Why We Record Revelations

Now that I'm a month ahead of schedule in blogging about General Conference talks, I should probably focus on the lesson I'm giving this week. This Sunday, I'm going to teach about the publishing of modern revelation, particularly the Doctrine and Covenants. The lesson makes an "Attention Activity" out of borrowing the Primary children's copies and the Doctrine and Covenants and asking them to discuss one of the verses in the that book without looking the verse up. This seems unsporting to me, so instead, I think I'm going to ask them what President Thomas S. Monson talked about in his most recent General Conference talk. I'm pretty sure all of my students were members of the church then (There's only one I'm not 100% certain about.), so they should have all seen or heard the talk, and President Thomas S. Monson is our prophet, so they should have been paying attention. I know that, when I was young, my mother always made sure I was paying attention when the prophet spoke.

Yet, I am fairly certain that none of the children will be able to tell me much of anything about President Monson's last talk because I, myself, can't remember a thing about it, except that it was short. I think it had something to do with the Book of Mormon, but if I'm right, that's only because I looked up the talk a few weeks ago try find out how short it was. I'm only guessing at everything else I might say about the talk because I don't really remember it. And how terrible is that! We have a living prophet on the Earth, a spokesman for God, and I can't even remember what he said two months ago.

Good thing we wrote the talk down and published it in the Ensign.

We need publications like those ones because the messages we receive in General Conference are inspired, insightful, and all too easy to forget. The same problem existed in Joseph Smith's time. Joseph Smith received revelations, but if they hadn't been written down, they all would have been forgotten shortly after they were received. Thankfully, they were able to record and publish those revelations so all the early saints could read them and benefit from them.

And we can do the same. We can read the Doctrine and Covenants whenever we want to, and we can learn from the revelations that were given to Joseph Smith. But, more importantly, we can also read the church magazines and learn from the revelations that more recent modern-day prophets have received, which is almost entirely the reason why I blog about them: So I have a good reason to read them, listen to them, think about them, learn from them and blog about them. It's all about retaining or regaining a recollection of what the prophets have said so we can continue to benefit from their words. And that's just as important in our day as it was in Joseph Smith's, and vice versa.