Deliver the Message

My Husband brought up a good topic he had been pondering the other night while we were doing dishes. He shared the experience of Abinadi, a prophet from the Book of Mormon. Abinadi had been called to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the people of the land they were living in. They were ruled by King Noah, whom continuously corrupted the gospel and commandments of God. Due to his wickedness, he had led astray the entire kingdom. While preaching the gospel of Christ as commanded by God, Abinadi was summoned unto King Noah to stand at trial for his teachings. The following occurred (Mosiah 13:1-6):

  1 And now when the king had heard these words, he said unto his priests: Away with this fellow, and slay him; for what have we to do with him, for he is mad.

 2 And they stood forth and attempted to lay their hands on him; but he withstood them, and said unto them:

 3 Touch me not, for God shall smite you if ye lay your hands upon me, for I have not delivered the message which the Lord sent me to deliver; neither have I told you that which ye requested that I should tell; therefore, God will not suffer that I shall be destroyed at this time.

They were unable to lay their hands on him until he delivered his message. Shortly after he was sentenced to death and died a martyr. However, it was not in vain. One of the priests was touched by the spirit of God when receiving his message and later, almost the entire kingdom, through his teachings (Alma 18:1-3), were converted once again to the Lord.

The thought my husband brought up was that it wasn’t Abinadi’s role to convert the people. Conversion was done through the Holy Ghost. What he was commanded to do was to deliver the message. Sometimes in our lives we become so caught up in the idea that it is a commandments of God to convert one another that we feel we are failing if we do not. We are taught in the scriptures that conversion is a process that happens through the individual being converted (3 Nephi 3:19) the Lord and the Holy Ghost (3 Nephi 11:35-36). It’s our job to deliver the message not to convert others.

This concept intrigued me so I decided to research more about it in the scriptures, mostly in the concept of family. Is it our job to convert our children to the gospel or just to deliver the message and allow them to be converted through their own process? I came across the following scriptures:

Deuteronomy 11:19, And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

Ephesians 6:4, And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

1 Nephi 8:37-38, And he did exhort them then with all the feeling of a tender parent, that they would hearken to his words, that perhaps the Lord would be merciful to them, and not cast them off; yea, my father did preach unto them. And after he had preached unto them, and also prophesied unto them of many things, he bade them to keep the commandments of the Lord; and he did cease speaking unto them.

There were many scriptures alluding to ‘teaching’ your children along with exhorting and ‘bring up unto’. What does it mean? When Abinadi taught, did he just talk or was there more? Because of the population he preached to, he was limited in his actions-possibly just to presenting and answering questions, but for us as parents, we can do a lot more as we spend our lives ‘delivering the message’. This way, as we stand accountable before God in the last days for how we raised our children, we will be judged according to our own actions and how we fulfilled the commandments of God in teaching our children (Doctrine and Covenants 68:25, 28).

A well know scripture in Proverbs (22:6) says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it”. How do we do this? How do we effectively deliver the message?

One of the best ways I found in the scriptures was to be an example,

Matthew 5:14-16 says, “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven”.

Alma, from the Book of Mormon, gives us another great example of this. He was called to preach the gospel to a group of people called the Lamanites who were under the rule of King Lamoni. He went to the king and offered himself as a servant, building the trust of the King and his people before sharing the gospel in words. As he served righteously and protected the lives of the servants, the following occurred:

Alma 18:2 And when they had all testified [the servants] to the things which they had seen, and he [King Lamoni] had learned of the faithfulness of Ammon in preserving his flocks, and also of his great power in contending against those who sought to slay him, he was astonished exceedingly, and said: Surely, this is more than a man.

This experience opened the heart of King Lamoni to hearing the words Alma had been sent to preach. Later King Lamoni and thousands of his people (Alma 37:10) were converted to the Gospel through the Holy Ghost.

Colleen Menlove said in the April 2005 General Conference meeting, “As you include children at your family dinner table, as you involve them in daily family prayer and scripture study and in family home evening, you are following the example of the Savior by loving and teaching them. As you do this, let them know that together your family is striving to keep the commandments and to be worthy to be an eternal family. It may be during the informal one-on-one times that the Spirit will prompt us to ask just the right questions or to say just the right thing to help our children know and feel the light of the Lord. If we make the opportunities, the Spirit will guide us… It will take time and effort to teach children, but we must not become distracted or give up. Our children so need the fulfillment of the promise “and great shall be the peace of thy children.” Let no child wonder if he or she is loved by Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Let all children know who they are, what they are to do, and who they can become.” (All Thy Children Shall be Taught.)

I believe this is what it means to ‘deliver the message’ that we are commanded to give. As we live by example, nurture and teach our children (whether formally (e.g. FHE) or informally (e.g. within everyday conversations)), the Holy Ghost will testify to them “and by the power of the Holy Ghost [they] may know the truth of all things” (Moroni 10:5) and be converted unto the Lord and our responsibilities to ‘teach [our] children’ (Doctrine and Covenants 68:25, 28), will be fulfilled.