Each of us, at some time during our membership in the Church, will be a teacher. That is one of the beauties of this Church, isn't it? And the call to teach is an opportunity to follow Jesus Christ, the Master Teacher. Clarity and plainness in teaching have always been a hallmark of our prophets. Our beloved President Gordon B. Hinckley was masterful at teaching with understandable words and in logical lines of thought. He said, "Effective teaching is the very essence of leadership in the Church. Eternal life will come only as men and women are taught with such effectiveness that they change and discipline their lives. They cannot be coerced into righteousness or into heaven; they must be led, and that means effective teaching." End of quote. In your role as teachers in this great work you need to have the Spirit. No eternal learning can take place without that quickening of the Spirit from heaven. The greatest teachers I have known were not necessarily the most proficient in techniques of teaching. Rather they were able to speak spirit to spirit, heart to heart. Their great influence had less to do with mechanically following prescribed lesson plans or educational theories, and more to do with sincerity, passion, and conviction. Brothers and sisters, we are a testimony-bearing people, and this should be especially true for us as teachers. The teacher who bears testimony by the power of the Spirit will be able to touch the hearts and minds of the students. Brigham Young found this to be true of his own conversion to the gospel. He said, "If all the talent, tact, wisdom, and refinement of the world had been combined in one individual, and that person had been sent to me with a Book of Mormon, and had declared in the most exalted of earthly eloquence, the truth of it, undertaking to prove it by his learning and worldly wisdom, it would have been, to me, like the smoke which rises, only to vanish.

But when I saw a man without eloquence or talents for public speaking who could only just say, 'I know by the power of the Holy Ghost, that the Book of Mormon is true, that Joseph Smith is a Prophet of the Lord,' the Holy Ghost, proceeding from that individual, illuminated my understanding, and light, glory, and immortality were before me. I was encircled by it, filled with it, and I knew for myself that the testimony of the man was true."