As I’ve told my son, the trick of religion is to find that place where you take it seriously, but not *too* seriously.

I see no shift in emphasis, except as it relates to the language various preachers or prophets have chosen to communicate to their audience. Based on their understanding of the group they were addressing either by the written or the spoken word they chose those words that would convey the message most clearly .

“Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”

I think that we could read in Mosiah that in the end, doing the Lord’s will is all that matters. We may believe we are doing great locked in our rooms reading the scriptures and praying all day and pouring our souls in ‘thanks and praise’ but after all is said and done it wouldn’t profit us at all, if we are not doing what God has commanded, his will. I don’t think that is in conflict with Amaleki’s words because we read that:

“Thou shalt offer a sacrifice unto the Lord thy God in righteousness, even that of a broken heart and a contrite spirit.” D&C 59:8

In the scriptures the heart is a symbol for our will, so we sacrifice our will to do what he would have us do, that is, keep his commandments. I believe that our form of worship consists in exactly that, as Jesus taught that the greatest commandment was to love God and our fellow men, so the basis for the law, or the commandments is a sort of worship to God based on our love for Him. “If you love me keep my commandments”

I also find that it ties into what is said in James 1:27 “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world”

There is no progression in ourselves in worshiping without service to others and to ourselves through keeping the commandments out of love.

I was also questioning the statement “We still wouldn’t be any better of than if we had just kept the commandments.” If we were in a payment/debt relationship with God, then this would be true, but since we are not…. Praising God for his goodness and thanking him with our whole souls is still valuable to us in the “King Benjamin model” because gratitude is integral to the atonement relationship (which KB accepts) but has no place in the debt relationship (which KB rejects).

God is not asking you to pay him back.

Exactly! It is really hard for mortals used to market like arrangements to believe that we either can’t or are not expected to pay back anything good we receive. I can’t help but think of a statement by Tacitus “Good turns are pleasing only in so far as they seem repayable; much beyond that we repay with hatred not gratitude.”

If this is true the idea that God doesn’t want us to pay him back makes us really uncomfortable. So we find it more desirable to believe that keeping the commandments is a form of payment; when, in fact it is not.

We still wouldn’t be any better of than if we had just kept the commandments.

I’m not so sure that is what Benjamin was saying, and it hangs on what “unprofitable” means.

In a nutshell, I think “unprofitable” means that the servant, whose job it is to do whatever the master demands, has not gained anything to his “account balance”; i.e., the master may very well have profited from the servant’s labor, but he doesn’t owe the servant anything.

In that light, I don’t see any conflict at all between Benjamin and Amaleki.

I agree that “keeping the commandments” is an extremely nebulous term. Benjamin definitely does not define what he means by keeping the commandments within this speech, but leaves it open, as though the audience already knew God’s commandments. This Chapter begins (vs 4) and ends (last verse) with a statement that keeping the commandments leads to happiness. Somewhere in between (vs 20 or so) we have Benjamin saying all we need to do is keep the commandments, and that if we do so, we are “immediately” blessed. (ie- the commandments are for our benefit)