AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?

There are four requirements suggested by the Church to ensure temporal self-reliance of the saints:

1.  Gain an adequate education and stay abreast of your field.
2.  Live within your income and consistently save for a rainy day.
3.  Avoid excessive debt.
4.  Acquire and store a year's worth of necessities.

Being temporally self-reliant seems to go hand in hand with being accountable for the stewardships with which we have been entrusted.  In D&C 104:13 we read:

"13. For it is expedient that I, the Lord, should make every man accountable, as a steward over earthly blessings, which I have made and prepared for my creatures."

If we are not engaged in provident living, we are not being good stewards indeed.  I have battled with this concept for many years having lived on the poverty line as a single mother.  There never seemed to be enough of my resources to ensure self-reliance should I one day be facing a bleak future.  We live and learn from consequences we suffer and I am one of the pupils.

It is interesting to me that straight behind this concept of temporal self-reliance comes an admonition from the Lord to be our brother's keeper.  Consider what the Lord says following the abovementioned scripture:

"14. I, the Lord, stretched out the heavens, and built the earth, my very handiwork; and all things therein are mine.
15.  And it is my purpose to provide for my saints, for all things are mine.
16.  But it must needs be done in mine own way; and behold this is the way that I, the Lord, have decreed to provide for my saints, that the poor shall be exalted, in that the rich are made low.
17.  For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves.
18.  Therefore, if any man shall take of the abundance which I have made, and import not his portion, according to the law of my gospel, unto the poor and the needy, he shall, with the wicked, lift up his eyes in hell, being in torment."  D&C 104:14-18

I am certain that we shall be judged the most on how we have cared for each other whilst on this mortal journey.  All that we possess in this life is not ours at all, it all belongs to God who gave it to us in the first place, as per the scripture above.  Therefore, each time we stretch out our hands to give, we are not giving away what is ours but what we have been provided with by God for our care and for the care of others.  We are merely being good stewards and instruments in God's hands of blessing others.  I have already mentioned this in another blog and will do so again here.  We are not meant to judge one another as we do not understand each others' capacities and burdens. We are not to think that someone has brought upon themselves their own calamities and now should suffer the consequences.  King Benjamin spoke of this in Mosiah 4, calling us all beggars before God.  I believe we are here to learn two things, without which we can never become like the Saviour and therefore cannot have eternal life, and that is love and service.  When we arrive at the point where we love and care for others as much as we do for ourselves, we have achieved our purpose and can go home assured we have accomplished what we have been sent here to do.  We will then be able to live in God's kingdom with each other sharing freely the inheritance of the Firstborn he so freely desires to share.  In the words of Victor Hugo: "To love another person is to see the face of God".

I want to share with you an instance from my own life where I was helped in a very small way but which was a great help to me at the time.  I was a newly divorced single mother battling to make ends meet.  With a few more days to pay day, I realised that the fuel in my car would not last.  I knelt down and prayed this one particular morning asking the Lord for $20 for fuel.  I then went to work and didn't really think about it much until lunch time when my co-worker came to my desk and put $20 on it.  I asked what the money was for and he said he was coming back from lunch when he noticed $20 on the footpath.  He said he picked up the note and wondered what to do with it. He decided he didn't need it and as he did so I immediately came into his mind and he resolved to give the money to me.  As President Spencer W. Kimball put it so aptly: "God does notice us and he watches over us but it is usually through another person that he meets our needs".   

AN UNBEATABLE PARTNERSHIP

How can we be spiritually self-reliant when  the scriptures clearly teach that we need to be reliant on God in all things?  President Lorenzo Snow has said that the gospel was purposely designed to be  difficult to live so that it would turn us to God for supernatural aid to enable us to live it, that without Him we could NOT live it.  I think it was designed to lead us to God and to make us dependent on Him. (Teachings of the Presidents of the Church, pp 178, 179) 

What does it mean to be spiritually self reliant then? This is my take on it. To me it means to have your own testimony and your own relationship with God and not put your trust in the arm of the flesh when it comes to the things of the spirit and how you will live your life.  We cannot live on borrowed light, just as the Ten Virgins proved.  In the beginning when our faith is weak and we are just starting on our spiritual journey, it is essential for us to believe in the faith of others and to be nourished by their testimony but as you grow and mature in the Gospel, you have to come to stand on your own two feet and make the Atonement active in your life. Only you can do this.  By being spiritually reliant on God in all things, we also become spiritually self-reliant. It becomes a matter of your relationship with God. If you do not have this relationship with God and do not rely on him you will eventually end up relying on priesthood leaders to help you solve your problems and give you guidance on your spiritual path.  This is a grave mistake because it is putting your trust in the arm of the flesh and that arm very often fails. Priesthood leaders are overburdened these days with their responsibilities, earning a living and taking care of their families.  They are there to assist people with their process of repentance but I do not believe they should be holding our hands while we work out our salvation.  That responsibility belongs to God.  We are responsible for our own spiritual wellbeing and we have all the tools to help us: scriptures, prayer, temple, fasting. The list goes on.  If we would just do it our lives would be less complicated.  There is more depth to this.

