Oak Hills Stake—18 April 2001
(Note: This talk hearkens back to the olden days before the High Priests and Elders were united into one group.)
I rejoice at this opportunity to speak to you. In the last ten days I have had a personal conversation with every bishop, every high priest group leader, and every leader of a stake program concerned with the changes we are making in this stake. In these interviews I have been impressed with the spiritual strength which you possess as a group. That bodes well for the future of this stake and its work.
The work of this stake is the salvation of souls. The Church breaks its work into three parts: teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every soul on earth, perfecting the saints, and redeeming the dead. These three can be considered as one: our work is to prepare the world and the Church for the personal presence of Jesus Christ again on the earth. The salvation of souls is to prepare them to enjoy standing in the personal presence of our Savior when He comes.
So we call upon our high priest group leaders to be saviors on Mount Zion. It is your calling and opportunity to invite and enable every soul in your stewardship to come unto Christ and be perfected in Him. This involves missionary work to see that all really understand. There is as important a missionary field within the Church as there is outside the Church. If we could convert every member to actually put his or her faith in Jesus Christ and in nothing else, our task within the Church would be complete. The perfecting of the saints is actually missionary work; taking each soul from limited faith to full faith in Christ. And of course no one can have full faith in Christ without laboring mightily to find the records of his or her deceased relatives and doing the work for them in the temple.
So our priesthood goal is simple. It is to invite, entice, persuade and enable every soul to come unto Christ and be perfected in Him. As we do our work well, we will establish the Lord’s pavilion so that all will be in readiness for Him. He will have a dwelling place for Him to come to, Zion, and the world will have been made ready for His judgments and blessings. Our Savior will come as a thief in the night; he will not make an appointment to see us. “Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh. Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his goods. But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; And shall begin to smite his fellowservants, and to eat and drink with the drunken; The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of; And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 24:44–51) Let us then be good stewards, giving meat in due season.
The high priest group leader is the leader and advocate of all persons assigned to the high priest group. His task is to prepare each person to be worthy to receive the full blessings of Jesus Christ. As a priesthood program manager, he sees that the Gospel is taught, he makes callings and programs available to all in his stewardship, he conducts personal priesthood interviews to ascertain progress and readiness, he entices each person to serve with sacrifice, that each might become worthy of the full blessings. If he does his job well, he will be able to recommend every soul to the bishop for a temple recommend, and the bishop will question the person by the Holy Spirit and see that the high priest leader has done his work well.
There are three keys to this work: 1. Accomplishment, 2. Flexibility, and 3. Accountability.
- We are to use the programs of the Church to accomplish the task of bringing every soul to Christ. We do not just plan and talk: we get the job done.
- We are flexible as to how to delegate the work. It may be done in a hundred different ways. For instance, the high priest group leader himself may focus on missionary work, one of his assistants may have charge of family history and temple work, and the other assistant may be in charge of extraction for the ward. Or the committee chairman for missionary work might be the ward mission leader. Or all of the persons called to be family history consultants in the ward may be members of the high priest temple committee.
- But however the work is delegated, the responsibility cannot be delegated: The high priest group leader remains responsible for manning and assuring the success of each program in his stewardship. He will discharge that accountability by having personal priesthood interviews and other personal contacts with every person who reports to him, and he will in turn report that success to the bishop as he meets with the bishop.
And in all this he will work closely with the Elders Quorum President. Remember that the Elders President is also a high priest group leader in training. The work of the elders and the high priests is very similar, and must be correlated in every way.
It is possible to do all this and do it well. We remember the saying of the apostles of Christ when he explained how narrow the way, how strait the gate. They said, “Who then can be saved?” Our Savior answered, “With men [by the power of men] this is impossible. But with God [by the power of God] all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:25–26)
We are children of Jesus Christ, and all of His power is available to us to bring this great work off triumphant. I pray that we will do so with due haste, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.