“And We Talk of Christ”

Posted on by Mitch Peterson

Last updated on July 19th, 2025 at 07:47 pm

General Conference Applied

S5 E13 – Sunday, May 25, 2025 | “And We Talk of Christ” by Elder Gary E. Stevenson; April 2025 General Conference

Listen on Amazon Music | Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen and/or Watch on Spotify | Watch on YouTube

Podcast Episode Outline

Introduction

Bio

  • Bonnie H. Cordon on How Belief Builds Confidence, Leadership, and Lasting Change | Case Studies Podcast | S1 E84:
    • [Casey Baugh] “So Elder Stevenson, Gary, was like a second father growing up … His son is my oldest friend that I have. … We were 17 years old, and we’re just not making good decisions in life, like very few good decisions, and we’re at a baseball tournament in Mesquite, and Gary was down there with us. We were going to go to [Las] Vegas as 17 year olds and Gary’s like, ‘Hey, let me take you guys and I’ll show you guys the best time you’ve ever had in your life’. I think there was some wisdom in him seeing these kids are going to get into trouble.

      “So he took us down there. … And I remember we went to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and it was the first time where I was like, I need to make a lot of money when I get older because I want to have this experience. … But that was Gary, he was … a complete servant leader. … Growing up we lived at their house. … He was a really successful business person in the valley and had a lot of influence and had a nice home, and it was always something that, as a 15, 16, 17 year old kid, I was like, ‘I want that when I get older’. …

      “His wife was as much or more impactful than Gary, because she was there all the time and she was just all love. … I remember our senior year at homecoming, they rented out a room up at the university and catered a dinner. … [At] my graduation [Lesa] made me a blanket with all my achievements in high school and she did it for all of us. … It’s just special. You realize the impact that people can have, seeing the potential in you, potentially when you don’t see it in yourself. And you realize that you can do things when you realize people are believing in you.”
  • Mitch – personal correspondence with a friend whose dad served in a stake presidency with Elder Stevenson many years ago: “I’ve been involved with Elder Stevenson in many different ways. … [He’s] always been a man that would do anything for anyone, but even more for those close to him. The other thing that came to mind was a business related story I was told by a sales rep I worked with. He shared an experience where years before, he was working with Gary on a business deal, and he was put in a spot where he could have made [an] unethical decision to capture a lot of business, but Gary stood his ground and didn’t do the deal as it didn’t align with his beliefs.”
  • The following is from a Utah State Magazine article, “Elder Stevenson Fondly Recalls Growing Up An Aggie” An “Aggie.”
    Creating an ICON
    Brett Stevenson (’12), the third of Gary’s four sons — three of whom graduated from USU — was 15 years old when his father was called as a mission president for the church’s Japan Nagoya Mission. He vividly remembers growing up in Japan during those formative years and learning much from his father about service and leadership. However, it wasn’t until Brett had returned from his own mission and enrolled in school at Utah State that he began to really understand who his father was from a temporal perspective.
    “I was interacting with a lot of people that had worked at ICON and had worked with my dad, when I really started to hear what he was like in his professional role. And that was what has had the biggest impact on me — how people spoke about my dad and how he treated them,” Brett says.
    “How he cared for them individually and knew them individually as a person and wasn’t too tied up in the bigger picture of the business. He knew people and had an impact on their lives. Hearing them talk about the impact that he had on them personally, and their families, really started to open my eyes to even in business you can have those relationships, and you can have that impact with people that you work with and lead.”
    In the late 1970s, Stevenson, along with fellow USU students Scott Watterson and Brad Sorenson, was pursuing a degree in the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business. The trio had all recently returned home from serving church missions, Stevenson from the Japan Fukuoka Mission, Watterson from Taiwan, and Sorenson from the Pacific Islands.
    As Stevenson recalls, it was a group project in his marketing strategy planning class that eventually led to what is now iFit. Initially known as Weslo Design International, the trio — along with early partner Blaine Hancy — incorporated in 1977, two years before they would graduate, and began importing various products such as kitchenware and marble products from Taiwan. Eventually, trampolines were added, which was the company’s initial foray into the health and fitness industry.
    “I knew them before my time at Utah State, but we were also studying business together,” Stevenson says of his friends and business partners. “And it was while we were doing that at Utah State that this idea of the creation of a business germinated and part of the nourishment of that idea that germinated was coming through our coursework.
    “I have just clear memories, I could go through course, after course, after course — marketing research, and consumer behavior, and operations research, and economics … there’s just nothing quite like … a university campus and that teaching and learning experience.”
    In 2008, after more than 30 years, Stevenson stepped down as president and chief operating officer of ICON Health & Fitness — formerly Weslo and now iFit — as he accepted a call into full-time church service as a member of the church’s First Quorum of the Seventy in the Asia North Area presidency.
    Then, in 2012, he was named Presiding Bishop of the church, where he oversaw various physical affairs of the church, including natural disaster relief efforts throughout the world. He continued in that calling until October 2015 when he accepted a call to serve as a member of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
  • This was Elder Stevenson’s 23rd general conference address. His most recent address was “Days Never to Be Forgotten” from the October 2024 General Conference.

