They Should Not Stop

In preparation for the April general conference next year, President Nelson gave us a couple of questions to ponder and then invited us to also “select your own questions.”  In that effort, I have been thinking about this one: What does your baptism in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mean to you?  I was baptized when I was eight years old and I remember the day.  One of the things I remember about after the baptism was a desire I felt to not make mistakes and I remember keeping track and counting my sins for the first little while.  I distinctly remember my mom coming to pick me up from a friends’ house not long after my baptism, and my friend and I decided it would be funny to hide from her on the other side of the road so she wouldn’t find me.  As I recall it now, I felt thereafter felt guilty and that was in my mind my third “post-baptism” sin as I was tracking them that I had to repent of (I don’t recall what the first two were).  I don’t think that’s the kind of list we should be keeping, but as I reflect on that now I realize that through the gift of the Holy Ghost I was being taught the importance of repentance and continually trying to improve.  One of the great blessings of baptism for me is the guidance through the Holy Ghost that helps me to continually try to be better. 

               In the story of the Jaredites’ travel to the promised land, one phrase has always stuck out to me.  After they had made some progress on their journey, “And the Lord would not suffer that they should stop beyond the sea in the wilderness, but he would that they should come forth even unto the land of promise” (Ether 2:7).  Surely there were times on their journey when they thought they had traveled enough and had reached a good spot, but the Lord wasn’t satisfied until they reached the promised land.  So it is for us—when we are baptized we enter the covenant path and the Lord is not satisfied until we have been perfected and arrived “unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).  The Lord will not settle for second best for us, for He desires us to be even as He is insomuch that we must “overcome all things” in order to receive the fullness of the blessings He has for us (Doctrine and Covenants 76:60).  For me baptism is a commitment to tell the Lord that we are in it for the long haul; we want to undergo the full treatment to become like Him, no matter how long that road will be.  The natural man is content to let life take him where it will, to enjoy the moment and settle for mediocrity; but to follow Christ we commit to become a new creature, to put off the natural man and become a saint through the atonement of Christ (Mosiah 3:19).  The Lord promises each who will embark on that journey, “I will also be your light in the wilderness; and I will prepare the way before you, if it so be that ye shall keep my commandments; wherefore, inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall be led towards the promised land” (1 Nephi 17:13).  If we will keep His commandments on that covenant path, He will be our light to lead us to the promised land.  We may want to stop in the land Bountiful on the seashore thinking that is good enough, but He wants to keep improving us and refining us until we have become like the Savior and are “purified even as he is pure” (Moroni 7:48).  If I were to keep up the list I started when I was eight it would likely need to reach into the millions of sins before I have overcome them all, but the Lord’s promise to us at baptism is that through the Savior we can reach the heavenly promised land “to dwell in the presence of God and his Christ forever and ever” (Doctrine and Covenants 76:62).