Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ we can be liberated from sin on condition of repentance. There is no greater liberation.

God’s existence is a reality. Immortality is a reality. These realities will not go away simply because we have different opinions about them. These realities will not be dissolved just because some have doubts about them.

Everything the Savior did and said was for the benefit of humankind. His Atonement, His example, and His teachings—everything was to help us not only to have a more abundant life on earth but also to attain the most abundant of all life—even eternal life.

I hope you will allow your mind to conceive and believe that Heavenly Father sent His Son to give us hope and help in finding a more abundant life.

Is the road you are now traveling and the present conduct of your life leading you to achieve your full God-given potential?

“While there is much of value to be learned, there is only one arena of study where we may learn absolute truth—and that is centered in the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Throughout your life you will have opportunities each day to be reminded of the admonition that was followed by a prophet of the Lord: “Whate’er thou art, act well thy part.”

Armed with BYU degrees, you will leave this place that has grown sacred to you because of the academic and spiritual opportunities you have been afforded here. You too carry the responsibility to add burnish to the name Brigham Young University. It now becomes your time to demonstrate to your employers, your graduate school professors, your business colleagues, your neighbors, and your friends what a BYU education truly means.

Individually and collectively our destiny lies in the ability to connect the points of light in our lives so that we can see the broad patterns of eternity.

I will tell you about some of my own experiences with adoption and adoption in this country and in the Church, and finally I will speak about adoption as it pertains to all of us as the seed of Abraham.

Like the mortal life of which they are a part, adversities are temporary. What is permanent is what we become by the way we react to them.

Jesus Christ, our Savior and Redeemer, ­provided the ultimate example of service to others. Throughout His ministry, as He went about teaching His gospel, He blessed and healed the sick and afflicted.

“When we don’t use our arms, we lose the use of our muscles. So it is with our talents and testimonies in our lives.”

I submit that a prerequisite for dealing in any way with adversaries is to love them. A wonderful side effect of living this principle is that it invites the Spirit to teach us how to handle the situation. Hatred and contempt are not consonant with the presence of the Spirit.

It is our obligation to go to work on our problems and then counsel with the Lord and get the ratifying seal of the Holy Spirit on the conclusions that we’ve reached; and that ratifying seal is the spirit of revelation.

Being “an example of the believers,” living a life of kindness and compassion, keeping your covenant “to mourn with those that mourn,” and serving others can all have powerful effects on those around you.

Our efforts with respect to spiritual strengthening, intellectual enlargement, character development, and lifelong learning, while worthy ends, are more importantly means and resources enabling us to lose our lives in the service of God and fellowman.

All hell may be moved, but as it moves, the devil’s kingdom will be irrevocably shaken, so that many can be shaken loose from his grasp. It is the kingdom of heaven that is coming—triumphant, true, and everlasting!

The interconnected nature of the spiritual and secular learning that takes place at Brigham Young University is one of the defining characteristics of a BYU education.

“Patience is a constant companion of self-discipline.”

“May we lay down our lives for those sheep, a day at a time, in a service that partakes of the most honorable cause that ever graced the pages of human existence.”

When we think of all we need to know, temporally and spiritually, it can be daunting. However, knowledge is also a great source of empowerment and comfort.

God gives each of us opportunities to create so that we can learn to take joy in that celestial process. Sometimes the result will not be what we have expected, but the process itself is important.

There is no need to be fearful about the tests of life. As your faith in Jesus Christ is firm, the tests of mortality will shape your eternal destiny.

In this setting today it is worth noting that the two terms we hear often at graduation—alma mater and alumni—both originally referred to a special relationship, one very much like but also different from that between a parent and a child.

Just as you can have love in your heart always, your heart can be drawn out in prayer—always.

A rather common fallacy accepted in society is that with graduation, one has finished her or his education. That is a serious misunderstanding if we are considering a truly educated person, particularly one with the lofty goal of achieving eternal life and eventually perfection.

