20. Springtime

A bishopric message written on Monday, April 27, 1998, and published in the May 1998 issue of the Bountiful Twentieth Ward Newsette.

Springtime. What a glorious time of year. A time of rebirth and renewal. A time of hope and promise. A time when the very earth bears record of Him who made it (see Moses 6:63; 2 Nephi 11:4 Alma 30:44; and Helaman 8:24).

Although in concert with the rest of the Christian world we celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus at Christmas time, we believe from latter-day revelation that it really happened in the spring of the year, during that season when shepherds would be “abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8).

It was also in the spring of the year, at the season of Passover, when the Lamb of God worked out what Elder Neal A. Maxwell has called “the awful arithmetic of the atonement,” causing the Savior “to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit” (D&C 19:18) that He might take upon Him the pains and the sicknesses and the infirmities and the sins of His people (see Alma 7:11–13).

It was also on an early spring morning, the first day of the week, when faithful women arrived at an empty tomb to become the first witnesses of His glorious resurrection.

And it was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of 1820 that the boy Joseph walked into a grove of trees near his New York farmhouse and, in answer to his humble prayer, saw the Father and the Son in that glorious vision that opened the dispensation of the fulness of times.

These and a score of other springtime events associated with the gospel of Jesus Christ—such as the restoration of the priesthood in May 1829 and the organization of the Church in April 1830—all remind us of “the great and wonderful love made manifest by the Father and the Son in the coming of the Redeemer into the world; that through his atonement, and by obedience to the principles of the gospel, [we] might be saved” (D&C 138:3–4).

May God bless us, as we enjoy this season called spring, to remember always these evidences of His love.