As Much as We Want to Breathe

In President Nelson’s last conference talk he made this statement: “When you reach up for the Lord’s power in your life with the same intensity that a drowning person has when grasping and gasping for air, power from Jesus Christ will be yours.  When the Savior knows you truly want to reach up to Him—when He can feel that the greatest desire of your heart is to draw His power into your life—you will be led by the Holy Ghost to know exactly what you should do.”  We must do much more than simply ask in a casual prayer for help or knowledge from heaven; Christ demands much more than that of us.  Amaleki put it this way: “Come unto Christ, who is the Holy One of Israel, and partake of his salvation, and the power of his redemption. Yea, come unto him, and offer your whole souls as an offering unto him” (Omni 1:26).  When Christ was asked about what the “first commandment” was He said this, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment” (Mark 12:30).  As we seek to come unto Him and learn of Him and be like Him we must do so with all our heart.  We have to want it as much as we want to breathe when we can’t breathe. 

               I think we see in the scriptures the kind of intensity of feeling that we should have when we truly desire to come unto the Lord.  For example, Enos described his experience this way: “And my soul hungered; and I kneeled down before my Maker, and I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul; and all the day long did I cry unto him” (Enos 1:4).  He wanted to commune with God so badly that he wouldn’t stop praying even when night came.  Nephi, the son of Nephi, showed a similar intensity in his prayer when the people’s lives were threatened: “And it came to pass that he cried mightily unto the Lord all that day” (3 Nephi 1:12).  The father of King Lamoni showed the Lord how much he wanted to understand spiritual things: “O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee” (Alma 22:18).  He wanted to come to know God so badly that he was willing to sacrifice anything.  Joseph Smith as a young boy showed that same kind of desire.  It’s easy to think that he simply read a scripture and went into the woods to pray and get an answer, but it likely was a much lengthier process than we imagine.  He wrote that after he found James 1:5 it entered “with great force into every feeling of [his] heart” and that he “reflected on it again and again.”  When he finally made his decision to pray, he did so and was “seized upon by some power which entirely overcame [him]” and which we know was the adversary.  But Joseph’s desire to get an answer from God was so great that he did not give up.  He wrote that he exerted “all [his] powers to call upon God to deliver [him] out the power of this enemy” (JSH 1:12, 15-16).  Many of us likely would have shrunk and given in when the process proved to be so difficult, but Joseph didn’t.  He wanted an answer from God just like a drowning person wants air. 

               Elder Holland said this: “Salvation is not a cheap experience. Salvation never was easy. We are The Church of Jesus Christ, this is the truth, and He is our Great Eternal Head. How could we believe it would be easy for us when it was never, ever easy for Him?”  We cannot expect that God will grant us great spiritual knowledge and power if we do not put our whole hearts into obtaining it and in some instances pass through great struggles.  President Nelson and the scriptures teach us that we must witness to God that we want to commune with Him more than we want to obtain anything else.