“Come as you are,” a loving Father says to each of us, but He adds, “Don’t plan to stay as you are.”
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, “Songs Sung and Unsung,” General Conference, April 2017
The apostle Paul warned the people of Corinth that “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him” (1 Corinthians 2:14; see also Alma 26:21). He explained that we can only understand God’s word by receiving God’s spirit.
The Greek word translated “natural” in this passage, psychikos (ψυχικὸς), means governed by physical desires or worldly concerns, as opposed to pneumatikos (πνευματικός), or spiritual things. Some English translations of the Bible render “natural man” as “the person without the Spirit” (NIV), people who aren’t spiritual (NLT), or “an animal man” (Anderson New Testament). (See parallel translations of 1 Corinthians 2:14 on biblehub.com.)
Paul’s warning is simply that spiritual things are meaningless to us unless we rise above our physical desires and open our minds to higher things. But the angel who taught King Benjamin took this concept a step further. We are not only oblivious to God in our natural state, we are actually in opposition to Him and to His purposes:
For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.
Mosiah 3:19
It’s noteworthy that we overcome our natural selves by becoming like children. Surely we inherited our mortal inclinations when we were born. And yet, with an awareness of their helplessness, children are more inclined to yield to good guidance than adults may be. They also tend to be more attuned to spiritual things, perhaps because of this willingness to adapt.
God’s purpose is to make us holy and pure. In order for Him to do that, we have to yield to Him as children yield to their parents. We have to be willing to let Him do His work. As Elder Patrick Kearon recently taught us:
Surely one of Jesus’s most consistent invitations and pleas during His mortal ministry was that we change and repent and come unto Him. Fundamentally implicit in all of His teachings to live on a higher plane of moral conduct is a call to personal progression, to transformative faith in Christ, to a mighty change of heart.
God wants for us a radical reorientation of our selfish and prideful impulses, the eviction of the natural man, for us to “go, and sin no more.”
“God’s Intent Is to Bring You Home,” General Conference, April 2024
Today, I will strive to overcome my natural tendencies and allow God to lift me to a higher plane. I will remember that God wants me not only to understand holy things, but also to become holy.
Leave a Reply