Only In and Through the Name of Christ

It would have been hard to imagine just a few weeks ago that our world would look like this as it does today.  With just about everything non-essential shut down, all of our lives have been a bit (and sometimes a lot) turned upside down as limit contact with others and try to adjust to a new normal stuck mostly at home.  Throw in an earthquake in Utah yesterday and things just keep getting wilder.  The stock market is crashing, the stores are running out of food and supplies, and the virus just keeps spreading and killing people.  At our house with six kids at home the whole day, and me attempting to work from home, the chaos reached a new level.  Yesterday was particularly bad as we attempted to make “school” happen for our oldest children the way their teachers dictated on top of everything else.  The scriptures say that the “whole earth shall be in commotion” in the last days and it certainly feels like we are quickly getting there globally and personally at home (Doctrine and Covenants 45:26).    

                So, looking for some kind of inspiration this morning, I reread Mosiah 3, one of the greatest discourses on the Savior and His atonement.  The focal point I believe in the chapter is verse 17: “And moreover, I say unto you, that there shall be no other name given nor any other way nor means whereby salvation can come unto the children of men, only in and through the name of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent.”  I believe this verse applies not just to spiritual salvation—the kind that brings us back to the presence of God to dwell with our Father in Heaven—but also to temporal salvation in all the challenges we are facing. Whatever struggles we are confronting, whatever difficulties we need to overcome, the way through is by Jesus Christ and our faith in Him.  Seeking to turn to Him is always the first step through our crises small and large.  I believe that verse 19 in this chapter helps us to understand just how we do that, how we can come unto Him.  We must “yield to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.”  That is a list for a lifetime of attributes to develop, and I believe all our experiences are tailored to help us become as King Benjamin taught: humble and submissive, patient and filled with love towards all.  We have challenges so that we can learn to submit to all things that the Savior sees that we need to experience; we must learn to say through our trials, “Have thine own way Lord, have thine own way; thou are the Potter, I am the clay.”          

                Yesterday as we discussed with our children what to do if we had a major earthquake much worse than what hit us yesterday, our three-year-old said something like this: “I know Mom, just go and hide in a crack and the earthquake will never find you!”  Well, that might not work, but I believe we can go to the Lord in submissiveness and that same simplicity of my little girl and ask the Lord to hide us in His hands.  As the psalmist wrote, “For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon a rock” (Psalm 27:5).  In His hands is the only real place to hide from a world turned upside down, and the only way to enter His pavilion is by humbly yielding our wills and submitting ourselves to Him with faith, repentance, and a childlike trust that He knows exactly where He is taking us all.