[MUSIC PLAYING] The Atonement was definitely
not a one-time thing.
It's something that you have to
work at continually because no one has a perfect day. Every day you make mistakes,
and you constantly need to rely on Jesus Christ's Atonement
and be able to ask for forgiveness for those things
that you slip up on. You don't want to admit to
someone that you have a problem that needs to
be taken care of. You want to keep it to yourself
and say, "OK, I made this mistake. I'll just never do it again. And if I don't ever do it again,
it won't be a problem." But then when you don't take
care of it, then it ends up--you just think to yourself,
"Well, it's not even worth it. I messed up, and I didn't
confess to it." And so you don't feel obligated
to fix anything. One guy just gave me a phone
call, and he said he needed to talk to me. And I said, "Well, OK. Let's meet at a certain time."
And he came in, and we talked about some issues that
he was dealing with. And it takes a lot of courage
to call your bishop when you know that he thinks
you're perfect. All bishops know that no youth
are perfect, that they're involved in different things. And the temptations that are
around our youth today are very strong. For a long time I just felt
like, "OK, I'm accountable to the bishop." And you make sure
that's taken care of. Then you have to really
think--Jesus Christ literally died for us, and so we're
accountable to Him even more than the bishop. At around that time, they
called me as a ward missionary. I went out with the missionaries
a lot. I realized that it's just really
awesome to be out with the missionaries because they
have that Spirit with them all the time. They live a lifestyle that
allows them to have the Spirit with them always, and
I realized that's something that I wanted. "And now, O my son Helaman,
behold, thou art in thy youth, and therefore--" Alma's telling Helaman
about--recounting his story of when he was racked
with his sins.
He felt better, and he was
relieved from that the second he caught hold of that thought
about Jesus Christ being able to take over and take
care of our sins. And that's definitely the
feeling you get when you take that first step. Each day, ours is the challenge
to access the power of the Atonement so that we can
truly change, become more Christlike, and qualify for
the gift of exaltation and live eternally with God, Jesus
Christ, and our families. [MUSIC PLAYING]