My talk today is for a very specific group of people. If after telling you who, you think ‘that’s not me,’ I pray you’ll listen anyway as you may one day join this group and if nothing else it will help you understand the rest of us better. I’m talking to those who have felt more than once that you’ve been stretched too thin, that more than once your most sincere prayers have gone unanswered, to those who have thought I can’t possibly obey all these commandments, and to those who quietly wonder whether they are still becoming what God intended, or simply enduring.
Last week I was driving in my car listening to Elder Eyring’s Talk, “Proved and Strengthened in Christ,’ which is my assigned talk and upon hearing, “The greatest example of proving and strengthening occurred through the Savior’s Atonement.” I was taken back to 8th Grade Band Class. I was sitting Stage Left in the Brass Section with a curious friend named Matt. We had many Gospel discussions that year. He asked lots of questions about Polygamy, the Word of Wisdom, Proxy Baptisms in the Temple, Blacks in the Priesthood, was the Book of Mormon really translated from Golden Plates, but in that moment one very specific day stood out. It was the day Matt, a born-again Christian, asked me if I was saved. I said, with as much conviction as a 13 year old wanting to sound smart could muster, “Yes, I was baptized by Priesthood Authority.” Seemingly unimpressed, he immediately quizzed, ‘so are you saved by Grace or Works?’
Like many of you, I immediately thought of 2 Nephi 25:23, and said, ‘we are saved by grace, after all we can do.’ I remember his perplexation! Holding my baritone, looking back at him, he seemed very confused; all of a sudden of all the many controversial ‘Mormonisms’ we discussed that year seemed normal compared to the thought that Later-Day Saints (or at least me), believed we weren’t saved by grace alone.
I don’t know what might have changed for Matt had I simply said by grace, but obviously that moment impacted me to be pondering it 32 years later! While not the main topic of my talk, that premise, believing we are saved by grace, helps add context and serves as the backbone to everything else I have to say.
Before I say anything else, if there is only one thing you take away from my talk today, it is this; Grace is not the reward for becoming better. Grace is the power that makes this becoming possible.
If you need evidence of this, you have to look back no further than Elder Kearon’s talk from last April titled, ‘Receive His Gift.’
“You may be wondering, “What do I have to do to receive this gift from God?” Well, actually, nothing. It is a gift from the Giver. It is simply a fact. Just let it in. You are His child. You are beloved of Him. Do not complicate it. Do not block the receiving of this gift with thoughts that you are somehow undeserving. The reality is none of us is “deserving”—all the Father’s gifts are received only through the merits, mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah…”
Jordan B Peterson once observed that our nervous system responds in an entirely different way when we face the demands of life voluntarily. In that light, when I started to understand that grace is not something I earn at the end but something that is there from the beginning, my relationship with obedience started to change. I tried to stop striving out of fear to qualify for God’s grace and started, as best I could, to trust, to have faith in him. Now, back to Elder Eyring’s point, grace does not (unfortunately it may seem) remove the demands of discipleship, but it can and should transform how we interact with it.
“Brothers and sisters, your proving and strengthening may not look like Moroni’s or Jacob’s or the Prophet Joseph’s. But it will come. It may come quietly, through the trials of family life. It may come through illness or disappointment or grief or loneliness.”
This area of family life of which he speaks is a continued struggle for me. He says quietly, I said loudly, like literally me, loud.
I spent years as a single man and then a young father imagining that I would be the cool dad, yet on a near daily basis I hear my parents fall straight out of my own mouth.
It reminds me of a meme that I know I’ve shared with many of you. It shows a man praying and it says “Bless me with patience… Not opportunities to be patient, I’ve had plenty of those and they don’t seem to be working.”
Back to Eyring, “The word prove has several meanings. To prove something is not simply to test it. It is to increase its strength. To prove a piece of steel is to place it under strain. Heat, weight, and pressure are added until its true nature is enhanced and revealed. The steel is not weakened by the proving. In fact, it becomes something that can be trusted, something strong enough to bear greater burdens.”
In baking, proving is the stage where dough is left to rest so the yeast can do its work. Sometimes it looks like nothing is happening, but inside the dough is rising and becoming what it cannot become any other way.
And here is the part that I hate to love. The dough, just like the steel in Pres Eyring’s example, does not get to decide when it is done. The baker does.
The dough may feel ready too soon, that it’s overworked or exhausted, but it is the baker who knows when it has risen enough to be placed in the oven and how long and at what temperature it stays in there.
In our lives, we often ask God to hurry the proving and the baking, but He alone knows when the work He is doing in us is complete.
For most of my life I read the “after all we can do” in 2 Nephi 25:23 as a condition. I heard Nephi saying, do everything you can, and then grace finally shows up. But when you read the verses before and after and look at the punctuation, that is not what it says. Nephi does not simply write that we are saved by grace after all we can do. He writes that we labor diligently, we persuade, we believe, we try to be reconciled to God, because we already know that it is by grace that we are saved. The phrase “after all we can do” is not the qualifier. It is a confession that even after we have done everything within our power it is the baker that puts everything together. It is his work that made the bread for however much we complain about the proving or think that it was just the proving that made the bread.
That tiny shift in sentence structure changes the entire experience of living the gospel. If grace comes after obedience then we’re screwed. But if grace is the beginning and the end, the foundation if you will, then obedience can and should become voluntary, hopeful, and even brave. When we stop asking, have I done enough yet, and start asking, what is God making of me then hopefully the days can become less hard. That is what Elder Eyring means when he says we are not just tested but strengthened. Grace is not the reward for surviving the proving. Grace is the power that makes the proving safe.
So to my friend Matt, and to all of you, I bear witness that despite all I have done, it is by God’s grace that I am saved. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
[This message was shared during the Vernal 4th Ward Sacrament, Jan 11, 2026]
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