There was a time when the Nephite nation stood on the brink of destruction. The Lamanites, the hatred for the Nephites fueled by Nephite dissenters, began waging war, and the Lamanites kept winning battle after battle after battle. The destruction of the Nephite nation seemed imminent, and the genocide these bloodthirsty dissenters wanted was surely at hand. The Nephites were weak, and they were outnumbered. They didn’t keep the Lord’s commandments, so they didn’t have His protection as they had had in the days of Captain Moroni. Their cities kept falling to the Lamanites. They were so weak thbat their best strategy was to retreat and keep hoping that the “next time” would be the battle that changed the war. “Next time” never came, and the Nephites’ situation was becoming more and more perilous.
The Nephites were fortunate, however, for there were two among them who went forth and defeated the Lamanites and rescued the Nephites from imminent destruction. These two were Nephi, the son of Helaman, and his brother, Lehi. Nephi and Lehi marched toward the Lamanite Armies, armed, not with swords or spears, but with the word of God and the Spirit of the Lord. These two missionaries were all that stood between the Nephites and destruction. And where the Nephite Armies had failed, God’s Army of Two succeeded. Nephi and Lehi first converted the dissenters, whose hatred had started the war in the first place. They began converting the Lamanite soldiers. Nephi and Lehi were thrown into prison, but a miraculous event in prison convinced 300 of the Lamanites of the reality of Jesus Christ. And these 300 soldiers went from the Lamanite Army straight into God’s and soon converted the majority of the Lamanite warriors. The result? The Lamanites folded up their tents and returned home. The Nephites were spared! In Alma 31:5, we read: “And now, as the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened unto them.” Truly, that was borne out here. The Nephites had been spared not by their swords but by the word of God.
Nephi and Lehi stand as some of the greatest missionaries in all of the scriptures. After that, Nephi spent the next five or so years of his life, continuing his missionary work. Then he headed home to his beloved Zarahemla.
I wonder what Nephi expected to find in Zarahemla. I wonder how he imagined what life in Zarahemla would be like. Every missionary seems to give home an exalted status and remembers it to be much better than it really was. When you’re out on a mission, your hometown gets built up in your mind as a Shangri-La. I think the movie, The RM, dramatizes so well how a missionary visualizes his return home to be so perfect, and how divorced from reality that view of home can be. You start thinking of home as a place where no one does anything wrong, everyone likes you, and every girl wants to date you. I don’t think Nephi was focused on whether he’d have lots of friends and whether the ladies would like him. But I think Nephi expected that the people in his hometown would be keeping the commandments. Here, were his friends—the ones who had been spared by the preaching of the word of God. Surely, they would be grateful that the Lord had spared them. Surely, they would recognize what a great thing the Lord had done for them. And, surely, in knowing all this, the people of Zarahemla would be walking humbly in God’s paths. Certainly, the people of Zarahemla couldn’t forget the miracle by which they were spared.
And just like the missionary in The R.M., Nephi was disappointed by what he found when he returned home.
Wickedness had overrun the city. The corrupt Gadianton Robbers ran the government. The innocent were being condemned. The guilty were being let free. The people were living not serve God, but to “get gain and glory of the world, and, moreover, that they might the more easily commit adultery, and steal, and kill, and do according to their own wills” (Helaman 7:5).
This wasn’t the Zarahemla Nephi remembered. This wasn’t the Zarahemla Nephi hoped to come home to. This was not his Shangri-La. You can feel the heartbreak and sadness that comes to Nephi as he witnesses this. Of this, we read, “when Nephi saw it, his heart was swollen with sorrow” (Helaman 7:6).
What Nephi does next speaks to the greatness of him as a man and as a missionary, and why we remember him as a great prophet and one of the greatest missionaries of all time. When he returned home from years of hard missionary labor, he didn’t quit being a missionary. He saw the people needed the word of God, so he preached it to them.
