An Ensign to the Nations

by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland

• No man or woman who speaks here is assigned a topic. Each is to fast and pray, study and seek, start and stop and start again until he or she is confident that for this conference, at this time, his or hers is the topic the Lord wishes that speaker to present regardless of personal wishes or private preferences. Each has wept, worried, and earnestly sought the Lord’s direction to guide his or her thoughts and expression.
• The audience is made up of members of the Church, those who are not members of the church, the children, the youth and young adults, the middle-aged, and the elderly. They must speak to families and parents and children at home even as they speak to those who are not married, without children, and perhaps very far from home, the poor in spirit, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the meek.
  

• President Harold B. Lee put it best years ago when he said that the gospel is “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the [comfortable].

• As the path of discipleship ascends, that trail gets ever more narrow until we come to that knee-buckling pinnacle of the sermon of which Elder Christofferson just spoke: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”

• We understand not everyone is viewing pornography or shirking marriage or having illicit sexual relationships. We know not everyone is violating the Sabbath or bearing false witness or abusing a spouse. We know that most in our audience are not guilty of such things, but we are under a solemn charge to issue warning calls to those who are—wherever they may be in the world. So if you are trying to do the best you can then give yourself high marks and, when we come to that subject, listen for another which addresses a topic where you may be lacking. If we teach by the Spirit and you listen by the Spirit, some one of us will touch on your circumstance, sending a personal prophetic epistle just to you.

• Every sermon given is always, by definition, both a testimony of love and a warning.

• You are one of those angelic messengers called from before the foundation of the world to wave the ensign of the gospel of Jesus Christ to all the world.

To read the complete talk, go here.