I love the promises I made in connection with my baptism, ordination, endowment, and sealing.1 Each of these covenants is precious to me. I take them seriously and make life choices, big and small, with them in mind. If anything, these covenants have become more, not less, important to me over time.
I wish, however, that I could go back in time and talk to my younger self in the days and weeks leading up to making these covenants. If I could, I would tell myself three things that I think would have made my covenant-making more meaningful while also lowering some of the anxiety sometimes associated with covenant-keeping. Here’s what I would tell myself.
First, keeping your covenants will not save or exalt you.
This is one of the most foundational teachings of Christianity: we are not saved by the works of the law. Like every other appendage of the gospel, the covenants we make are only life-giving if they are connected to the Atonement of Jesus Christ.
Coming out of the temple, I felt like I had a bunch of new laws I had to keep in order to “prove worthy.” The way I framed it, I had to do it all on my own. My exaltation simply came down to whether or not I would keep my covenants. The problem with that formulation is the next thing I would tell my younger self.
Second, you will not keep all your covenants.
I haven’t perfectly kept all the covenants I have made. There are countless times I haven’t borne other people’s burdens or mourned with them the way I should have. I have not stood as a witness of God at all times and in all things. I have not perfectly magnified my callings. I am often selfish with my time, talents, and treasure.
This is the problem with trying to save myself through covenant keeping—it is impossible. As soon as I adopt the mindset of “proving myself worthy” through strict obedience, I have cursed myself.
So is my covenant-making all for naught? “What then?” Paul rhetorically asks the Saints in Rome. “Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” He answers emphatically, “By no means!”2
We make covenants not because we will keep them perfectly and they will save us. Instead, the covenants we make are a way we formalize our personal relationship with God.
The main story of scripture isn’t about our faithfulness to God, but rather God’s faithfulness to us in spite of our faithlessness. God is the hero of the story. It is God who reaches for us, strives for us, is patient with us, forgives us, reconciles with us. No matter how frequently and flagrantly we spurn Him, God has covenanted to take us back.
The third thing I would tell my younger covenant-making self is that the point of the covenants isn’t the covenants.
Covenants aren’t ends in themselves. Each covenant I make is a composite part of one larger goal—to help me become, as C. S. Lewis put it, a “little Christ” by way of emulation.3 Medieval Christians called this imitatio Christi, or the imitation of Christ.
Every covenant we make corresponds to some aspect of Christ’s character. Living our covenants, however imperfectly, helps us become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Bearing one another’s burdens, mourning with those that mourn, comforting those in need of comfort, standing as a witness of God at all times and in all things, magnifying priesthood callings, receiving God, obeying God, sacrificing on behalf of others, being chaste, consecrating everything for the kingdom of God—this is all a primer to walk in Jesus’s footsteps and live like He lived. This isn’t about earning my way to heaven. It’s about taking on Christ’s countenance, little by little, day by day, all as part of a grand “new and everlasting covenant” that is meant to transform me from the inside out.4
My younger self experienced covenants as a cross to bear, forgetting that Jesus already bore the cross. Covenants are meant to be an invitation to a life of holiness, not the imposition of a life of drudgery. Not because I will be perfect in keeping my covenants on my own. Rather, because I have bound myself to Jesus Christ, “the mediator of a new covenant,” whose infinite and eternal grace is more than sufficient for me, for you, and for all of God’s children.5
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Notes
1. See Mosiah 18:8–10; Doctrine & Covenants 84:33–40; “About the Temple Endowment,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples /what-is-temple-endowment?lang=eng; “About Temple Sealings,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/what-happens-in-a -temple-sealing?lang=eng.
2. Romans 6:15, NRSV.
3. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Touchstone, 1996 [1943]), 154.
4. “The scriptures speak of the new and everlasting covenant. The new and everlasting covenant is the gospel of Jesus Christ” (D. Todd Christofferson, “The Power of Covenants,” Ensign, May 2009).
5. Hebrews 9:15, NRSV. See also Moroni 10:32–33.
