We hold in our arms the rising generation. They come to this earth with important responsibilities and great spiritual capacities. We cannot be casual in how we prepare them. Our challenge as parents and teachers is not to create a spiritual core in their souls but rather to fan the flame of their spiritual core already aglow with the fire of their premortal faith.
Entrapments designed by Satan can only bring to you misery, spiritual captivity, and death. This is true every time. The sad consequences of yielding to Lucifer’s lures are predictable, dependable, repeatable, and regrettable.
Conversely, I promise that as you keep God’s commandments, as you live by His laws, you will become increasingly free. This freedom will unveil to you your divine nature and allow you to prosper personally. You will be free from the bondage of sin. You will be free to be you—an effective, righteous leader. You will be prepared to lead by precept and by example wherever you are needed. Happily, the blessings of keeping God’s commandments are also predictable, dependable, and repeatable.
As members of His restored Church, we know that Jesus Christ, our Master, is our ultimate Mentor. As a true millennial, you were born to be a true disciple of Jesus Christ. In fact, the only way to be a true millennial is to be one of His true disciples!
Your responsibility to the Lord to help gather the elect out of the moral chaos and the swirling preponderance of sin in our day is no small undertaking. Lucifer and his minions are using every form of technology and communication to spread lies about life and about the true source of happiness. Thus, to do what you came to earth to do will require the finest leadership skills your generation can muster.
Thankfully, we have superb models to follow. While the world may look to the considerable leadership abilities of men and women such as Napoleon, Joan of Arc, George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and others, I believe that the finest leaders to have walked the earth are the prophets of God.
To date, 16 men have been chosen by the Lord to be Presidents of His Church, restored in this dispensation—this culminating dispensation in the history of the earth. I have personally known 10 of those 16 men. (That says more about my age than anything else. Let’s just put it this way: I no longer buy green bananas.)
Now, if you are serious about rising up as a true millennial, I urge you to study the lives and teachings of these 16 prophets of God. That study will change your life.
AI can help us plan activities, translate messages, organize our schedule. But then let us spend our best energy with people. Computer-assisted tools can help connect us with family, past and present, what we call family history or genealogy. I love that we may feel alone in the world until family history and genealogy deeply connect us with family we may have never known.
If AI can help your work, please consider using it. But please recognize the difference between AI helping tutor you to enhance your understanding and you simply having AI do your homework with little benefit to your learning. If we let it, AI can let us slip into being lazy, dependent, perhaps dishonest. Please do not let AI replace you in work that would otherwise help you stretch and grow. And please do not take credit and claim as your own work what you know AI has primarily done.
When we apply the principle of individual growth through our work and effort, AI can enhance, deepen, enliven our creativity and capacity. As a tool well used, AI can help us. This is especially true when we’re doing and growing through our efforts and work, specifically in a religious setting. We do not grow spiritually if we let AI write our talks or lessons or do our seminary or institute homework.
While AI can be a useful tool for online research, editing, translation, and other tasks, we should not use AI to create or write our initial drafts or final versions of our spiritual messages.
Genesis chapter 11 recounts the time when men with one language and one speech said, “Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven. ... Therefore is the name of it called Babel.” In this biblical account of the Tower of Babel, we understand God’s displeasure at the human arrogance of men who thought they could build a physical tower to rival heaven.
A Jewish chief rabbi adds an interpretation from the Midrash, the traditional commentary on the Torah. This reading of the Midrash says, “Frenzied to build a physical tower, men wept more when clay bricks were broken than when human beings making the bricks died.” When men promoted material things like clay bricks and towers above the lives and values of human individuals, it is no wonder the God of heaven grieved.
We begin at the beginning. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. ... And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.” You may or may not consider yourself spiritual or religious, but each of us has personal moments of reflection, reverence, even transcendence. We feel present. We feel purpose and connection. This occurs in part because all things denote and bear record of their Creator. Put another way, God is God. Some talk too glibly about AI “becoming God” or “godlike AI.” Even if AI training changes or if we achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence) or ASI (artificial superintelligence), we know reasoning, even superhuman reasoning, has limitations. Man is not, and certainly divinity is not, defined solely by reasoning.
AI is not and cannot be God. AI can answer questions, but it cannot answer prayers. It may organize thoughts, but it cannot offer covenant relationships or blessings. Platforms and technologies cannot substitute for authentic, divine, and human connection.
I am the only man living in the flesh that received endowments under the hands of the Prophet Joseph Smith. I am the only man in the flesh that was with the Twelve Apostles when he turned over the kingdom of God to them and laid upon them the commandment to bear off this kingdom. He stood for some three hours in a room delivering to us his last lecture. The room was filled as with consuming fire. His face was as clear as amber; his words were like vivid lightning to us. They penetrated every part of our bodies from the crown of our head to the soles of our feet. He said, ‘Brethren, the Lord Almighty has sealed upon my head every Priesthood, every key, every power, every principle that belongs to the last dispensation of the fulness of times, and to the building up of the kingdom of God. I have sealed upon your heads all those principles, Priesthood, apostleship, and keys of the kingdom of God, and now you have got to round up your shoulders and bear off this kingdom or you will be damned.’ I do not forget those words—I never shall while I live. That was the last speech he ever made in the flesh. Soon afterward he was martyred and called home to glory.”
I consider that the building of temples is one of the important things required by the Lord of the Latter-day Saints in the dispensation of the fulness of times, that we may go into those temples and not only redeem the living but redeem our dead.
In his continuing efforts to strengthen the Church, serve in the community, and provide for his family, Wilford Woodruff followed principles he had learned from his hardworking father. Elder Franklin D. Richards of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said that Elder Woodruff was “noted for his activity, industry and physical endurance. Though not a large man, he was able to perform labors that would have prostrated men of ordinary physique.
Wilford Woodruff’s search ended when he was 26 years old. On December 29, 1833, he heard a sermon preached by Elder Zera Pulsipher, a Latter-day Saint missionary. In his journal he described his response to Elder Pulsipher’s sermon:
“He commenced the meeting with some introductory remarks and then prayed. I felt the Spirit of God to bear witness that he was the servant of God. He then commenced preaching, and that too as with authority, and when he had finished his discourse I truly felt that it was the first gospel sermon that I had ever heard. I thought it was what I had long been looking for. I could not feel it my duty to leave the house without bearing witness to the truth before the people. I opened my eyes to see, my ears to hear, my heart to understand, and my doors to entertain him who had administered unto us.”
Wilford Woodruff invited Elder Pulsipher and his companion, Elijah Cheney, to stay in the Woodruff home. Two days later, having spent some time reading the Book of Mormon and meeting with the missionaries, Brother Woodruff was baptized and confirmed a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From that day his life changed. Having found the truth, he dedicated himself to bringing it to others.
My soul was drawn out upon these things,” he said. “In my early manhood I prayed day and night that I might live to see a prophet. I would have gone a thousand miles to have seen a prophet, or a man that could teach me the things that I read of in the Bible. I could not join any church, because I could not find any church at that time that advocated these principles. I spent many a midnight hour, by the river side, in the mountains, and in my mill … calling upon God that I might live to see a prophet or some man that would teach me of the things of the kingdom of God as I read them.
