Reconciled to God

In Jacob’s teachings to the Nephites that Nephi included in his record, he said this: “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, reconcile yourselves to the will of God, and not to the will of the devil and the flesh; and remember, after ye are reconciled unto God, that it is only in and through the grace of God that ye are saved” (2 Nephi 10:24).  This is a statement very similar to the famous words by Nephi about grace who taught that it is by grace we are saved “after all we can do,” and yet we rarely quote this verse from Jacob (2 Nephi 25:23).  Jacob tells us we must be “reconciled” to God and to His will.  Based on the definitions I see for the word reconcile, I believe the meaning of this one is along the lines of “to bring into agreement or harmony.”  And of course, the reconciliation is all on our part in the sense that it is our will that must change in order to align with God’s and not vice versa (even though we probably all find ourselves at one point or another pleading in our prayers that this relationship might be reversed).  So we can perhaps say that our great task is to learn the will of God and change our lives so that it is in harmony with God’s will for us, and then it is only by the grace of God that we can be saved. 

                This verse reminds me of the famous teaching by Elder Maxwell about giving our will to God.  He said in his last general conference address, “Brethren, as you submit your wills to God, you are giving Him the only thing you can actually give Him that is really yours to give. Don’t wait too long to find the altar or to begin to place the gift of your wills upon it!” (see here).   As Jacob taught in the same discourse referred to, we are “free to act for [ourselves]—to choose the way of everlasting death or the way of eternal life” (2 Nephi 10:24). In other words, our agency is inherently ours, and according to Elder Maxwell it is the only thing that is really our own.  So that is the great gift we must give to God: submit our will to His, or in other words, learn and do what the Lord would have us do.  This, I believe, is what it means for us to be reconciled to Him, and that is the great action that brings us into alignment so that then by His grace we can be saved.  In the Lectures on Faith—which were originally published in the Doctrine and Covenants—I think that we see that this is a fundamental requirement of true faith.  We read that “three things are necessary” in order to “exercise faith in God unto life and salvation.”  We must first have “the idea that he actually exists,” and second we need “a correct idea of his character, perfection and attributes,” and lastly faith requires “an actual knowledge that the course of life which he is pursuing, is according to his will” (see here).  Those first two requirements I think are pretty straightforward and expected, but the last perhaps is not so obvious as a component in true faith.  We must know that the course of our life is according to the will of God; or, in other words, in order to have faith unto salvation we must reconcile our will to God’s and bring our lives into accordance with His divine will.  Paul taught it this way: because of Christ’s reconciliatory sacrifice, God “hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation.”  The invitation then from Paul to us and from us to the world as we take the gospel to the ends of the earth can be summed up with this five words: “Be ye reconciled to God” ( 2 Corinthians 5:18, 20).