Through Faith

Through Faith

And it came to pass that after I had prayed and labored with all diligence, the Lord said unto me: I will grant unto thee according to thy desires, because of thy faith. (Enos 1:12)

Yea, and how is it that ye have forgotten that the Lord is able to do all things according to his will, for the children of men, if it so be that they exercise faith in him? Wherefore, let us be faithful to him. (1 Nephi 7:12)

Introduction: Faith is Not Confusion

What is faith? If you ask a Christian, they are likely to paraphrase Paul by saying that faith is things hoped for and not seen. But that isn’t a definition; it’s an example.

Some consider faith to be evidence-free belief. They use the word when people ask them why they believe what they do, saying something like, “Well, sometimes we just have to take things on faith.” Yet Peter, who surely knew the gospel of Jesus Christ at least as well as they do, said.

Peter was not implying that our “answer” ought to be no better than “I don’t know.”

Faith is not a substitute for evidence; it is a process that always generates it.

Some think of faith as internal evidence for a belief. If this is the case, what could Paul have meant when he said that faith comes by hearing a preacher (see Romans 10:14, 17)? How can someone share evidence that only exists internally? And why, then, did Jesus (not to mention his disciples) go through the trouble of doing so many outward miracles, when it cost them their lives to do so?

Some think of faith as meaning “a belief.” One can believe anything they want, but one cannot have faith in anything they want. One can’t wish their way into heaven. If they could, the Bible would be much shorter than it is.

Is it wise to proceed in life without a firm understanding of what faith is, how to get it, and how to exercise it?

Faith lies at the core of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul said that it is through faith that we are saved (see Ephesians 2:8), through faith that we endure severe persecutions and trials (see Hebrews 11:35-37), receive God’s approval (see Hebrews 11:2, 39), work miracles (see Hebrews 11:33-34), and that “without faith it is impossible to please him.” (Hebrews 11:6)

Can someone be a true Christian if they can’t even define what it means to have faith in Jesus Christ? Can you say you have faith if you can’t even define what it is? Can you claim to live according to faith if you can’t explain what it means to do so?

How can a word that is used as such a central anchor to the gospel of Jesus Christ (about 400 times in the New Testament, depending on the translation) be so ambiguous to so many who claim to be Christians?

Claiming to be a Christian without knowing what faith means and how it is practiced seems as absurd as claiming to be a carpenter without knowing what a hammer is or how it is used.

Put in the simplest terms, faith is seeking out and living according to a greater understanding of reality. It is consciously desiring, searching for, and acting to obtain specific outcomes.

Faith is the process by which outcomes are obtained. It consists of the mapping of cause (action) to effect (outcome), the reasons we have to believe the mapping, and the desire we have to obtain the expected outcome (see Figure 1). Faith is a process because each component of faith is continually updated and improved as we gain understanding through experience.

Faith is not limited to religion. A variety of historical and cultural circumstances mean that the sources we have that describe it are explicitly religious, but this does not limit its application to only religious circumstances. When we read scriptures that describe faith, we ought to attempt to apply them as broadly as possible, recognizing that they were phrased in religious terms to garner the greatest comprehension of a lesseducated populace that had a pre-existing, largely-shared understanding of God and the gospel.

There is nothing mystical about faith. It is as tangible as turning a screw or pumping water.

Faith is a mechanism of power. It yields outcomes beyond what would otherwise occur through new or greater belief—new actions based on better-informed desire and superior reason.

Faith is a process. It is not so much something you have, but something you do. Faith is to think in terms of what is possible, to be accurate about where you really are, to design a realistic, detailed path from where you stand to where you want to go, to execute that path, and to revise it as you learn more about reality and about yourself. Faith means daring to dream of outcomes that would otherwise not happen, searching for a path to obtain them, and exercising both sufficient adherence and effort to obtain them.

Faith is much more than an optional strategy in life. Faith is a principle that drives all situations, whether we classify them as secular or spiritual. All good outcomes in life are obtained through faith, no matter how secular they may seem.

