Born Again

One of President Nelson’s most important and repeated teachings was the power of the atonement of Jesus Christ. A year ago he taught, “There is no limit to the Savior’s capacity to help you. His incomprehensible suffering in Gethsemane and on Calvary was for you! His infinite Atonement is for you! I urge you to devote time each week—for the rest of your life—to increase your understanding of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. My heart aches for those who are mired in sin and don’t know how to get out. I weep for those who struggle spiritually or who carry heavy burdens alone because they do not understand what Jesus Christ did for them.” I have tried to make Friday the time each week that I do this, and today I pondered the experience of Alma. He was one who for a short time also didn’t know how to get out of the mire of his sins. In his agony he was as Isaiah described, “But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked” (Isaiah 57:20-21). This is how Alma related it to his son Helaman, “But I was racked with eternal torment, for my soul was harrowed up to the greatest degree and racked with all my sins. Yea, I did remember all my sins and iniquities, for which I was tormented with the pains of hell; yea, I saw that I had rebelled against my God, and that I had not kept his holy commandments…. Oh, thought I, that I could be banished and become extinct both soul and body, that I might not be brought to stand in the presence of my God, to be judged of my deeds. And now, for three days and for three nights was I racked, even with the pains of a damned soul” (Alma 36:12-16). It was after that extreme pain of remembering his sins that he also remembered the Savior: “And it came to pass that as I was thus racked with torment, while I was harrowed up by the memory of my many sins, behold, I remembered also to have heard my father prophesy unto the people concerning the coming of one Jesus Christ, a Son of God, to atone for the sins of the world. Now, as my mind caught hold upon this thought, I cried within my heart: O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me, who am in the gall of bitterness, and am encircled about by the everlasting chains of death” (Alma 36:17-18). He reached out to the Savior in his mind, not casually or flippantly but with his whole soul, desperate to obtain help from the mire of his sins, and peace came: “And now, behold, when I thought this, I could remember my pains no more; yea, I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more. And oh, what joy, and what marvelous light I did behold; yea, my soul was filled with joy as exceeding as was my pain!” (Alma 36:19-20) Alma showed us that all we need to do to obtain grace and mercy from the Savior is to ask, but we must ask with an intense sincerity of heart as he did.

                Alma’s experience reminds me of another teaching of President Nelson about how to receive help from the Savior. He said, “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.” To me that description matches exactly what Alma did. For us to receive the Savior’s forgiveness and strength, we too must reach out with intensity and desire. We cannot be like Oliver when he tried to translate—"you took no thought save it was to ask me”—but our asking must be accompanied with a deep yearning to receive His help in our lives (Doctrine and Covenants 9:7). When Alma came out of his experience his first words were these: “I have repented of my sins, and have been redeemed of the Lord; behold I am born of the Spirit. And the Lord said unto me: Marvel not that all mankind, yea, men and women, all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, must be born again; yea, born of God, changed from their carnal and fallen state, to a state of righteousness, being redeemed of God, becoming his sons and daughters; And thus they become new creatures” (Mosiah 27:24-26). He would focus on this need for us to be “born again” throughout his teachings during his lifetime, mentioning it multiple times.

It struck me today that this metaphor of being “born again” indeed implies that the process of coming unto the Savior and changing involves great feeling, pain, and struggle. It is not a cheap or easy experience. There are few times in this life that are more filled with intensity and pain and struggle and desire than the physical birth of a baby. So, for the Lord and His prophets to use this metaphor I think suggests that our journey to the Savior must be accompanied with exactly the kind of intensity of feeling and experience that President Nelson described. From the beginning the Lord made sure that Adam understood this comparison: “That by reason of transgression cometh the fall, which fall bringeth death, and inasmuch as ye were born into the world by water, and blood, and the spirit, which I have made, and so became of dust a living soul, even so ye must be born again into the kingdom of heaven, of water, and of the Spirit, and be cleansed by blood, even the blood of mine Only Begotten; that ye might be sanctified from all sin, and enjoy the words of eternal life in this world, and eternal life in the world to come, even immortal glory” (Moses 6:59). We must be born again through the blood of the Only Begotten in a process that the Lord Himself here likened to the process of a physical birth. As we seek Him with the intensity of Alma who cried unto the Savior in his great torment, we will indeed have His power in our lives to transform us.