Finding Strength in Christ | Michael D. Barnes | July 2008

Описание: How do we overcome our weaknesses? In this devotional, Michael Barnes gives advice on how to receive help from the Lord when overcoming weaknesses.

This devotional was given on July 1, 2008.

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I am honored to address all who are listening today. My thoughts are directed primarily to you, my student colleagues, who represent the future of the Church and the hope of families in the world. Today we will consider how the Atonement of Christ can help us become strong in response to our God-given weaknesses. We will discover that our weaknesses are assets because they help us be humble. And when we humbly seek our Heavenly Father and are endowed with grace, we become strong in Christ.

As a young Primary boy, I learned that Heber J. Grant was truly a great man. He served as president of the Church from 1918 to 1945 and was ordained an apostle at age 25. In general conference in April 2000, President James E. Faust used examples from President Grant’s life in his talk “The Power of Self-Mastery”:

Part of [President Grant’s] strength was his great determination for self-mastery. His father died when he was only a year old, and his widowed mother struggled to raise him. He was conscientious in helping her and trying to take care of her.1

President Faust quoted Roderick L. Cameron’s description of Heber J. Grant’s struggle to become proficient playing baseball:

When he was older and wanted to join a baseball team, he found the other fellows laughing at him and calling him a “sissy” because he could not throw the ball between the bases. His teammates teased him so much that one night he went home and made up his mind that he was going to play with the nine who would win the championship of the Territory of Utah. He purchased a baseball and practiced hour after hour, throwing at a neighbor’s old barn. Often his arm would ache so much he could hardly go to sleep at night. He kept on practicing, and kept on improving and advancing from one team to another until he finally did succeed in playing with the [team] who won the championship!

Another instance of his self-mastery was his determination to have readable handwriting:

His penmanship was so poor that when two of his [friends] were looking at it one said to the other, “That writing looks like hen tracks.” “No,” said the other, “it looks as if lightning had struck an ink bottle.”

Heber realized at that point that he could not be much good to an employer or society if he did not improve his penmanship. He practiced and worked at it persistently. Over the next few years he was offered lucrative jobs because of his superior penmanship, won first prize in a contest against professional penmen, and taught penmanship and bookkeeping at the University of Utah.

Another challenge for President Grant was singing:

When he was a small child . . . he could not carry a tune. When he was ten, a music instructor worked and worked with him, trying to teach him the simplest song and finally gave up in despair. At the age of twenty-six, when he was an apostle, he asked a Professor Sims if he could teach him how to sing. After listening to him, the professor replied, “Yes, you can learn to sing, but I would like to be forty miles away while you are doing it.”

This only made him try harder.

President Grant once said, “I have practiced [the hymn “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow”] between three and four hundred times, and there are only four lines, and I cannot sing it yet.”

Once, on a trip to Arizona with Elder Clawson and Elder Kimball, [President Grant] asked them if he could sing one hundred songs on the way. They thought he was joking and said, “Fine, go right ahead.” After the first forty, they assured him if he sang the other sixty they would both have a nervous breakdown. He sang the other sixty.

President Faust concluded that “by practicing all of his life he made some improvement in singing but perhaps not as much as in baseball and penmanship, which he mastered.”