Come, Follow Me September 16-22: 3 Nephi 1-7
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Back Where We Started
By Kimberly Matheson
A few Sundays ago, a bishopric counselor sat on my living room couch, all smiles, to extend me a new calling: primary chorister. My heart sank. Primary chorister has been, for many years, high on my list of Church Assignments That Scare Me and That I Think I’ll Be Really Bad At. What’s more, I was still trying to recover from a high-burnout assignment from the year prior. Week after week, I had been working to let Christ soften my heart and humble me back into a place of service. In fact, when this brother positioned himself on the sofa across from me, I thought my heart-work was over. Surely, I thought, eight months was plenty of time to recover from a difficult calling! Surely, I was back to my old, eager-to-serve self! But then I heard the words “Primary chorister” and realized that my heart was not as soft and service-ready as I had imagined. Five minutes before, I fancied that I had successfully overcome the natural woman. Now I saw that I hadn’t budged very much at all. Thinking that I had climbed far above my old cynicism, I found myself instead only a few inches off the ground—and not a very resilient few inches at that.
This is an experience familiar to every Christian. We rely on the atonement, we try to change, we are forgiven, we feel as though we’ve come so far—and then, usually accompanied by a hefty dose of despair, we suddenly find ourselves back where we started, caught in the same old sins and flaws and resentments.
This recurrent feature of Christian discipleship is also a feature of this week’s readings. 3 Nephi 6 ends on the same gut punch I felt in my living room. The opening chapters of Third Nephi detail the painstaking work by which the Nephites finally eliminate the Gadianton robbers who had been plaguing their society for the past seventy-five years. In a Herculean effort, the Nephites uproot their families and property, construct a temporary gathering place, and garrison their entire population in a single location under siege conditions for nearly a decade. And it works. The robbers are eliminated (3 Nephi 5:6)! Everyone gets to go home (3 Nephi 6:1)! Infrastructure is booming (3 Nephi 6:7)! Their food storage has saved them (3 Nephi 6:2)! This story, we are confident, will land on a happy ending.
Except. A mere four years after eliminating secret combinations, a faction arises in the Nephite government that secretly murders those who testify of Christ (3 Nephi 6:23). The Nephites have clawed their way back to the possibility of religious and national stability only to turn around and see, in a matter of verses, a group of murderers who “did enter into a covenant one with another ... to combine against all righteousness” (3 Nephi 6:28). The Nephites are right back where they started.
This is a regular dilemma of discipleship. We are all plagued by foibles that we swear are through. My life is a long litany of “last times,” habits that see my resolve break long before my self-destructive patterns do. We hear it echoed in St. Paul’s lament that “I do not do the good I want to do” (Romans 7:19) and the story of so many broken-hearted saints sitting in so many bishops’ offices. We think we’ve eliminated our own Gadianton robbers, only to discover that they are more tenacious than we’d fathomed.
How do we work so hard to do better, trusting in atoning promises of a new heart (Mosiah 5:2) and salvation from sin (Ephesians 2:4–8), only to find ourselves going circles in the valley of the shadow of death? Theologians describe our dilemma this way: we really have been saved by Christ’s grace. Paul wasn’t kidding when he said we are made “new creatures” in Jesus. The trick is this: although Christ’s grace has objectively saved us, subjectively speaking, we’re still accustomed to sin. The Savior has paid every price, shown us a better way, and blotted out the debts on the ledger. It’s just that we are creatures of routine. We love what we know. And most of what we’ve known in mortality is fallen.
The problem, we might say, is one of habit. Grace makes us new creatures, but we live in bodies shaped by the routines of the old creatures. Grace rewrites the stony tables of our hearts, but they remain inside rib cages habituated to mortal desires and a lifetime of idolatrous passions. We are like the Nephites: desperate to claw our way to the peace and faith that Christ has already won for us, only to find ourselves prey to the years of habit we built before we encountered the Savior.
This isn’t bad news, in the end. It’s just reality. It’s less a problem than it is the pragmatic outline of how we become saints, how Christ hammers our lives into the shape he also made possible for them. In other words, this is not even remotely a threat to redemption (because what could possibly threaten Christ’s saving power?); it is simply its process. We are saved, freed from sin, every bit in the purview of the Savior who paid the price for our souls and ransomed us from Satan’s clutches. It simply takes time to hammer out the new habits that reflect that. We fall, day after day, and Christ keeps lifting us back, over and over again, setting our feet yet again on the right path. And he will keep doing it as many times as it takes. He will keep doing it until we have spent enough time on the strait and narrow path to find our familiar grooves there, forming new habits with more power and stability than the old.
Like the Nephites in these chapters, we constantly fall into old habits. But Christ is on the horizon, closer in fact than we realize: this very night, he tells his people, I’m coming to save you (3 Nephi 1:13). Any “night” of sin in which we find ourselves is on the cusp of giving way to the “morning” of Christ’s redemption because tomorrow morning—any tomorrow morning—marks a day in which Christ has already come into the world.
Two days after our living room meeting, I texted my bishopric to accept the calling. They thanked me for my faith and courage, but my heart felt no softer than it had on Sunday afternoon. I knew that, even if I didn’t know how to do this calling well and without resentment, Christ did. Even if I didn’t feel quite willing to subject myself to my musical fate in a room full of unruly minors, I felt willing to try letting Christ carry me. I knew, deep down, that this is what it feels like to be smoothed and polished and that neither the difficulty of the task nor even the frequent hardness of my heart are obstacles to what Christ has won. They are simply the leftover symptoms of a sinful disease that has already been cured; I have to wait for it to go into remission.
Images
Walter Rane, A Day, a night, and a Day. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/a-day-a-night-and-a-day/].
Brandon Gonzales, Light & Life II, 2023. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/light-life-ii/].
Kevin Wasden, The Return: A Broken Heart and a Contrite Spirit, 2023. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/the-return-a-broken-heart-and-a-contrite-spirit/].
Casey Jex Smith, Zerahemla, 2008. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/zerahemla/].
