President Holland’s new video may help you feel the Savior’s love this Easter

I speak very carefully, even reverently, of what may have been the most difficult moment in all of this solitary journey to Atonement. That concluding descent into the paralyzing despair of divine withdrawal when He cries in ultimate loneliness, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” With all the conviction of my soul, I testify that He did please His Father perfectly and that a perfect Father did not forsake His Son in that hour. Nevertheless, that the supreme sacrifice of His Son might be as complete as it was voluntary and solitary, the Father briefly withdrew from Jesus the comfort of His Spirit. It was required, indeed it was central to the significance of the Atonement, that this perfect Son who had never spoken ill nor done wrong nor touched an unclean thing had to know how the rest of humankind would feel when we did commit such sins. His Atonement to be infinite and eternal, He had to feel what it was like to die not only physically but spiritually.

“One of the great consolations of this Easter season is that because Jesus walked such a long, lonely path utterly alone, we do not have to do so. This Easter week and always, may we stand by Jesus Christ ‘at all times and in all things, and in all places that [we] may be in, even until death,’ (Mosiah 18:9) for surely that is how He stood by us when it was unto death and when He had to stand entirely and utterly alone.”