AUTHOR’S NOTE: This lesson will not follow precisely the format of the lesson in the manual for Gospel Doctrine. I want to provide some insights and background to the excellent material contained in the Church’s publication. Please do not teach this lesson at the expense of that one. The manual provided by the Church is your main and most important non-scriptural resource. This lesson is clearly of lesser value and inspiration, but I hope it will help you in understanding what happened to Israel in the wilderness and at Mount Sinai.

We speak about “excellence” a great deal, but by definition, excellence does not come easily or quickly—an excellent education does not; a successful mission does not; a strong, loving marriage does not; rewarding personal relationships do not. It is simply a truism that nothing very valuable can come without sacrifice and effort and patience on our part. Perhaps you discovered that when you got your last grades. Maybe you are also finding that many of the most hoped-for rewards in life can seem an awfully long time coming.

Here are a few times when famous people were mentioned in general conference and why.

If I were teaching this lesson, I might begin by pouring water into several different shaped containers and asking class members to comment on what we can learn from that activity about the qualities of water. Someone will probably say that water takes the shape of its environment. If you then ask for words that describe water, you might get words like these: flimsy, unsound, mercurial, capricious, changeable, wobbly, fickle, erratic, unreliable, undependable, vacillating, untrustworthy, variable, mutable, impermanent, unsteady, uncertain, transitory, ephemeral, inconsistent, precarious, and unstable. I am amazed at how many words the English language has to describe this rather undesirable characteristic. But this lesson will require us to think about them because we are going to talk about three people who were much like water (one was even compared to water), and one young man who was as unlike water as it is possible to be.

August 15 marks the anniversary of the Prophet Joseph Smith's first public announcement of the beautiful doctrine of baptism for the dead.

To most of us, leprosy is a disease that only existed in Biblical times and meant misery and exile. But to Latter-day Saints in a small Hawaiian leprosy settlement known as Kalaupapa, the disease meant a community of unity, coupled with a faith in God that neither they nor their neighbors would trade for anything.

"While our own families are our most important responsibility, every family on the earth is in need of the vital blessings that come from living true principles."

Over and over the Lord has indicated that the day of His coming is soon—and yet we are still waiting for their fulfillment.

A series of remarkable promptings and experiences led a world-class cellist back to the faith she’d decidedly left more than 20 years earlier.

Learn more about the inspiring new novel The Rent Collector, or enter to win a copy in our September/October giveaway.