Since the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the 
Prophet Joseph Smith until 23 September 1995, The Church of Jesus Christ 
of Latter-Day Saints has issued a proclamation only four times.  It has 
been more than fifteen years since the last one, which described the 
progress the Church had made in 150 years of its history.  Thus, you can 
imagine the importance our Heavenly Father places upon the subject of 
this most recent proclamation.
	Because our Father loves his children, he will not leave us to 
guess about what matters most in this life concerning where our attention 
could bring happiness or our indifference bring sadness.  Sometimes he 
will tell us directly, by inspiration.  But he will, in addition, tell us 
through his servants.  In the words of a prophet named Amos, recorded 
long ago,  "Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his 
secrets to his servants the prophets."  (Amos 3:7).  He does that so that 
even those who cannot feel inspiration can know, if they will only 
listen, that they have been told the truth and been warned.  
	The title of the proclamation reads:  "The Family:  A 
Proclamation to the World--The First Presidency and Council of the Twelve 
Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" (see Ensign, 
Nov. 1995, p. 102).
	Three things about the title are worth our careful reflection.  
First, the subject: the family.  Second, the audience, which is the whole 
world.  And third, those who proclaimed are those we sustain as prophets, 
seers, and revelators.  That means that the family must be as important 
to us as anything we can consider, that what the proclamation says could 
help anyone in the world, and that the proclamation fits the Lord's 
promise when he said, "Whether by mine own voice or the voice of my 
servants, it is the same" (D&C 1:38).
	Before we start to listen to the words of the proclamation 
together, the title tells us something about how to prepare.  We can 
expect that God won't just tell us a few interesting things about the 
family; he will tell us what a family ought to be and why.  And we know 
at the outset that we could be easily overwhelmed with such thoughts as:  
"This is so high a standard and I am so weak that I can never hope for 
such a family."  That feeling can come because what our Heavenly Father 
and his son Jesus Christ want for us is to become like them so that we 
can dwell with them forever, in families.  We know that from this simple 
statement of their intent:  "This is my work and my glory--to bring to 
pass the immortality and eternal life of man."  (Moses 1:39).
	Eternal life means to become like the father and to live in 
families in happiness and joy forever, so of course what he wants for us 
will require help beyond our powers.  that feeling of our inadequacy can 
make it easier to repent and to be ready to rely on the Lord's help.
	The fact that the proclamation goes to all the world--to every 
person and government in it--gives us assurance that we need not ve 
overwhelmed.  whoever we are, however difficult our circumstances, we can 
know that what our Father commands we do to qualify for the blessings of 
eternal life will not be beyond us.  What a young boy said long ago when 
he faced a seemingly impossible assignment is true:  
	"I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of 
men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the 
thing which he commandeth them" (1 Nephi 3:7).
	We may have to pray with faith to know what we are to do and we 
must pray with a determination to obey, but we can know what to do and be 
sure that the way has been prepared for us by the Lord.  As we read of 
what the proclamation tells us about the family, we can expect, in fact 
we must expect, impressions to come to our minds as to what we are to do, 
and we can be confident it is possible.
	The proclamation begins this way:
	"We the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles 
of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim 
that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the 
family is central to the Creator's plan for the eternal destiny of His 
Children."
	Try to imagine yourself as a little child, hearing those words 
for the first time, and believing that they are true.  This can be a 
useful attitude whenever we read or hear the word of God because he has 
told us, "Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom 
of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein" (Luke 18:17).
	A little child would feel safe hearing the words that marriage 
between a man and woman is ordained of God.  The child would know that 
the longing to have the love of both a father and a mother, distinct but 
somehow perfectly complementary, exists because that is the eternal 
pattern, the pattern of happiness.  The child would also feel safer 
knowing that God would help mother and father resolve differences and 
love each other, if only they will ask for his help and try.  Prayers of 
children across the earth would go up to God, pleading for his help for 
parents and for families.
	Read in that same way, as if you were a little child, to the next 
words of the proclamation: 
	"All human beings--male and female--are created in the image of 
God.  Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, 
as such, each has a divine nature and destiny.  Gender is an essential 
characteristic of individual premoral, mortal, and eternal identity and 
purpose.
	"In the premortal realm, spirit sons and daughters knew and 
worshiped God as their Eternal Father and accepted His plan by which His 
children could obtain a physical body and gain earthly experience to 
progress toward perfection and ultimately realize his or her divine 
destiny as an heir of eternal life.  The divine plan of happiness enables 
family relationships to be perpetuated beyond the grave.  Sacred 
ordinances and covenants available in holt temples make it possible for 
individuals to return to the presence of God and for families to be 
united eternally."
