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Continue ShoppingLatter-day Saints Will Have To Fight Against Conforming to the World
One of the adversary’s most effective tools in getting sons and daughters of God to “quench the Spirit,” especially those of adolescent and young adult age, is to exert peer pressure, the pressure of a group to conform to the norms of the group that are inconsistent with the Lord’s purposes. In today’s world, this pressure is often applied directly through social media and indirectly through both social and mass media.
However, its most immediate and compromising effect regularly occurs through face-to-face associations within groups. Because this pressure to conform is so pervasive and prevalent in all of our lives, it is important for all to understand how powerful the influence can be, often without anything being said directly to the one being influenced. However, it is also encouraging to learn how, in critical moments, a single person in a group willing to do the right thing can be a powerful influence for good, and to know that there are many opportunities to be the one providing that influence.
Two significant lessons for all of us are: 1) the importance and value of us being a true partner for others, and 2) the importance and value of choosing and associating with good friends who will be true partners for us, recognizing and acting on what is right at critical moments in furthering the Lord’s purposes.
The Savior expressed being a “true partner” this way to the people in Bountiful: “Therefore, hold up your light that it may shine unto the world. Behold, I am the light which ye shall hold up—that which ye have seen me do.”
In Lehi’s dream of the tree of life, the spacious building was “filled with people, both old and young, both male and female . . . in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers towards those who had come at and were partaking of the fruit.” It takes strength to be the one standing for truth. Jacob showed that strength when confronted by Sherem, a man who was seeking to “overthrow the doctrine of Christ”:
And [Sherem] was learned, that he had a perfect knowledge of the language of the people; wherefore, he could use much flattery, and much power of speech, according to the power of the devil.
And he had hope to shake me from the faith, notwithstanding the many revelations and the many things which I had seen concerning these things; for I truly had seen angels, and they had ministered unto me. And also, I had heard the voice of the Lord speaking unto me in very word, from time to time; wherefore, I could not be shaken.
Not all valiant people will see angels, but they can and must have “many revelations.” They can and must see “many things” concerning the trials they are facing, and they can and must hear “the voice of the Lord speaking unto them.” Consider the significance of Jacob’s words later in this account: “But behold, the Lord God poured in his Spirit into my soul, insomuch that I did confound [Sherem] in all his words.”
It was God’s Spirit on which Jacob relied and by which he was guided, strengthened, and protected. That same spirit guided Tricia in her fifthgrade trial and also guided us as parents. Guidance, strength, and protection are available to all of us if we will resist spirit-quenching temptations to conform with the world and instead follow the living prophets and the promptings we will receive.
The following was taken from the book Growing Up Unto the Lord by former General Authority Seventy Craig Cardon, currently on sale at cedarfort.com.
