Bednar - Bear Up Their Burdens with Ease - April 2014

Elder Bednar speaks about his friend who purchased a new pickup truck and took it to the mountains to get firewood.  As he climbed higher and higher in the mountains, the snow became deeper and deeper until the point that he got the truck stuck in the snow.  Since he couldn't get the truck out, he decided to cut the firewood, load it in his truck, and then get his truck out.  The additional weight from the wood provided the needed traction to get his car out of the snow and back on the road.  Elder Bednar likens this story to the spiritual traction we can get from having a load upon our backs which the Savior helps us carry.

• Each of us also carries a load. Our individual load is comprised of demands and opportunities, obligations and privileges, afflictions and blessings, and options and constraints. Two guiding questions can be helpful as we periodically and prayerfully assess our load:
  
  • “Is the load I am carrying producing the spiritual traction that will enable me to press forward with faith in Christ on the strait and narrow path and avoid getting stuck?
    
  • Is the load I am carrying creating sufficient spiritual traction so I ultimately can return home to Heavenly Father?”
    

Elder Bednar counsels us that we need to look at the load as a blessing and not a burden to our spiritual growth.

• Sometimes we mistakenly may believe that happiness is the absence of a load. But bearing a load is a necessary and essential part of the plan of happiness. Because our individual load needs to generate spiritual traction, we should be careful to not haul around in our lives so many nice but unnecessary things that we are distracted and diverted from the things that truly matter most.
  

The Strengthening Power of the Atonement
Elder Bednar describes what a yoke is: a heavy beam that rests on shoulders that makes two animals work together with even amounts of burden.  He talks about the yoke that the Savior offers us and how he is the second one to help lift our burdens so we don't have to go through life's challenges alone.

• Making and keeping sacred covenants yokes us to and with the Lord Jesus Christ. In essence, the Savior is  beckoning us to rely upon and pull together with Him, even though our best efforts are not equal to and cannot be compared with His. As we trust in and pull our load with Him during the journey of mortality, truly His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

In order to activate the full power of the atonement and the full yoke of help from the Savior, we are to make covenants with God and honor those covenants.

• Covenants received and honored with integrity and ordinances performed by proper priesthood authority are necessary to receive all of the blessings made available through the Atonement of Jesus Christ.
  

Elder Bednar goes on to talk about the atonement.  As we have pointed out here many times on this blog, the atonement is not just for our sins.  It is for our burdens, it is for our guidance, it is for making things right and whole in our lives when things have been unfair.  The atonement is there to strengthen and heal us.

• Most of us know that when we do things wrong and need help to overcome the effects of sin in our lives, the Savior has made it possible for us to become clean through His redeeming power. But do we also understand that the Atonement is for faithful men and women who are obedient, worthy, and conscientious and who are striving to become better and serve more faithfully? I wonder if we fail to fully acknowledge this strengthening aspect of the Atonement in our lives and mistakenly believe we must carry our load all alone—through sheer grit, willpower, and discipline and with our obviously limited capacities. It is one thing to know that Jesus Christ came to the earth to die for us. But we also need to appreciate that the Lord desires, through His Atonement and by the power of the Holy Ghost, to enliven us—not only to guide but also to strengthen and heal us.
  

The Savior Succors His People
The Savior invites to to come to Him and give Him our burdens.  He invites us to accept this gift of the atonement to heal us and to improve our lives.

• The Savior has suffered not just for our sins and iniquities—but also for our physical pains and anguish, our weaknesses and shortcomings, our fears and frustrations, our disappointments and discouragement, our regrets and remorse, our despair and desperation, the injustices and inequities we experience, and the emotional distresses that beset us.
  
• There is no physical pain, no spiritual wound, no anguish of soul or heartache, no infirmity or weakness you or I ever confront in mortality that the Savior did not experience first. In a moment of weakness we may cry out, “No one knows what it is like. No one understands.” But the Son of God perfectly knows and understands, for He has felt and borne our individual burdens. And because of His infinite and eternal sacrifice, He has perfect empathy and can extend to us His arm of mercy. He can reach out, touch, succor, heal, and strengthen us to be more than we could ever be and help us to do that which we could never do relying only upon our own power. Indeed, His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

An Invitation, a Promise, and a Testimony
Elder Bednar concludes with an invitation to have the atonement be a greater part of our lives.

• The unique burdens in each of our lives help us to rely upon the merits, mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah. I testify and promise the Savior will help us to bear up our burdens with ease. As we are yoked with Him through sacred covenants and receive the enabling power of His Atonement in our lives, we increasingly will seek to understand and live according to His will. We also will pray for the strength to learn from, change, or accept our circumstances rather than praying relentlessly for God to change our circumstances according to our will. We will become agents who act rather than objects that are acted upon.
  

How happy I am to have the details of the atonement described in such simple terms.  I have learned so much about the atonement in the past months and seeing the words of the prophets describe the healing power but also the redeeming power provides me hope.  The atonement is not just for our sins, it is to make things right, make us whole, and to make the unfairness in our lives easier to handle.  The imagery of a load on our shoulders is so easy to understand.  Recognizing that the Savior is there to help us lift that burden so it doesn't all rest on us is truly what the atonement can and should do in our lives.