Last updated on April 29th, 2025 at 09:00 am
General Conference Applied
S5 E5 – Sunday, April 27, 2025 | “As a Little Child” by President Jeffrey R. Holland; April 2025 General Conference
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Podcast Episode Outline
Introduction
Bio
- President Jeffrey R. Holland, “Motions of a Hidden Fire“, April 2024 General Conference: “Another experience began 48 hours after my wife’s burial. At that time, I was rushed to the hospital in an acute medical crisis. I then spent the first four weeks of a six-week stay in and out of intensive care and in and out of consciousness.
“Virtually all my experience in the hospital during that first period is lost to my memory. What is not lost is my memory of a journey outside the hospital, out to what seemed the edge of eternity. I cannot speak fully of that experience here, but I can say that part of what I received was an admonition to return to my ministry with more urgency, more consecration, more focus on the Savior, more faith in His word.
“I couldn’t help but feel I was receiving my own personal version of a revelation given to the Twelve nearly 200 years ago:
“‘Thou shalt bear record of my name … [and] send forth my word unto the ends of the earth. …
“‘… Morning by morning; and day after day let thy warning voice go forth; and when the night cometh let not the inhabitants of the earth slumber, because of thy speech. …
“‘Arise[,] … take up your cross, [and] follow me.’
“My beloved sisters and brothers, since that experience, I have tried to take up my cross more earnestly, with more resolve to find where I can raise an apostolic voice of both warmth and warning in the morning, during the day, and into the night.” - This was President Holland’s 63rd general conference address. His most recent address was “‘I Am He’” from the October 2024 General Conference.
Discussion Questions
- What is the Lord, through President Holland, inviting us to do?
- Because “Jesus began the last year of His mortal life by intensifying the training of His Apostles,” should we also expect our training to intensify as the Savior’s Second Coming approaches?
- What can we learn from Easton Darrin Jolley’s story?
- Can you state with President Holland that “coming from a lifetime of reading, I bear witness that the Book of Mormon is the most rewarding book I have ever read and the keystone of my little dwelling in a kingdom of many mansions”?
- Why is laughter so important to our wellbeing?
“Jesus began the last year of His mortal life by intensifying the training of His Apostles. If His message and His Church were to survive Him, more had to be pressed into the hearts of 12 very ordinary men who had known Him for scarcely 24 months.
“One day Jesus witnessed an argument among the Twelve and later asked, ‘What was it that ye disputed among yourselves?’ Apparently embarrassed, they ‘held their peace,’ the record says. But this greatest of all teachers perceived the thoughts of their hearts and sensed the first blush of personal pride. So He ‘called a little child unto him, …
“‘And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
What is the speaker inviting me to do?
- In my own words: Become as a little child: “love … easily, … forgive … readily, [and] … laugh … delightfully.”
Why does it matter, or why is it important? (Doctrines, Principles, Christlike Attributes)
- Christlike Attribute: “I strive to be submissive to God’s will. (Mosiah 24:15)” (Humility)
- “[15] And now it came to pass that the burdens which were laid upon Alma and his brethren were made light; yea, the Lord did strengthen them that they could bear up their burdens with ease, and they did submit cheerfully and with patience to all the will of the Lord.”
What’s in it for us? (Promises)
- No promises identified.
How will we take action? (Directives, Personal Revelation)
- “Children love so easily, they forgive so readily, they laugh so delightfully.” -President Holland
- Mitch:
- “The Hero of Ages” by Brandon Sanderson: “‘The world appears to be ending. That is an indisputably depressing event.’ Elend shook his head. ‘We can survive this, but the only way that will happen is if our people don’t give up. They need leaders who laugh, leaders who feel that this fight can be won. So this is what I ask of you – I don’t care if you’re an optimist or a pessimist, I don’t care if secretly you think we’ll all be dead before the month ends. On the outside, I want to see you smiling. Do it in defiance if you have to. If the end does come, I want this group to meet that end smiling as the Survivor taught us.'”
- I will strive to laugh more.
“‘Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’
“It should be noted that even before Christ’s birth, King Benjamin’s farewell sermon included this profound comment on a child’s humility. It says, ‘The natural man is an enemy to God, … and will be, forever and ever, unless he … becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, … humble, … full of love, … even as a child [responds] to his father.’
