The Pure Love of Christ

This week my wife gave birth to a beautiful little girl whom we named Charity.  The name is well-known to Christians as the word denoting pure love and giving.  Paul suggested that “charity never faileth” and that it is the greatest of all virtues.  Mormon gave us perhaps the most succinct definition of the word when he wrote that “charity is the pure love of Christ” (Moroni 7:47).  It is perhaps a lot to live up to for someone to be named after the love of our Savior, but we do hope that her name throughout her life will help her to remember what is most important in life and how to treat others.  She certainly is a powerful representation to us now of purity and the love of God sent in perfect innocence to our family.  And her name spoken repeatedly in our house is also an excellent reminder to the rest of us about the way we should speak to and treat one another.  My five-year-old son has been telling people when we give the name of is new sister, “So we have to have love in our house forever.”  If only it were that easy!

             While we hope that Charity and the rest of the family will be inspired by her name, we know that it takes more than just a name to bring the kind of love and compassion and kindness in our home that the virtue of charity represents.  I have written before about the interesting fact that five of the cities named in the book of Mormon during the description of the final events before the Nephites were destroyed were Biblical names: David, Joshua, Shem, Boaz, and Jordan.  These were names of lands and cities in the land northward and were not mentioned elsewhere in the Book of Mormon.  The names most certainly came from the plates of brass and were a testament to the faith they had at some point in Nephite history.  For example, the city of Joshua may have at one time reminded the people of this famous invitation from the Joshua of the Old Testament: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve… but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).  This was a scripture that was on the plates of brass, for Mormon quoted it in his abridgment of the plates, “For thus saith the scripture: Choose ye this day, whom ye will serve” (Alma 30:8).  But the name of the city couldn’t guarantee the righteousness of the city, and eventually the name lost its significance to the people and they chose not to serve the Lord and this led to their destruction.  They had a city named after David, and yet they could not declare like the young Israelite full of faith: “The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine” (1 Samuel 17:37).  Instead the Nephites faced their enemies without any faith in the Lord and were destroyed.  A name alone cannot save us—as Helaman put it to his sons when he explained why they were named Nephi and Lehi, we must remember not only the meaning of our names but to do according to their meaning.  So for Charity I hope she can do likewise: “Do that which is good, that it may be said of you, and also written, even as it has been said and written of them” (Helaman 5:7).  We must all likewise seek to remember and to do, to seek to fill our lives with the pure love of Christ.