“Settle This in Your Hearts”

My dear brothers and sisters, I express my  love for you and bring you the love of President Dallin H. Oaks, the First Presidency, and the Quorum of the Twelve.

It is a special privilege for me to address you. You are intelligent, believing, and courageous in your devotion to our Savior Jesus Christ and His restored gospel. You are here at Brigham Young University to learn and grow, both in your mind and in your spirit. I pray that my message today will be meaningful to the spiritual progress you are seeking.

What Does It Mean to “Settle This” in Our Hearts?

Here is our word for today: settle.

Depending on how you use the word, there are multiple definitions. For our discussion today, I would propose this definition of the verb “to settle”:

• To resolve definitively and conclusively
• To calm or bring to rest
• To make stable and permanent

Here are three statements that will remind you how the word might be used:

• I am settled on what my major should be.
• If Elder Andersen will hurry, I will settle my growing hunger pains in the Cougareat.
• After that date last night, I am totally unsettled.

In March 1831, as recorded in Doctrine and Covenants 45, Joseph Smith was instructed by the Lord to translate the New Testament.¹ Throughout the next year, using the King James Version, the Prophet Joseph made inspired modifications and additions to the New Testament. Let’s look at two verses in the King James Bible:

1. Luke 14:27: “And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.”

2. Luke 14:28: “For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?”

We love these two scriptures. The Prophet Joseph was inspired to add a verse between these two verses. This verse is our subject today: “Wherefore, settle this in your hearts, that ye will do the things which I shall teach, and command you.”²

Settle this in your heart!

Remember our definition?

• To resolve definitively and conclusively
• To calm or bring to rest
• To make stable and permanent

As a Latter-day Saint, what does it mean to have your faith in Jesus Christ and your devotion to the restored gospel settled in your heart? For me, it means that you have spiritually weighed the blessings and sacrifices of following Jesus Christ and of exercising your precious will and agency. You have determined—you have chosen in your mind and in your spirit—that this will absolutely be the path your life will take. You are going forward no longer doubting your decision.

As a Latter-day Saint, you have received a witness of the Prophet Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and also that today the Lord’s hand and the priesthood of God are within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You have embraced with complete confidence the covenants of the Lord’s house, and you have resolved to do what the Savior said: “Ye will do the things which I shall teach, and command you.”

I know that a large number of you here today have already settled your faith in Jesus Christ, your desire to truly be His disciple, and your determination to stay true to the covenants and priesthood power of the restored gospel.

For many of us, this is not something that suddenly falls upon us. Rather, it comes as our faith in Christ and spiritual sensitivity grow step-by-step while at the same time we are experiencing the distastefulness and emptiness of the world’s allure.

My own determination to settle this in my heart increased significantly while I was a student here at BYU 53 years ago. For you who are continuing the process of settling definitively and conclusively your commitment to your faith, let’s discuss how to receive the divine direction and make the important choices you seek.

The decision to permanently follow Jesus Christ is greatly bolstered by the impressions, promptings, and unforgettable spiritual moments you experience in your life. Many here have served missions, and—such as with my mission to France—a mission builds a foundation for the settling. You have felt and now feel the Holy Ghost working in your life. You have felt the Lord’s influence as you have prayed and opened the scriptures. You have felt the joy of forgetting yourself and of thinking more of others! Do you now desire to increase these spiritual feelings and to feel them with greater power? There is great opportunity here at BYU to strengthen these experiences.

Even with the spiritual influences you have experienced, the decision to settle your resolve to follow Jesus Christ and keep the covenants of the restored gospel is a most sobering consideration. It is a compelling decision of choice that thoughtfully awaits an answer from each developing disciple.

You live in a world of information and misinformation—and now artificial information—overload, with overflowing options and choices. With hundreds of entertainment channels, an unending source of social media, boundless podcasts, and an unending profusion of published opinions, you live in a world of commotion and unsurprising confusion. With the array of influences bombarding your lives, the adversary is replete with his deceptive tactics. You will remember President Oaks’s warning last February:

One of the many reasons you will need the constant influence of the Holy Ghost is that you live in a season in which the adversary has become so effective at disguising truth that if you don’t have the Holy Ghost, you will be deceived. Many obstacles lie ahead. The distractions will be many.³

To make your faith in the Savior central to all your important motivations and decisions requires an unusual clarity of purpose, a humility, and a firmness of mind. Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, “Without real faith and its attendant submissiveness, people sooner or later [will] find one thing or another to stumble over.”⁴ To settle this in your heart is to courageously choose the road of discipleship with a determination to never turn away.

