Line upon Line

Introduction

As I look at you young single adult Elders, Priesthood holders, I am reminded of when I was a new missionary in the early 1960s in Berlin when the Berlin Wall was being erected. A difficult and terrible time in that city. The mission held a conference, and a new Apostle was presiding. We didn’t know anything about him, and we were anxious to listen to his counsel. His name was Gordon B. Hinckley. When it came his turn to speak, he stood up, took a minute to look us all over, and said, “well brethren, you aren’t much to look at, but you’re all the Lord’s got!”

Well, brethren. You aren’t much better looking than we were, but you sure aren’t any worse either. And, you, too, are all the Lord’s got.

Today I want to share with you some thoughts about your becoming who you are here to become. In all of your effort and education and stress and long hours of work to become what you want to become, I would challenge you to focus more on who you are becoming. It is in this “Gospel of Daily Living” now, as single adults, where you are forming the habits and lifestyle that you will be taking into the larger family for which you are preparing.

There seems to be a feeling that when you get married, that you will immediately become someone else.

• Where today—if you spend your evenings playing video games—when you get married you will somehow immediately be more interested in reading scriptures and saying prayers together in the evening.
• Where today—if you are too busy to start your day with prayer and Gospel study—you will be miraculously transformed into a Gospel scholar.
• Where today—if you are “too busy” to attend Family Home Evening on Monday nights or to attend the temple regularly—you will suddenly become a convert to your covenants.

Unfortunately, I’m going to have to burst your bubble. You are today who you are becoming. When you get married you will take you with you. You won’t leave “you” behind and become someone else.

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.^[1]

If your heart today is on games and entertainment, on hanging out and just living and spending what you have — paycheck to paycheck — then that’s the person you will take into your marriage and family.

The Apostle Paul understood this when he wrote to the Corinthians:

 11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.^[2]

Please understand: I enjoy entertainment and leisure just like you do. So, I am not condemning anyone for wanting “time off.” In fact, I love to play golf, although if you ask the guys I play golf with they will tell you that what I do has no relationship to the game of golf. But, there are two reasons why I am really lousy at golf.

1.First. I’m just lousy at golf.

2.And, second. During the years when our children were in our home, it took away from “family time.” So, I accepted to be a poorer golfer, take my children with me, and make the game more a family outing than serious golf. My golf score suffered, but my family was enriched by it. I put away childish things.^[3]                                                                                       

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with someone who related a very sad story about one of the couples who met and were married in this ward. It is a story of a heartbroken newly wed wife who thought she was getting a husband who had developed the same daily Gospel living habits as she had.

• Both good people; faithful members.
• But, the sister had determined who she was supposed to become and was actively working to be that person and the brother was still:

 11 . . . a child [who continued to speak] as a child . . . [understand] as a child . . . [and think] as a child . . . [who had not yet become] a man . . . [who had] put away childish things.^[4]

You Are Determining Who You Will Become

I want you to clearly understand that it is you who are determining today who you will become tomorrow. As William Ernest Henley wrote in his stirring poem titled “Invictus” in the latter part of the 19^th Century . . . even having lived through the amputation of one leg and severe surgery on the other:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.^[5]

We all understand our reliance on our Savior and His atonement. But, let us not forget that we, too, are children of our Father in Heaven. And, ultimately, it is we ourselves who determine who we will be. The self-help founder James Allen observed that:

Of all the beautiful truth pertaining to the soul, none is more gladdening or fruitful of divine promise and confidence than this – that you and I are the master of thought, the molder of character, and the maker and shaper of condition, environment and destiny. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of our own thought, we hold the key to every situation, and have within ourselves the means of transforming ourselves into what we will.^[6]

So, if you need to:

1.Change your daily Gospel habits, do so.

2.Restructure your living environment so that you live in a “Gospel living” home, do so.

3.Meet with the Bishop and clear up issues in your life, do so.

And, I would ask you in all of your effort to be interesting and to be accepted to still be modest.

Be Modest

1.Be modest in your dress: both on Sunday here at church, and every day as you go to work.

2.Be modest in your grooming. You represent the Savior.

3.Be modest in what you watch on TV, read in books and magazines, see in the movies, and in what you look at on your computers and on the Internet.

4.Be modest in your language.

Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.^[7]

Great Decisions

I believe that in life we make at most ten great decisions decisions from which flow all the others: decisions about education, mission, profession, military service, worthiness and Gospel living. Every important decision you will make in your entire life, you will probably make during this decade. If you let the Spirit of the Holy Comforter guide you in making the right decisions, you will spend your life in joy and love and service. If not, you will find yourself spending your life struggling in the tragedy and unhappiness of the consequences of wrong decisions. Or, as Henry David Thoreau penned, living “lives of quiet desperation.”^[8]

You are now in the midst of making great decisions such as:

• What your profession will be. (By that I mean first profession. You’ll probably have eight different ones in your lifetime.)
• Who you will marry. No decision will affect you more than this one.
• And, how committed you are going to be to the Savior, His Church, and your callings during your lifetime.

I challenge you to remember that as you make these “big” decisions, along the way you will be making other important decisions as well.

Be Morally Clean

You will decide whether you are going to be morally clean. From the 10 Commandments we read: 18 Neither shalt thou commit adultery.^[9]

But, as you know, it is more complex than this. The Savior made this clear in His Sermon on the Mount when He broadened this to include not just actions, but also thoughts and desires:

 27 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

 28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.^[10]

Exercising Agency

There are what is called “instruments of agency” over which we are expected to exercise “agency” or control. Eyes and ears are two of these. As Job teaches us:

I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid?^[11]

We are not responsible generally for what passes by our eyes unless we’re in a place where we shouldn’t be. But, we are responsible for what we linger on, lust upon, and then act upon. Of all the sins committed by David and Bathsheba, it was David who broke “the covenant” made with his eyes. And, David who lusted; and David who acted upon his lusts. Bathsheba had every right to bathe. David had no right to let his eyes linger upon her. (I might add that David also exercised “unrighteous dominion” as King toward both Uriah and Bathsheba. He had all the power.)

To use another example from the Savior. Let’s look at the story of the woman taken in adultery in John Chapter 8. There are several points regarding this story, but I want to focus on two of them.

• If she were taken in the very act of adultery, then there must have been a man there in the very same act. She certainly wasn’t alone! Why did they not drag him through the streets, too? The hypocrisy of it was and is evident.
• We also can find special meaning in one phrase the Savior used:

7 . . . he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.^[12]

Now, I know that I may be putting too much emphasis on the use of the masculine in this sentence since it was common usage then. But, I can’t help but point out that Jesus said “let HE who is without sin . . .” I’d like to think He was addressing this hypocrisy, too, along with His other points.

Brethren: you cannot get away with saying “how she was dressed was a come-on.” Whether that is true or not, you are responsible for your own covenants. Your eyes. Your hands. Your hearts.

Pornography

And, you will decide when you are alone in your room whether you will become involved with pornography. But then, you know this. Here is a pattern with which we are all too familiar.

• The boy sitting alone in his room at the age of 9, 10 or 11 becomes curious. Porn is easy to find.
• By 15 he’s hooked.
• Then, by 17 he knows he needs to get it cleared up if he is going to go on a mission. He does.
• He has a good mission pornography clean.
• He returns. Six months later he’s back at it again.

Pornography is now one of the leading causes of divorce in America. And, I can tell you that if you start looking at pornography now (or looking at it again) it is extremely likely that you will still have this addiction– and make no mistake it is an addiction–when you are married with a family.

• It will destroy the trust your wife has in you, and enter guilt on both sides.And, trust, I believe, is the most important virtue in a marriage.
• It will destroy the loving relationship you should be having with one another by placing another woman a phantom woman who does not exist between you.
• It will destroy your family. You will eventually be the father whose now former wife and children do not want to have anything to do with you . . . and whose children will be raised by another dad who will love them and their mother as they deserve.

If you do not get this taken care of now, this is the life you can expect. You decide: which life do you want? One where you have a loving family and a positive, intimate relationship with your wife, or one where you are on the outside looking in at what could have been? Your choice.

Let me emphasize something here: none of what I am talking about here should in any way lead you to believe that intimacy between a husband and a wife is somehow an endured evil in order to have children. I love Orson Pratt’s explanation (even though it is a bit long.)

God created man, male and female. He is the Author of our existence . . . . In the breast of male and female He established certain qualities and attributes that never will be eradicated–namely, love towards each other. Love comes from God. The love which man possesses for the opposite sex came from God. The same God who created the two sexes implanted in the hearts of each love towards the other. What was the object of placing this passion or affection within the hearts of male and female? It was in order to carry out, so far as this world was concerned, His great and eternal purposes pertaining to the future. But He not only did establish this principle in the heart of man and woman, but gave divine laws to regulate them in relation to this passion or affection, that they might be limited and prescribed in the exercise of it towards each other. He therefore ordained the Marriage Institution. The marriage that was instituted in the first place was between two immortal beings, hence it was marriage for eternity in the very first case which we have recorded for an example. Marriage for eternity was the order God instituted on our globe; as early as the Garden of Eden; as early as the day when our first parents were placed in the garden to keep it and till it, they, as two immortal beings, were united in the bonds of the new and everlasting covenant.^[13]

I once heard someone say that “sex is so intimate, so personal, that it is easier to do it than to talk about it.” When you first get married, my counsel to you is to communicate openly and honestly with each other about this new experience of your lives (in which you fully express your trust and love together), so that you can have an intimate lifetime of loving one another in every special sense that God had in mind when He commanded Adam:

24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.^[14]

If that is not a clear statement by God Himself regarding the beauty and love of intimacy in a marriage, then I can find no substitute. And, by the way, I would remind you: it’s how we all got here!

Live Morally Clean

In the meantime, while you are in the process of searching for your eternal companion, the rules are in place to protect you both from the heartache of the consequences of engaging in inappropriate intimate behavior that will probably cause you to break up by bringing guilt and stress into your relationship. I have seen this time and time again. What should have been a positive experience where the couple could have grown closer, it blew them apart through guilt, recrimination, and failed attempts to stop. By allowing the physical to overpower all other aspects of the relationship, you blind each other to the depth and breadth of the character and personality of the person you are dating.

God is counting on you to marry well, and raise up righteous children in holiness to the Lord. In order to marry well you must date well. Here are some rules that I think are essential to doing this. When on a date:

• Date out not in. Go out and do interesting things; don’t stay in an apartment particularly if there is no one there to temper your actions.
• Nothing good happens after midnight. Go home.
• When affection becomes arousal, you’ve gone too far.
• There is never any reason to be in each other’s bedroom.
• Both of you should keep your clothes on and your hands out of private places both above and below the waist.
• When all else fails, follow the Joseph principle. Just leave. If you’re embarrassed to leave tell her “I’m leaving not because I don’t like you . . . but because I do.” Then leave. As with Joseph before Potiphar’s wife:

 And she caught him by his garment, saying, Lie with me: and he left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out.^[15]

Marriage

And, once you complete that covenant of marriage, you will decide whether you are going to make your family the center of your life, and Church the center of your family life.

I understand that not all marriages work. But, in most cases . . . not all . . . but in most cases, there are two great sins that defeat a marriage. They are pride and selfishness. You will decide when things are going wrong in your life — and you and your wife are not getting along whether you will quit and turn to divorce — or whether instead you are determined to work out your problems together with God’s help and the counsel of your Bishop — and create a happier, lasting marriage and family.

And, let me add: no real man physically abuses, harms or emotionally hurts his wife or children. God meant you to be their protector, their refuge, and their defender.You are to be a partner in your home in love and righteousness and with a spirit to serve. It is never appropriate to exercise violence. As David O. McKay taught us:

No success in life can compensate for failure in the home.^[16]

Family of One

An essential understanding of the Gospel requires each of us to view ourselves not just as individuals, but as the beginning of an eternal family. This is just as true for you as young single adult Priesthood holders as it is for those of us who have already received the blessing of marriage and children.

