“No achievement in this life, important as it may be, will be relevant if we lose the language of the gospel in our families,” said Elder Valeri V. Cordón, General Authority Seventy, during the Saturday afternoon session of the 187th Annual General Conference of the Church on April 1.

“By ‘language of the gospel,’ I mean all the teachings of our prophets, our obedience to those teachings and our following righteous traditions,” he said.

Elder Cordón shared three ways the “language of the gospel” can be preserved.

1. Being more diligent and concerned at home

Powerful teaching is important to preserving the gospel in the home. It requires diligence and effort. When families move to places where a different language is spoken, langauge loss happens as parents don’t spend time teaching their children their native language.

“I noticed a similarity between preserving a mother tongue and preserving the gospel of Jesus Christ in our lives,” he said.

“We have been invited many times to acquire the practice of daily family and personal scripture study,” he said. “Many families that are doing this are blessed each day with greater unity and a closer relationship with the Lord. When will daily scripture study happen? It will happen when parents take the scriptures in hand and, with love, invite the family to gather together to study.”

2. Strong modeling in the home

“It is not enough just to talk to our children about the importance of temple marriage, fasting and keeping the Sabbath day holy,” he said. “They must see us making room in our schedules to attend the temple as frequently as we can. They need to see our commitment to fasting regularly and keeping the entire Sabbath day holy. If our youth cannot fast two meals, cannot study the scriptures regularly and cannot turn off the TV during a big game on Sunday, will they have the spiritual self-discipline to resist the powerful temptations of today’s challenging world, including the temptation of pornography?”

3. Traditions

Language can be altered or lost when other languages and traditions are mixed with the mother tongue, he taught.

“To combat the worldly traditions of our day, we need to use the scriptures and the voice of our modern prophets to teach our children about their divine identity, their purpose in life and the divine mission of Jesus Christ. …

“Just as a mother is compassionate with her little children, our Heavenly Father is patient with our imperfections and mistakes. He treasures and understands our feeblest utterances, mumbled in sincerity, as if they were fine poetry; He rejoices at the sound of our first gospel words; He teaches us with perfect love.”

mholman@desnews.com @marianne_holman