Follow prophets' warning and avoid faces of pride
E-mail story
It's easy. Send a link to the story you were just reading to a friend. Just fill out the form on this page and we'll send it along.
Your name and e-mail address are transmitted to the recipient. Otherwise, it is considered private information; see Privacy policy.
"The horror of the Book of Mormon is not the physical destruction of the Nephites by the Lamanites, but the spiritual self-destruction of the Nephites. Their destruction was a slow spiritual suicide that separated them from the protecting arm of the Lord," explained K. Douglas Bassett, instructor of ancient scripture at BYU, speaking on "Faces of Pride in the Book of Mormon."
"The Book of Mormon echoes the witness of the Prophet Ezra Taft Benson, `Great nations do not fall because of external aggression: they first erode and decay inwardly, so that, like rotten fruit, they fall of themselves. The strength of a country is the sum total of the moral strength of the individuals in that country.'"Pride introduces itself early in the Book of Mormon and wears various faces throughout the text."
The face of costly apparel: "For us the disease which encompassed the Zoramites takes on more than clothing - it can include cars, houses, boats, diplomas, and anything else which has a foundation where the need for the approval of man carries more weight than the need to be accepted of God."
The face of contention: In the Book of Mormon "the most damaging contention was among the Nephites themselves, and more specifically from those within the Church itself. Even within the Church it is so easy to fall into a trap of contention when good, well-intending people disagree over how a particular program should be administered.
"As the Nephites of old, we can choose to bask in the temporary successes of pride which led to their eventual failure, or we may follow the word of warning spoken by the Prophets who once lived in mortality as well as our own living Prophet."
