In Sunday School this last week Brother Perry opened the discussion by asking about the wrestle Enos had and I raised my hand to answer partly because nobody else was answering. I said that Enos was hungering for a remission of his sins but on further reflection I realize that while he received a remission of his sins the scriptures didn’t say that was why he started his prayer that day.
Enos says, before he relates the story, that a remission of his sins was an outcome of his prayer but all we know of his motivation according to his record is “the words which I had often heard my father speak concerning eternal life, and the joy of the saints, sunk deep into my heart. And my soul hungered…”
Thinking on the doctrine of eternal life and what he had been taught about the joy of the saints caused him to want something but that something wasn’t necessarily a yearning for forgiveness. It may have simply been yearning for further knowledge or for a personal connection with God. We don’t know precisely what his soul hungered for but we do know that the hunger motivated him to pray and that in the course of that earnest prayer he prayed for the welfare of his own soul and heard a voice declare to him that his sins were forgiven.
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