This week, BYU President Shane Reese and his wife, Sister Wendy Reese, kicked off this Winter 2024 semester with a well-attended Tuesday morning devotional. They centered their remarks on BYU’s double heritage as an educational institution of both spiritual and secular knowledge.
Sister Reese taught, “This faculty has a double heritage: the preserving of the knowledge of men and the revealed truth sent from heaven.” This heritage is foundational to the mission of the university and has been taught by many prophets and apostles over the years.
Both President and Sister Reese pointed to President Spencer W. Kimball’s 1975 address to the university where he taught, “Your double heritage and dual concerns with the secular and the spiritual require you to be ‘bilingual.’ As scholars, you must speak with authority and excellence to your professional colleagues in the language of scholarship, and you must also be literate in the language of spiritual things.”
But simply knowing our heritage is not enough, Sister Reese explained, we need to live out our dual heritage: “One of the fundamental assumptions of becoming BYU is that we must not only hear the words of the prophets, seers, and revelators, but we must act on those words. We must be doers, and not just hearers.”
President Reese laid out seven things that the university will be focusing on to be doers of the word with the goal of becoming “The BYU of Prophecy.”
- Strengthen the student experience
- Retain and strengthen a focus on undergraduate teaching
- Reinforce our “double heritage”
- Develop the courage to be different
- Build a covenant community of belonging
- Invest in mission-inspired scholarship
- Focus on mission-aligned hiring
Keeping track of these things as faculty and students “will require us to see our studies and our work through a gospel lens rather than merely seeing the gospel through a societal lens, or a disciplinary lens, or any other lens that limits our vision and our perspective. In other words, if we are to become the BYU of prophecy, we will need eyes to see,” President Reese explained.
He encouraged the audience to put Jesus Christ first, to view all that they do through an eternal lens, and to follow President Nelson’s admonition to “think celestial.”
President Reese also referred to section 88 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which he described as the constitution for church education. Specifically, he quoted verse 67: “And if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you; and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things.”
A primary source for his devotional address was Sister Michelle Craig’s talk from the October 2020 General Conference entitled “Developing Eyes to See,” which is also what President Reese titled his own talk. He echoed two questions that Sister Craig referred to in her talk and encouraged us to ask ourselves regularly: “One: what am I doing that I should stop doing? And two: what I am not doing that I should start doing?”
President Reese taught that using Sister Craig’s questions and other questions that invite the Spirit, we can “develop eyes to see others as God sees them” and that “will lead us to look beyond ourselves and to find those we can help.”
President Reese pointed out how important it is to look beyond ourselves and quoted the words of our Savior: “[W]hosoever will save his life, shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” He taught that the best way to care for ourselves is to care for others.
Remembering our divine identity is crucial to everything we do, especially as we strive to “become the BYU of Prophecy.” President Reese said, “I solemnly declare to each one of you today that you are literally daughters and sons of God. As we make and keep sacred covenants, we are bound to Christ through those covenant bonds.”
In closing, President Reese shared a powerful testimony of the Savior and His gospel: “I want you to know at the beginning of this new year that I know that Jesus is the Christ, our Redeemer and Savior. He has given us the miraculous gift of resurrection through which our bodies will become immortal. And His atoning sacrifice has made it possible for all of the unfairness of this mortal world to be made right.”
President Reese encouraged all BYU students to make attendance at the weekly devotionals a priority this semester; they are held on Tuesday mornings at 11:00 AM in the Marriott Center on the north end of campus.
President and Sister Reese’s addresses can be found online at speeches.byu.edu. President Reese’s message is entitled “Developing Eyes To See,” and Sister Reese’s message is entitled “Being Doers of the Word.”
Written by: Dallin Webecke
Contributor at the Cougar Chronicle
The Cougar Chronicle is an independent student-run newspaper and is not affiliated with Brigham Young University or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