Invitations

  1. “We are followers of Jesus Christ, and we seek to both receive and share His light.”
  2. “Through ancient and living prophets, our Heavenly Father has commanded us to ‘hear Him!’ and to ‘come unto Christ.’ ‘We talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, [and] we prophesy of Christ.'”
  3. “Christ is at the center of His Church and should be at the center of our lives.”
  4. “In recent First Presidency messages concerning Easter, we have been challenged to ‘celebrate the Resurrection of our living Savior by studying His teachings and helping to establish Easter traditions in our society as a whole, especially within our own families.’ In short, we have been encouraged to move to a higher and holier celebration of Easter. … Recent First Presidency encouragement to look ‘forward to Easter and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ—the most glorious of all messages to mankind’ highlights the magnitude of this season.”

Discussion Questions

  1. What is the Lord, through Elder Stevenson, inviting us to do?
  2. Just like the small picture of the Savior in Sister Stevenson’s passport, what are other ways that we can incorporate the Savior into more of our routine, daily activities?
  3. Elder Stevenson shares several examples of how we can “share [Jesus Christ’s] light”. In what ways have you “[shared Jesus Christ’s] light” recently?
  4. What have you and your family done over the past couple of years to “move to a higher and holier celebration of Easter”? Or, if you have not made changes to your celebration of Easter, what do you intend to do in your 2026 Easter celebration?
  5. “While there appears to be a growing trend among various Christian theologians to view the Resurrection in figurative and symbolic terms”, why do you believe in the literal resurrection of all of God’s children?

External Resources Referenced In This Episode

  1. Elder Neil L. Andersen, “The Divine Gift of Forgiveness“: the 5 R’s of repentance
  2. President Russell M. Nelson, “What We Are Learning and Will Never Forget“, April 2021 General Conference: “You may feel that there is still more you need to do to make your home truly a sanctuary of faith. If so, please do it! If you are married, counsel with your wife as your equal partner in this crucial work. There are few pursuits more important than this. Between now and the time the Lord comes again, we all need our homes to be places of serenity and security.

    “Attitudes and actions that invite the Spirit will increase the holiness of your home. Equally certain is the fact that holiness will vanish if there is anything in your behavior or environment that offends the Holy Spirit, for then ‘the heavens withdraw themselves.’

    “Have you ever wondered why the Lord wants us to make our homes the center of gospel learning and gospel living? It is not just to prepare us for, and help us through, a pandemic. Present restrictions on gathering will eventually end. However, your commitment to make your home your primary sanctuary of faith should never end. As faith and holiness decrease in this fallen world, your need for holy places will increase. I urge you to continue to make your home a truly holy place ‘and be not moved‘ from that essential goal.”
  3. Elder Gary E. Stevenson, “The Greatest Easter Story Ever Told“, April 2023 General Conference: “The First Presidency letter was a wake-up call. Not only did they invite all of us to make sure our celebration of the most important event to ever happen on this earth—the Atonement and Resurrection of Jesus Christ—includes the reverence and respect the Lord deserves, but they also gave us more time with our families and friends on Easter Sunday to do so. …

    “New Testament scholar N. T. Wright suggested: ‘We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts. … This is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity.’ …

    “As Lesa and I continued to ponder and seek ways to expand our family Easter celebration to be more Christ-centered, we discussed what scripture reading tradition we might introduce to our family—the Luke 2 equivalent for Easter, if you will.

