BYU (Brigham Young University) is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often mistakenly called the “Mormon Church.” BYU students take nearly a semester of spiritually uplifting, stimulating religion classes.
In this series (see below), students enrolled in scripture study classes have shared their thoughts, insights, and reflections on the Book of Mormon in the form of letters to someone they know. We invite you to take a look at their epiphanies and discoveries as they delve into the scriptures.
In publishing these, we fulfill their desire to speak to all of us of the relevance, power and beauty of the Book of Mormon, a second witness of Jesus Christ and complement to the Bible. The Book of Mormon includes the religious history of a group of Israelites who settled in ancient America. (The names they use are those of prophets who taught the Book of Mormon peoples to look forward to the coming of Christ—Nephi, Lehi, Alma, Helaman, and other unfamiliar names. We hope those names will become more familiar to you as you read their inspiring words and feel the relevance and divinity of their messages through these letters.)
Let us know if you’d like to receive your own digital copy of the Book of Mormon, and/or if these messages encourage and assist you spiritually as well.
Mormon Thoughts: Thankfulness
So recently I was thinking about the effects of humility, and thankfulness and how it affects our daily lives. The effects of pride are evident in all things as are those of humility. Have you ever seen a humble person bragging about himself? Or vice versa? I would like to quote a scripture from the Book of Mormon. It’s found in Helaman 4:13. The Lamanites are the mortal enemies of the Nephites, about which the verse is referring:
And because of this their great wickedness, and their boastings in their own strength, they were left in their own strength; therefore they did not prosper, but were afflicted and smitten, and driven before the Lamanites, until they had lost possession of almost all their lands.
People when they let pride affect them they begin to confide in their own strengths instead of the lord. When they do this they lose any and all help that they had from him. There are many ways that we can have and demonstrate pride, and one of the ways that we do this when we do not thank him as we should.
We should be constantly praying to God, as the scripture in 2 Nephi 32:9 reads:
But behold, I say unto you that ye must pray always, and not faint; that ye must not perform any thing unto the Lord save in the first place ye shall pray unto the Father in the name of Christ, that he will consecrate thy performance unto thee, that thy performance may be for the welfare of thy soul.
We must be in a constant attitude of prayer. Now we realize that that doesn’t always happen and some may say it is even impossible. However when we recall that he can hear the very whispers of our hearts and minds, it does not become too hard to understand how we can speak to him. All we have to do is talk to him via these methods and listen via the Holy Ghost and we will know what he wants us to.
This brings us back to our original point that we need humility to be able to recognize God’s hand in all things and then to thank Him for that. When we thank Him we will be blessed in all our doings and we will not have to suffer the same fate as these who were afflicted and smitten by the Lamanites.
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