The Lord promised that those “that believe” will perform certain miracles.

This promise was not given in isolation. Rather, it came immediately following the Lord’s assertion that “he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” (Mark 16:16) Miracles are given to teach which beliefs bring about salvation. Jesus was saying that if someone’s beliefs do not result in casting out devils, speaking with new tongues, taking up serpents and drinking poison without being harmed, and healing the sick, they aren’t the ones that lead to salvation.

The belief Jesus spoke of is not just effectual for certain miraculous manifestations. Those who hold the belief Jesus referred to will find every aspect of their lives radically more effectual than their peers. The fact that Christians today live such normal lives is even stronger evidence than the lack of Jesus’ listed miracles that, whatever their belief, it is categorically different than what Jesus was teaching and describing.

Through faith in Jesus Christ, individuals repent, obtain promises from God, and work mighty miracles in his name. In a world where people can’t even define the word, is it any wonder we see so few of these things? How many people do you know who unerringly obey all of God’s commandments? How many people have received promises from God through personal communication from him? How many Christians do you know who work the same type and quantity of miracles in Jesus’ name as you find so commonly performed in the scriptures?

Where is faith today? You will not find it exercised or taught in churches. You will actually find stronger examples of it in the secular world than among the religious. As Jesus said, “the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.” (Luke 16:8)

It is easy to see the truth in Jesus’ claim that worldly people more effectively search for what they profess to desire than do religious people. Most religious people do not live according to what they say they desire. They do not actively seek the path to what they claim they want. They do not live according to their understanding of how they will get it. They do not revise their path when they learn new information.

Is it any wonder that so many Christians are indiscernible from those who do not believe in God? Is it any wonder why the Christian world is so noticeably devoid of the many miracles that Christ explained could only be manifest through faith? Is it any wonder why those who do not yet believe in God prefer to remain in their disbelief rather than accept a religion that fails to demonstrate any benefit?

In this volume, you’ll be taken on a tour of scripture to explain what faith is, how it is obtained, and how it is used. You’ll learn why it is impossible to please God without it, and why it is necessary to exercise faith in Christ to lay hold of every good thing. You’ll come to understand how faith affects secular aspects of life and discern those specific circumstances where only explicit faith in Christ will yield what is available to us.

As you increase in understanding and application of faith in your life, you will draw closer to God and become capable of doing more in his service and for your fellowman than you ever dreamed possible. You will quickly learn that it is impossible to have faith in Jesus Christ for very long, because soon after exercising faith in him, you will come to know— not merely believe—that he is real. You will come to know of the reality of his atoning sacrifice and of his unending love for you, exactly why this matters in every aspect of your daily life, and you will live so as to best share his love with all mankind.

Chapter 1: Faith is a Process

As sentient beings, humans have the power to choose how they act based on their thoughts. This capability is useful only to the extent that we recognize and correctly understand the relationships between cause and effect.

Models are an effective way to explicitly state our understanding of a system. Models are characterizations of relationships between entities in a system. The purpose of a model is to reveal what actions will yield a desired effect. While the complexity and indeterminate nature of reality suggest limits to any finite model, models are nevertheless powerful tools to increase the reach of our understanding and the intentionality of our actions.

Faith is not a product. It is a process. It is something you do, not something you have. Faith is to outcomes what wisdom is to knowledge. The one is a process whereby you generate the other.

Describing faith as a process provides insight on what faith really is, how we can act according to faith, how we can increase our faith, and how we can help others to do the same.

Peter speaks of adding “to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge;” (2 Peter 1:5) It is through the process of faith that we become better, and it is through doing so that we gain knowledge. The price of faith is to believe what you do not yet see. The reward of faith is to see what you believed come to pass.

Faith is a mental exercise where you explicitly consider things, open your mind to new ideas, think about what you really desire and why, apply everything you’ve observed, challenge your feelings, question your preconceived notions, and marshal the courage and audacity necessary to walk straight into the unknown. It is the only way to resolve the otherwise mutual exclusivity of deep confidence and absolute willingness to be wrong, both of which are required to obtain the greatest outcomes.