    “And then we had this heavenly epiphany: In addition to the important verses about Easter in the New Testament, we as Latter-day Saints are endowed with a most remarkable Easter gift! A gift of unique witness, another testament of the Easter miracle that contains perhaps the most magnificent Easter scriptures in all of Christianity. I am referring of course to the Book of Mormon and, more specifically, to the account of Jesus Christ appearing to inhabitants in the New World in His resurrected glory.”
  4. Emily Belle Freeman, Celebrating a Christ-Centered Easter: Seven Traditions to Lead Us Closer to Jesus Christ
  5. Janet and Joe Hales, A Christ-Centered Easter: Day-by-Day Activities to Celebrate Easter Week: “For years I felt that our family’s Easter celebration was as hollow as the chocolate bunnies we devoured on Easter morning. All my life I had been told that the atonement and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the most sacred and significant events in all creation. If that is true, I reasoned, then shouldn’t Easter, the commemoration of those events, be the highlight of our year?” Spurred on by that question, authors Janet and Joe Hales became determined to make Easter the highlight of the year for their family. Their ideas, suggestions, and discoveries are included in this book, A Christ-Centered Easter: Day-by-Day Activities to Celebrate Easter Week.” Suggestion from the book’s intro”One word of advice before you throw out the Easter baskets and chocolate bunnies: don’t. When we began our tradition of a weeklong, Christ-centered Easter celebration, we transformed the egg dying, hunt, and candy into a wonderful Spring Celebration held on the first day of spring. When the warm spring days finally break free from winter, we certainly feel like celebrating. And now we do! We make Spring Baskets and dye Spring Eggs. Because the first day of spring is always before and independent of Easter, we can cheerfully celebrate springtime with our children. They, in turn, do not feel deprived when we later celebrate the actual Easter holiday in a different way.”
  6. Eric D. Huntsman (Director of the BYU Jerusalem Center), God So Loved the World: The Final Days of the Savior’s Life: “Perhaps it is because in most traditions Christmas always falls on December 25 and the date of Easter is different from year to year. Perhaps it is because so many customs make the celebration of the birth of Christ such a happy occasion. For whatever reason, however, in practice Easter is simply not as important as Christmas for most of us. And yet we have Christmas because of Easter. As President Gordon B. Hinckley noted, if the Babe of Bethlehem had not grown up and performed the even greater miracle of the Atonement—conquering both sin and death—the coming of the Son of God into the world would not have the significance, the cosmic and saving importance, that it does.” “While some from Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant backgrounds have strong religious traditions associated with Easter and the days leading up to it, for many people, including Latter-day Saints, the combination of family time, festive decorations and customs, gift-giving, and even the music of Christmas more easily attracts our attention. We understand theologically the significance of Easter, to be sure, but to use the holiday more effectively to commemorate the sacred events that surround it, perhaps we need to choose to celebrate it, or at least prepare for it, a bit differently than we do now.”

What will you do?

How will you take action on the invitations extended in this General Conference address?

Conclusion

The focus of our next podcast episode will be the April 2025 General Conference address that was delivered by Elder Dale G. Renlund and was entitled “Personal Preparation to Meet the Savior.”

As we conclude this episode, we would invite you to refer to the podcast episode details for this podcast episode where we have provided important information for connecting with us and further supporting the General Conference Applied Podcast. The best ways to help us are to like and subscribe to the podcast, to share the podcast with others, to like and share our content on social media, to share your own experiences with us on social media, and especially to contact us on our website.

Please remember that General Conference Applied is meant to be a supplement for your review of General Conference Addresses. We promise that you will get more out of each General Conference Applied episode when you study the General Conference address first.

Thank you for joining us in this effort to become doers of the word and to take action on general conference invitations.

Tags

Easter | Jesus Christ | Light of Christ | Resurrection

Additional Content

Previous Podcast Episode (“Right Before Our Eyes” by Elder Ronald A. Rasband)

Next Podcast Episode (“Personal Preparation To Meet the Savior” by Elder Dale G. Renlund)

All Podcast Episodes

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial