It is natural and appropriate that every follower of Christ should seek to express feelings about the gospel and the Savior in the most humble and yet eloquent terms of praise and love possible. Nephi’s psalm, which begins with verse 17 and extends through verse 35, is a memorable example of this kind of spiritual utterance.
Consider what Nephi has gone through: As a young man he is uprooted with little warning from his native environment to spend eight years in the desert, enduring adversity of all kinds, including life-threatening torment at the hands of his older brothers. Then he completes a sometimes perilous sea journey to a strange new land where every manner of challenge has to be met. His father, the spiritual anchor of the family, has just passed away, and the older brothers again take up their aggressive assault against him, which soon forces him and his immediate circle, upon divine warning, to again flee into the wilderness and start anew. Amid such uncertainties and despite his tribulations, Nephi expresses gratitude for divine guidance and heartfelt love for the Lord.
The Psalm of Nephi (see 2 Nephi 4:17–35) creates a bond between Nephi and all of us. We all struggle with sin and temptation, and we all have deep feelings of gratitude for the gospel plan and the Atonement. We, like Nephi, know that we must trust in the Lord, receive His love with thanksgiving, and recognize His gifts to us in all things. As we read and re-read the Psalm of Nephi, we can let his words resonate within us and then ponder what thoughts and utterances we might wish to generate as an expression of our own personal situation before God and our gratitude for His love and mercy. We can let the “Psalm of [our own names]” become a mirror of our own devotion and reverence for the Lord and a testimony of our own certainty in the blessings of the Atonement.