President Henry B. Eyring of the First Presidency taught that our belief in God gives us freedom:“Korihor was arguing, as men and women have falsely argued from the beginning of time, that to take counsel from the servants of God is to surrender God-given rights of independence. But the argument is false because it misrepresents reality.
When we reject the counsel which comes from God, we do not choose to be independent of outside influence. We choose another influence. We reject the protection of a perfectly loving, all-powerful, all-knowing Father in Heaven, whose whole purpose, as that of His Beloved Son, is to give us eternal life, to give us all that He has, and to bring us home again in families to the arms of His love.
In rejecting His counsel, we choose the influence of another power, whose purpose is to make us miserable and whose motive is hatred. We have moral agency as a gift of God. Rather than the right to choose to be free of influence, it is the inalienable right to submit ourselves to whichever of those powers we choose” (“Finding Safety in Counsel,” Ensign, May 1997, 25).
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Sometimes the only defense we have against those who attack our faith is to share our testimony of the truth. There is no embarrassment in taking this approach—Alma, a prophet of God, used this approach with Korihor. As Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles explained: “Korihor’s arguments sound very contemporary to the modern reader, but Alma used a timeless and ultimately undeniable weapon in response—the power of personal testimony” (Christ and the New Covenant [1997], 121).
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