(Continuing from from Neal A. Maxwell:“As Obedient Children III, the starting post of this series: ‘As Obedient Children’. . .
But the Prophet Joseph observed, there are a “great many . . . too wise to be taught.”1 The knees of the mind bend so reluctantly.
Our discipleship is to be patterned after that of the Master (3 Nephi 31:16-17), who “learned . . . obedience by the things which he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8). Can we expect it to be otherwise with us? We who are entreated to take His yoke upon us (Matthew 11:29) cannot expect immunity from tutoring and suffering at the hands of a loving Father. Now continuing . . .
Faith is strongest when it is without illusions. Realistic faith alone provides for testing and proving dimensions of this mortal experience (Doctrine and Covenants 98:12; Abraham 3:25). We undergo afflictions such as “are common to man” (1 Corinthians 10:13). Additionally, God will deliberately give us further lessons and experience which take us beyond the curriculum common to man and on into uncommon graduate studies or even post-doctoral discipleship. These trials are often most difficult to bear. Our Father is full of pressing, tutorial love: “The Lord seeth fit to chasten his people; yea, he trieth their patience and their faith” (Mosiah 23:21). Nevertheless we are assured that “all of these things shall give [us] experience and shall be for [our] good, if we endure them well and learn from them (Doctrine and Covenants 122:7; 121:8). For we are to learn much by our own experience.
Thus life itself does not do all the afflicting. Indeed, some trials come directly from God or with His assent. On the final record will be the incontestable evidence as to whether we are “willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon [us], even as a child doth submit to his father” (Mosiah 3:19).
Having taken His yoke upon us, then, we will experience—though on our small and lesser scale—certain things that will permit us to learn of Jesus: loving when our love is not reciprocated or is even rejected, as with the wicked in His day; serving when our service is not appreciated, as with the nine lepers (Luke 17:12-19); seeing erring loved ones who are free to choose but are choosing unwisely, as when he lamented, “O, Jerusalem . . .” (Matthew 23:37); watching in some the root of bitterness spring up to trouble and defile others (Hebrews 12:15); experiencing anguish as a result of what is happening to us and around us, but, as with Nephi, still knowing that God loves us (1 Nephi 11:17); being mocked and despised by the world, perhaps even betrayed, and feeling aloneless—all part of suffering in order to learn obedience (Hebrews 5:8).
The Prophet Joseph Smith taught that “all will suffer until they obey Christ himself.”2 Indeed, some suffering actually comes in striving to become like Christ as well as in obeying Him.
For true believers, then, life is a process of getting grounded spiritually: “Settle this in your hearts, that you will do the things which I shall teach and command you” (JST, Luke 14:28) . . . continued “As Obedient Children V”
~Elder Neal A. Maxwell, Not My Will, but Thine (Salt Lake City, 1988), 4-6
