Coming To Christ: A Personal Journey

Hello everyone! :) I’m currently taking a particular religious course that allows me to study the life and ministry and Atonement of Jesus Christ. As an introduction to said course, the professor has been insistent on our learning of the differences between the Four Gospels in the New Testament that provide the backbone of our knowledge regarding the life of the Savior. Rather than merely harmonizing the Gospels, throwing them all into a blender to produce a combined image of Christ that is far less poignant and far less unique than separate and individual portraits of Him, this professor suggests that we ought to cherish and accentuate the beauty of the four different portrayals of Christ that we see in the Gospels.

            This isn’t to say that one Jesus is better than the other—in all reality, all are Christ, and each Gospel exemplifies a different side of Him that, when understood with reference to the others, makes clearer the actual person of our Savior. That being said, it got my gears turning, and I began to realize something.

            All of the writers of the Gospels focus on different aspects of Christ’s mission and divinity. One focused on His suffering, one on His divine Sonship, while another strove to teach about His fulfillment of the Mosaic Law. These personal testimonies of our Lord are to be cherished both collectively—in showing us that He is God—and individually, in showing us different aspects of the Savior.

            Each of us, too, has a unique understanding of our Lord and King. Each of us can read the Bible text and realize that He is something special for us: that some part of the Savior resonates with all of us. Rather than trying to ambiguously “come unto Christ”, we should be looking for ways to enhance our relationship with Him. How is He our personal Savior? How can we have a personal relationship with Him?

            To better enhance and define this desired personal relationship, God has given us the scriptures, which teach us about the premortal, mortal, and millennial Messiah. He has given us commandments throughout these scriptures, giving us a pattern of living that will allow us to be in harmony with Christ’s lifestyle, thereby enabling us to understand Him better. He has also given us covenants, or binding promises, and ordinances, or sacred symbolism associated with those promises, that not only teach us more about the nature of Jesus Christ, but also spiritually bond us to Him and His Atonement, tightening our relationship and expanding our definition of the Savior of the world. With just a single covenant, we understand Him deeply already—but with an increasing number of covenants, made plain and clear by the mouths of modern-day prophets, we begin to see Him as a truly universal, all-powerful Being worthy of worship, praise, and emulation.

            Maybe none of this makes sense. I’m struggling to write it all down coherently. God has given us our agency, or the ability to choose. As we exercise that agency in accordance with His divine will, as revealed through scripture and Church leadership, we see ourselves becoming more like our Savior. The more we emulate Him, the better we understand Him. We will want to continually build our faith in Him in specific ways, leading to a very personal and intimate relationship with Him. We will want to repent and change, moving away from worldly trends to more holier spheres. We will want to make promises with Him, as did ancient prophets like Noah and Abraham and Moses, that will secure our relationship with Him, obtaining the promise that He will always be our God, and we will strive to always be worthy of that. With each additional covenant, or sacred promise, that we make, we further strengthen that relationship and expand our vision of Who He is—thus necessitating the need for several covenants, and the need for modern-day revelation, that will increasingly expand the parameters of our understanding.

            Baptism and a copy of the Bible will only take us so far. We can better learn about and know and experience Christ as we glean information and knowledge about Him from multiple, divinely acknowledged sources, like modern-day prophets, additional revelations, and more canonical scriptures, meant to bolster the mind and improve our relationship with Him.

            This brings me back to the beginning. God has given us the tools we need to build a relationship with Him—He has given us the necessary materials to come more fully into His presence. He has also given us the agency, the liberty, the freedom, to use these materials to build a unique relationship with Him. Note that we still must go to Church, and read our scriptures, and say our prayers, and make and keep sacred covenants—those are the tools. But how we go to Church, how we read our scriptures, how we say our prayers, and how we live a covenant-making and –keeping lifestyle—that’s up to us. That’s what determines the level of the intimate relationship with God.

            How we choose to use the tools He has given us ultimately affects what our relationship with Him becomes. The more tools we have, the better we can build our relationship with Christ. The better we use the tools we have, the more rich, unique, intimate, personal, and lovely that relationship will be. Those laws of physics and motion and math used to design a bicycle are also applied in designing a car, or a train, or an airplane.

            It really is all up to us. And note as well that the better we use our tools, the easier it will be to discover new ones. The Wright brothers couldn’t have dreamed of jet planes when they first flew at Kitty Hawk. Newton couldn’t have dreamed of nuclear power when an apple fell on his head. Hippocrates couldn’t have dreamed of eradicating entire diseases as he strove to understand the four humors. It’s the same with us—the limits of our relationship with God...well, there aren’t any! There are qualifications and necessary requirements to build that relationship, but within the parameters that these guidelines set, there is an infinite possibility of connection with God. The better defined our qualifications and requirements, the better the ultimate relationship will be.

            Just as the Gospel writers each saw a unique perspective of Jesus, so too can we as we use the tools He has given us to build a more personal relationship with Him. Just as they each bore witness that He is the Son of God, so too can we. Just as they each made covenants with Him, so too can we. And just as they each saw Him not only as a Redeemer for all men, but also as Redeemer for every individual man, so too can we. May we use the tools God has given us—the scriptures, the commandments, the covenants—to build a personal relationship with Him is my prayer.