Sacrament Meeting Program

Presiding: Bishop Todd Christensen
Conducting: Brother Chris Balmforth
Opening Hymn: #125 - How Gentle God's Commands
Invocation: By Invitation

Ward Business

Sacrament Hymn: #186 - Again We Meet Around the Board
Administration of the Sacrament

Speaker: Sister Livia Christensen
Speaker: Brother Cris Hoopes
Intermediate Hymn: #1052 - Joyfully Bound
Speaker: Alex Shipp

Closing Hymn: 303 - Keep the COmmandments
Benediction: By Invitation

Ministering—“That Ye Love One Another; as I Have Loved You”

By Sister Kristin M. Yee
Second Counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency

In my first general conference message, I briefly shared how the transformative power of the Savior’s Atonement changed my father.

Today I would like to tell you a little more about how that change began. My father hit a very low point in his life when two ministering brothers began to visit him. One of them invited my father to come with him and his wife to the temple. He accepted the invitation. Each week they picked him up and drove to the next city to worship and serve in the house of the Lord. This continued for three years. Then my dad decided to become a temple worker.

I remember seeing changes in my father during that time. He became aware and attentive to the needs of others. He took better care of his health. He began to care about His relationship with God and subsequently all the relationships in his life. The change was real. He now had the Spirit with him, and I felt it.

Bless this ministering couple for helping my dad. They didn’t judge him for where he was in his life. They walked with him and helped him to develop his relationship with God. They are still my father’s closest and dearest friends.

Because these humble and devoted disciples of the Savior quietly ministered to a seemingly lost and dejected man, my family and I have been eternally blessed.

When we choose to minister in our inspired assignments and our daily interactions, we are helping to bless someone’s father, someone’s sister, someone’s son. When we minister, we are helping to answer each other’s prayers. We are the Savior’s hands. Oh, how I am grateful for all those who have blessed families like mine by ministering with compassion.

I know the Lord is aware of you and your struggles as you strive to keep your covenants and minister to others. He has promised blessings and divine help for you and your family as you exercise your faith to serve Him.

We may not be able to fix difficult or heartbreaking circumstances as we hope; some changes are not ours to make. But we can choose to love and minister as the Savior would.

Ministering by the Spirit invites the Savior’s healing into our lives and the lives of those we minister to. I often find peace, clarity, healing, and purpose when I minister. I find the Savior when I minister. This is by divine design.

Ministering is truly loving and caring for others as the Savior would. It is a way of being; it is the way of our Savior, Jesus Christ. It is not a program or a checklist; ministering is the essence of who God is and who we can become as we follow Him.

We are not called to or released from ministering. It is part of fulfilling the covenants we made at baptism and in the temple. We covenanted to take upon us the Savior’s name—becoming as He is as we sacrifice and consecrate our lives to Him. When we minister as He would, we begin to think, feel, and love as He would.

Our Father in Heaven carries out His eternal work by ministering to the individual needs of His children one by one. The Savior showed us this pattern often during His mortal ministry as He compassionately blessed, healed, and cared for “the one.” He invites us to do likewise—to minister in individual and personal ways, ways that help us to feel the love of God. When we feel loved and seen by Him, it changes everything. And when we bless the one, we bless the whole.

The Savior shows us the ultimate individuality of God’s love through His atoning sacrifice and the divine capacity He has to heal and minister to you and me on an intimate level.

Jesus Christ chose to suffer for our sins and to atone in indescribable agony that we might be saved and receive divine succor. All this He did without the assurance that we would love Him in return. “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

This is the kind of love He has for you and me. And this is the kind of love He desires us to have for each other: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you.” We can demonstrate our love for Him by keeping His commandments and ministering to others while they and we are yet imperfect.

Ministering—“That Ye Love One Another; as I Have Loved You”

Sister Yee describes how Jesus Christ ministered and testifies of the blessings of ministering in His way.

Kristin M. Yee