I Didn't Want Him To

If I had to select the most important verses in the Book of Mormon, I believe that near the top of my list would be Mosiah 3:19. The angel beautifully taught to King Benjamin how we overcome our fallen state through the Holy Ghost, the atonement of Jesus Christ, and our own willingness to submit to the Lord: “For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields 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.” I thought of this verse shortly after my three-year-old daughter came upstairs today and gave my wife a great shock. She was missing a portion of her hair on one side of her head, and the culprit came up behind her. We made that five-year-old brother go get the scissors he used and the hair he had cut, and after he got his discussion we tried to tell our daughter that she shouldn’t let him do that. She said sadly, “I didn’t want him to.” I was struck by her humility and imagined the scene of how her big brother had told her what to do and she had meekly obeyed despite clearly not wanting this operation on her hair. Just like the verse suggests, she had let something be inflicted upon her, submitting despite her own better judgment. Gratefully the gospel does not require us to always submit to our older siblings, but her actions struck me as an example of how we should submit to the Lord even when we might feel our lives are not turning out how we think they ought to. It indeed takes great humility to humbly accept His will even when we want to say, “I didn’t want him to.”

            The importance of this verse is highlighted by the fact that President Nelson has referenced it in general conference at least ten times. For instance, most recently he said this: “How, then, do we overcome the world? King Benjamin taught us how. He said that “the natural man is an enemy to God’ and remains so forever ‘unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord.’ Each time you seek for and follow the promptings of the Spirit, each time you do anything good—things that ‘the natural man’ would not do—you are overcoming the world.” He also taught about how we put off the natural man in another address when he said this: “Now, my dear brothers and sisters, it takes both faith and courage to let God prevail. It takes persistent, rigorous spiritual work to repent and to put off the natural man through the Atonement of Jesus Christ.” On another occasion he suggested that this natural man is “not only an enemy to God; he is also an enemy to his wife and children.” He highlighted the difficulty of overcoming the natural man when he taught in another talk that “the change from being a natural man to a devoted disciple is a mighty one” before again quoting Mosiah 3:19. Clearly this principle of putting off the natural man through the atonement of Jesus Christ is an important one for President Nelson, and his teachings encourage us to strive to follow King Benjamin’s counsel. Like my daughter, we can all learn to submit to the Lord’s will so that He can turn us into true saints.