Don’t Miss This Devotional
Designed for Covenant Relationships
Our covenants can bind us to Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ—and to each other.
From a devotional address given to students at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA, on November 8, 2022. For the full address, visit speeches.byu.edu.
Studying family has taken me into the deepest and most dependent, vulnerable, and profound relationships of our lives—and that has brought me to a powerful truth. Though our culture may tell us otherwise, we are not designed for self-actualized, pleasure-seeking autonomy. We are deeply relational beings, designed not for independence but for radical dependence and connection. Marriage and family life provide a powerful context for us to experience this truth. But they are not just the means to an end. Familial love and belonging are the end.
Our individual agency endows us with the responsibility and privilege of becoming beings who can experience the deepest forms of connection. In the exquisite language of the first and great commandment, we are each “a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.”1
The Plan of Salvation Is to Enable Us to Become Beings of Love
The whole work of the plan of salvation, culminating in the great atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, is to enable us to become beings of love in the deepest form of connection with others. This is what the Prophet Joseph Smith saw in the vision described in Doctrine and Covenants 76. The celestial sphere is a place of profound intimacy where we will “see as [we] are seen, and know as [we] are known, having received of his fulness and of his grace” (see Doctrine and Covenants 76:94).
This teaches us that all commandments and every truth revealed by prophets of God—including the precious truths in the proclamation on the family2—are to guide us in the ways of God that we might become beings of love.
Righteousness is never an end in itself. It is a way of being that allows me to know and see in purity and, in doing so, to love. This is no cheap form of love—warm affirmation to make myself and others feel good. This is the quality of pure love, free of any design for self-protection or self-validation, offering that which is truly needed for the right reason: to help others become good.
How Do We Become Beings of Divine Love?
But how do we become beings of such love?
Experiencing such purity in relationships means being deeply grounded in who we are, claiming the truth about our relational nature. This is the truth President Russell M. Nelson offered us when he asked, “Who are you?” and then answered: “First and foremost, you are a child of God. …You are a child of the covenant. …You are a disciple of Jesus Christ.”3
Those are not descriptions of an autonomous identity. They are relationships that define our being. Their bond of love is at the core of our beings. Eternal father and mother, sister and brother—these are not simply titles. They are a material reality.
I have learned through painful and joyful experience that when the love of God is the foundation for my identity, I no longer need to pressure, coerce, judge, or extract validation from others in order to feel sufficient myself. I no longer need to prove myself worthy of God’s love, continually judging what I or others deserve. I am free to learn how to offer goodness, how to offer what is truly needed out of love.
Covenants Create the Relationship through Which We Become At-One with Him
One of the most powerful expressions of God’s love is His offer to be in covenant relationship with us.
In His becoming at-one with us, He opens the way for us to become at-one with Him. No wonder the transcendent promise of our first covenant is that we might always have His Spirit to be with us.
If there is anything studying family has taught me, it is that development emerges from within strong relationships. That is true from the beginning of our mortal experience when, as infants, our first task is to establish a bond of deep emotional connection through which we can experience the love and responsiveness that build our right brain, regulate our emotions, and establish our sense of identity and belonging.
In a parallel yet infinitely more profound way, covenants with the Lord Jesus Christ offer us the relationship through which our souls can grow, experience Him, and become beings who can see and know and love as He does, for we have experienced it in Him.
As President Russell M. Nelson taught:
“[Through covenants], we … create a relationship with God that allows Him to bless and change us. If we let God prevail in our lives, that covenant will lead us closer and closer to Him. …
“… Covenant keepers who love God and allow Him to prevail over all other things in their lives make Him the most powerful influence in their lives.”4
Our covenant relationship with Jesus Christ is not the means to another end. It is the end. Let me share Sister Tracy Y. Browning’s powerful witness: “Friends, Jesus Christ is both the purpose of our focus and the intent of our destination. … The Savior invites us to see our lives through Him in order to see more of Him in our lives.”5
His Covenant Relationship with Us Is the Truest Intimacy
The Lord’s covenant relationship with us is the truest intimacy. It is the experience of perfect love with a Being who we know sees all that we are responsible for—in all our weakness and our sins—and reflects it back to us in the light of His purity, which expands our agency and leads us to a better way through His redeeming love. It is from the intimacy of our relationship with Him that we learn the path of intimacy, of pure love for others.
But in our pride, we want to put trust in our behaviors rather than in our relationship with Him, believing we can somehow save ourselves. We are tempted to hide from our nothingness.
We fear that our pain and loss is a mark of “accusation”—that being single, never married, divorced, or infertile; struggling in marriage; having suffered abuse; wrestling with questions of gender or sexuality; or any other seeming difference from the ideal marks us as less worthy, second tier, not belonging. Instead He says, “Come, share it all with me.” He tells us:
“For I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour. …
“… Thou wast precious in my sight …, and I have loved thee. …
“Fear not: for I am with thee (see Isaiah 43:3–5).
He answers the pain and loss that is woven into the fabric of our mortal experience with the purest form of love—covenant love—entering into it with us. In doing so, He changes its quality, carving out caverns for His healing love.
Within the intimacy of His healing, guiding, purifying, strengthening covenant relationship, we learn that in our families, in our marriages, with our children, in our ministering relationships, and in all our relationships, “Perfection isn’t possible. Intimacy is.”6 In fact, intimacy with Christ is perfection. We find that our perfectionism—our fearing and hiding from our nothingness, weaknesses, sin, and suffering—only interferes with intimacy, blocking our ability to receive His love and to see, know, and love others.
Like the apostle Peter, we might have feared allowing the Lord to see and wash our muddy feet (see John 13:4–10). But as Moroni taught, the only kind of perfection is perfection in Christ: “Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him …, and love God with all your might, mind and strength …, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ” (Moroni 10:32). And so the great apostle Peter pled, “Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head” (John 13:9).
We Are All Part of God’s Eternal Family
We are deeply relational beings, designed for love and connection with God and with one another. Though our families fill a sacred role in the development and experience of this love, this is not where such love begins and ends. I treasure the women and men in my life who have extended love and service, refusing to be constrained by a false belief that they were not part of the sacred work of family because they were single, divorced, or childless. They offered their all to bring their fellow brothers and sisters into the power of their love.
This is what we are doing when we stand in the place of eternal brothers and sisters and receive ordinances and make covenants in their behalf. This is what we are doing when we open our hearts to receive mission calls—not knowing where or how we may be called to serve, just knowing that we yearn to bless our eternal brothers and sisters with the opportunity for a covenant relationship with our Redeemer. This is why in our wards and stakes we seek to listen and to know, to love, and to strengthen one another in our covenant relationship with Christ. We are an eternal family.
Our Redeemer stands before us, offering one of the most sacred prayers ever recorded:
“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. …
“I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one” (John 17:21, 23; see also verses 22 and 24).
May we seek and experience this promise together with Him in our families and in our eternal family, eternally sealed together in relationships of divine love and belonging.