“Now, there are obviously some infantile inclinations we don’t encourage. Twenty-five years ago, my then-three-year-old grandson bit his five-year-old sister on the arm. My son-in-law, caring for the children that night, frantically taught his daughter all the lessons on forgiveness he could think of, concluding that her little brother probably didn’t even know what a bite on the arm felt like. That ill-conceived fatherly comment worked for about a minute, maybe a minute and a half, until there was a window-rattling cry from the children’s bedroom, where my granddaughter calmly called out, ‘He does now.’
“So what is it that we are to see in the virtues of life’s junior varsity? What was it that brought Christ Himself to tears in the most tender scene in the entire Book of Mormon? What was Jesus teaching when He called down heavenly fire and protective angels to surround those children, commanding the adults to ‘behold [their] little ones’?
“We don’t know what prompted all of that, but I have to think it had something to do with their purity and innocence, their inborn humility, and what it could bring to our lives if we retain it.
- “Christ and the New Covenant: The Messianic Message of the Book of Mormon” by Jeffrey R. Holland: “As he had done the first and second days, so too on the third he again ministered to the children, loosing their tongues and filling their hearts with spiritual truths. As a result, not only children but also babes in arms ‘did open their mouths and utter marvelous things; and the things which they did utter were forbidden that there should not any man write them.’
“It is significant that in each of the three days of his Nephite ministry, Christ had a singular spiritual experience with children. Those experiences, linking each of the days of his Nephite ministry, trumpet again the truth that Christ taught in the Old World as well as the New, that ‘of such is the kingdom of heaven.’
“From that time forth, the disciples began to teach, baptize, and confer the Holy Ghost upon as many as sought the privilege. The new converts, as with the children whom they were like in many ways, ‘saw and heard unspeakable things, which [were] not lawful to be written.’ With such conversion and infusion of the Spirit, all self-centeredness and vanity were swept away, and they did ‘minister one to another; and they had all things common among them, every man dealing justly, one with another. And it came to pass that they did do all things even as Jesus had commanded them.'” - It seems to me that the centuries of Nephite peace came because the people became like little children. They did not become “childish,” they became “childlike,” just as Bishop L. Todd Budge spoke of President Russell M. Nelson.
“Why are our days of despair labeled by one as ‘vanity of vanities’? How is it that ‘vain imaginations and the pride of the children of men’ are the words that characterize the great and spacious building, so spiritually dead in Lehi’s vision? And the Zoramites, that group who prayed so self-servingly? Of them Alma said, ‘O God, they [pray] unto thee with their mouths, while they are puffed up … with the vain things of the world.’
“By contrast, is there anything sweeter, more pure, or more humble than a child at prayer? It is as if heaven is in the room. God and Christ are so real, but for others later on, the experience can become more superficial.
“As Elder Richard L. Evans quoted some 60 years ago: ‘Many of us profess to be Christians, yet we … do not take Him seriously. … We respect Him, but we don’t follow Him. … We quote His sayings, but we don’t live by them.’ ‘We admire Him, but we don’t worship Him.’
- “The Screwtape Letters” by C. S. Lewis: “The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether. When the patient is an adult recently re-converted to the Enemy’s party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood. In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularized; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part. One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray ‘with moving lips and bended knees’ but merely ‘composed his spirit to love’ and indulged ‘a sense of supplication’. That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practiced by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time. At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
- Elder Robert M. Daines, “Sir, We Would Like to See Jesus“, October 2023 General Conference: “That is what we all want—we want to see Jesus for who He is and to feel His love. This should be the reason for most of what we do in the Church—and certainly of every sacrament meeting. If you’re ever wondering what kind of lesson to teach, what kind of meeting to plan, and whether to just give up on the deacons and play dodgeball, you might take this verse as your guide: will this help people see and love Jesus Christ? If not, maybe try something else.”
“How different life could be if the world esteemed Jesus above the level of a profane swearing streak from time to time.
“But children really do love Him, and that love can carry over into their other relationships in the playground of life. As a rule, even in their youngest years, children love so easily, they forgive so readily, they laugh so delightfully that even the coldest, hardest heart can melt.
“Well, the list goes on and on. Purity? Trust? Courage? Character?
“Come with me to view the humility before God demonstrated by one young, very dear friend of mine.
“On January 5, 2025—91 days ago—Easton Darrin Jolley had the Aaronic Priesthood conferred upon him and was ordained a deacon in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Easton had longed to pass the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper for as long as he could remember. But this sacred opportunity was accompanied by the stomach-wrenching fear that he would fail, that he would fall, that he would be teased or embarrass himself and his family.
