As Bishop McNeil said, I just came back from the England Manchester Mission. I’ll just say a few fun facts from my mission..When I was there I served in 6 areas and 2 countries..The Isle of Man and England. The Isle of Man is tiny though so it doesn’t really count, but they say they’re their own country. I had about.. I’ll have to count that out later.. Companions..
Anyway, Bishop asked me to talk about our Savior and how we come to know him. In my mission, one thing we always talked about was becoming converted, which is like the same thing. I’m sure everyone knows what becoming converted means. It means to become more like our Savior. Not just to know about him, because you want to become like him, but to truly want to follow his path.
I found there are 4 steps to conversion. The first step is desire. You can’t become like the savior if you don’t want to become more like him. If we want to become converted, if we want to be like our Savior, we have to want it. There’s a difference between being curious and actually truly wanting to know the Savior. One person I taught on my mission was Josh. He’s absolutely crazy, but he’s a really good kid! He loved the church. He loved coming to the YSA activities, and he loved coming to church..and it’s interesting you know.. He was curious, but he didn’t really have the true desire to really learn until me and my companion at the time, Sister Gilland, taught a lesson with him and two of the YSA in that ward. It was supposed to be a lesson about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but it turned into a lesson on desires and on joy. The difference between finding pleasure in the world, and finding joy in Jesus Christ. That’s when we saw the wheels in his head were turning. That's when he started thinking about if he truly wanted to learn. Once Josh changed his desires from curiosity to seeing if this was truly something he wanted in his life, that’s when all the miracles started happening. That’s when he really started gaining a testimony. It’s the same for us.. Do we actually want to really learn, or do we want to really become like Jesus Christ. Do we want to make this a life commitment? In Alma 32: 27 “But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words. “ We don’t have to want it all at once, but if we let that work within us, if we let that desire truly grow, and we prioritize that over maybe other little things, then we can have that desire to gain a true conversion.
Step two was research. So the next thing you have to do is you have to learn about Jesus Christ. You can’t say you know someone if you don’t know anything about them. There’s a quote by J Richard Clark quoting President Romney “I don’t know much about the gospel, other than what I have learned from the standard works. When I drink from a spring, I like to get the water from where it comes out of the ground. Not down the stream after the cattle have waded through it. I appreciate other people's interpretations, but when it comes to the Gospel, we ought to be acquainted with what the Lord says. We ought to read the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants and all the scriptures with the idea of finding out what's in them, and what the meaning is, not to prove some idea of your own. Just read them and plead to the lord to let you understand what he had in mind for you when he wrote them. “ So, in our mission, the most important thing we had to do every day before studying anything else was to read our scriptures. Actually in my fourth month I think, we were at a zone conference which is where all the missionaries from the area get together and President grills you on what you’re doing wrong and then he gives us ways to improve on that..but when we had a zone conference, the President banned everything except the scriptures, Preach my gospel, General Conference talks, and Jesus the Christ. Not because we were being bad missionaries or anything, but because he knew what we needed to be focused on. He knew what we needed to study in order to really have a testimony and the tools to help our friends. Even like the Prophet, or even like the great missionary Ammon, he had to do this too. In Alma 37: 9, Ammon speaks about his experience with him and his brothers teaching the lamanites. “Yea, I say unto you, were it not for these things that these records do contain, which are on these plates, Ammon and his brethren could not have convinced so many thousands of the Lamanites of the incorrect tradition of their fathers; yea, these records and their words brought them unto repentance; that is, they brought them to the knowledge of the Lord their God, and to rejoice in Jesus Christ their Redeemer.” So, the scriptures are really important. You read the scriptures and you learn more about Jesus Christ.
The third step is the Holy Ghost. This step is kind of funny, because this step is in all the other steps at the same time, but I’ll just call it step three. The Holy Ghost is the whole reason why we feel this way. If we didn’t feel the Holy Ghost, all we would be doing is reading words on paper...and because of those feelings we get, that’s when we really know if this is the true church. There’s a promise in Moroni 10:4-5.. I’m sure almost everyone has read this one before. It’s like one of the biggest scriptures we use. It says “And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.” The Holy Ghost is very very important. God, he uses the Holy Ghost to teach us that these things are true, and he uses it to let us know when we need to improve on things. A lot of times while on the mission, I was a wishy washy person, and I would doubt my decisions, or doubt what I was doing. I noticed a pattern.. When I had the Holy Ghost with me I was more confident in myself, I was able to do things better. In the times when I didn’t have the Holy Ghost with me is when I started slacking off or started doubting. The Spirit lets us know how to improve. He lets us become strong enough so that we don’t have to be weighed down by our own doubts. If we try to do it all on our own, that’s when our doubts come in. The Holy Ghost also encourages us to change. Another scripture in D&C 11:12 says “And now, verily, verily, I say unto thee, put your trust in that Spirit which leadeth to do good—yea, to do justly, to walk humbly, to judge righteously; and this is my Spirit.” That’s basically God telling us to follow the Holy Ghost. He’s not going to lead us wrong. The only thing he asks us to do are things that are, good, just, humble, and righteous. That sounds pretty good.
The last step to becoming converted is repentance. In the mission, we didn’t call repentance repentance that much..because that sounds like you’re going to go in and get slapped on the wrist and be told, “ alright, you’re punished, go on”. What repentance is, is change. It’s becoming more like Christ. When someone repents, it’s like walking on the path. There’s only one path that leads to heaven. There are a bunch of side paths that go all around it. Every time you go out on a side path, you can repent and get back on the right path. That’s what repentance is. It’s not something to bring us down and make us feel super guilty. It’s something that changes us. When we truly repent, we don’t want to sin anymore. When we repent, it’s because we want to do better, not because we want to avoid consequences. There’s a scripture for that one. In Mosiah 3:19 “For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the fHoly Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.” That’s what repentance is.. Repentance is replacing the natural man with something more Christlike. With something that will bring us closer to Jesus Christ. To repent, we just need to sacrifice that, we need to sacrifice the natural man. Another story in the Book of Mormon is when Aaron is teaching King Lamoni’s father.. I don’t have the exact scripture, so I’ll just paraphrase it. So, King Lamoni’s father is really interested.. He wants to know what Aaron is talking about. After Aaron teaches him about the scriptures, and the plan of salvation, King Lamoni’s father gets down and he prays to God and he says that he’ll sacrifice all his sins to know him. That’s what God asks of us. He asks us to sacrifice our sins. Sacrifice the things holding us back so that we can get to know him.
When we do all these steps, that’s when we become converted. Becoming converted it to become like Jesus Christ. To feel as he feels, to do as he does, and to love as he loves. I just want to bear my testimony that I know this Gospel is true. I know that this Gospel does change people. That when we decide to let our desires change us, and let Jesus Christ come in and help change us, That’s when we can feel that true happiness that he talks about. We just have to be willing to give up the bad parts. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
