Making Covenants with God | Henry B. Eyring

God provided a Savior and a gospel that teaches us the purpose of life, and He provided covenants we could make with Him. Covenants lift us up to be our best selves and enjoy the best blessings. Ordinances signify those covenants.
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"All of us can remember times in our lives when we felt a pull to be better than we were, to rise higher. The feeling may have come at about the same time we had the thought “There must be something better in life than this.” Sadly, there are also times when we felt like giving up. And then the thought was something like “Maybe this feeling of being miserable is what life is really like. Maybe I need to learn to live with it. It looks as if that’s how everyone else feels. Those movies about feeling good and those people who look happy have bought into an illusion.” I remember there was even a T-shirt made with a slogan on the front saying, “Life is hard and then its over.” And the look on the man’s face wearing it made it seem that he was living proof.
But everyone that I have come to know well, even the most discouraged and the most miserable, will tell you that sometime in their lives, maybe just once that they can remember, they felt that upward pull, that thought that there just had to be something better and higher.
The feeling that you are meant to be better, perhaps in a way you haven’t yet discovered, comes from our Heavenly Father. The opposing thought, that the upward pull is an illusion, comes from the adversary, who wants us all to be miserable, as he is.
Heavenly Father does more than allow you to feel that upward pull. He has provided a way to rise higher, almost beyond our limits of imagination, not by our own powers alone, which would not be nearly enough, but through the power of the atonement of his Son, Jesus Christ...
Our Heavenly Father not only provided a savior and a gospel of Jesus Christ that teaches us the purpose of life and gives us commandments, but he provided covenants we could make with him. And with those covenants he provided ordinances where he could signify what he promised or covenanted to do and we could signify what we promised or covenanted to do. All of those covenants, taken together, are a “new and everlasting covenant"...
We can do the things now that will lead us to love, make, and keep covenants. And we can without invading their agency invite others by example to love and want to make and keep covenants.
Now I want to tell you what I know. I have not talked to you about theory. I have talked to you about what I know. I know that God, our Heavenly Father, lives. I have felt his patient and enduring love all my life. I know that Jesus is the Christ, that through his sacrifice and love we are cleansed and sanctified as we obey the laws of the gospel. I know that the ordinances and covenants offered through the keys of the priesthood held by President Gordon B. Hinckley are honored by God when we honor them. I promise you that the promises are true. I pray that you will accept them." - Elder Eyring
Henry B. Eyring was a member of the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when this fireside address was given at Brigham Young University on 8 September 1996.
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