I first discovered Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” when I was a young man. You know the words:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.⁵

In your world of complexity, Robert Frost might rewrite his poem this way: “One hundred roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel them all, long I stood.” With so many choices and alluring paths before you, it will require strength of heart and mind to boldly—without distraction or deception—settle this in your heart and walk the road less traveled toward the Savior.

Reason and Revelation

The prophet Jacob said:

Come unto the Lord, the Holy One. Remember that his paths are righteous. Behold, the way for man is narrow, but it lieth in a straight course before him, and the keeper of the gate is the Holy One of Israel.⁶

Confidently preparing to settle this in your heart is a work of both the mind and the heart. The Lord has said, “I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart.”⁷

Here is an important principle: To settle this in your heart does not mean you have to settle everything in your mind. In 1991, when I was serving as a mission president in France, President Oaks—then Elder Oaks—visited our mission. He shared with me a book he had recently written: The Lord’s Way. Let me share with you a very valuable lesson I learned from chapter 2 entitled “Reason and Revelation”: “Reason and revelation are methods of learning that are available to seekers of every type of knowledge.”⁸ President Oaks quoted President Boyd K. Packer: “Each of us must accommodate the mixture of reason and revelation in our lives. The gospel not only permits but requires it.”⁹

President Oaks then explained the sequential nature of spiritual learning: “Study and reason come first. Revelation comes second.”¹⁰ He went on to say:

Reason can authenticate revelation and inspiration by measuring them against the threshold tests of edification, position, and consistency with gospel principles. But reason has no role in evaluating the content of revelation in order to accept or reject it according to some supposed standard of reasonableness. Revelation has the final word.¹¹

President Oaks wrote, “Reason screens revelation and revelation confirms or overrules reason.”¹² He also taught, “Reason has the first word” and “revelation has the last word.”¹³

I really like that couplet: “Reason has the first word” and “revelation has the last word.”

This principle helped me realize that all our questions need not be answered to settle this in our hearts. There will always be questions we cannot fully answer. For example, how did the vastness of the universe play into God’s creation of our world? How do we explain the Black Death disease of the Middle Ages, the Spanish flu, or even our own coronavirus disease? Reason alone will not fully explain the events of the Church in the 19th century, the methods of translation then, or policies that seem foreign to us now. If we are not wise to the workings of the Spirit, there is an internet full of questions that can bring doubt and fear and become obstacles to settling this in our heart.

We live in a time of great commotion.¹⁴ We need the peace and comforting assurance that our course in life is anchored and steady. Allow the questions that do not yet have answers to rest patiently in a box labeled Answers Forthcoming. Trust the clear and powerful feelings of your heart. Remember the apostle Paul’s declaration of faith: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”¹⁵

Substance, evidence, and the spiritual movement inside of us are real and discernible. “Reason has the first word,” but “revelation has the last word.”

What is it that you are to settle in your heart? The scripture reads, “Settle this in your hearts, that ye will do the things which I shall teach, and command you.”

Here are 10 truths that the Lord Jesus Christ or His prophets have taught us that will settle in our hearts as we solidify our faith in Jesus Christ. I give you 10, but there are certainly many more:

1. God is our Father; we are His children.
2. He hears our prayers; we need His answers.
3. We are on earth for an important purpose.
4. Jesus Christ is the Only Begotten Son of God.
5. Keeping His teachings brings happiness in mortal life and promises of eternal life.
6. His suffering and Resurrection allow us to be forgiven and to live beyond the grave.
7. He restored His gospel and priesthood through the Prophet Joseph Smith.
8. His sacred word in the Bible and Book of Mormon guides us.
9. Receiving His ordinances and observing our covenants is our path to return home.
10. The gift of the Holy Ghost is needed in our every moment.

And of course we are not only to believe these things. We also embrace the actions that follow. King Benjamin counseled, “If you believe all these things see that ye do them.”¹⁶

Let me share two powerful ways to receive the spiritual strength to settle this in your heart.

