A Missionary as Nephi of Old

In D&C 33 the Lord called Ezra Thayre and Northrop Sweet to be missionaries.  He said, "Ye are called to lift up your voices as with the sound of a trump, to declare my gospel unto a crooked and perverse generation. For behold, the field is white already to harvest; and it is the eleventh hour, and the last time that I shall call laborers into my vineyard."  The Lord then gave an interesting promise to them: "Open your mouths and they shall be filled, and you shall become even as Nephi of old, who journeyed from Jerusalem in the wilderness" (D&C 33:2-3, 8).  What strikes me as unexpected is that we don't typically think of Nephi (the son of Lehi) as an example of a great missionary in the Book of Mormon.  I would have expected that the Lord said that they would become as Ammon or Alma or Nephi the son of Helaman or Samuel the Lamanite.  But He didn't; he used Nephi as the one we should hope to be like when preaching the gospel.  So why was Nephi chosen as the example par excellence of a missionary? 

            We generally think of missionaries as those who leave their families and go to preach to people unknown to them or who are potentially hostile to them.  Did Nephi ever do this?  Lehi was of course a missionary in Jerusalem, but there is no indication that Nephi was as well.  Nephi certainly acted as a missionary when he went to Ishmael's family.  He wrote, "And it came to pass that we went up unto the house of Ishmael, and we did gain favor in the sight of Ishmael, insomuch that we did speak unto him the words of the Lord" (1 Nephi 7:4).  Surely Nephi was the main one doing the talking and speaking the words of the Lord to the family of Ishmael as a missionary--Laman and Lemuel likely weren't much help in that regard.  It's also possible that much later after the Nephites had separated from the Lamanites that Nephi served as a missionary to the Lamanites.  We know that Enos, Nephi's nephew, wrote about the Lamanites, "For at the present our strugglings were vain in restoring them to the true faith," which means that by his day some kind of missionary efforts had been undertaken to the Lamanites (Enos 1:14).  But it's likely that this didn't happen in Nephi's time, for his description of the relationship between the two groups was simply this: "And it sufficeth me to say that forty years had passed away, and we had already had wars and contentions with our brethren" (2 Nephi 5:34).

             Perhaps there is another way to interpret the Lord's commendation for Nephi's work in opening his mouth and preaching the gospel.  As I think about it a little more deeply, it's clear that Nephi was an incredible missionary to his own family.  Surely any efforts we make to teach the gospel to our own families can also be seen as missionary work.  And if that's the case, then Nephi was one of the most devoted missionaries of all time because he labored for decades trying to preach to his rebellious brothers.  Along their journey "in the wilderness" here's how Nephi described his own efforts to teach his brethren: "I did exhort them that they would pray unto the Lord their God.... Wherefore, I, Nephi, did exhort them to give heed unto the word of the Lord; yea, I did exhort them with all the energies of my soul, and with all the faculty which I possessed, that they would give heed to the word of God and remember to keep his commandments always in all things....  And it came to pass that I, Nephi, did exhort my brethren, with all diligence, to keep the commandments of the Lord....  Wherefore, I, Nephi, did strive to keep the commandments of the Lord, and I did exhort my brethren to faithfulness and diligence (1 Nephi 7:21, 15:25, 16:4, 17:15).  He taught his brothers over and over and over again, always encouraging them to keep the commandments of God.  And he only stopped when the Lord commanded him to flee for his life.  If we interpret the Lord's statement in D&C 33 to be referring to Nephi's labors to teach to his own family, then I think there are two important takeaways.  First, our own efforts to preach the gospel to our families are just as important--if not more so--as our efforts to teach the gospel to the rest of the world.  And second, the Lord is more concerned with our efforts than our success as measured by the acceptance of to whom we preach.  Despite Nephi's unflappable efforts to preach to his brothers, in terms of actually getting them to become converted, he did not succeed.  But that of course wasn't Nephi's fault.  He was diligent in opening his mouth, and now he stands as the Lord's example of a truly successful missionary.