriminate on any grounds. Some LGBT advocates take an equally uncompromising position on the other side. We believe there is a better way. I have described what the Church has been advocating for years—urging mutual respect, balancing the competing rights of people within a pluralistic society.

I have spent a lot of time on this last subject because of its topicality and because it provides one of the best examples of the challenges in navigating boundaries while the public and our members are caught in a tsunami of changing social values. This is made more complex when those values are not shared in every country across the world, and so the Church looks for principles anchored to scripture and doctrine.

Video

Audio

Download audio

Text

Complete text transcript

This life is a test of faith. Keep your faith strong. Don't give in to doubt.

Read, watch, or listen to this devotional address at speeches.byu.edu

You young adults are now living in “the decade of decision.” Many of the most important choices of your life will be made in your late teens and twenties, such as “going to the temple, serving a mission, getting an education, selecting an occupation, and choosing a companion and being sealed for time and for all eternity in the holy temple.”

Today I speak particularly to those persons who are struggling with one of these important decisions—some perhaps almost paralyzed from fear of making the wrong decision and some maybe needing only a little reinforcement to remain confident in a decision made previously.

Four lessons of inspired decision making by Nephi in the well-known opening chapters of the Book of Mormon, if applied, can reduce your fears and increase your confidence to go forward.

Read, watch, or listen to this devotional address at speeches.byu.edu

My hope today is to encourage you that healing is possible if you apply the principles that lead to healing. I will try to explain clearly three principles that can lead to healing and to knowing that all healing is a gift from Jesus Christ, for, as Isaiah said, “with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).

Healing is much more than “getting better” or “having our problems go away.” Healing is growth, development, and maturation. In a word, healing is change. It takes time and energy and struggle, but healing teaches us. 

Read, listen or watch this devotional address at speeches.byu.edu

Face the future with optimism. I believe we are standing on the threshold of a new era of growth, prosperity, and abundance. Barring a calamity or unexpected international crisis, I think the next few years will bring a resurgence in the world economy as new discoveries are made in communication, medicine, energy, transportation, physics, computer technology, and other fields of endeavor.

I believe many of today’s young adults will be active participants in temporal blessings if they keep the commandments of the Lord. With prosperity will come a unique challenge—a test that will try many to their spiritual core. As you step into this new world of prosperity and engage in converting your education and skills into financial success, you will always have to distinguish between wants and needs.

From a commencement address given at BYU-Idaho on April 6, 2012.

Read, listen, or watch at byui.edu.

The pavilion that seems to intercept divine aid does not cover God but occasionally covers us. God is never hidden, yet sometimes we are.

From a conference talk given in October, 2012.

Read, watch, or listen at lds.org

If life hasn’t yet taught you the wisdom of the proverb I am about to share, it would be my prayer that by the end of my remarks it will have enlightened your understanding and touched your hearts sufficiently to motivate you to make some helpful and wise changes in your life. Here is the proverb: “Enter not into the path of the wicked. . . . Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away.” 2The wisdom of Solomon in this passage is to be discovered in the word avoid. Solomon had discovered, as all wise people do, one of life’s most helpful guiding principles: It is easier to avoid temptation than it is to resist temptation.

From a devotional address given at BYU on September 13, 2013.

Read, watch, or listen at speeches.byu.edu