Faith consists of desire, gaining reasons, acting, obtaining outcomes, and knowing.

Desire answers the question, what do you want? Desire is not about what you say you want, or what others want for you. It is about what you really want, deep down inside.

Reason answers the question, why do you want it? Why should you seek the outcome you desire? Why do you want what you desire? Why is what you want better than any alternative? Why does the desired outcome occur, or, in other words, what is the mechanism that results in what you seek? Why should you believe that the actions you consider will lead to the outcome you seek?

Motivation is the combination of desire and reason. Desire is emotion, reason is logic. Together, they form your motivation for action. Each aspect of motivation has strengths and weaknesses.

Emotion can impart momentum to action in a way that most people fail to achieve with reason alone, but emotions are less likely to be aligned with reality and less likely to endure than reason.

Action answers the question, how? Action consists of enumerating what things you will do to obtain what you seek, and actually doing those things. What many call “faith” is suspiciously devoid of action. Faith is a principle of action, and action is what distinguishes faith from wishing. You can wish anything you want, but if you don’t do anything about it, it can’t be faith.

Outcomes are what well-reasoned and sufficiently-desired actions produce.

Knowing refers to obtaining, through your personal experience, the outcome you seek. Once you have obtained the outcome, you have completed a circuit of the faith cycle by replacing your faith with knowledge. Knowledge is also gained throughout the faith process, as developing desires, exercising reason, taking actions, and receiving outcomes all result in increased knowledge.

In each phase of the faith cycle, pain serves as an obstacle to progress. It hurts to change your desires. It is unpleasant to realize your desires are inclined towards something less than what you thought. It is painful to uproot a deep-seated desire.

It hurts to exercise reason. It is unpleasant to overcome irrational emotion. It can be painful to fight misplaced desire with logic. It takes effort to learn and to recognize and fight against mental biases.

It hurts to act towards the outcomes we seek. Effort is never easy, and things of greater worth almost always require not just more effort, but much greater effort. Action almost always reveals that the path is much harder than you expected. It hurts to realize that what you seek will require far greater effort, far greater sacrifice, and much more time than you thought.

Without faith, the inevitable pain present in each step of the faith cycle will waylay you. With faith, you can conquer the obstacles of discomfort and toil that lie between your present circumstances and the outcomes you seek.

Faith concerns itself with the habitual discovery and implementation of efficacious actions. Exercising faith will lead the individual to continued improvement and inevitable joy.

Faith is the process by which potential is transformed into existence. It is the means by which the information present in the spirit is discovered and instantiated into physical reality. It is the means by which the image of God is extracted and applied to the world to yield something in greater fidelity to the creator.

Faith means daring to dream of outcomes that would otherwise not happen, searching for a path to obtain them, and exercising both obedience to the path and sufficient effort to obtain them. Following this pattern is what Jesus meant when he used words like ask, seek, and knock.

Asking doesn’t mean wishing. It means putting in the necessary effort and obedience to discover the path to what you desire, then exercising the necessary effort and obedience to traverse that path and obtain what you desire.

Faithful people are catalysts. They will improve the circumstances of themselves and those around them no matter into what environment you place them. They serve as direct catalysts by personally obtaining the outcomes they seek through faith, as well as indirect catalysts when their examples give others reasons to believe that they might do the same.

Joseph, son of Jacob, was placed in a pit, but he ended up the second most powerful and the first most important man in the world. When he was put into slavery, he was made the commander of the slaves. When he was put into prison, he was made commander of the prison. Everything put into his hands prospered, because he had faith. He applied his ability to ideate and act to his surroundings, and he reshaped them in the image of the power of his mind. His story as recorded in scripture serves as a powerful example of what can be accomplished and demonstrated to others, through faith, even in the most trying of circumstances.

