What is faith?

What is faith?

I thought I knew the answer to this question.  After all, I believe that Jesus Christ is my Savior, I have a testimony and knowledge of His teachings in the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and other books of scripture, and I was trying to live the standards I had been taught.  Isn't that enough?

However, the past couple of weeks, I have become overwhelmed trying to do everything that I have been expected to do that I finally broke down and turned to the Lord, asking what He would have me do.  One thought that came to mind was to read in Preach My Gospel, the teaching manual for Latter-day Saint missionaries, on the topic of faith.  A one passage stuck out to me in particular:


"Faith in [Christ] means that you trust Him and are confident that He loves you" (Preach My Gospel, 116)

As I read this, I realized that although I have desires to follow God and I certainly believe that He exists, I often doubt that I can do all that He asks me to do, and sometimes I lose hope that I can meet His expectations for me.  However, as we learn about the Savior, we realize that He is not an arbitrary monarch waiting for us to fail, nor is he a distant deity who has little conception of our struggles.  He is our loving Savior, who knows all things and who was willing to suffer and die for our sins.  He doesn't want us to fail -- He wants to help us to succeed.

Now in doing so, He doesn't expect us to sit back and let us do all of the work.  As I stated in my last blog post, Christ expects us to do what we can do and then put our trust in Him to make up for where we lack.  However, our faith in Christ, which as Preach My Gospel later says, "motivates us to act" (p. 116) should be based not only on our belief that Christ lived and that He died for us, but on our trust that He really has our best interests at heart and that He is willing to help us today, as soon as we put our trust in Him and make efforts to do His will.

I also found a scripture in Alma 32 of the Book of Mormon that helped me to better see how I can put this into practice.  In this scripture, the prophet Alma states that faith " is when we "believe in things which are not seen which are true" (vs. 21), explaining that when we have faith, we put our hope and trust in something that we can't see or understand right away.

From this scripture, I realized  that we not only exercise  faith that a God exists and that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, but whenever we work to achieve a goal or try to accomplish something worthwhile.  We can't see the end result, but God can, and as we strive to learn God's will for us and then act to accomplish it with faith in Him, he can help us to accomplish our righteous goals.

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