Studying the Gospel at Home

In his Conference talk titled "Prepared to Obtain Every Needful Thing," Elder David A. Bednar stressed the importance of fulfilling our personal responsibility to study the Gospel, especially during the week, between Sundays. While it used to be the case that most Gospel learning happened at church and hopefully made it home, the new program is built around learning the Gospel at home and then bringing our insights to church. This pattern makes sense for a number of reasons.

For starters, Sunday is only one out of the seven days of the week. We go to church for only 2 out of the 168 hours of the week. In contrast, we spend a ,ot more time than that at home. Granted, much of that time is spent eating or resting, but we still spend a lot more time at home than at church, so it seems reasonable that many of us would have more time for Gospel study at home, especially if we made it a priority.

Learning the Gospel at home also makes sense because it allows us more flexibility. At church, we have to try to stay mostly on-topic and hope that the topic of the week contains a message for everyone. One or two hours is hardly enough time to cover every insight that can be gleaned from a study of a few chapters of scripture, so it's largely a matter of chance whether or not the Sunday School lesson shares the part of the message that's most important for you. However, when studying independently, we can follow whatever paths and tangents the Spirit prompts us to follow, leading us to whatever insight we need to hear, whether others find and share that insight our not.

But ultimately, a large part of the reason we study the Gospel at home more than at church is because studying the Gospel is our responsibility. We cannot passively sit and wait for a talk or Sunday School lesson to give us whatever spiritual message we need at the moment. It's up to us to actively studay and find those messages ourselves.

Of course, we should still study the Gospel on Sundays, both at church and at home, but the bulk of our Gospel study should be done at home.