To belong with God and to walk with each other on His covenant path is to be blessed by covenant belonging.
Heavenly Father does hear every child’s prayer. With infinite love, He beckons us to come believe and belong by covenant.
This world is full of mirage, illusion, sleight of hand. So much seems transitory and superficial. When we put aside the masks, pretense, crowd-sourced likes and dislikes, we yearn for more than fleeting veneer, ephemeral connection, or the pursuit of worldly self-interest.
When we come to God’s great commandments to love Him and those around us by covenant, we do so not as stranger or guest but as His child at home.
In losing our worldly self through covenant belonging, we find and become our best eternal self—free, alive, real—and define our most important relationships.
When we covenant all we are, we can become more than we are.
Covenant belonging gives us place, narrative, capacity to become. It produces faith unto life and salvation.
Divine covenants become a source of love for and from God and thereby for and with each other
God, our Heavenly Father, loves us more and knows us better than we love or know ourselves.
Faith in Jesus Christ and personal change (repentance) bring mercy, grace, forgiveness. These comfort the hurt, loneliness, injustice we experience in mortality.
Our Heavenly Father wants us to receive God’s greatest gift—His joy, His eternal life.
We are not meant to wander in existential uncertainty and doubt but to rejoice in cherished covenant relationships “stronger than the cords of death.”
God’s ordinances and covenants are universal in their requirement and individual in their opportunity.
God’s ordinances provide guideposts on His path of covenants.
Covenant belonging centers in Jesus Christ as “mediator of the new covenant.” All things can work together for our good when we are “sanctified in Christ … in the covenant of the Father.”
Along life’s path, we may lose faith in God, but He never loses faith in us
His porch light is always on.
He invites us to come or return to the covenants that mark His path. He waits ready to embrace us, even when we are “yet a great way off.”
However often we stumble or fall, if we keep moving toward Him, He will help us, a step at a time.
The Book of Mormon is evidence we can hold in our hand of covenant belonging.
His priesthood authority. God’s priesthood and His ordinances sweeten relationships on earth and can seal covenant relationships in heaven.
Priesthood can bless literally from cradle to grave—from an infant’s name and blessing to a grave dedication. Priesthood blessings heal, comfort, counsel.
Covenant marriage becomes supernal and eternal as we daily choose the happiness of our spouse and family before our own
As “me” becomes “we,” we grow together.
As we bless each other across a lifetime of forgetting ourselves, we find our hopes and joys sanctified in time and eternity.
Everything good and eternal is centered in the living reality of God, our Eternal Father, and His Son, Jesus Christ, and His Atonement.
Here is the full talk:https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2019/10/41gong?lang=eng
-Sherri Jorgensen
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