By Melody Coleman
Students should center their lives in the Atonement of Jesus Christ to know the Savior, former BYU counsel Thomas Griffith said.
'We must come to know in great detail the events that make up the Atonement of Christ to know him,' Griffith said.
Griffith, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Colombia Circuit, spoke at the Mar. 14, 2006 Tuesday Devotional in the Marriott Center.
A former BYU student, Griffith began his remarks by sharing his experience as a BYU stake president. He said he felt the members of his stake needed to have a better understanding of the Atonement. He challenged every ward member in the stake to relate every talk and lesson to the Atonement.
'If you cannot link the topic you are teaching to the Atonement, you should consider if it should be taught,' Griffith said. 'We wanted our church meetings to be full of life, substance and redemption.'
Griffith said this posed a challenge when the lessons in the manual to be taught were about tithing, visiting teaching, education and emergency preparedness. They decided to offer two suggestions to teachers as they taught the approved curriculum.
First, he urged teachers to find principles of Christ''s life in the subject they were teaching. Second, he urged the teachers to find part of Heavenly Father''s effort to draw church members closer to Christ. They found that when they spoke of the Savior, the Atonement was always applicable, Griffith said.
Griffith said he was one day reading 3 Nephi 11 where he read of the Savior''s visit to the Americas. As he studied the interactions of Christ with the people in the Americas, he said he felt that the residents didn''t recognize Christ when he appeared until after he showed the wounds in his body and explained who He was and asked them to come and feel for themselves the wounds in his body. They then fell to their knees at his feet because they knew him, Griffith said.
'Although they had been obedient, perhaps they had not come to know him as their Savior,' he said.
Jesus had commanded them to come to him and do something difficult by putting their hands in his wounds, and this is how they came to know him. In American culture, people hide their scars and do not ask others to feel them. It is only through physically feeling those scars of the Savior that the people are able to understand the Atonement and how it applies to them, Griffith said.
'It was physical contact with emblems of suffering,' he said. 'Every Sunday, you and I have physical contact with Christ''s suffering when we take the Sacrament.'
The Sacrament is the way that to make physical contact with the Savior, and through this physical contact, church members can know him as their Redeemer, he said.
Griffith served a mission in South Africa and Zimbabwe. He was recently released as president of the BYU Ninth Stake. Griffith had been BYU''s General Counsel prior to his appointment to the appeals court. He has also served as the Senate Legal Counsel. As Senate Legal Counsel, he was involved in the impeachment trial of former President Bill Clinton.
Griffith graduated from BYU in 1978 and received a jurist doctorate from the University of Virginia. He and his wife Susan, are from Washington, D.C. and are the parents of six children and the grandparents of two.