	Understanding these truths ought to make it easier for us to feel 
like a little child, not just as we read the proclamation, but throughout 
our lives, because we are children--but in what a family and of what 
parents!  We can picture ourselves as we were, for longer than we can 
imagine, sons and daughters associating in our heavenly home with parents 
who knew and loved us.  But now we can see ourselves home again with our 
heavenly parents, in that wonderful place, not only as sons and daughters 
but husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, grandfathers and 
grandmothers, grandsons and granddaughters, bound together forever in 
loving families.  And we know that in the premortal world we were men or 
women, with unique gifts because of our gender, and that the opportunity 
to be married, and to become one was necessary for us to have eternal 
happiness.
	With that picture before us we can never be tempted even to 
think, "Maybe I wouldn't like eternal life.  Maybe I would be just as 
happy in some other place in life after death.  I've geard that even the 
lowest kingdoms are more beautiful than anything we have ever seen."
	We must have the goal not just in our minds but in our hearts.  
What we want is eternal life in families.  We don't just want it if that 
is what words out, nor do we want something approaching eternal families. 
 We want eternal life, whatever its cost in effort, pain, and sacrifice.  
Whenever we are tempted to make eternal life our hope instead of our 
determination, we might think of a building I took a look at a few weeks 
ago.
	I was in Boston.  For a little nostalgia, I walked up to the 
front of the boarding house I was living in when I met Kathleen, who is 
now my wife.  that was a long time ago, so I expected to find the house a 
little more dilapidated than it was, since I seem to be a little more 
dilapidated.  But to our surprise, it was freshly painted and much 
renovated.  A university has purchased it from the Sopers, the people who 
owned it and ran it as a boarding house.
	The building was locked, so we couldn't get in to see the back 
room on the top floor, which once was mine.  Costs have changed, so this 
will be hard for you to believe, but this was the deal the Sopers gave 
me:  My own large room and bath, furniture and sheets provided, maid 
service, six big breakfasts and five wonderful dinners a week, at the 
price of $21 a week.  More than that, the meals were ample and prepared 
with such skill that we called our landlady with some affection, "Ma 
Soper."  Just talking about it with you makes me realize that I didn't 
thank Mrs. Soper often enough, nor Mr. Soper and their daughter, since it 
must have been some burden to have twelve single men to dinner every week 
night.
	Now, you aren't tempted by that description of a boarding house, 
and neither am I.  It could have the most spacious rooms, the best 
service, and the finest eleven men you could ever know as fellow boarders 
and we wouldn't want to live there more than a short while.  If it were 
beautiful beyond our power to imagine, we wouldn't want to live there 
forever, single, if we have even the dimmest memory of the faintest 
vision of a family with beloved parents and children, like the one from 
which we came to this earth and the one which is our destiny to form and 
to live in forever.  There is only one place where there are will be 
families--the highest degree of the celestial kingdom.  That is where we 
will want to be.
	A child hearing and believing those words would begin a lifetime 
of looking for a holy temple where ordinances and covenants perpetuate 
family relationships beyond the grave and would begin a striving to 
become worthy, and to find a potential mate who has become worthy of such 
ordinances.  The words of the proclamation make it clear that to receive 
those blessings requires some sort of perfecting experiences.  A child 
might not sense at first, but soon would learn, that all the making of 
resolutions and trying harder can produce only faltering progress toward 
perfection.  With age will come temptations to acts that create feelings 
of guilt.  Every child will someday feel those pangs of conscience, as we 
all have.  And those who feel that priceless sense of guilt and cannot 
shake it may despair, sensing that eternal life requires a progress 
toward perfection that seems increasingly to be beyond them.  So you and 
I will resolve to speak to someone who doesn't yet know what we know 
about how that perfection is produced.  We will do that because we know 
that someday they will want what we want, and will then realize that we 
were their brother or sister, and that we knew the way to eternal life.  
Tonight and tomorrow it won't be hard to be a member missionary if you 
think of that future moment when they and we will see things as they 
really are.
	Some other words in the proclamation will have special meaning 
for us, knowing what we know about eternal life.  They are in the next 
two paragraphs:
	"The first commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve pertained to 
their potential for parenthood as husband and wife.  We declare that 
God's commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth 
remains in force.  We further declare that God has commanded that the 
sacred powers
of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully 
wedded as husband and wife.
