Submit to All Things

The words of the angel to King Benjamin included this well-known verse, “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” (Mosiah 3:19). Three times in this verse we see a form of the word submit: we are to be submissive, to submit to the Lord, and to be as a child which doth submit to his father. The word yield seems to me to also be a synonym of submissive here—we must submit to the enticings of the Holy Spirit. To become a saint—which as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we espouse to be—we must become submissive to the Lord and to His will. The angel suggested that we need to be like a child who is willing to submit, and that reminds me of the story about the eight-year-old boy who had a sister dying of leukemia. She needed a blood transfusion and the brother’s blood was compatible, and so he was asked if he would give his sister a pint of blood. As one website relates the story, “The next day he went to his parents and said he was willing to donate his blood to his sister. So they took him to the hospital where he was put on a gurney beside his sister. Both of them were hooked up to IVs. A nurse withdrew a pint of blood from the boy, which was then put into the girl's IV. The boy lay on his gurney in silence while the blood dripped into his sister. The doctor came over to see how he was doing. The boy opened his eyes and asked, ‘How soon until I start to die?’” The boy had been willing to submit his own life to his sister, thinking that donating blood meant that he would die. I don’t know if that story really happened, but it surely highlights the kind of submissiveness that we are to have if we are to indeed put off the natural man.     

                I read the Sermon on the Mount today, and surely one of the themes of what Christ wants us to be is submissive. We are to be “persecuted for [His] name’s sake,” to not even get angry with our brother, to “be reconciled to [our] brother,” to “agree with [our] adversary quickly,” and to “deny [ourselves] of these things… and take up [our] cross” (3 Nephi 12:10, 22, 24-25, 30). We are to be persecuted, to humble before our adversaries, and to be reconciled with anyone who has anything against us—to do that means that we must submit our will to God’s. Jesus who indeed bore a physical cross was the perfect example of being submissive, and we are to bear our own crosses submissively as He did. In addition, we are to “not resist evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also; And if any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also; And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou not away.” To do that takes incredible submission to the Lord’s will and the abandoning of our own. He summarized with this most difficult invitation: “But behold I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them who despitefully use you and persecute you” (3 Nephi 12:39-42, 44). To do that will indeed require of us to be “submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love.” The next two chapters additionally invite us to pray in secret, to “forgive men their trespasses,” to fast but “appear not unto men to fast,” to “cast the beam out of [our] own eye” first before trying to fix someone else, to do “even so to them” all things we want done to us, and to do “the will of [our] Father who is in heaven” (3 Nephi 13:6, 14, 18; 3 Nephi 14:5, 12, 21). To perform all of these we must have a measure of submissiveness, putting God’s will and the needs of others before our own desires and humbly reaching out to Him without seeking the praise of the world. To put off the natural man is a lifelong process, and the Sermon on the Mount helps us see specifically what hat looks like to submit our will to the Lord’s.