A lot of modern-day prophets have made intense promises
about the blessings of studying from the Book of Mormon every day. President Benson talked about “a power in the book that will begin to flow into your
lives the moment you begin a serious study of the book.” Boyd K. Packer stated that the Book of Mormon “has the nourishing power to heal
starving spirits of the world.” Joseph Smith himself claimed that “a man would get nearer to God by abiding by
its precepts, than by any other book.” Many other prophets, apostles, and inspired men and women have made similar
promises.
But sometimes those promises seem so far out there. Once
you’ve finished the Book of Mormon the first time, why would you want to keep
reading it every day for the rest of your life? Doesn’t that seem a little,
well, boring?
While it may seem redundant, those promises are true. Here’s
the thing: We expect God to produce miracles using some exciting, one-time
event. He’s God; He has that kind of power. But that’s not how He works. That’s
not how anything in the universe works, really. Even Redwoods grow from tiny
seeds, and mountains reach their impressive heights only over millions of years
of constant shifting of the earth. Mere mortals also have experience with the slow
steadiness of change: Skyscrapers do not go up instantly, in a blaze of smoke.
Neither would we trust doctors to perform surgery after just a few weeks of
study. Artists spend years practicing their art before even attempting to start
a masterpiece that will itself take days and weeks and months of continuous
effort to perfect. It takes consistent effort to produce significant results. Why
then should it be any different with learning the mysteries of God?
And the Book of Mormon contains more than mortal power. The
stories and doctrines contained therein were written not merely in the language
of the Nephite prophets, but in the language of the Spirit. This Spirit that
infuses the Book of Mormon is the same Spirit that God uses to communicate with
us personally. As we read its pages, God speaks to us, answering our questions
in the way that we best will understand, comforting us in the way that He knows
we best respond to, giving us specific guidance for our specific needs for every
specific day in our specific lives.
And this means that, although the words contained inside the
Book of Mormon may never change, their meaning in our lives does. Why? Because
our lives are constantly changing. And through the Book of Mormon’s simple words
and stories, the Spirit can communicate the individual application of God’s
truth.
And there is so much depth to the doctrine in the Book of
Mormon that it is impossible to glean it all in even a lifetime of readings. Not
because the doctrine is dense, but because that’s how God’s truth works: It
contains both simplicity and depth. A child can understand the basics – and yet
the more we go through new experiences, the more principles taught in the Book
of Mormon that we’ve never noticed before start to make sense – and even
principles we thought we fully understood take on more substantial meaning in
our lives. And just as we understand the love our parents have for us in deeper
and deeper shades as we gain more experience of what it means to sacrifice for
someone else, so too does our understanding of the Savior’s love for us grow in
ever deepening shades as we experience more of the heartbreak and joy that life
has to offer, and realize the immensity of His all-encompassing sacrifice for
us.
Through the stories in the Book of Mormon, God reassures us
of the reality of His existence and of His love for us, as evidenced by the
Plan He set in motion before He even started creating the world, centered in
the willing agony and death of His Son. And He’ll reassure us of the specific
parts of that Plan we need to understand in order to draw steadily closer to
Him day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year. Little by little,
our lives will become more full of His love and peace, and less full of the artificiality
and complications of the world around us.
God uses the small and simple means of the Book of Mormon to bring about His
complex miracles – because really, what greater miracle can there be than the
one that happens inside of us? And rather than making Him look weak, it is
evidence of God’s power that He can take something so simple and, from it,
create something so magnificent.