	"We declare the means by which mortal life is created to be 
divinely appointed.  We affirm the sanctity of life and of its importance 
in God's eternal plan."
	Believing those words, a child could spot easily the mistakes in 
reasoning made by adults.  For instance, apparently wise and powerful 
people blame poverty and famine on there being too many people in some 
parts of the earth or in all the earth.  With great passion they argue 
for limiting births as if that will produce human happiness.  A child 
believing the proclamation will know that cannot be so, even before 
hearing these words from the Lord through his prophet, Joseph Smith:  
"For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared 
all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto 
themselves: (D&C 104:17).
	A child could see that Heavenly Father would not command men and 
women to marry and to multiply and replenish the earth if the children 
they invited into mortality would deplete the earth.  Since there is 
enough and to spare, the enemy of human happiness as well as the cause of 
poverty and starvation is not the birth of children.  It is the failure 
of people to do with the earth what God could teach them to do, if only 
they would ask and then obey, for they are agents unto themselves.
	We would also see that the commandment to be chaste, to employ 
the powers of procreation only as husband and wife, is not limiting but 
rather expanding and exalting.  Children are the inheritance of the Lord 
to us in this life, but also in eternity.  Eternal life is not only to 
have forever our descendants from this life.  It is also to have eternal 
increase.  This is the description of what awaits those of us married as 
husband and wife by a servant of God with authority to offer us the 
sacred sealing ordinances.  Here are the words of the Lord:
	"It shall be done unto them in all things whatsoever my servant 
hath put upon them, in time, and through all eternity; and shall be of 
full force when they are out of the world; and they shall pass by the 
angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory 
in all things, as hath been sealed upon their heads, which glory shall be 
a fullness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever.
	"Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore 
shall they be from everlasting to everlasting" (D&C 132:19-20).
	Now you can see why our Father in Heaven puts such a high 
standard before us in using procreative powers whose continuation is at 
the heart of eternal life.  He told us what that was worth this way:
	"And, if you keep my commandments and endure to the end you shall 
have eternal life, which gift is the greatest of all the gifts of God" 
(D&C 14:7).
	We can understand why our Heavenly Father commands us to 
reverence life and to cherish the powers that produce it as sacred.  If 
we do not have those feelings in this life, how could our Father give 
them to us in the eternities?  Family life here is the schoolroom in 
which we prepare for family life there.  And to give us the opportunity 
for family life there was and is the purpose of creation.  That is why 
the coming of Elijah was described this way:
	"And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises 
made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their 
fathers.  If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at 
his coming" (Joseph Smith History 1:39).
	For some of us, the test in that schoolroom of mortality will be 
to want marriage and children in this life, with all our hearts, but to 
have it delayed or denied.  Even such a sorrow can be turned to blessing 
by a just and loving Father and his Son, Jesus Christ.  No one who 
strives with full faith and heart for the blessings of eternal life will 
be denied.  And how great will be the joy and how much deeper the 
appreciation then after enduring in patience and faith now.
	The proclamation describes our schooling here for family life in 
the presence of our Eternal Father:
	"Husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care 
for each other and for their children.  'Children are an heritage of the 
Lord' (Psalms 127:3).  Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children 
in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual 
needs, to teach them to love and serve one another, to observe the 
commandments of God and to be law-abiding citizens wherever they live.  
Husbands and wives--mothers and fathers--will be held accountable before 
God for the Discharge of these obligations.
	"The family is ordained of God.  Marriage between man and woman 
is essential to His eternal plan.  Children are entitled to birth within 
the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who 
honor marital vows with complete fidelity.  Happiness in family life is 
most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord 
Jesus Christ.  Successful marriages and families are established and 
maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, 
respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.  
By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and 
righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and 
protection for their families.  Mothers are primarily responsible for the 
nurture of their children.  In these sacred responsibilities, fullness 
and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners.  
Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual 
adaptation.  Extended families should lend support when needed."
	Those two paragraphs are filled with practical implications.  
There are things we can start to do now.  They have to do with providing 
for the spiritual and the physical needs of a family.  There are things 
we can do now to prepare, long before the need, so that we can be at 
peace knowing we have done all we can.
	To begin with, we can decide to plan for success, not failure.  