Please consider some of the things we can do to always remember Jesus Christ every single day. The Savior said, “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.”

“America is the great ongoing dream of democracy. America deserves the commitment of our lives to maintain this dream.”

“We must fight the good fight. We must finish our course. We must keep the faith.”

In God’s economy, America is now and has always been a choice and favored land. God has decreed for her a final, great, and glorious destiny.

Will we drift along with the downturn, or will we master the moment and right the ship? If we choose drift, the consequences will surely be disastrous. But if we choose mastery, we have the chance to reverse our course and write a whole new chapter in the American story.

If you will remain unwaveringly anchored to the Lord Jesus Christ and devote your heart and soul to him . . . you will be blessed and all of the promises of the eternities will be given unto you.

“A timid, fearing people cannot do their work well, and they cannot do God’s work at all.”

Will we continually soften our hearts, change our lives, and partake of the knowledge and understanding our Father in Heaven wishes to give us? Or will we confine ourselves to the safe, secure methods of the educational establishment and accept a lesser portion?

With the instruction to “always remember Him,” the Lord does not want some form of general, always-sort-of-in-the-back-of-the-mind kind of remembering.

Truly, if we love God, we will serve him now, and give thanks now.

Learn to appreciate the power and potential in your heads. Get out of your comfort zone! Expand your vision! Experience the satisfaction that comes from real, earned accomplishment.

I could wish nothing better for each of you, my dear young friends, than love—the companionship of one dearer than any friend; someone to be deliriously excited over and to be happy with; someone to stir within you the very best that is there; someone to grow more appreciative of, more tender toward, more grateful for, more a part of as one year becomes another and life moves toward eternity.

Let us better open this campus to fellowshipping so that it may someday also be said of us, “And they did fellowship one with another, and did rejoice one with another, and did have great joy.”

No matter what challenges or uncertainties you face, I pray that you will always faithfully employ this essential spiritual element in your learning.

Today I would ask: What does it mean to you to love God with all your mind? We feel what it means to love Him with our heart, but what does it mean to love Him with our mind?

I bear solemn testimony that the restored gospel of Jesus Christ is rolling forth under His direction and in preparation for His second coming.

Opportunities to gather the elect, to lift others, and to let your light shine are not reserved only for members of the Living Legends or our other BYU performing groups. Opportunities to serve … are available to all of us if we will seek for them and have the faith and courage to accept them when they come.

We are not meant to accomplish this life alone. While we are waiting, we have angels ascending and descending all around us.

It is my understanding—based on more than twenty years of research—that operations and ministrations of angels are largely unknown to mortals. Angels can move about the earth conducting the Lord’s divine work, and they serve, minister, and mingle among mortals, usually without our awareness.

The subject I believe we have neglected is the Book of Mormon’s witness of the divinity and mission of Jesus Christ and our covenant relationship to him.

We cannot be slackers in our commitment to the Lord . . . Our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and our gratitude for His sacrifice for us compels us to serve by bearing testimony of Him, even Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God.

“The ultimate in maturity is being able to feel and express appreciation, being fully aware of value and importance, and showing gratitude for it.”

The Savior, both in His own recorded words and through the words of His holy prophets, has invited us to come unto Him, to experiment for ourselves on the truthfulness of His gospel, and to claim the attendant blessings.

My counsel to you…is to be clear in your priorities, in your understanding, in your faith, and in all your endeavors.

As you leave your alma mater, you’ll carry many fond memories of your years on this campus. You’ll recall the long hours of hard work in the library and the lab, the sound of the national anthem in the morning and evening, and the teachers and the friends who have enriched your life.

We believe with great confidence and conviction that you are optimally prepared for long lives of continued learning and substantial service in all that you do. We are proud of you and your accomplishments.

