Elder Holland's Messages of Perseverance

When I was a freshman in college, my roommate and I were both preparing for our missions and we developed a tradition of watching an Elder Holland talk at night before going to bed.  From the talks he gave at BYU devotionals as president of the university to all of his general conference talks, there are many incredible messages to choose from, and we went through lots of them during those months.  They were for us, like for Oliver Cowdery, “days never to be forgotten—to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven” as we anticipated with eagerness our chance to serve as missionaries.  Elder Holland’s passionate way of describing principles of the gospel and his motivating power to encourage us on the path of discipleship had a significant impact on me then and continues to do so today.

One of the themes that I see in many of his talks is the need for perseverance in the gospel no matter what the cost.  Talks such as Remember Lot’s Wife, However Long and Hard the Road, and The Inconvenient Messiah are beloved by many and have been powerful inspirations to me to keep going forward in the covenant path no matter what the cost.  Two of his most influential talks in my mind both take their titles from the words of Paul to the Hebrews: Cast Not Away Therefore Your Confidence and An High Priest of Good Things to Come, both of which were given in the same year, 1999.  The first comes from these powerful verses to the Hebrew Saints: “Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompence of reward. For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise…. Now the just shall live by faith…. But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul” (Hebrews 10:35-39).  Elder Holland’s message was that we must not draw back once the Lord has directed us forward; we must not retreat from a good thing once the Lord has confirmed it is the way to go.  He summarized Paul’s words this way, “In LDS talk that is to say, ‘Sure it is tough—before you join the Church, while you are trying to join, and after you have joined.’ That is the way it has always been, Paul said, but don’t ‘draw back,’ he warned. Don’t panic and retreat. Don’t lose your confidence. Don’t forget how you once felt. Don’t distrust the experience you had. That tenacity is what saved Moses when the adversary confronted him, and it is what will save you.”  Paul never retreated once he received his divine manifestation from heaven despite the bitter persecution and terrible suffering he endured for the name of Jesus.  He never drew back from his mandate to take the gospel to the Gentiles, and his invitation to the Hebrews is a powerful reminder to all of us to cast not away our confidence in the Lord. 

               Elder Holland’s message about a “high priest of good things to come” similarly invites us to persevere despite the difficulties and challenges we encounter.  The title comes from Paul’s description of the Savior: “But Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle” (Hebrews 9:11).  When we have faith in Christ we can hope with a surety for good things to come in the future, no matter what the trials we face today.  These Hebrew Saints must have been facing great challenges that tempted them to lose hope, but Paul sought to encourage them to believe in Christ and His future promises of good to come if they were faithful.  In this talk Elder Holland put Kanarraville, Utah on the map as he described his young family when they broke down only 34 miles into a road trip across the country, twice.  His words from his older self to that stranded young father have replayed in my mind many times over the years: “Don’t give up, boy. Don’t you quit. You keep walking. You keep trying. There is help and happiness ahead—a lot of it—30 years of it now, and still counting. You keep your chin up. It will be all right in the end. Trust God and believe in good things to come.”  He summarized his message with these memorable lines: “Some blessings come soon, some come late, and some don’t come until heaven; but for those who embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ, they come.”  How grateful I am for the teachings of Paul and Elder Holland—their powerful messages invite us to keeping believing in our great high priest of good things to come and to cast not away our confidence in the great plan of God for us individually.