Statistics are thrown at us every day to persuade us that a family 
composed of a loving father and mother with children loved, taught, and 
cared for in the way the proclamation enjoins is going the way of the 
dinosaurs, toward extinction.  You have enough evidence in your won 
families that righteous people sometimes have their families ripped apart 
by the ideal rather than what might be forced upon you by circumstances.
	There are important ways in which planning for failure can make 
failure more likely and the ideal less so.  Consider these twin 
commandments as an example:  "Fathers are to . . . provide the 
necessities of life . . . for their families" and "mothers are primarily 
responsible for the nurture of their children."  Knowing how hard that 
might be, a young man might choose a career on the basis of how much 
money he could make, even if it meant he couldn't be home enough to be an 
equal partner.  By doing that, he has already decided he cannot hope to 
do what would be best.  A young woman might prepare for a career 
incompatible with being primarily responsible for the nurture of her 
children, because of the possibilities of not marrying, of not having 
children, or of being left alone to provide for them herself.  Or, she 
might fail to focus her education on the gospel and knowledge of the 
world that nurturing a family would require, not realizing that the 
highest and best use she could make of her talents and her education 
would be in her home.  Because a young man and woman had planned to take 
care of the worst, they might make the best less likely.
	They are both wise to worry about the physical needs of that 
future family.  The costs of buying a home, compared to average salaries, 
seem to be rising and jobs harder to hold.  But there are other ways the 
young man and the young woman could think about preparing to provide for 
that future family.  Income is only one part of it.  Have you noticed 
husbands and wives who feel pinched for lack of money, then choose ways 
to make their family income keep rising, and then find that the pinch is 
there whatever the income?  There is an old formula you've heard, which 
goes something like this:  Income five dollars and expenses six dollars: 
misery.  Income four dollars and expenses three dollars happiness.
	Whether the young man can provide and still be in the home and 
whether the young woman can be there to nurture children can depend as 
much on how they learn to spend as how they learn to earn.  Brigham Young 
said it this way, speaking to us as much as he did to the people in his 
day:
	"If you wish to get rich, save what you get.  A fool can earn 
money; but it takes a wise man to save and dispose of it to his own 
advantage.  Then go to work, and save everything, and make your won 
bonnets and clothing" (Journal of Discourses, 11:201).
	In today's world, instead of telling you to make bonnets, he 
might suggest you think carefully about what you really need in cars, and 
recreation, and houses, and vacations, and whatever else you will someday 
try to provide for your children.  And he might point out that the 
difference in cost between what the world tells you is necessary and what 
your children really need could allow you the margin in time that a 
father and a mother might need with their children to bring them home to 
their Heavenly Father.
	Even the most frugal spending habits and the most careful 
planning for employment may not be enough to ensure success, but it could 
be enough to allow you the peace that comes from knowing you did the best 
you could to provide and to nurture.
	There is another way we could plan to succeed, despite the 
difficulties that might lie before us.  The proclamation sets a high 
hurdle for us to clear when it describes our obligation to teach our 
children.  We are somehow to teach them so that they love one another and 
serve one another and keep the commandments and are law-abiding citizens. 
 If we think of good families who have not met that test, and few meet it 
without some degree of failure over a generation or two, we could lose 
heart.
	We cannot control what others choose to do, and so we cannot 
force our children to heaven, but we can determine what we will do.  And 
we can decide that we will do all that we can to bring down the powers of 
heaven into that family we want so much to have forever.
	A key for us is in the proclamation in this sentence:  "Happiness 
in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the 
teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ."
	What could make it more likely that people in a family would love 
and serve one another, observe the commandments of God, and obey the law? 
 It is not simply teaching them the gospel.  It is in their hearing the 
word of God and then trying it in faith.  If they do, their natures will 
be changed in a way that produces the happiness we seek.  From Moroni 
these words describe exactly how that change is the natural fruit of 
living the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
	"And the first fruit of repentance is baptism; and baptism cometh 
by faith unto fulfilling the commandments; and the fulfilling the 
commandments bringeth remission of sins;
	"And the remission of sins bringeth meekness, and lowliness of 
heart; and because of meekness and lowliness of heart cometh the 
visitation of the Holy Ghost, which Comforter filleth with hope and 
perfect love, which love endureth by diligence unto prayer, until the end 
shall come, when all the saints shall dwell with God" (Moroni 8:25-26).
