The second section of the Visiting Teaching message on practicing holiness truly touched my heart. Although there were several things that touched me in both quotes, I felt myself truly respond to Bonnie Parkin’s admonition that “holiness is a product of covenant living.”
Throughout our spiritual walk with the church, we make covenants. First, we covenant when we are baptized to serve Christ and try to be like Him. Then we renew that covenant every Sunday when we take the sacrament; we restate our willingness to keep His commandments. When we go through the temple, we make several covenants, and when we are sealed to our spouses, we covenant again. We are truly a covenant making people!
But it is one thing to make a covenant, and quite another to keep it. There are many who come into the waters of baptism and then fall away. There are others who are sealed in the temple and break their sacred promises. Still others covenant to consecrate all they have to the Lord, then find themselves unwilling to give of their time or energy.
To become holy, we must be willing to live up to the covenants we have made. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Sure, the same way trying to keep all of the commandments sounds easy! The truth is, the gospel is hard because we must struggle with our very temporal, very human nature. We must do, not what is easy, but what is worth it. We must serve those who are around us and those who are far away from us.
Holiness, then, is not another item added to our gospel to-do list, but the sum of all of those items. It is like charity. To develop charity, we must serve. To develop holiness, we must trust and obey. Holiness can be part of our character, part of who we are rather than what we do. Like the light of Christ, holiness shines in both our actions and in our words.
That said, follow the admonition of this month’s visiting teaching message, and do your visiting teaching!
Related Articles:
Gospel Doctrine: The Gift of the Sacrament
Young Women: It Shows In Your Face
Gospel Doctrine: Spiritually Reborn