"The Marriage relation is ... without beginning of days or end in years; ... it lays the foundation for worlds, for angels, and for the Gods; for intelligent beings to be crowned with glory, immortality, and eternal lives.  In fact it is the thread which runs from the beginning to the end of the holy Gospel of Salvation...; it is from eternity to eternity."
- Brigham Young

I come before you with a broken heart and a contrite spirit.  If I come with any other attitude, I will not be able to help you, and my whole desire today is to be a blessing to your life together as a married couple.

Several weeks ago the impression came to me strongly that I was to deliver to the members of the wards in the stake an explicit message about the meaning of the covenant we undertake in connection with temple marriage.  At one time, I proposed within myself to put it off until Fall Semester when I thought it would be more appropriate, as more members would likely be present.  However, it was made clear to me that no postponement was in order.  Thus, I have striven over these weeks to learn, from the Lord, the appropriate message to deliver.  Prayer has been a part of my preparation, as has fasting.

As I thought about my remarks, I was led to consider Jacob’s sermon as recorded in the Book of Mormon: He declared that “having first obtained my errand from the Lord,”[1] he would now “declare unto [the Nephites] the word of God.”[2]  He also affirmed that with the “help of the all powerful Creator of heaven and earth [he could] tell [them] concerning [their] thoughts.”[3]  My situation today is similar to Jacob’s.  And I do understand what I am saying with those words.  Further, Jacob was grieved in his heart because of the burden of part of his message which was to speak, “in the presence of the pure in heart,” of “wickedness and abominations,” by which he meant principally sexual sin.[4]

Although I do not know all of the reasons for the prompting of the Spirit regarding my message, I do know of several occurrences involving former or current stake members that make it pertinent.  For example, I remember an interview I had when I had been bishop (in the 139th ward of this stake) for less than a week.  A young man came to me and said, “Bishop, I don’t love my wife anymore.”  I waited expectantly.  Finally he announced that he thought it best that they get a divorce.  He offered as a kind of excuse that he had not had a “revelation” during the temple ceremony confirming the priesthood ordinance of sealing.

Just recently a young woman called me and said that she and her husband were probably going to “split,” as she put it, after a year or less of marriage.  They were “both agreed,” she told me, as if that were sufficient reason; besides, he had just been the subject of a church disciplinary council and she could see no reason to continue their union.

A third recent story: A young mother was at home tending a small child.  When her husband did not come home at the expected time, she went up on campus to find him.  She did.  He was wandering around holding hands with a married woman from another BYU stake.

A final story.  Within the last few days a former member of our stake sought me out in desperation.  She and her husband have been transient for some time as they prepare to move back east, and she had no one to turn to.  She was distraught as she told me with emotion that her husband was asking her to engage in sexual activity about which she felt extremely uncomfortable.  Apparently her refusal to do what he asked had provoked him over time to accuse her of not loving him with the ardor that she owed him.

What is going on here?  I believe these are good people who have been misled; they have been thoughtless; they have not actually considered nor pondered the meaning of the marriage covenant they made under the authority of the Holy Priesthood.  Rather, they have succumbed to the lure of a fairy-tale—a tale to the effect that the sole key to a happy LDS life is to be worthy of the temple and be married in it.  Then, the story goes, God, seemingly almost in gratitude for the couple’s willingness to be sealed in the temple and perhaps because of their singular worthiness, will bless the resulting union such that a kind of romantic haze will envelop them as they walk arm in arm through the years, parents to inevitably righteous children, finally to be whisked into the celestial kingdom.