	When we prepare a child for baptism, if we do it well, we prepare 
them for the precess that will bring the effects of the Atonement into 
their lives and the powers of heaven into our home.  Think of the change 
we need.  We need the Holy Ghost to fill us with hope and perfect love, 
so that we can endure by diligence unto prayer.  And then we can dwell 
forever with God in families.  How can it come?  By the simple promise 
Mormon described to his son Moroni.  Faith in Jesus Christ unto 
repentance and then baptism by those with authority leads to remission of 
sins.  And that produces meekness and lowliness of heart.  And that in 
turn allows us to have the companionship of the Holy Ghost, which fills 
us with hope and perfect love.
	You know that is true; I know that is true form our own 
experience and from the experience of those in our families.  we know 
that someday we could find on our bedspread after a twenty-hour flight 
across the world, a sign written in colors in a childish hand:  "You must 
be so tired!  Lay down and relax!  You're back home where we'll take care 
of every thing!"  And you could know that is more than talk if her older 
sister had said in a phone call made at a stopping place on that flight 
home, "Oh, I'm just vacuuming the house."
	How does an eleven-year-old who has never flown across the sea 
know the effects of jet lag on her mother and father?  How does a 
fifteen-year-old decide to run a vacuum without being asked?  Or how does 
a husband know the feelings of his wife, or a wife the feelings of her 
husband, and so understand without being told, and then help without 
being asked?  Why does a niece give up her bed to an aunt and a nephew 
share his house and dinner table?  How do a son and daughter-in-law find 
it possible to take children in to their already busy home and act as if 
it were a blessing?  It takes the powers of heaven brought down by 
believing these words and acting on them:
	"And the remission of sins bringeth meekness, and lowliness of 
heart; and because of meekness and lowliness of heart cometh the 
visitation of the Holy Ghost, which Comforter filleth with hope and 
perfect love, which love endureth by diligence unto prayer, until the end 
shall come, when all the saints shall dwell with God" (v. 26).  And may I 
add the words in families.
	The proclamation is careful in what it promises:  "Happiness in 
family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings 
of the Lord Jesus Christ."  My heart aches a little to know that many who 
read those words will be surrounded by those who do not know or who deny 
the teachings of Jesus Christ.  They can only do their best.  But, they 
can know this:  their placement in a family, however challenging, is 
known by a loving Heavenly Father.  They can know that a way is prepared 
for them to do all that will be required for them to qualify for eternal 
life.  They may not see how God could give them that gift, nor with whom 
they will share it.  Yet the promise of the gospel of Jesus Christ is 
sure:
	"But learn that he who doeth the works of righteousness shall 
receive his reward, even peace in this world, and eternal life in the 
world to come.
	"I the Lord, have spoken it, and the Spirit beareth record.  
Amen"(D&C 59:23-24).
	That peace will come from the assurance that the Atonement has
worked in our lives and the hope of eternal life that springs from it.
	The proclamation warns that for those who fail to resopond the
results will be more disastrous than simply the lack of peace in this
life or absence of happiness. Here is the prophetic warning and the call
to action, with which the proclamation ends:
	"We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who
abuse spouce or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family
responcibilities will one day stand accountable before God. Further, we
warn that the disitigration of the family will bring upon individuals,
communitites, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern
prophets."
	"We call upon responcible citizens and officers of government
everywhere to promote those measures designed to mantain and strengthen
the family as the fundamental unit of society."
	The family unit is not only fundamental to society and to the
Church but to our hope for eternal life. We begin to practice in the
family, the smaller unit, what will spread to the Church and to the society
in which we live in this world, and then will be what we practice in
families bound together forever by covenants and faithfulness.  We can
start now to "promote those measures designed to mantain and strengthen
the family." I pray that we will. I pray that you will ask, "Father, how
can I prepare?" Tell him how much you want what is that he wants so much
to give you. You will recieve impressions, and if you act on them, I
promise you the help of the powers of heaven.
	I testify that our Heavenly Father lives, that we lives with him
as spirits, and that we would be lonely living anywhere but with him in
the world to come.
	I testify that Jesus Christ is our Savior, that he made possible
the changes in you and me which can give us eternal life by suffering for
the sins of all of us, his spirit brothers and sisters, the children of
his Heavenly Father and our Heavenly Father.
	I testify that the Holy Ghost can fill us with hope and with
perfect love.
	And I testify that the sealing power restored to Joseph Smith and
now held by President Gordon B. Hinckley can bind us in families and give
us eternal life, if we do all that we can do in faith. And I so testify
and express my love to you.  In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.