Brad's Talk

so brad gave a talk today in our new ward. he'd been thinking on it for the past week, but really didn't write stuff down until this morning and put it together in about an hour. he was asked to go off of elder nelson's conference talk on eternal marriage and address how prophets help us fulfill God's plan for us, etc. here are some condensed thoughts from it:

1) family and His children are so important to God that He has asked us to address Him as Father, above all other titles. think about that. all the innumerable miracles and wonders He has performed, all the glorious titles He possesses, and the act and role He wants to be known for is that of a Father, our Father. especially in the most intimate of circumstances as our one-on-one personal prayers, it's always Father first.

2) the family is the most basic and fundamental unit of society, both here in mortality and in the eternities. societies that are not founded upon the family unit will eventually fail. here's a lesson from d&c 49 addressing the shakers. they were a religious group who arose out of the same great awakening as our church, but they believed that Christ had come again in the form of a woman named ann lee, the leader of their group. they tried to build a utopian society where they were forbidden to eat meat, baptism was unnecessary, and they were forbidden to marry or have families. section 49 is a revelation of the Lord basically calling them to repentance and was read to them, but it was rejected. the lesson, though, is that because of their disobedience to the commandment of marriage and family (the first commandment given to man) and their failure to gain new converts, their group fell apart and the shakers went extinct. hopefully our society won't come to that, but we can see, beginning in western europe, that families are dying out at a remarkable rate.

3) the sealing of families is of utmost importance to the Lord. the prophecy of the coming of elijah and the hearts of the children turning to their fathers is the only one that i know of that is quoted in each of the 4 standard works. it must be pretty important. often we only think of sealing in one dimension--that is, to our own families, our descendants and ancestors, forward and backward. but what the Lord wants is a gigantic 3-dimensional web, not just a single-link chain. we're to be sealed to our own family by blood, to other families by marriage, and to the Lord by spirit and covenant.