Faith doesn’t play favorites. It yields the same types of results for everyone who puts it into practice. You, too, will become a catalyst for improvement in this world as you deliberately strive to strengthen your faith.

Chapter 2: Faith and Desire

It will come as a surprise to most that God gives us what we desire.

Therefore, the better the outcomes you desire, the better the outcomes you receive.

Perhaps some reason for the confusion lies in a misunderstanding of what desire is and isn’t.

Desire is seen by many Christians as a bad thing. Desire is like good soil in a garden. The presence of a weed does not indicate that the ground is bad—it just indicates that what is growing there could be better. If you pull the weed without planting something better in its place, some other weed will grow in its place. This is why so many who are addicted never really conquer the addiction. They have to be on guard for the rest of theirlives, constantly implementing and maintaining sophisticated schemes to avoid circumstances that will overcome them. They mistakenly assume they have too much desire when in reality they simply have too little information. By finding out why weeds are not desirable, what plants are desirable, and filling your garden with them, you make it so that all of your soil is being used to the maximum beneficial purpose.

It is true that, by nature, our desires are inclined towards evil.

While our desires can entice us towards evil, they can also entice us towards good.

Desire is not, of itself, either good or evil. Desire is a powerful gift from God that, used correctly, is required to obtain the best outcomes. God actually commands us to seek for what we desire.

Desire is a required and helpful component of the gift of free choice. In order to be truly free to choose, we must have both desire and reason. Without desire, we could never act for ourselves.

Desire is sometimes used interchangeably for lust. Really, desire is only lust if left on its own instead of being combined with reason, which is another component of the faith process.

Desire only becomes lust when we stubbornly ignore new reasons that show that what we desired is not the best outcome available to us. Unfortunately, stubborn obstinance is the rule rather than the exception. For example, it was the reaction of the people when Jeremiah pointed out to them the insufficiency of their desires: “And they said, There is no hope: but we will walk after our own devices, and we will every one do the imagination of his evil heart.” (Jeremiah 18:12) It was also the response of the people to the wisdom Ezekiel brought them.

Lust is to desire something without regard as to how one actually obtains it. That which is unlawfully obtained can’t be as good as that which is, even when it appears the same on the surface. The guilt that comes with ill-gotten gains sours what appears the same as honest gains. The lack of foundation of hasty acquisitions aborts any joy that might be found in them long before their natural life ends. Lust makes a counterfeit of the real thing.

One day, during his mortal ministry, the Lord pointed out that his disciples had neglected to recognize that he had all power to lead them to what they desired, as evidenced by the fact that they had not bothered to ask him.

God is able to send many blessings to us without our having asked for them. However, many will require us to first ask for them. Jesus knew that a fullness of joy could only come through first asking.

Do you believe in an all-powerful God who knows all things and desires your greatest possible joy? If so, why would you restrain yourself from asking him to lead you to the fulfillment of what you desire?

You might contend that God is also all-knowing, and since he already knows what you want, you don’t need to tell him. Asking is not about telling him what you want. Rather, it is about explicitly recognizing he is the source of all good and consciously recognizing what it is you really want, both of which provide you with compelling reasons to accept and walk the path he sends to lead you to what you desire, no matter how otherwise unpleasant, difficult, or surprising it may be.

The purpose of desire is to cause us to act in ways we otherwise wouldn't, in order to come to the point where we are willing to do what is required to obtain what we seek. Without desire, you will never commit the actions required to obtain outcomes beyond what you already have.

Far from being something that should be repressed, desire is a critical part of happiness. Happiness requires both something that helps you and something that you desire.

Benefit alone is insufficient for happiness. You can have what benefits you and still be miserable if you do not recognize or value that benefit. No matter how good something is, it will not give you joy unless you want it. We can’t be happy without desire any more than a child can rejoice in eating kale due only to its nutritional value. If a child doesn’t want kale, it doesn’t matter how healthy it is, it will not be something that gives them joy. What improves will only bring you happiness when you want improvement.

