Not a Tame Lion

Speaking about C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Elder Larry Wilson recently made this statement, “Especially in the figure of Aslan, Lewis described a loving but stern God who came to save us from our sins and not in our sins. As we raised our own children, my wife often told them, ‘Aslan is “not a tame lion,”’ as a way to explain that we must come to eternal life on His terms, not our own. We must accept God’s will for our lives even when we don’t fully understand it” (see here).  The phrase that Aslan is not a tame lion is repeated throughout the seven books by the characters who try to understand the Lion that created their world, though I never quite understood what it signified.  But I think Elder Wilson’s explanation makes sense; “tame” animals are those who live in your house and who, more or less, obey your orders and serve you.  And, unfortunately, that’s how some have come to think of God.  As Elder Christofferson described it: “Sadly, much of modern Christianity does not acknowledge that God makes any real demands on those who believe in Him, seeing Him rather as a butler ‘who meets their needs when summoned’ or a therapist whose role is to help people ‘feel good about themselves.’   It is a religious outlook that ‘makes no pretense at changing lives’” (see here).  We have to be careful that we don’t start to see God as someone whose main role is to serve us and help us out of our problems.  He is not a “tame” God; rather, it is us who must learn to serve and sacrifice in order to come to know Him.   His work is to “bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man,” and that very well may include letting us sometimes struggle through the challenges of mortality (Moses 1:39). 

                I think the scriptural phrase that encapsulates this idea is this: “Seek not to counsel your God” (D&C 22:4).  It’s easy for us when we pray and ask for blessings frequently to, consciously or not, start counseling God about all the things He needs to do for us or give us.  But that is the wrong direction for counsel to go; Jacob taught his people in the Book of Mormon: “Wherefore, brethren, seek not to counsel the Lord, but to take counsel from his hand” (Jacob 4:10).  It’s more important in prayer that we learn what the Lord would have us do than that we tell the Lord what we need Him to do for us.  If we seek not direction from God to guide our lives then we “seek to counsel in [our] own ways” instead of the Lord’s (D&C 56:14).  If we “seek not [His] counsel” then we will have “no power” and manifest our “folly” (D&C 136:19).  Recently we’ve struggled with our six-year-old daughter who is frequently instructing us on how to act: how to care for the baby, how to parent her, how to discipline her siblings, and even how to say the right things to her.  It’s easy for me to see in her that she needs to better understand the proper relationship between a child and parent and that it is not a child’s place to command his or her parents to do things.  But perhaps I have the same problem to some extent in my own relationship with God—am I trying to counsel or to seek counsel at His hand?