Elder Garret W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said in October 2019 general conference:
“Heavenly Father does hear every child’s prayer. With infinite love, He beckons us to come believe and belong by covenant.
This world is full of mirage, illusion, sleight of hand. So much seems transitory and superficial. When we put aside the masks, pretense, crowd-sourced likes and dislikes, we yearn for more than fleeting veneer, ephemeral connection, or the pursuit of worldly self-interest. Gratefully, there is a way through to answers that matter.
When we come to God’s great commandments to love Him and those around us by covenant, we do so not as stranger or guest but as His child at home.1 The age-old paradox is still true. In losing our worldly self through covenant belonging, we find and become our best eternal self2—free, alive, real—and define our most important relationships. Covenant belonging is to make and keep solemn promises to God and each other through sacred ordinances that invite the power of godliness to be manifest in our lives.3 When we covenant all we are, we can become more than we are. Covenant belonging gives us place, narrative, capacity to become. It produces faith unto life and salvation.4 (below)
Divine covenants become a source of love for and from God and thereby for and with each other. God, our Heavenly Father, loves us more and knows us better than we love or know ourselves. Faith in Jesus Christ and personal change (repentance) bring mercy, grace, forgiveness. These comfort the hurt, loneliness, injustice we experience in mortality. Being God, our Heavenly Father wants us to receive God’s greatest gift—His joy, His eternal life.5
Our God is a God of covenant. By His nature, He “keepest covenant and showest mercy.”6 His covenants endure “so long as time shall last, or the earth shall stand, or there shall be one man upon the face thereof to be saved.”7 We are not meant to wander in existential uncertainty and doubt but to rejoice in cherished covenant relationships “stronger than the cords of death.”8 ~Elder Gerrit W. Gong, November 2019 Ensign p.80; also link to read, listen to, watch complete talk. . .‘Covenant Belonging.’
reference: 4. See Lectures on Faith (1985), 69
