Scouting Values In the Scriptures – Nephi

This is the first installment of the “Scouting Values in Scriptures” weekly series. We’ll begin with the Book of Mormon and move on to the Old & New Testaments, Doctrine & Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price.

The Scout Law has 12 points. Trustworthy. Loyal. Helpful. Friendly. Courteous. Kind. Obedient. Cheerful. Thrifty. Brave. Clean. Reverent 

The Book of Mormon has 531 pages.

And on almost every one of them, someone is living – or failing to live – one of those 12 points. The people in the Book of Mormon weren’t Scouts. But they were building the same things Scouting builds. The same values. Scouting didn’t invent these values. They’re eternal. But they build the same character. The same kind of discipleship.

If you’ve ever wondered why Latter-day Saints took to Scouting so naturally – why the Church affiliated with Scouting back in 1913 and maintained that partnership for over a century – part of the answer is in the book our families read every week or every day.

The values were already there. Scouting just gave us as Latter-day Saints a new way to look at it. For today’s post, we’ll look at our first example. 

A Scout Is Trustworthy: Nephi

The first time we meet Nephi, he’s being asked to do something really hard. Return to Jerusalem for the Brass Plates and face a powerful and dangerous man. Nephi was asked to retrieve records his family needed but couldn’t safely obtain. His older brothers refused. They murmured. They calculated the odds and decided the mission was impossible.

Nephi’s response has always struck me as the most Scouting thing in scripture: “I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them.” (1 Nephi 3:7)

He didn’t know how it would work. But he went anyway.

Nephi’s promise was to God. And he kept it at great personal cost, repeatedly, over the course of a lifetime. His older brothers promised too. They, however, didn’t keep theirs.

The difference between Nephi and Laman or Lemuel isn’t talent or strength. It’s faith & TRUSTWORTHINESS. It’s what we as Scouts & Scouters do with a commitment when following through gets really hard.

The Scout Law isn’t something Scouting invented. It’s something Scouting named – because the qualities it describes are as old as scripture. They show up in the Book of Mormon because they show up in human beings who are trying to be disciples of Jesus Christ.

These qualities can show up in Scout troops today. In young men and women who are being formed, deliberately and carefully, into the kind of people these Book of Mormon figures were.

Join us here next week for the next installment of “Scouting Values in the Scriptures”