We Need Each Other

In the first Sunday Morning Session talk in the October 2015 General Conference, Elder D. Todd Christofferson spoke about why Jesus Christ organized a church during His mortal ministry, why such a church was necessary, and why such a church is necessary today. Some people believe that it isn't.  Some people believe that they can come sufficiently close to God without an organized religion. However, for most of us, for all of us, we need the help of the Lord's church in order for us to accomplish the Lord's purposes.

It is important to recognize that God’s ultimate purpose is our progress. His desire is that we continue “from grace to grace, until [we receive] a fulness” of all He can give. That requires more than simply being nice or feeling spiritual. It requires faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, baptism of water and of the Spirit, and enduring in faith to the end. One cannot fully achieve this in isolation, so a major reason the Lord has a church is to create a community of Saints that will sustain one another in the “strait and narrow path which leads to eternal life.”

Without the support and encouragement of other believers, it would be easy to become complacent and to hit a plateau in our spiritual progress. It's easy to just be nice and feel spiritual and think that that's enough. But it's not enough. God wants us to become like Him, and that requires growth. And growth requires guidance, encouragement, support, and challenges, like the challenges we sometimes hear in church, challenging us to read the Book of Mormon by the end of the year or to collectively gather some thousands of blankets to donate to charity. I doubt many of us would exert ourselves the way we do to meet those challenges unless someone else threw down the gauntlet.

One of the greatest challenges we face in life is to become more and more like our Savior, Jesus Christ. To accomplish that goal, we must become perfect, and that requires a lot of growth on our part, which implies that we'll need a lot of direction and encouragement from others. Elder Christofferson said:

One of the greatest blessings of being part of the body of Christ, though it may not seem like a blessing in the moment, is being reproved of sin and error. We are prone to excuse and rationalize our faults, and sometimes we simply do not know where we should improve or how to do it.

In a church where members watch over each other and challenge one another, we can know where and how we need to improve. For those of us who already know all too well where we need to improve, the church can provide encouragement and the assurance that perfection is within everyone's eventual grasp and that each of us already has and can and will continue to improve. We have each come a long way in our spiritual journey, and with the help of our brothers and sisters in the church, we can each continue to improve and progress.

We are all on the same journey. We all have the same starting place and the same goal, and we are all working toward that goal together. Our individual paths may be different, depending on personal circumstances, but we're always within earshot of each other, so we can all challenge and encourage each other to keep going. Without each other, I think that many of us would give up on our and Our Savior's ultimate goal. But when we're all pulling together and encouraging each other, there's no limit to what we can accomplish. God has set lofty goals for us, goals which I'm sure we can only reach together.