While desire is essential to joy, it is also insufficient in and of itself to provide you joy. What is desired must also actually provide objective value to you—it must help you. You can be miserable with exactly what you want if it doesn’t benefit you. For reference, see the misery common among the rich and famous. The end of misplaced desire is misery.

Sometimes, particularly in prayer, we try to dress up what we really want, pretending we are more noble than we really are. There is no point pretending that God doesn’t know what you really want. God sees your heart and he knows what you really want: “Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee.” (Psalm 38:9)

But what of those who know they desire things they shouldn’t? Some attempt to fight temptation as a matter of will, thinking that, through sheer determination, they will somehow change what they desire. These won’t be successful for more than a brief moment, as those who attempt to fight desire via willpower will still be plagued by desire to do what they know is wrong.

It is vain to pretend to seek what we do not actually desire.

This kind of desire will never produce anything of worth.

It is necessary to desire “with full purpose of heart, acting no hypocrisy and no deception before God, but with real intent.” (2 Nephi 31:13) You need to be ruthlessly honest about what you really want and why.

Enumerate what it is you want. Be specific. Be clear. Write it down. Keep it. Refer back to it.

The more detail you provide, the more power your desire will have to motivate you.

As a flawed human being, you are sure to be less than perfect in your idea of what you want, your idea of how to obtain it, and your diligence and exactness in implementing those ideas. Only through honesty in execution can you learn the accuracy of the presumed path to what you want, notice the need for corrections, and summon the courage and stamina to make those corrections.

Without honesty in your desires, you’ll never be able to change your desires when change is needed. Improved desires come through reason, and reason can’t operate from false premises.

Integrity is required in order for us to obtain what we seek, and as long as we are dishonest about our desires, we cut ourselves off from both the fulfillment of those desires and any potential improvement to those desires.

God’s desires are based on a perfect understanding of what things are worth, what they cost, and what endures. Our desires, on the other hand, are based on foolish assumptions, false beliefs inherited from others, and vain wishes.

Man’s desires, by default, are not God’s desires. They are much lower: focused on what is easy, what is quick, what provides cheap pleasure, and what makes sense to our ignorant and foolish minds.

Your default desires will not lead you to happiness. They will disappoint you by leading you to.

Things which are fleeting. Things which are less than what you think they are. Things that are not nearly as good as what you don’t yet know about or correctly value.

In order to become all God intends you to be, you have to replace your natural desires and actions with the Lord’s desires and actions.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. (Matthew 6:33)

What God sends you will conflict with what was there before. That’s why obeying him is described as yielding to him. You have to yield to all things that he sends you.

Unfortunately, people do not embrace God’s obviously superior guidance.

Why do people prefer such base alternatives when God offers such wonderful alternatives? Because the natural man: 1) does not perceive the good things God has to offer; 2) is not willing to let go of the inferior things they presently have to receive something better; and 3) is not willing to pay the price associated with what they say they want. Each of the foregoing problems are just facets of one problem: dishonesty.

Every step in life comes with a realization that you have less than what you thought and that the attainment of something better will require more than what you’ve done. The positive side to this realization is realizing that there is something better out there than what you already have.

There is always something better. The question is whether we are willing to pay the price required to obtain it.

We tend to tire of setting our hearts on something only to be bitterly disappointed in our expectations. Unfortunately, success in the game of life is determined by how many times, and how brutally, you are willing to be disappointed. Those who soften their desires in hopes of sparing themselves pain will only rob themselves of joy, and those who avoid disappointment through quitting the search will never obtain lasting or deep joy.

What makes it hard is that you can’t see how much better what is still out there actually is until you get it, and you can’t get it without walking through what seems to be unending darkness.

You have to keep trying. You have to try harder.

The stronger your desire, and the greater the value of what you desire, the more often and more deeply you will be disappointed. The less urgently you desire, and the lesser the value of what you desire, the less you will receive.

Those who attempt to avoid pain will only do so short-term, because they will only have “that which they are willing to receive, because they were not willing to enjoy that which they might have received.” (D&C 88:32) If you want to receive all the joy God has made available to you, you have to believe he has greater joy to give than what you can presently imagine.

