How to Keep a Covenant: the Covenant Path

(with an unusual insight into the sacrament along the way.)

The covenant path is one of those inspired insights that help us understand how best to keep ourselves keeping our covenants.  The answer relates to what we learned yesterday, that covenants are goal-oriented in  nature.  Any tasks that the covenant requires us to perform are means to the end.  So the answer is that you can best keep the covenant you have already made by working towards the next covenant step that this latest covenant is preparing you for.

I was talking with some men about scouting.  One pointed out that at its inception scouting had a purpose that you can see in its name.  It was training for being a military scout.  That’s what makes sense of all the woodcraft, first aid, and everything else.  Once that purpose was loss, it was reduced to tradition and general uplift and sooner or later was going to lose its way.  The actions  of scouting can only be sustained by the purpose of scouting.

So with your covenants.  The covenants have a goal, and only working towards that goal will keep you following through on your commitments in the covenant.  Because most covenants have a lofty distant goal like exaltation, the covenant path gives us a more accessible goal to work towards.

As I learned recently, the covenant path doesn’t end with your own marriage and its related sacraments when you have children, because then you have the real and motivational goal of having them walk the covenant path.  You walk alongside them and experience new things as they do.

In Lehi’s Dream some people take the fruit and then fall away.  Other people take the fruit, then take more fruit, then have some fruit.  They do not fall away.  In other words, they keep their first covenant by making more, over and over.  Enjoy to the End.  This fits with our New Understanding of Lehi’s Dream: instead of being a series of events, it is actually the same event, repeated over and over.

Which brings us to the sacrament.  The brethren recently have made the point that while the sacrament is a renewal of your baptismal covenant, it is also its own covenant.  Which means that when you count the covenants you make, you have made hundreds.  On the covenant path, your next covenant is only a week away.   You have a covenant you are building towards right now.  The way you get the most benefit out of the sacrament next Sunday is you are working towards it now.