1 Nephi 3

(January 5, 2014)
This chapter has a number of profound and powerful lessons to take.  First, I think there is great meaning to the idea that the Lord favors those who obey His commands.  We sometimes think that the Father loves us unconditionally, and I believe that to be fully true.  But there is a difference between loving and favoring – we are loved unconditionally but we are favored when we follow the commandments of the Lord.

The second idea was that the children of Lehi, in bringing their property to Laban, were sacrificing only what was already lost.  After all, they were not taking it with them into the wilderness, so they had no use for it.  And in any event, the Babylonian captivity was just around the corner and they would be losing what they had at that point even if they stayed.  Laban, on the other hand, had no opportunity to even enjoy what he took from them, as he would shortly die.

I think this holds a powerful lesson.  Our property (and even our life, for which property can be a metaphor) is already lost.  We will die, the captivity is inevitable, and there is nothing that we can do to avert that.  We can use and give up our property for the building of the Kingdom of God – and by so doing help to qualify ourselves to enter in there some day – or we can clutch at our property or even take the property of others – only to find that we have lost that property and the inevitable night of captivity has come.  It is our choice.

One final, similar thought.  Laman and Lemuel were clearly angry at the loss of their property, and that is a temptation that each of us must face.  We may think that we are called to give up our property or our lives in a futile attempt to accomplish the Lord’s work – only to find, in the end, that our property was ‘wasted’ as we couldn’t even accomplish what the Lord had commanded us to do.  But just as Laman and Nephi each had to determine how they would respond to their use of property in a ‘futile’ attempt to serve the Lord, so much we each resolve to serve the Lord and give our everything to Him even when it seems that our everything is lost in the process and His work is not moved forward.  For it only appears that way to the eye of the natural man – but to the eye of faith the Lord takes what we offer Him and magnifies it beyond our comprehension.