If you truly believe this, you must surely desire that level of joy. If you desire that level of joy, you are assured to suffer great disappointment as he teaches you what it takes to obtain it, why it is as valuable as it is, and how extensive is the list of what will not provide it. There is no other way.

Desire is not just a question of asking what you want. Why you want what you want is at least as important to consider. Your why is more important than your what because the why always dictates the what: your reason for wanting what you want is only because of why you want it. Refining your desires requires you to ask what you want, then to ask yourself why you want it, then to ask if what you said you wanted is really the best way to obtain what you seek. By repeating this process over and over again, you will reveal what you really want.

It’s a rare thing for a person to relentlessly drill into what it is they really want. This can be an extremely unpleasant experience, because it will very likely reveal that you’ve wasted significant emotion and energy on situations that weren’t justified. You will also very likely be presented with realizations that require you to leave your comfort zone: bigger dreams, and the more radical actions required to obtain them.

Those few who dare to practice the relentless refinement of what they desire will find themselves moving up a hierarchy of desires. They may start anywhere. Perhaps they desire an object, or a relationship, or comfort. No matter where someone starts in their desire, if they continue in learning and introspection, they will arrive at the same end. At some point, everyone will come to the realization that what they really want is joy.

Joy is the foundational reason we do everything we do. Without extreme honesty and sharpened reason, we will do a poor job in obtaining it. This is not surprising: throwing a bullseye in darts is hard, but imagine how unlikely it is when you don’t even know about the dartboard!

God knows all things. God knows of joy beyond what you can imagine.

Only in seeking him will you find the path to the greatest joy.

The path to obtaining this joy includes many things that take preparation and experience to bear.

However, the Lord assures us that all that is important will be given along the way.

The greatest outcomes will come to those who can focus their desire on God.

To have your desire focused uniquely on God is the meaning of Jesus’ instruction to make our “eye single” to God’s glory.

You can only have one top priority. What do you desire the most?

If you are wise, you will desire God more than anything else. You will realize that desiring God is the real-life analog to using one of your wishes from a genie to ask for infinite wishes. There is a reason God commands us to seek him above all else. His only desire is for us to obtain everything he has, and the only way that can happen is if we seek him above all else. God’s desires for us will lead us to joy, happiness, and peace, and will provide all of those things in enduring, ever-increasing abundance.

Too often we wrongly assume desire to be something innate— something we can’t control or change. This is a false belief, and as long as you hold it, you will be a slave to whatever limited outcomes your present desires lead you to.

Desire is a choice. Desire is how you wish things were. There is nothing external or transcendent about desire. Desire is completely within and completely up to you.

Agency is the ability to choose to act independent of what is felt. Our feelings do not dictate our actions. God made us free to choose based on our thoughts. We can choose to submit our thoughts to our feelings, and thus enslave ourselves to a narrow, often incorrect perspective, but we do not have to.

You change desire through choosing differently. You choose differently as a result of having different reasons. You change desire through changing your reasons.

Desire is a judgment of value. When the value we perceive in things changes, our desires immediately change. The value we perceive in things is not an innate quality. It is a choice, and to the degree we are honest, it is a choice based on how things really are.

Changing your desire is a process of reason, not a question of willpower. Jesus said: “I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33) As long as you are overcome by the world, you are missing something he has to teach you.

Jesus was tempted like we are, but he did not succumb.

If you have to avoid all sorts of situations in life to avoid succumbing to what you know isn’t right, you aren’t lacking willpower. You are either lacking information, honesty, or both.

The solution to temptation is not a matter of what you want, but why you want it.

You change your desire through using your faculties of reason to better understand the consequences of what it is you desire, to evaluate whether better consequences exist in another desire, and to exercise the honesty to prefer what is truly best for you.