A friend asked me recently 'how do we fully submit our will to God in the light of the fact that we are also taught to be self-reliant'?  It seems a contradiction in terms doesn't it?  Firstly, our will is the only thing that truly belongs to us that we have to give, all else we have comes from God, including the breath we breathe.  Secondly, God's perspective is always eternal and our eternal welfare is the one He is mostly concerned about. A good friend taught me this.  Very often these two facts clash in our lives.  For us to submit our will to the Father means to want for ourselves what the Father wants and not what we want.  That means changing our perspective from a temporal one to a spiritual one.  We live in a fallen world and our first instinct is to act as 'the natural man' (Mosiah 3:19)  In other words, we are very short sighted.  What is needful is for us to come to think as God thinks, to know Him, His mind and His will for His children to such an extent that our first instinct will be to make choices that would benefit us eternally, that which is good for us in the long run and not here and now. 

I stand in awe of Third Nephi whose faith on the Lord Jesus Christ was so great that angels ministered to him daily. (3 Nephi 7:18).  Imagine having angels coming to you every day.  I think his faith was so great because he became so in sync with the Lord that he did nothing that God would not do himself.  Because of this God came to have such trust in him that he promised him that 'all things shall be done unto thee according to thy word, for thou shall not ask that which is contrary to my will'. (Helaman 10:5)  In other words, God knew Nephi and that he would not ask for anything inappropriate or not beneficial to his eternal salvation and the salvation of others.  When you come to the this point where you are of one mind with the Lord, you are spiritually self-reliant on a deeper level.  When you come to this point, it is extremely difficult for the adversary to shake you or entice you to put your trust in the arm of the flesh in any form.  And this is where we want to be.

Remember that Satan's way is to have us rely on ourselves and our wisdom, which is very finite and inadequate for the salvation of our souls and he would have us temporally reliant on others.  Both of these spell only one thing, bondage.  God seeks to make us free, he wants us in partnership with Him so that we will make wise choices that would lead us to optimal freedom.

THE LORD'S WAY

This week's Sunday School lesson is on spiritual and temporal self-reliance.  I am amazed at how much this principle is a part of warfare we have been engaged in since before the world began.  This is very much good vs evil, freedom vs bondage.  God wants us to be free while Satan wants us in bondage, terrified and miserable as he is.  God's way is to have us spiritually reliant on Him and temporally reliant on ourselves but Satan's way is opposite.  Elder Dallin H. Oaks expressed it this way:

"There are powerful forces at work to beguile us into self-sufficiency in spiritual things and to lure us into some degree of dependence in temporal things.  It is easy for Latter-day Saints to fall prey to those forces". (Dallin H. Oaks, The Lord's Way, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1991)

The adversary seeks to corrupt the practice of self-reliance because through it he can lead us away from God and keep us in bondage.  He would have us believe that we need to be spiritually self-reliant (thinking we can "work out our own salvation", in other words, not needing the Saviour) and heavily reliant on others in temporal things, meaning we would be putting our trust in the arm of the flesh.  He seeks to put us into bondage to the world.  This is most evident through debt.  Anyone who is knee deep in credit card debt will agree with this.  When you are in debt, you are in bondage to the world and you are not free. 

Elder L. Tom Perry of the Council of the Twelve said it this way:

"Independence and self-reliance are critical to our spiritual and temporal growth.  Whenever we get into a situation which threatens our self-reliance, we will find our freedoms threatened as well.  If we increase our dependence on anything or anyone except the Lord, we will find an immediate decrease in our freedom to act". (As quoted in The Church News, Oct. 12, 1991)

This is the old battle field, different venue.  We are veterans of a war with Satan whose goal has been from the beginning to have us captive and in bondage.  Nephi said it well:

"Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them which are expedient unto man.  And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself". 2 Nephi 2:27

Tomorrow I will post about what it means to be spiritually self-reliant.