First, think more about the Savior. Do you remember this scripture? “Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not.”¹⁷

Immerse yourself deeply into the divine mission, the perfect life, the life-changing teachings, the incomparable Atonement, and the breathtaking promises He offers you. Pray more in His name, read His words, apply His teachings, speak His name in reverence and with conviction, and believe in His power to forgive and refine you. The more you put Him into each of your days, the more you will know He is your Savior and Redeemer. Settling this in your heart will be the natural consequence of your renewed confidence in Him.

Second, embrace more completely the Book of Mormon. When was the last time you read the Book of Mormon from the first page until the last? Was it when you were on your mission? If so, it is time to read it again. Remember that the Prophet Joseph Smith declared this book will bring you “nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.”¹⁸

In my many years of experience, I have come to see that all—yes, all—those who have settled the truthfulness of the restored gospel in their hearts have an abiding conviction that the Book of Mormon came through the Prophet Joseph Smith by the gift and power of God. There are literally millions of stories of how the Book of Mormon has changed someone’s life.

Here is one I love.

Robert E. Sackley, who later served as a General Authority, was severely wounded as an elite Australian commando in World War II. While hospitalized in Australia, he was given a copy of the Book of Mormon. He attributed an important part of his conversion to the restored gospel to a passage from the Book of Mormon that he memorized while recovering in the hospital. Here is the verse that you will recognize:

For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.¹⁹

That one scripture opened Elder Sackley’s heart to this sacred book, and it transformed his life.²⁰ The Book of Mormon has transformed my life. It has transformed many of your lives. I promise you that the Book of Mormon has the power—should you choose to use it—to solidify your faith in Jesus Christ and your personal commitment to the restored gospel. It is absolutely true and sacred scripture.

What Happens Once We Have “Settled This” in Our Hearts?

I now turn to the part of my message that I am most eager to share. What happens once we have settled this in our hearts? How does this amazing choice and decision lift us, enrich us, and help us to be who we want to be? Many here could speak to this question. Thank you for allowing me to speak for all of us.

As we settle this in our hearts, we absolutely trust in our Heavenly Father and in His Son Jesus Christ. We use the gift of choice—our precious agency, a gift whose value is next to life itself—to say to our Father, “I am yours, totally, completely, without reservation or condition. I will follow Thy Son not only because Thou has asked me to follow Him but because I want to; I want to be His true disciple. My desire is complete. I will, of my own volition, love Thee, my Father, and Thy Son before all else. I will keep Thy commandments and turn my talents to helping others, my brothers and sisters, and to strengthening Thy kingdom on earth.”

This is the spirit of consecration. When a heart willingly and completely—on its own, without compulsion—turns the key of consecration, the door of freedom and spiritual power is opened. We are given a heavenly conferral, a greater vision of our purpose here on earth, a sustained ability to feel and to know, and an added abundance of spiritual gifts.

Temptations that once seemed enticing lose their glamour as they are seen for what they are. The mocking voices from those in the “great and spacious building”²¹ fade away. The many distractions and deceptions of the adversary are more quickly spotted and dismissed.²²

Our focus becomes what is good, what brings happiness to others, and what is more lasting and righteously satisfying. We continue to freely nourish the spiritual direction we have chosen. It is increasingly gratifying, and it becomes very natural.

An even more profound witness of the Savior follows.

My personal journey to settle this in my heart has been eternally strengthened and extended by my angel wife, Kathy. When I met her here at BYU in 1974, her settled heart was more developed than mine. We have walked the road of discipleship together, and her example and love of the Savior has been a light to my own journey.

Now, as I address you in the later years of my life and as a special witness of the Lord Jesus Christ, I declare with a sureness and knowledge that He who we worship and adore, Jesus Christ, is the light and life of the world. He lives. He is the central being of all human history. He is our Savior and Redeemer. I love Him, and I thank Him for the confirmation I have been given.

As you begin this most important school year, I bless you that as you deeply desire to settle this in your heart, your faith in Jesus Christ and your personal commitment to your Heavenly Father and His Beloved Son and to the restored gospel will guide and direct you. I bless you that your spiritual understanding will flourish, your spiritual gifts will multiply, and your life will be filled with greater purpose and happiness. I express my love for each of you, and I leave you my blessing in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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