“You see, Easton has a rare and very destructive illness, Ullrich congenital muscular dystrophy. It has progressively filled his young life with formidable challenges while shattering his hopes and dreams for the future. He will soon be in a wheelchair permanently. His family does not talk about what awaits him after that.
“The Sunday after his ordination, Easton would pass the sacrament for the first time. And his privately held motivation was that he could present himself and these sacred emblems to his father, who was the bishop of the ward. In anticipating that task, he had begged and pled and wept and begged, extracting a guarantee that no one, no one, would try to help him. For many reasons, private to himself, he needed to do this alone and unaided.
“After the priest had broken the bread and blessed it—an emblem representing the broken body of Christ—Easton, with his broken body, limped up to receive his tray. However, there were three sizable steps from the meetinghouse floor to the elevated stand. So, after receiving his tray, he stretched up as high as he could and placed his tray on the surface above the handrail. Then, sitting down on one of the higher steps, with both hands he pulled his right leg up onto the first step. Then he pulled his left leg onto the same step, and so on up until, arduously, he was at the summit of his personal three-step Mount Everest.
“He then maneuvered himself to a structural post by which he could climb to a standing position. He made his way back to the tray. A few more steps and he stood in front of the bishop, his father, who, with tears drenching his eyes and flooding down his face, had to restrain himself from embracing this perfectly courageous and faithful son. And Easton, with relief and a broad smile consuming his face, might well have said, ‘I have glorified [my father and] have finished the work [he gave] me to do.’
“Faith, loyalty, purity, trust, honor, and, in the end, love for that father he so wished to please. These and a dozen other qualities make us also say, ‘Whosoever … shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’
“Sisters and brothers and friends, at the top of the list of the most beautiful images I know are babies and children and youth as conscientious and priceless as those we have referred to today. I testify that they are images of the kingdom of God flourishing on earth in all of its strength and beauty.
“In that same spirit of testimony, I bear witness that in his youth, Joseph Smith saw what he said he saw and conversed with those with whom he said he spoke. I testify that a humble and pure Russell M. Nelson is God’s ordained and gifted prophet and seer. Coming from a lifetime of reading, I bear witness that the Book of Mormon is the most rewarding book I have ever read and the keystone of my little dwelling in a kingdom of many mansions. I bear witness that priesthood and prayer are restoring my life—Christ’s priesthood and your prayers. I know all this to be true and bear witness of it in the name of the most loyal and humble of all God’s sons—Alpha and Omega, the Great I Am, the crucified, the faithful witness—even the Lord Jesus Christ, amen.”
- “Christ and the New Covenant: The Messianic Message of the Book of Mormon” by Jeffrey R. Holland: “I have read a reasonable number of books in my life, and I hope to read many more. I am not steeped in scholarship, but I can recognize profundity in print, especially when I see it page after page. In a lifetime of reading, the Book of Mormon stands preeminent in my intellectual and spiritual life, the classic of all classics, a reaffirmation of the Holy Bible, a voice from the dust, a witness for Christ, the word of the Lord unto salvation. I testify of that as surely as if I had, with the Three Witnesses, seen the angel Moroni or, with the Three and the Eight Witnesses, seen and handled the plates of gold.
“The Book of Mormon is the sacred expression of Christ’s great last covenant with mankind. It is a new covenant, a new testament from the New World to the entire world. Reading it was the beginning of my light. It was the source of my first spiritual certainty that God lives, that he is my Heavenly Father, and that a plan of happiness was outlined in eternity for me. It led me to love the Holy Bible and the rest of the Standard Works of the church. It taught me to love the Lord Jesus Christ, to glimpse his merciful compassion, and to consider the grace and grandeur of his atoning sacrifice for my sins and the sins of all men, women, and children from Adam to the end of time. The light I walk by is his light. His mercy and magnificence lead me in my witness of him to the world.”
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 Dieter F. Uchtdorf and was entitled “‘By This All Will Know That You Are My Disciples’“.
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Tags
Children | Humility | Jesus Christ | Purity
Additional Content
Previous Podcast Episode (“‘Draw Near Unto Me'” by President Henry B. Eyring)
Next Podcast Episode (“By This All Will Know That You Are My Disciples” by Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf)