The following is a talk I gave at my Stake's Young Women's camp the week of July 4th. A few important points of context: First, the location of the talk was the amphitheater which they refer to as the Sacred Grove. Second, each day's lessons share a theme, and that day's theme was love. Third, some parts may seem disjointed because the questions were not rhetorical; each question involved receiving answers and comments from the audience. So, without further ado:
Good afternoon. Today is July 4th, our nation’s Independence Day. It also happens to be the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, which occurred from July 3rd through July 5th 1863. Who can say a bit about the Battle of Gettysburg and why it was fought? So in honor of our nation’s Independence Day and the Battle of Gettysburg I would like to share a speech made by Abraham Lincoln when he visited the Gettysburg battlefield to dedicate the cemetery for the soldiers who had died there. You have probably heard the first words of it before,“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Now, before I continue I would like to talk a little bit
about this introduction. First off, does
anyone know what the words “four score and seven” mean? What was President
Lincoln referring to? Why did the Founding Fathers want to separate themselves
from Britain? What were some of the reasons they gave in the Declaration of
Independence?
So in 1776 the Founding Fathers dedicated themselves and
their country to the precepts of liberty.
They didn’t just say that liberty was a nice thing. They put everything on the line to make this
country free. In the last sentence of
the Declaration of Independence they wrote, “And for the support of
this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,
we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” And then they signed it, and stood by it, and
some of them lost the things they promised to give in order to make their free
country a reality.
Why would they do that? I understand that your theme today is
love. Well, these men had a special kind
of love. They had it for their country,
for their principles, and for their God.
We call that love devotion. Devotion makes us dedicated. It makes us willing to sacrifice anything we
must to see the object of our devotion survive.
By no coincidence do we find these men in this
place at that time. They were led there
by God. In the Book of Ether we read, “And
now, we can behold the decrees of God concerning this land, that it is a land
of promise; and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall serve God, or they
shall be swept off.” So because the
Founding Fathers devoted themselves to God and His principles by guaranteeing
all citizens the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as a
direct result of their devotion God helped them in the insurmountable task of
defeating the world’s strongest military force, and those who refused to obey
God were swept off.
We
can learn a valuable lesson here. When
we make devoted sacrifices, when we give our all to a righteous cause, God will
reward us by applying His Son’s atoning sacrifice which, in turn, purifies our
own sacrifice, giving our devotion real power.
Such were the men and women who, against staggering odds, made this
country free. They did it with God’s
help, and He helped them because they gave everything.
Coming back to President Lincoln’s
speech, he said, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Make no mistake; we can lose the blessings we
receive for our devotion far more easily than we gain them. Think on the Great Apostasy. Jesus Christ himself established his church
on the Earth. He gave his perfect life
for the cause as did most of his apostles, and yet despite the best efforts of
so many good people, the church fell, and the time would not come to restore it
for many hundred years.
So it was with the church, so it is
with everything. You must maintain your
testimony if you wish to keep it. When you have a temple recommend, you do not
get it for life, nor can you pass it on to anyone else. It is the same with our God-given
freedoms. President Ronald Reagan once
said,
Freedom is never more than one
generation away from extinction.
We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for,
protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our
sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once
like in the United States where men were free.
Elder
Jeffrey R. Holland said almost the exact same thing at a BYU devotional, “We
are always just one generation away from extinction. All we would have to do, I
assume, to destroy this work is stop teaching our children for one generation.” So I hope you see just how much you matter in
the Lord’s eyes. You cannot afford to
believe that what you do will not affect the lives of others. It already has. The moment you were born your parents started
concerning themselves with the work of making sure that you carried on the
flames of gospel knowledge, which includes the values on which this nation was
founded, and you must engage yourself in this same work if we have any hope
that the beliefs we love will survive.
Let me tell you my own story. I was fifteen years old. I was on my way from Geometry class to a
study hall in the cafeteria when I saw my friend Dan Devin in the hallway. Our schedules caused us to cross paths more
or less in the same location every day, and we always exchanged a few words of
friendship during the few minutes between bells. He knew I was headed to the study hall where
a TV often showed the news; in fact, he was leaving the study hall where I was
heading. He stopped me and said,
“Logan, you’ve got to go watch the
TV in the study hall. Somebody flew a
plane into the World Trade Center or something.
Everyone’s going crazy.” He
sounded confused and excited, like he did not perhaps believe what he was
saying himself.
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know at the time what
the World Trade Center was. I quickly
learned. I recognized the New York
skyline on the television and I stood confused as I watched one of the two
tallest buildings in Manhattan smolder in a bent over pile of rubble. In the next half hour I watched in horror and
disbelief as I watched live as the second tower fell. In the course of a view hours a handful of
religious extremists took the lives of thousands of U.S. Citizens. Their lives ended, and the laws and liberties
we claimed to believe in lay in a heap with those broken buildings.
I knew enough about American History to realize that
before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington,
D.C, no foreign entity had attacked the continental United States since the War
of 1812. Nearly two hundred years had
passed since that time. I realized this
attack would be recorded as one of the most significant and tragic events in my
nation’s history, and it happened during my lifetime.
And that’s when it hit me. There was no one else. Sure, my parents had taught me the importance
of my freedoms, but they were both beyond the age when they could defend
themselves or their children. In fact, my
father had spent six years in the Navy and had arguably already made the best
contribution he could have. The question
kept coming to my mind, “Who’s going to fix this?” “Who’s going to stop these
people?” The answer “somebody else”
simply was not good enough for me.
That’s when I realized that if I expected this country to continue and
if I expected to enjoy the same rights that I did then, that I would personally
have to do something about it.
It wasn’t easy for me.
I didn’t believe I could do it at first.
I was a heavy kid, and in truth I got heavier than I was at that time
before I took my goal seriously and started losing weight. At my heaviest I weighed 330 lbs. I was a big kid. I didn’t tell anyone I wanted to join the
military because I was embarrassed about my weight and that they might make fun
of me.
But I joined the rugby team, I started running. I started
going to the gym in the evenings. I
tried to eat right by eating less, not eating out, and skipping dessert. Eventually I started to lose the weight. By the end of my senior year I had lost
enough weight that I could seriously think about joining the military.
Now, I
didn’t join right away. I served a
mission and I got a college degree. Both
of these have helped me make a more significant contribution to the Army. But over the course of those six years I
never forgot what I wanted to do. I
stayed in shape and studied and learned and prayed so that when the time came I
could do what I needed to do.
I don’t
tell you this to brag, but to tell you that my prayers have been answered. The Lord has gone with me every step of the
way. I lead soldiers now. I love what I
do and I love to wear my country’s flag on my shoulder. I feel that honor every day of my life.
If I may
return to Mr. Lincoln’s speech,
We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have
come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those
who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting
and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not
consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or
detract. The world will
little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what
they did here.
The words “consecrate” and
“hallow” mean “to make holy”. We have
spoken already about the consecrating power of sacrifice. As children of our Heavenly Father we have a
natural and righteous tendency to honor the physical locations where this
process takes place. Take the temple,
for example. Within the walls of the
temple we make promises that we will give all of ourselves to build the kingdom
of God. We commit ourselves totally to
the savior and to our families. This
makes the temple holy, above all because when God accepts our offering His
presence is felt there. Many other places also undergo this transformation from
the mundane to the sacred. Our
meetinghouses become the host to baptisms and sacrament meetings, and even our
homes, if we are doing what we should be, can transform into holy ground where
family member learn, accept, and live the gospel.
I
understand, in fact, that you have named this location the Sacred Grove. I presume you named it after the Sacred Grove
in upstate New York where one particular spiritual transformation gave birth to
the Restoration of the Gospel. So I
wonder, “Is this really a Sacred Grove?”
You see, just calling it that doesn’t make it so. That is what President Lincoln was saying. The
people who gathered at the battlefield of Gettysburg wanted to honor the men
who had given their lives for their country by making their cemetery a holy
place, but President Lincoln recognized that sacrifice, not words, hold the
consecrating power. They couldn’t honor
the cemetery by simply saying, “This is an honorable place.” Only the honorable
actions of the soldiers who fought there could do that.
Similarly,
the church teaches that the words of a baptismal or sacramental prayer to do
not wipe away a person’s sins, nor even the physical act of the ordinance. These merely serve as symbols for the real
internal sacrifice that we hope to make.
So I ask again, “Is this a Sacred Grove?” What are you devoting
yourselves to here? Are you promising to become a better disciple of Christ?
Are you dedicating yourself to the service of others? On this Fourth of July
are you willing to commit to serve this nation in whatever way that you
can? I believe that for some of you, if
not all of you, the answer to at least one of those questions is “yes”. For this reason we are not just in an open
space in the woods. We are in a Sacred
Grove.
So will
we devote ourselves to true principles?
As President Lincoln said,
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to
the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before
us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain-...
And
so I ask my question of devotion somewhat differently: Have these dead died in
vain? Many more men and women have died for the cause of freedom since
President Lincoln’s speech and as assuredly as the sun rises we will fight
another war. So, have they died in vain?
Only you and I can answer that question. We answer it by how we choose to live our
lives. Perhaps you think that the manner
in which you live your life has little effect, but as I said before, you cannot
allow yourselves to think this. Girls
younger than you crossed oceans, countries, and the Great Plains of the United
States to gather in Zion during the days of the pioneers. Young women like you survived the Exodus from
Egypt across Sinai to the Promised Land in Israel. Young women like you have made a difference. Young women like you will make the difference.
I’ve now compared in many ways our devotion to the gospel
with our devotion to our nation’s ideals.
I did not do this simply because it provides a convenient analogy, or
because they share common principles, though that is true. I compare the two because at their root they
are the same, and they rely the one on the other. We must have liberty to worship according to
the dictates of our own conscience. This
country was chosen by God to serve as the home of the Restoration and currently
houses the general headquarters of the church. As citizens of this country we
have a special responsibility to the world to ensure that our church has a home
where its leaders can freely teach the message that God has for his children.
Look at the world.
Look at the places where the church is struggling or does not exist at
all and you will find that these same nations are the most oppressive, the
least free. Can you imagine our church
accomplishing all the good work that it does if the headquarters were in China,
or North Korea, or Iran? Of course not.
So we see that our work as good citizens plays an essential role in the
survival of our church.
But this road is a two-way street. As we said before, the Lord reserved this
land, the Land of Promise, for those who obey him. We cannot hope to retain our freedom if we
willfully ignore the God who gave us that freedom, or deny Him His role. As members of God’s true church we possess
special knowledge of God’s will for his children and therefore we have a
special responsibility to represent Him in the public sphere.
Some people believe you should not do this. They say that anyone who allows religion to
influence their political views violates the First Amendment. They viciously pervert our Founding Fathers’
intent in order to advance policies and attitudes contrary to our Father’s
will. You must not believe them.
When the framers of the constitution wrote that, “Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof…” they had in their minds the memory of England’s Wars of
Religion. Their native land of Britain
once had an official religion under the Roman Catholic Church. Then the official religion became Protestantism. Then Catholicism again. Then Protestantism
again. At one point people took over the
government because they thought the protestant government wasn’t protestant
enough. Through all this the persons in
power sought to subjugate, if not outright exterminate their political enemies
using religion as a pretext.
The framers did not want this kind of violence or
intolerance in their new nation and so they established freedom of religion as
one of our country’s basic liberties. They
did not, however, envision a society that would exclude morality from the
public sphere. We should not believe
such an absurd lie for two reasons: First, because all ideas and convictions
must receive equal treatment as a basic tenet of our republic. Second, because all of the leaders who have
made this country great have all held deep religious convictions.
Concerning the first point, we have in the United States
many people of varied backgrounds and beliefs.
Some people care very deeply for the environment. Others concern themselves entirely with
improved treatment for minorities, children, prisoners, or many other people
who often have their voice ignored.
These citizens freely pursue these noble causes and their reasons for
doing so have no bearing on their ability to influence policy. To believe that we should limit or ignore
certain political efforts simply because their motivations arise from religious
convictions constitutes an unequal treatment before the law, and we as members
of the church should never accept our being unjustly silenced.
As for the second point, just think what our country
would be like if we did silence religious conviction. Our Found Fathers declared independence
because they had God-given rights that no king or democratic majority could
overrule. Without their religious
conviction they would have no reason to oppose the crown or parliament because
really, what higher power exists than the power of government, or even a
democratic majority?
Speaking of more modern times, I am sure you have all
heard of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and I am sure you
have heard of the Civil Rights movement and the struggle for racial
equality. But have you read the speech?
Have you read where Dr. King said:
I have a dream that one day ever valley shall be exalted,
ever hill and mountain shall be made low, The rough places will be made plain,
and the crooked places will be made straight, And the glory of the Lord shall
be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
You should see then, that not only must you insist that
your moral convictions have a voice in this country, but your faith, as well as
the faith of many other people or different religions must influence our nation
and its government if we have any hope of our republic’s survival.
I cannot emphasize this enough. Whether it is attacks on unborn children or
the war on the family, Satan is doing his very best to destroy this nation at its
core, and you young women have a responsibility to represent Heavenly Father’s
side of the argument.
For this reason you must get involved. Share your faith whenever you can. Do not be ashamed of it. Refuse to be
silenced. Take this time as youth to
educate yourselves in the gospel and in the history of this nation so that when
the time comes, you may defend both. We
do not need people who merely agree with a good cause, you must be devoted,
because as I said before, there is no one else.
You’re it. Only you, the youth here, the rising generation can ensure, “that
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government
of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” I leave these thoughts with you in the name
of Jesus Christ, Amen.
You're great.
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