This declaration is one of the more profound and hopeful in all scripture. It acknowledges human weaknesses but promises God’s blessings in spite of those weaknesses. However, it sets conditions upon which we may hope. Like all of God’s blessings, this one requires action on our part. Here, the requirement is: “if men come unto me.… ” The Lord explained in Matthew 7:7–8:
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
The Lord stands ready to answer, but the first step is ours. We begin with what Alma called “a particle of faith,” even if it is no more than the “desire to believe” (Alma 32:27) and with acting on that desire. Alma continues: “Let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words” (Alma 32:27). This is what the Lord means when he tells Moroni that men must “come unto me.”
God will respond to our initial action by “show[ing] unto men their weakness.” In what way is this a blessing of faith? When Jesus explained how God responds to prayer, he compared him to a father who gives good gifts to his children: “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?” (Luke 11:11; see also Matt. 7:9–11). Interestingly, in Jesus’s context, the bad gift resembles the good gift. Bread in ancient Israel was not pan-formed loaves but rounded lumps, something like rounded stones. Similarly, the barbel native to the Sea of Galilee is longer and perhaps could be seen as somewhat like a serpent.
The Lord is saying that a good father will clearly differentiate between an apparently good (but really harmful) gift and a truly good gift. Thus, showing us our weaknesses is a good gift, even though it may first appear negative. It is almost the symbolic reversal of the situation in Luke.
The Lord explains that he “give[s] unto men weakness that they may be humble.” Whether we acknowledge our weaknesses or not, we have them. Indeed, a near-universal great fault is our refusal to acknowledge faults. Certainly, the Nephites frequently exhibited this weakness:
And now, because of this great victory they were lifted up in the pride of their hearts; they did boast in their own strength, saying that their fifty could stand against thousands of the Lamanites; and thus they did boast. (Mosiah 11:19)
See that ye are not lifted up unto pride; yea, see that ye do not boast in your own wisdom, nor of your much strength. (Alma 38:11)
And now, because of this great thing which my people, the Nephites, had done, they began to boast in their own strength. (Morm. 3:9)
For the great and precious principle of agency to work, we must be able to act for ourselves. Lehi gave this essential definition of agency: “And the Messiah cometh in the fulness of time, that he may redeem the children of men from the fall. And because that they are redeemed from the fall they have become free forever, knowing good from evil; to act for themselves and not to be acted upon, save it be by the punishment of the law at the great and last day, according to the commandments which God hath given” (2 Ne. 2:26).
To the degree that we act righteously, we advance along the path toward godhood. However, if we begin to feel that we are in control, not God, we are in danger. Modern boasts could be: We build rockets that go to the moon. We build flourishing economies and pleasant lifestyles. We do, we know, we accomplish. In many respects, this is true. The problem is not in our doing, but in our forgetting. In using the strength we achieve through exercising our agency, we are liable to forget its ultimate source. To remind us, the Lord gives us weaknesses. Were we so strong that we never saw ourselves as dependent, we could easily forget that we needed anyone else, especially God.
Nevertheless, all of us have weaknesses that reveal our need for God. They teach us to be humble, so that we might—in the midst of all of our strengths—humbly acknowledge our relationship to God. In this way, we come to him and learn to walk in Christ’s way.
When we recognize our weaknesses in humility, then the Lord promises: “My grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me.” At the very point where we lack skills or are faced with a daunting task for which we have acknowledged weaknesses, Christ promises us “sufficient” grace. He matches his own mighty power with our personal powerlessness, enabling us to achieve the otherwise unattainable goal. We who might fail without assistance are assured not only of assistance, but of sufficient assistance. This promise rewards our humility with hope and confidence.
The Lord’s promise continues: “For if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.” The very areas of weaknesses are accounted strengths because of our faith. How does faith effect such a tremendous transformation?
Is the Lord telling us that, if we are physically weak, through faith we may become physically strong? Yes and no. While there are conditions that exercise cannot overcome, to the extent that the model of exercise may be applied to the process of gaining spiritual strength, the answer is yes. If we pick up weights and begin to use them, we give weak muscles resistance against which to work, and the muscle grows stronger. This process does not work if the “weight” we pick up is a piece of paper or if we hang on to a machine that does the motion for us. We get stronger only if we work against resistance. At this point we appreciate Lehi’s law of opposition: “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my first-born in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad” (2 Ne. 2:11).
The final step in this process is enduring to the end. Nephi1 reminds us that our beginnings may be excellent but persistence in the path is essential: “And now, my beloved brethren, I know by this that unless a man shall endure to the end, in following the example of the Son of the living God, he cannot be saved” (2 Ne. 31:16).
When we obey and, in humility and faith, turn our weaknesses into strengths by overcoming those weaknesses, they become a spiritual strength to us. However, should we lapse back into the former weakness, we will lose our strength. True transformation occurs when we become a new person, one who endures to the end.
To summarize the model: First, our weaknesses humble us to the point where we are willing to have faith in God’s grace. Second, we exercise that faith by taking action and working on the very area in which we have the greatest difficulty. That area also gives us the greatest resistance. Doing what we do most easily does not transform us; it only highlights the area where we already have talent. This is why the Lord shows us our weaknesses, so that we can work against resistance (or “opposition,” in Lehi’s terms). Agency exists so that there may be opposition in all things (2 Ne. 2:11).