Self Reliance | Boyd K. Packer

Self reliance is not only a temporal principle; we should work to become spiritually and emotionally self-reliant as well.
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Boyd K. Packer was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when this fireside address was given at Brigham Young University on 2 March 1975.
"The Church was two years old when the Lord revealed that “the idler shall not have place in the church, except he repent and mend his ways” (D&C 75:29). President Marion G. Romney in our last conference explained this principle with his characteristic simple directness: “The obligation to sustain one’s self was divinely imposed upon the human race at its beginning. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.’ (Genesis 3:19).”
The welfare handbook instructs, “[We must] earnestly teach and urge members to be self-sustaining to the fullest extent of their power. No Latter-day Saint will . . . voluntarily shift from himself the burden of his own support. So long as he can, under the inspiration of the Almighty and with his own labors, he will supply himself with the necessities of life” (1952, p. 2).
We have succeeded fairly well in establishing in the minds of Latter-day Saints that they should take care of their own material needs and then contribute to the welfare of those that cannot provide the necessities of life. If a member is unable to sustain himself, then he is to call upon his own family, and then upon the Church, in that order, and not upon the government at all.
We have counseled bishops and stake presidents to be very careful to avoid abuses in the welfare program. When people are able but are unwilling to take care of themselves, we are responsible to employ the dictum of the Lord, that the idler shall not eat the bread of the laborer. The simple rule has been, to the fullest extent possible, to take care of one’s self. This couplet of truth has been something of a model: “Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”
Now to the point. The substance of what I want to say here tonight to you students of Brigham Young University is this: That same principle, self-reliance, has application in emotional and spiritual things.
I have become very anxious over the amount of counseling that we seem to need in the Church, and the network of counseling services that we keep building up without once emphasizing the principle of self-reliance as it is understood in the welfare program. There are too many in the Church who seem to be totally dependent, emotionally and spiritually, upon others. They subsist on some kind of emotional welfare. They are unwilling to sustain themselves. They become so dependent that they endlessly need to be shored up, lifted up, endlessly need encouragement, and they contribute little of their own.
I have been concerned that we may be on the verge of doing to ourselves emotionally (and therefore spiritually) what we have been working so hard for generations to avoid materially. If we lose our emotional and spiritual self-reliance, we can be weakened quite as much, perhaps even more, than when we become dependent materially...
If we follow a course where, on one hand, we would carefully scrutinize an order for welfare products and yet, on the other hand, dole out counsel and advice without sending you to your own storehouse of knowledge and inspiration, then we have done you a disservice.
This Church relies on individual testimony. Each must earn his own testimony. It is then that you can stand and say, as I can say, that I know that God lives, the He is our Father, that we have a child-parent relationship with Him. I know that He is close, that we can go to Him and appeal, and then, if we will be obedient and listen and use every resource, we will have an answer to our prayers.
This is His church. God lives. Jesus is the Christ. We have a prophet presiding over this Church. Every one of us and every other soul on this earth can know that. I bear witness of that." - Elder Boyd K. Packer
Boyd K. Packer was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when this fireside address was given at Brigham Young University on 2 March 1975.
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