From ‘The True Standard of Goodness II’, Henry B. Eyring wrote: “I must be careful about what I promise you as you try choosing to be good. It won’t be all roses. President Ezra Taft Benson spent a lifetime trying to be good. Every time I was with him I felt his goodness. As nearly as I could tell he had used the Savior as his standard about as well as anyone I ever knew. And yet, in his advanced years, life got harder, not easier. In 1989 he expressed a sense of joy that included the edge of reality: “I leave you my testimony of the joy of living—of the joys of the full gospel and of going through the Refiner’s fire and the sanctification process that takes place. As the Apostle Paul said, ‘We know all things work together for good to them that love God.” Now continuing. . .
“A choice to be good—-even with the trials that come—-will allow the atonement to change your heart. In time and after persistence, your wants and even your needs will change. You remember that the people who believed King Benjamin’s talk found such a change had come to them: “And they all cried with one voice, saying: Yea, we believe all the words which thou has spoken unto us: and also, we know of their surety and truth, because the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually.” (Mosiah 5:2)
If we stay at it long enough, perhaps for a lifetime, we will have for so long felt what the Savior feels, wanted what he wants, and done what he would have us do that we will have through the Atonement, a new heart filled with charity. And we will have become like him. That promise is also in the book of Mormon: Moroni 7:47-48
You can make that choice to be good early. You can use the Savior as your standard for goodness. And you can stay with it. President Benson gave us that assurance, and testified that it is true. He said: “Attaining a righteous and virtuous life is within the capability of any one of us if we will earnestly seek for it. If we do not have these character traits, the Lord has told us that we should ‘ask, and ye shall receive; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ (Doctrine & Covenants 4:7.) The Apostle Peter tells us that when we possess these traits we are not ‘unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ (2 Peter 1:8; emphasis added.) To know the Savior, then, is to be like Him. God will bless us to be like His Son when we make an earnest effort.” (“What Manner of Men Ought We to Be?” Ensign, November 1983, p. 43.)
Elder Eyring concludes: “I add my testimony that God the Father lives, that we will want to be with him forever, that eternal life requires that we be clean, without spot, and that the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the restoration of the keys to the earth through the Prophet Joseph Smith make that possible. I pray that we will choose to be good, take the Savior as our standard, and make the earnest effort, persistently, however difficult the way, until we may someday see him and find that we have become like him.