From a tower in his own garden, he preaches to the passersby. The most significant part of that sermon on the tower, for me, is the question he asks these people, the very people who had been spared by the preaching of the word of God. Nephi asks them: “O, how could you have forgotten your God in the very day that he has delivered you?” (Helaman 7:20).
Now, you know how the Lord had delivered them. You know they were only alive by the grace of God. So don’t you also wonder: How these people could have forgotten God after what He had done for them? If you were Nephi, wouldn’t you also want to ask them: How could you? How could you forget your Lord?
There is someone I’d like to ask this question to. And that’s King Solomon. If I ever met him, I would like to ask him: How could you have forgotten your God after all he did for you? How could you have forsaken him and turned to your idols? Before he granted your wish for wisdom, you said this about yourself: “I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or come in” (1 Kings 3:7). He made you wise. Your wisdom became legendary. When God made you wise, He said: “Behold, I have done according to thy words: lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart; so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee” (1 Kings 3:12). Thousands of years later, people still remember how wise you were. But then you turned your back on God. You began to worship idols. You began to use your riches, not bless others, but to live lavishly. Your life quit being about serving others, and became self-serving instead. How could you, Solomon? How could you have forgotten that God who gave you your wisdom and your riches and your fame? How could you have been so foolish?
In 2 Nephi 7:11, we read: “Behold all ye that kindle fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks, walk in the light of your fire and in the sparks which ye have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand—ye shall lie down in sorrow.”
What caused Solomon to fall is the same thing that causes others to fall—he just forgot what the Lord had done for him. He quit walking in the Light of Christ and chose instead to walk in the sparks that he created. When he had walked in the Light of the Lord, he was wise. But when he walked in his self-made sparks, he was foolish.
Now, Solomon was as wise a man as there has ever been, and if he’s not bright enough to light his path, are any of us? No, we are not. That is why we need Christ to light the way for us. Look at it this way. Say, you get a call one night that tells you that if you get to Salt Lake by 6 p.m. the following day, you’ll get a million dollars. You have two choices: You can travel by night. But your car doesn’t have headlights. But you do have a pack of sparklers left over from the Fourth of July that you can use to light the way. Or, you could wait until the sun comes up and travel in the Light of the Day. Which option will actually get you to where you want to go? Traveling in the Light of the Day will get you there. Traveling 300 miles by the Light of Sparklers will surely end in tragedy. The same is true of your lives. You came here to Earth with a destination in mind. Walk in your own sparks, and you will crash and stumble and not go anywhere that matters. But walk in the Light of Christ, and you will reach your destination.
The story of the Jaredites’ journey to the America tells just how important it is to be guided by that Light. Jared and his brother were at the Tower of Babel when the Lord started confounding languages. It was then that the Brother of Jared began praying fervently that he, his family and his friends would not have their language confounded. Not only were those prayers are answered, but the Lord gave the Brother of Jared an additional promise: “I will go before thee into a land which is choice above all the lands of the earth.
“And there will I bless thee and thy seed, and raise up unto me of thy seed, and of the seed of thy brother, and they who shall go with thee, a great nation. And there shall be none greater than the nation which I will raise up unto me of thy seed, upon all the face of the earth. And thus I will do unto thee because this long time ye have cried unto me” (Ether 1:42-43).
Let me re-read that last line: “And thus I will do unto thee because this long time ye have cried unto me” (Ether 1:43). Because of his dutiful praying, the Brother of Jared’s prayers were answered on this most critical occasion. You would think that the Brother of Jared, having been so blessed because of this habit, would keep praying. But he didn’t. For four years, the Jaredites didn’t cross the sea because the Brother of Jared forgot to pray to the Lord.
This is really another “How could you?” story because I wonder just what he was thinking? How could he have forgotten God after he had been so miraculously blessed? Well, I won’t be asking that question to the Brother of Jared because, one, he’s a much, much better man than I am, and, two, the Lord kinda already did ask him that question.
