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Give the Lord Your Loyalty
Perfection is our goal, but we all still have a long way to go to obtain perfection. Maintain your integrity and seek to live by the Spirit. Keep all the commandments, so that you will one day stand blameless before God. Give the Lord this year and every year your faith and loyalty, that he may look with pleasure upon what you have done. Loyalty to the Lord also includes loyalty to those leaders he has chosen. I know that those whom the Lord has called to lead his children in this dispensation of time receive divine inspiration. My grandfather sat in the first Quorum of the Twelve; my father served as mission president and stake president in a much smaller church than we have today under five presidents of the Church; I have served as a stake officer and General Authority for sixty-one years. Our three lives have encompassed essentially the whole period of the restored Church; taken together, we have known with some intimacy almost all the General Authorities since the Restoration. On that basis I tell you that those Church leaders were men whose great accomplishments have gone beyond their great natural abilities, for the Lord has given them power to do his work. And what I say of the Lord’s influence on leaders I say also of countless thousands of others in whose homes I have stayed, whose testimonies I have heard, and whose good works and unselfish service I have seen. I have learned that where there is a prayerful heart, a hungering after righteousness, a forsaking of sins, and obedience to the commandments of God, the Lord pours out more and more light until there is finally power to pierce the heavenly veil and to know more than man knows. A person of such righteousness has the priceless promise that one day he shall see the Lord’s face and know that he is. Oftentimes special notice is taken of the General Authorities, and rightly so, since we all have the responsibility to pray for them, that they may be successful in their callings; but I know that the Lord is just as pleased with any soul on this earth who magnifies whatever calling the Lord gives him as he is with those whose lives and accomplishments are more visible
