When The Spirit Ceaseth To Strive

“For the Spirit of the Lord will not always strive with man. And when the Spirit ceaseth to strive with man then cometh speedy destruction, and this grieveth my soul.” (2 Nephi 26:11). We may sometimes fear that there is something fundamentally wrong with us if obeying the commandments and keeping to the covenant path is always a struggle for us. This fear is not only baseless but completely misunderstands the Plan of Salvation. It can and it ought to and it inevitably will be a struggle to transform our weak, imperfect, fallen nature into a true disciple of Jesus Christ. The values and the principles that we are striving to understand and live by are utterly alien and incomprehensible to our time-bound, mortal minds and hearts. Receiving a new heart from the Lord to replace our old one is not unlike the more literal process of physically receiving a heart transplant, in that our body’s natural defenses will identify the new heart as a threat and attempt to attack and eliminate it. Transplant recipients often have to go through strict protocols and painful procedures to weaken their own natural immune system enough to give the transplant a fighting chance. It is the same with our Spirits. If we try to replace our betrayed and bitter heart for a forgiving heart, our own natural sense of justice and revenge will rebel and fight against what to us is an unnatural desire to unconditionally forgive the one who has wronged us. As much as we would like to follow our Savior’s example and the promptings of the Spirit, even after we have decided to forgive, we will be tempted again and again to take back our forgiveness and demand satisfaction and retribution. But as long as we allow the Spirit to continue to strive with our natural tendencies, we can overcome our selfishness and our trauma and, even if we continue to struggle with unforgiving thoughts and feelings, we can nevertheless strive to honestly and sincerely and eventually completely forgive. The real problem comes when the Spirit ceaseth to strive. When the struggle is gone, it is not because we have finally become perfect, but because we have finally given up on striving to keep the commandments and live as the Savior would live. In such cases, our natural immune system has rejected the new heart that Jesus offered to us, and we are past being able to feel the influence of the Spirit. Our Spirit may with time become acclimatized enough to the new heart that it will eventually cease to see it as a foreign and invading force, and we may at that time cease to become an enemy to that part of God that He has offered to us, and after much striving, we may become a saint through submissiveness, humility, meekness and a willingness to do all that the Father would require of us. But in this mortal life, there will always be some new piece of our soul that must be replaced with a gift from our Savior, and the struggle will begin all over again. But that is OK. The struggle is part of it. As long as the Spirit is striving with demons of our nature, that means that we are still making progress along the path to perfection. When the striving ceases, that is when we have slumped off to the side of the path and have stopped trying to improve. I know that if we are still struggling, then we are on the right track.