You are now a “Family of One.” How you will act when you share responsibilities in a family of two .. . and then more . . . is largely being determined today from the habits you are now forming. When the time comes that you are no longer a Family of One, but an equal partner in your home, if you are to be successful, you will be:

1.Committed to making your family present and future — the center of your life;

2.Committed to making the Gospel and the Church the center of your family life; and,

3.Committed to making your daily Gospel habits match your stated beliefs.

You are in the midst of that great transition in life between arriving at maturity and moving into marriage. However, this does not mean that you should not begin to live a family life. In many ways, a “Family of One” is a state of mind and heart more than marital status one that requires a mighty change from the usual singles way of thinking. The prophet Alma recounted that his father, Alma the Elder, “according to his faith [underwent] a mighty change wrought in his heart.“^[17]

I ask each of you to join in undertaking a major transformation in how you view yourself and how you are living your life. That you move beyond thinking of yourself as a single adult, and begin thinking of yourself as a Family of One in preparation for becoming a family of two and more. For example:

• A single “20 something” man typically lives for today, spends for today, and puts his time and pleasures into today;
• Conversely, a gospel family looks to the future, makes personal, spiritual and professional decisions based on future family needs, and invests in their future with education and worthwhile experiences.

Successfully adjusting your mindset will require study, prayer, and fasting. It will require you to review your life and priorities. It will require, quite simply, a mighty change of your heart.

We live in an age of unbelievable wealth and material opportunity unknown in all the annals of history in any nation. What in any other generation would have been considered fabulous luxury is commonplace today. The traditional “rite of passage” from childhood to adulthood no longer exists. Never in all of history has a generation been able to “pursue their dreams” with so little personal sacrifice, or been enabled to drift in self-indulgence with so little apparent consequence. As Paul saw, it is:  5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof . . .  7 Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.^[18] The ease of our existence makes the mental transition to a responsible adulthood much more difficult because doing so is not required to survive into self-sufficiency.  

Delaying this mighty change, however, is far too dangerous because it leads to wasted years of just hanging around, casually dating without purpose, and overindulging in time consuming leisure simply because it’s fun. Grave and eternal consequences follow such conduct. We are reminded of the poem written by Robert Herrick^[19] in the 1600’s about fleeting beauty and youth.

           Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles to-day To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he’s a-getting,

The sooner will his race be run, And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time, And while ye may, go marry:

For having lost but once your prime, You may for ever tarry.

Eight Reasons Why Some YSA Men Have Difficulty Committing

I have identified eight reasons why some of you are having such a hard time making a family commitment. Think about whether any of these apply to you, and begin dealing with it now.

1.Expecting the same thrill on that first date as when you were 16 years old. Hopefully, you will be attracted to one another, and will want to be together because you enjoy each other. But, at your age, you should have grown to appreciate what Elizabeth Barrett Browning saw in her husband to be, Robert Browning, when she penned: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach. ^“[20] It is all of the person you need to see, not just the outside.

2.Not dealing with worthiness issues causes you to not want to date for fear of becoming involved and having to explain why you can’t go to the temple.

3.You came from a dysfunctional home

4.You just like being with guys

5.You’re a graduate student/intern/etc. here for a short time so it’s hard to commit to anything

6.You are struggling in a job not even earning enough to pay for yourself

7.You’ve heard so often that “marriage is hard” that it scares you. (Actually, I think being single was hard.)

8.

If any of these reasons apply to you, then search your heart, and take seriously this call to “Live a Family Life” by starting now as a Family of One.

Conclusion

Brethren. I pray that you will look to your decade of decision with hope, with anticipation, with excitement, and with a firm resolve to make the good decisions when these great decisions are upon you. Consider the message by the great American poet, Robert Frost in his poem entitled “The Road Not Taken.”^[21]

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood . . .

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

And so, even though the road that is paved with Gospel principles may be less traveled, it is the only road paved with happiness.