Latest from Sunday’s LDS General Conference: Don’t ‘trivialize’ Jesus, apostle Jeffrey Holland counsels

President Russell M. Nelson, the 100-year-old leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has yet to address this weekend’s General Conference.

If tradition holds, Nelson, who attended one of three sessions Saturday at the Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City, will deliver at least one sermon as the concluding speaker at the final meeting Sunday afternoon.

He viewed Sunday’s morning session from his home, while 92-year-old Dallin H. Oaks, his first counselor in the governing First Presidency and next in line to lead the global faith of 17.2 million members, conducted.

Nelson likely will use that time to reveal the location of new temples. In April, he announced 15 such edifices in a recorded message (though he was present at the session). During his nearly seven-year presidency, Nelson has announced 168, or 48%, of the Utah-based church’s 350 planned or existing temples around the world.

Here are the latest speeches and announcements from Sunday’s two sessions:

Morning session

Bishop L. Todd Budge: Be still and seek the Lord each day

In today’s world of endless tasks, “being still is an act of faith and requires effort,” observed L. Todd Budge, a member of the Presiding Bishopric, which oversees the church’s vast real estate, financial, investment and charitable operations.

Nevertheless, he stressed, doing so is vital for anyone seeking to remain close to God.

Quoting former church President David O. McKay, he explained: “We pay too little attention to the value of meditation, a principle of devotion. ...Meditation is one of the...most sacred doors through which we pass into the presence of the Lord.”

For him, Budge said that the phrase to “be still’ means to to “slow down and to live with greater spiritual awareness.”

In doing so, he told his listeners, “our worship becomes an expression of our love for him.”

General authority Brook P. Hales: Life is a ‘testing ground’

Despite challenges, heartaches and difficulties everyone faces, a loving God “has designed the plan of happiness such that we are not destined to fail,” said Brook P. Hales, a general authority Seventy. “His plan provides a way for us to rise above our mortal failures.”

Seeing human life as a “testing ground,” Latter-day Saints “must expect to be schooled and taught, and to pass through the refiner’s fire — sometimes to our utter limits,” he said. “To completely avoid the problems, challenges and difficulties of this world would be to sidestep the process that is truly necessary for mortality to work.”

As a result of his life’s experiences — good and bad — Hales  hopes he is “kinder to others, treats others as the Savior would, has greater understanding for the sinner, and that I have complete integrity.”

Primary leader Tracy Y. Browning: On obtaining answers to gospel questions

Membership in God’s kingdom is not a passive matter, Tracy Y. Browning, second counselor in the worldwide children’s Primary presidency, told listeners Sunday morning.

“Our residency therein requires aligning our life to divine principles,” explained the first Black woman to serve in a general presidency and the third female speaker during the two-day conference, “and putting in the effort to grow spiritually.”

Part of that growth, she explained, comes from asking questions and patiently working toward answers through scripture study, temple worship and seeking out the words of modern leaders. Further, it requires obedience to God’s commands and putting trust in him.

“Despite all of these efforts,” she noted, “some questions may persist until God, who ‘has all power’ and ‘all wisdom, and all understanding,’ who ‘comprehendeth all things’ in his mercy, provides enlightenment through our belief on his name.”

In 2022, Browning became the first Black woman to speak at General Conference.

Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland: Jesus is not ‘a one-dimensional caricature’

Believers cannot watch Jesus “respond to difficult, often devious situations without bearing witness that he was not and is not a one-dimensional caricature,” declared apostle Jeffrey R. Holland in the opening speech of the second day of the church’s General Conference.

Indeed, said Holland, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, “he is rather a divine being of profoundly rich character.”

The true nature of Jesus, considered by the faithful to be a “refuge from the storm, this prince of peace, and high priest of good things to come,” said the 83-year-old apostle, who spoke while sitting, “challenges our often shallow, very human perception.”

Believers have a tendency “to simplify, sometimes even trivialize, our image of him,” Holland said. “Down through human history, some people have reduced his righteousness to mere prudishness, his justice to mere anger, his mercy to mere permissiveness.”

Latter-day Saints must beware of and not fall for, he said, “any such simplistic versions of him that conveniently ignore teachings we find uncomfortable.”

To best understand this complex Savior, “through abundance as well as poverty, through private acclaim as well as public criticism, through the divine elements of the [church] as well as the human foibles that will inevitably be part of it,” Holland said, members must “stay the course with the true church of Christ.”

After all, he said, members “signed on for the whole term.”