Visiting Teaching Ideas: September 2012

Prayerfully study this material and, as appropriate, discuss it with the sisters you visit. Use the questions to help you strengthen your sisters and to make Relief Society an active part of your own life.

Honouring our covenants

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Visiting teaching is an expression of our discipleship and a way to honor our covenants as we serve and strengthen one another. A covenant is a sacred and enduring promise between God and His children. “When we realize that we are children of the covenant, we know who we are and what God expects of us,” said Elder Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. “His law is written in our hearts. He is our God and we are His people.”¹

As visiting teachers we can strengthen those we visit in their efforts to keep their sacred covenants. By doing so, we help them prepare for the blessings of eternal life. “Every sister in this Church who has made covenants with the Lord has a divine mandate to help save souls, to lead the women of the world, to strengthen the homes of Zion, and to build the kingdom of God,”² said Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

As we make and keep sacred covenants, we become instruments in the hands of God. We will be able to articulate our beliefs and strengthen each other’s faith in Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ.

From the Scriptures

1 Nephi 14:14; Mosiah 5:5–7; 18:8–13; Doctrine and Covenants 42:78; 84:106

From Our History

The temple is “a place of thanksgiving for all saints,” the Lord revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith in 1833. It is “a place of instruction for all those who are called to the work of the ministry in all their several callings and offices; that they may be perfected in the understanding of their ministry, in theory, in principle, and in doctrine, in all things pertaining to the kingdom of God on the earth” (D&C 97:13–14).

Relief Society sisters in Nauvoo, Illinois, in the early 1840s helped each other prepare for temple ordinances. In the ordinances of the higher priesthood that Latter-day Saints received in the Nauvoo Temple, “the power of godliness [was] manifest” (D&C 84:20). “As the Saints kept their covenants, this power strengthened and sustained them through their trials in the days and years ahead.”³

In the Church today, faithful women and men all over the world serve in the temple and continue to find strength in the blessings that can be received only through temple covenants.