This is the first in a series of Visiting Teaching Messages featuring aspects of the mission of the Savior.
The Divine Mission of Jesus Christ: Creator
Download the messageJesus Christ “created the heavens and the earth” (3 Nephi 9:15). He did so through the power of the priesthood, under the direction of our Heavenly Father (see Moses 1:33).
“How grateful we should be that a wise Creator fashioned an earth and placed us here,” said President Thomas S. Monson, “… that we might experience a time of testing, an opportunity to prove ourselves in order to qualify for all that God has prepared for us to receive.”1 When we use our agency to obey God’s commandments and repent, we become worthy to return to live with Him.
Of the Creation, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Second Counselor in the First Presidency, said:
“We are the reason He created the universe! …
“This is a paradox of man: compared to God, man is nothing; yet we are everything to God.”2 Knowing that Jesus Christ created the earth for us because we mean everything to Heavenly Father can help us increase our love for Them.
From the Scriptures
John 1:3; Hebrews 1:1–2; Mosiah 3:8; Moses 1:30–33, 35–39; Abraham 3:24–25From Our History
We have been created in God’s image (see Moses 2:26–27), and we have divine potential. The Prophet Joseph Smith admonished the sisters in Relief Society to “live up to [their] privilege.”3 With that encouragement as a foundation, sisters in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been taught to live up to their divine potential by fulfilling God’s purposes for them. “As they come to understand who they really are—God’s daughters, with an innate capacity to love and nurture—they reach their potential as holy women.”4“You are now placed in a situation where you can act according to those sympathies which God has planted in your bosoms,” said the Prophet Joseph Smith. “If you live up to these principles how great and glorious!—if you live up to your privilege, the angels cannot be restrained from being your associates.”5
What Can I Do?
1. How does seeking to understand our divine nature increase our love for the Savior?2. How can we show our gratitude for God’s creations?
Notes
1. Thomas S. Monson, “The Race of Life,” Ensign, May 2012, 91.2. Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “You Matter to Him,” Ensign, Nov. 2011, 20.
3. Joseph Smith, in Daughters in My Kingdom: The History and Work of Relief Society (2011), 171.
4. Daughters in My Kingdom, 171.
5. Joseph Smith, in Daughters in My Kingdom, 169.
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