Youth Lesson - How can the Book of Mormon help me strengthen my faith in the Atonement of Jesus Christ?

Have you learned anything in your gospel studies this week that you would like to share?

It is Easter today. What is Easter?

How can the Book of Mormon help me strengthen my faith in the Atonement of Jesus Christ?

From the lesson outline:

The primary purpose of the Book of Mormon is to convince all people that Jesus is the Christ. It teaches that we “must come unto Him or [we] cannot be saved” (1 Nephi 13:40). It contains many examples of faithful disciples who had faith in Jesus Christ and received the blessings of His Atonement. Book of Mormon prophets bore powerful testimony of the Savior, that we “may know to what source [we] may look for a remission of [our] sins” (2 Nephi 25:26).

Why is it important to convince people that Jesus is the Christ?  So they can follow his example? What does following his example get them? Eternal life. What about in this life? What do they get in this life? Knowledge of how to be happy. Is that true? Does following Jesus gives us the knowledge to be happy in this life?

But we have trials happen to us. People get hurt. People have disabilities. How is following Jesus suppose to make me happy when stuff like that happens?

Do you have any scriptures about Jesus Christ that are meaningful to you?

Do you have any scriptures which have helped you better understand the Atonement?

Often times people accuse Latter-day saints of not being Christians or people in the Church spend a lot of effort trying to prove to others that we are Christian.  In some ways the word Christian can kind of be a loaded word meaning more than what we intend.  The word saints is probably a better word to describe us.  A saint as the Lord used it was not someone who was perfect, but one who followed the Lord and made covenants with him.  Christian meaning one who believes in Christ is nice starting point, but the word saint means one who has made covenants with the Lord.

Have the youth imagine that a friend asks them if Mormons are Christians. Challenge them to use scriptures from the Book of Mormon (such as the scriptures suggested in this outline) to answer this question.

Everyone look up Elder Neil L Anderson’s October 2011 General Conference talk, “The Book of Mormon: Strengthening Our Faith in Jesus Christ.”  Everyone take a section and see if you can answer the question, “How can the Book of Mormon help me strengthen my faith in the Atonement of Jesus Christ?”

People in the old testament and in the Book of Mormon knew of Christ. Their animal sacrifices were to remind them off Christ. When something is like Christ to make us remember him we sometimes call that a type of of Christ.

Jacob tells us about this:

Jacob 4:5

5 Behold, they believed in Christ and worshiped the Father in his name, and also we worship the Father in his name. And for this intent we keep the law of Moses, it pointing our souls to him; and for this cause it is sanctified unto us for righteousness, even as it was accounted unto Abraham in the wilderness to be obedient unto the commands of God in offering up his son Isaac, which is a similitude of God and his Only Begotten Son.

After going over all this with the youth have them see if they have thought of any other things they could tell a friend to show that Latter-day saints believe in Christ.

We don’t hear a lot about the Savior so blatantly like this in the Old Testament.  There is a lot of stuff in Isaiah pointing forward to a messiah, but a lot of it is in poetry and symbolism.  Perhaps this was to protect the doctrine from those of that time who may have felt the teaching threatening.  Perhaps it was to protect the doctrine from the future custodians of the record.  Some of the hands that what we have now as the Bible were not always in it for God, so they removed things that were more plain and that threatened their position in the Church.

It is possible that there were things more plainly spoken about the Savior, but were removed by those that didn’t believe it or that wanted to keep control over the people.

The Book of Mormon is more rich with plainly spoken things about Christ because if was sealed away for our day and did not pass through all those hands.