Protecting What's On the Inside

It struck me today as I read the account of the Gadianton robbers taking up siege around the Nephite people that this is symbolic of both the adversary’s method of attack and how we can protect ourselves.  The Gadianton robbers “came up on all sides to lay siege round about the people of Nephi.”  The Nephites were all grouped together as one body in order to protect themselves from the Gadiaton robbers, and so the robbers “did suppose that if they should cut off the people of Nephi from their lands, and should hem them in on every side, and if they should cut them off from all their outward privileges, that they could cause them to yield themselves up according to their wishes” (3 Nephi 4:16).  In other words, the robbers thought that if they could prevent the Nephites from accessing what was physically outside of their body of Nephites then they could not survive. 

But what the robbers didn’t understand was that it was not what was outside their city that mattered; it was what was inside already within their reach that would ultimately save them.  And the robbers couldn’t get to that.  In the same sense, our spiritual survival in this world will not depend so much on what we physically have access to; rather, it is what is on the inside in our soul that will ultimately preserve us from temptation and the entrapments of the world.  Satan cannot take that away if we protect it.  I think the example of Job illustrates this very well.  Satan thought that he could defeat Job by destroying the physical things that were around Job: his family, his cattle, and even his health.  But no matter what Satan took away from Job, he could not deprive him of his faith—for that was on the inside and could not be reached by the adversary.  Job said, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).  In other words, no matter what Job lost physically, his faith and trust in the Lord would always remain.  That kind of faith is not easily developed, though, for very often these tactics of the adversary in depriving believers of the things of the world often do work to destroy faith.  The Savior described it this way: “The cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful” (Mark 4:19).  We have to develop faith strong enough that the loss of physical possessions does not affect our trust in God.  I’m reminded of the statement that Elder Oaks quoted in general conference of a man who had lost a teenage daughter to cancer: “Our family’s faith is in Jesus Christ and is not dependent on outcomes” (Healing the Sick, April 2010). That’s the kind of foundation of faith we have to develop in our lives so that the physical outcomes of the events in our life do not change our core trust in God.  Like the Nephites we must have “so much provision” of faith “laid up in store” that attacks by the adversary on our physical circumstances will not have “any effect” (3 Nephi 4:18).