Neal A. Maxwell
"[There is an] urgency of our coming to know God and His scheme of things, and of also developing within ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren a sense of history, including what God has done for Israel. Such reminders of the past-and millennia of memories from the scriptures-will help us amid present challenges.
"For instance, one religious and political leader, Shez, had the difficult assignment of beginning ‘to build up again a broken people’ (Ether 10:1). To begin with, Shez remembered ‘the destruction of his fathers’ and also ’remembered what the Lord had done in bringing Jared and his brother across the deep.‘ This sense of spiritual history helped him as he began to ’build up a righteous kingdom’ of people who, once again, learned to ‘walk in the ways of the Lord’ (Ether 10:2).
"This ‘memory’ or sense of history should reach back not just a few decades but to the very beginning-even way back to the stated purposes of the Lord with regard to this whole mortal experience…scriptures give us a framework for better understanding mortality amid ’all occasions.’
"Equipped with such a framework, along with a sense of history, we find that a great many things become clearer.
“This sense of spiritual history will thus truly help Church members to stay the course, to hold out faithful, and to endure well (see D&C 6:13; D&C 121:8). And surely some such guide and stay is crucial to us for it will take both testimony and spiritual sophistication to ride out some of the challenges of our time and to avoid being diverted or discouraged.” (We Will Prove Them Herewith, pp. 2-4)