As we read in Ether 2:14: “And it came to pass at the end of four years that the Lord came again unto the brother of Jared, and stood in a cloud and talked with him. And for the space of three hours did the Lord talk with the brother of Jared, and chastened him because he remembered not to call upon the name of the Lord.” Personally, I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the receiving end of that chastisement. Think about it, the Brother of Jared had been spared because of his prayers—during which time he was walking in the Light of Christ and being blessed for it. But then he wastes four years of his life because he forgot to pray and instead walked in the sparks of his own understanding.
Now, the Brother of Jared is faced with the task of building the barges to cross the sea. He follows the Lord’s direction. But there’s a problem: There’s no light. I think it’s an interesting problem to be faced by a man whose journey had been set back because he walked in his own sparks. And now, what is his solution when he wants to travel by light? He asks the Light of the World, Jesus Christ, to touch his finger to the sixteen white stones. Here, he was asking Christ to light the way for his journey. Really, we all need to do the same. We can have Christ light the path for us or we can walk in our own sparks. Again, with the Son of God lighting the way, we will reach our journey’s end. But if we don’t, we will end up elsewhere. Having Christ light our way is simple—we do the small things: come to church, read our scriptures, praying, following promptings from the Spirit and keeping the commandments. Do these things, and you’ll find the Light.
To me, that is the gospel. The chance to redefine who we are through repentance. A woman, who was well-known as a sinner, once came into the house of a Pharisee where Jesus was at. She then bathed his feet with her tears. The Pharisee wondered why Jesus would let such this filthy sinner touch his feet. But Jesus knew who she was. He knew she as no longer a sinner, and she was no longer filthy. Rather, she was a woman of Christ, a disciple. She had applied Christ’s blood to her soul. And she had let it change who she was. She had been redefined. Her past would no longer hold her tomorrow hostage. She could once again progress and become what she set out to be when she came to this Earth.
To each of us, Christ gives that opportunity. To remove, bit-by-bit, the unholy parts of ourselves, scrubbed clean by the Savior’s blood. And, as we take away the ungodly parts of ourselves and replace them with Christ-like attributes, we become more and more like our Savior—and, one day, we are as He is.
I look back at some reasons in my younger years for which I felt tempted to miss church—and, in careful reflection, I realize at just how idiotic they were. Two of those reasons were that church seemed too boring and I didn’t get anything out of it. I’d like to refute that by using something Wade Vest once told me about how Henry B. Eyring said to his dad that a particular lesson he’d heard that day in church was boring. And Elder Eyring’s father responded by disagreeing, and by saying, “Whenever I’m in a lesson, I try to think about how I would teach it.” I think that’s an important idea. I think if we come to church and listen to the lessons and think about how the topic applies to us, and how we have seen that principle played out in our lives, and if we think about how we could apply that principle to our lives. And if we get involved and make comments and start sharing insights, then church becomes interesting and we do learn important truths. Most of all, the best reason to come to Church is to feel the Spirit—when the Spirit is there, it will tell you all things, and it will deliver a personal message to you. Certainly, inviting the Spirit is the primary responsibility of the teacher, but it is also the responsibility of the students, who can invite the Spirit through insights and testimonies; and who shouldn’t chase the Spirit away through their irreverence.
Also, I can’t believe I ever thought going to Sacrament Meeting wasn’t worth the bother. As if renewing my covenants with the Savior wasn’t worth getting dressed up for. Hmmm. He gave His life for me, suffered all things for me, but I’d really rather stay home and watch the game? Wow. What was I thinking? The sacrament is an opportunity to remember that sacrifice, and if we’re not here to renew that covenant, then how can we remember Him always? The sacrament is our chance to show our gratitude to our Savior for what He did for us. It’s to remind us just how much we need Him.
I’m really glad I have the church because, honestly, I don’t know where I would be without the gospel, and I never want to put distance between me and Christ ever again.
Let me end by saying this: If you walk in the Light of the Gospel, you will never have anyone come up to you and say, “How could you have done what you did?” because if you walk in the Light of the Gospel, then your actions will be honorable. And your choices will reflect the gratitude you have for the blessings you have received. And your life will reflect that of the Master’s in whose Light you walk.
