some thoughts on faith

The way I see it- in God’s grand plan, God sent us to earth so that we could progress. He needed a way to test us, to see if we are worthy of all the glory and responsibilities he wishes to bestow upon us in the eternities, so that we can reach full measures of happiness, as He has. The way he does this is by allowing us to forget everything that we knew before we were born when we are born. Many people wonder why God doesn’t just appear to us or tell us exactly how everything is and was and will be. This is for a grand purpose--to test us, to allow us to grow. The test is whether we will exercise faith or not--whether we will act on things which we cannot see, which we believe or hope are true. This skill is absolutely essential for our eternal progression- if it were not, then I think God would tell us everything and save us the trouble, but just like a good parent who doesn’t do everything for his child, God allows us to figure stuff out on our own to allow us to grow. So anyway, that’s an introduction to say that learning how to exercise and acquire faith is crucial to what we’re trying to do here.

So, first we’re going to need an understanding of what faith is and how we can use it. We exercise faith all the time- its not just in a religious sense. We have faith that our alarm clocks will wake us up in the morning, that the sun will rise; we can have faith in other people- that they will do what they say they will; we have faith in science- that the earth rotates around the sun, etc. faith is acting on anything that we cannot see but believe to be true. An important difference, however is that in order to produce salvation, faith must be centered in Jesus Christ. This makes sense, Christ is the center of God’s plan for us to return to Him and like we said above, we need faith to do this. Hence, we need faith in Jesus Christ, which leads us to the other main point on faith- it delineates action. The very meaning of having faith in Christ means that we believe Him, that we believe His teachings, and if we believe his teachings, then we will operate them in our lives. If we believe that He did die for our sins for the purpose of enabling us to repent and become clean and thus able to dwell in Heavenly Father’s presence, then we will repent when we mess up. It seems to me there are a good many of us who profess to have faith in Christ but then do little to do what He says. This, then is not true faith. Faith in its definition is action. That’s the difference in faith and belief--having a belief is just that- believing. Faith is acting on that belief. (it is also interesting to note that Satan and his followers definitely believe in Christ. Note- the man possessed by evil spirits in Mark 5 who ran to Christ addressing him “Jesus, thou Son of the most high God.” or in Mark 1 where a man with an unclean spirit cries “I know thee, who thou art, the Holy One of God.” With all of Satan’s knowledge of God and Christ, he is still Satan) Mere belief or knowledge, then does little in the way of producing such desired results as salvation or accompaniment of the Holy Ghost in daily life. Knowledge alone does not assure us benefit from our knowledge. However, knowledge is also a key element of faith (many people erroneously exercise faith, or think they are exercising faith when they really are just hoping or believing). We must know in whom we have faith and what that means, in order to properly exercise it.

So how do we properly exercise faith? Simply put, we follow his gospel. His gospel being: faith, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost and enduring to the end. That is quite simply put because each step entails so much, but basically we first have to have hope, even if we can do no more than hope that it’s true (that God exists, sent His son, Christ can redeem us from all sin and guilt, etc) then we need to learn more about it and most importantly, to act on this hope. There’s no better way to figure out if something is true than to act on it- this requires faith in its infancy but also helps faith and hope to grow and develop. For instance, if we want to believe in repentance- try repenting.

Hm, well this post turned out to be more of a lecture than I had envisioned, but it’s a start. Everything starts with faith- it is a key element to our purpose here and critical we learn how to exercise it so that in the end, we will be truly happy and be who we want to be.