The message is clear: Whether in prosperity or in adversity, if we are not diligent and faithful, even the elect of God, even those greatly blessed by the Lord, can fall prey to the Great Lie and become hard-hearted, self-absorbed, stiff-necked, and puffed up in their pride.

You are stronger than you think. Heavenly Father knows and loves each of you. If you will make sure that you are all the way in by trusting in the Lord, taking His yoke upon you, and following Him, then He will make you a conqueror.

In our efforts to prepare, in our efforts to be ready, we are provided a sweet assurance in Alma, where we are reminded that the Savior “has all power to save every man that believeth on his name and bringeth forth fruit meet for repentance” (Alma 12:15).

When we are modest, we reflect in our outward actions and appearance that we understand what God expects us to do.

Having light is evidence that Jesus Christ is part of our life. His light—His spirit, His truth, His power—inspires, motivates, comforts, capacitates, and protects.

Go to, then, you who are gifted; cultivate your gift. Develop it in any of the arts and in every worthy example of them.

I now view creation not as something that occurred long ago but as a process that continues today in which we are given the sacred privilege to participate.

Improper understandings of love–which unfortunately are common in our culture today–are responsible for many of the struggles some individuals and couples have in dating, courtship, and marriage.

We are blessed to live and serve in a most remarkable season of the dispensation of the fulness of times. I testify that no unhallowed hand and no pandemic can keep the Lord’s holy work from progressing.

I’m guessing we all had various expectations as we arrived here, some outrageous and some reasonable. If your experience has been like mine, all of your expectations were not met, but I would surmise that our unmet expectations, whatever they were, brought good things to our college experiences, contributing to the people that we’ve become.

Fellow graduates, think for a moment upon ways in which you have been blessed. Perhaps foremost among our blessings, and far more valuable than an automobile, is an education at one of the finest institutions in the world.

You and I cannot know everything. There is, however, One who does know it all, who understands all, who created all and everything—He is the Father of our spirits, our Father in Heaven. Because He is our Father, He has an intense interest in our education. He knows what we need to learn to fulfill our mission in life.

Establish a set of guiding principles for your life, and never compromise them. Make no exception to them. Difficulties in life begin when small deviations from true standards are made to justify a quick move to a greater accomplishment.

I believe you will clearly see that—as with the parade of students who have passed through these same portals—your most cherished experiences at BYU came because the Spirit of the Lord was undergirding and surrounding your experiences. The Spirit was manifest in dedicated classrooms and on acres of consecrated soil, and it was witnessed to you by leaders with testimonies of the truth.

As we consistently go to Heavenly Father in prayer, we develop a relationship with Him that helps us see ourselves and Him in a clearer light. He will guide us!

I testify that by the proper application of our extrarational processes there is a systematic path leading to a high degree of assurance of things hoped for, even knowledge and a surety of divine and spiritual things.

There must be no concession to escapism here, that we must not be “soothed” regarding sacrifice and learning. This university was born out of pioneer effort and anguish.

It is audacious to believe that God is our Father—really our Father—and that we are His children—really His children. We have every reason to be fearless and bold, confident and courageous in our audacious faith.

We are authority figures, and our outreach, or our interest—or our lack of it—may influence these of little experience but great capacity to learn.

When we are faced with temptation, it would be wise to follow the Savior’s example by dismissing Satan without any further argument or discussion—immediately and swiftly.

As you leave these portals today, thank God reverently for what He has done for you, for the blessings that have been yours, for the work He has given you to do, for the strength He has bestowed upon you to do it, for the truth He has let you garner.

Inaction carries intense inertia, and it is often difficult to do more than simply study and comment on the problems that surround us.

The admonitions that we receive from our leaders to attend church, pray, read the scriptures, and remain worthy of the influence of the Holy Ghost can be viewed as reminders to regularly correct our courses by reference to divine standards.

Nations change when people change, and people change through the witness of other people—people like each of you here today. You make the future. You build it stone by stone with the choices you make.