We Cannot Fall

Elder Chi Hong Wong declared recently, “If we build our foundation on Jesus Christ, we cannot fall! As we endure faithfully to the end, God will help us establish our lives upon His rock, ‘and the gates of hell shall not prevail against [us]’ (Doctrine and Covenants 10:69).” When I was reading this I thought at first it said that “we cannot fail” if we build our lives on the rock of Jesus Christ. Though we may have temporary failures in various aspects of our lives, surely this statement is true as well: we cannot ultimately fail if we are built upon the rock of Jesus Christ. In other words, He who is “mighty to save” will indeed save us if we base our lives on Him (2 Nephi 31:19). With Jesus Christ as our foundation we cannot permanently fall or fail in our eternal progress. I love the way that Alma put it to his son Shiblon: “And now my son, Shiblon, I would that ye should remember, that as much as ye shall put your trust in God even so much ye shall be delivered out of your trials, and your troubles, and your afflictions, and ye shall be lifted up at the last day” (Alma 38:5). If we trust in the Savior—building our foundation on Him—He will ultimately deliver us out of all of our trials and afflictions. Instead of falling we will be lifted up to the Father through His power.

               So this of course begs the question of how we can put our trust in Him and build our foundation upon Jesus Christ. Certainly making covenants with Him, keeping His commandments, studying His word, and praying to the Father in His name are essential in building that foundation. Perhaps one key part as well is what we covenant to do each time we partake of the Sacrament: “Always remember Him.” Of the three promises we make when partaking of the bread, it is the only one that is mentioned in the prayer on the water. This to me suggests that it is the most important. In other words, remembering Him constantly is more important than even keeping His commandments or taking on us His name and trying to live like He would live. Or perhaps it means that it is the foundation of those other actions; if we truly think on Him always, remembering what He did and taught and suffered for us, then we will naturally keep His commandments and seek to live as He did.

            I had a powerful experience seeking to remember the Savior last week one evening when my two oldest children were fighting. My wife and I were struggling to know how to restore peace in our home as the insults were hurled and many hurtful things were said. We tried to talk and reason through it but that did little to help. They finally calmed down enough to sit down with me, and not knowing what else to do, I opened up the scriptures and started reading to them. I read them most of the words from the angel to King Benjamin in Mosiah 3, including this testimony: “And lo, he shall suffer temptations, and pain of body, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, even more than man can suffer, except it be unto death; for behold, blood cometh from every pore, so great shall be his anguish for the wickedness and the abominations of his people” (Mosiah 3:7). We talked about what the Savior suffered as He completed the atonement and what it might have meant to bleed from every pore. I suggested that the way we treat others is ultimately the way we treat Him. Miraculously, they actually participated in the discussion with some degree of humility as they remembered Him and eventually softened their hearts. They even gave each other a halfway hug by the end. It certainly didn’t fix fighting for all time, but it was at least a testimony to me that remembering the Savior is the most important step to solving any of our problems. And it was a witness of the testimony of this chapter: “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” (Mosiah 3:17). Indeed, He is the only way to our ultimate triumph over all our challenges, and as we build our foundation on Him we cannot fall.