Desire is completely independent of reality. Your desires can be completely aligned with reality, or completely opposed to reality. The more your desires align with reality, the more successful you will be in obtaining the outcomes you seek. To encounter the greatest joy, you must reconcile your desires and actions to reality—to things as they really are, not how you wish they were.

Limited understanding of reality will cause us to place our desires on things that have less value than available alternatives. Only God, who knows all things, perfectly understands what actually benefits, and by how much. It is essential that we use reason and effort to figure out God’s desire, and not merely seek whatever vain desire crosses our mind. The best desires are those that align with God’s, because they are the desires that align most with reality.

Wise desire is fueled by accurate valuation of future outcomes. God has all things before him continually through faith. He acts in the present with equal deference to the future.

Humans, by default, assign enormous preference to the present, even at the expense of the future. To become more like God, we must learn to weigh the future honestly, which will result in our willing sacrifice of the present for the sake of the future.

Don’t constrain your desires to an understanding of reality as what it seems to be here and now. Your desire should be reconciled to the fact that future outcomes exist that are far beyond your idea of what is possible—far beyond the best thing you can currently imagine. Your desire should also include the fact that things can be worse than you can currently imagine. Prepare accordingly.

Without faith, our understanding is limited to things as we think they are. With faith, however, we are provided a way to “see afar off,” or accurately assign present value to outcomes that are distant in time (see Moses 6:27 and Hebrews 11:13).

With faith, we gain the belief that things as they were, are, and will be consist of more than what we presently perceive. This means we gain access to the lessons from the past that we don’t currently know, opportunities in the present that we don’t currently recognize, and outcomes in the future that would otherwise be outside of our reach.

God has prepared outcomes far greater than what we can imagine.

God will incessantly steer you toward far better outcomes than what you know to seek. God will try to lead us to better things beyond what we know to ask.

Your willingness to trust him and receive what he wishes to give will determine how successful he can be.

The natural man doesn’t perceive the good things that are available. The natural man just tends to pick from what is closest or easiest.

We tend to fulfill our desires with their nearest available potential fulfillment. For example, if you long for deep intimacy with a human, you may go on dates with the most appealing person in your immediate circle in hope that this person fulfills your desire.

There is nothing inherently wrong with searching around us for the fulfillment of our desire. The trouble comes when we refuse to do anything more. Any meaningful blessing will not be fulfilled as easy as ordering something online. It doesn’t come to your doorstep in two days with free shipping.

Thankfully, the Lord knows what we really want—what will bring us the most joy—better than we do. He said.

He didn’t say that good fathers would give bread to the son that asks for bread, or fish to him who asks for it. Instead, the implication is that a good father will give his son things at least as good as what he asks for.

The path to better things begins in what you presently perceive and desire, but it will progress on to things beyond your current understanding or interest. In almost every case—and certainly in the case where the desire is anything but trivial— what you seek will not be available in your present circumstances. You will have to be stronger and better to qualify for what you seek. You will have to achieve and learn much more than you have yet. You will have to find people and circumstances that fit what you seek.

Desire is a powerful magnet that attracts us to what is truly worthy of our hope. God will use your desires to direct you toward greater outcomes by showing the inadequacy of what you thought would fulfill them. God orients us and motivates us along the path by revealing the insufficiency of our desires by showing us that what they lead to—or, more often, the actions we think lead to them—lead to pain, loss, and sorrow. He will show you that the easy outcomes you slotted into your deep desires are insufficient, providing you with the motivation you need to become willing to endure the greater sacrifice, change, and toil to obtain better outcomes.

We ought to realize that whatever we identify as the object of our longings is probably merely a placeholder: something that we understand and desire well enough to motivate us to search for its fulfillment and act to that end.

Placeholders are the prototype of what it is we seek. They are the people, actions, and situations we assume lead to the fulfillment of our desire. They represent the earliest semblance of what God will give us to fulfill our desires in the state necessary given our present understanding and the limits of what we are willing to receive.

Placeholders are not what we actually seek. They are merely something that holds the spot of the real fulfillment of our desire until we better understand what to ask for and seek. They are waypoints on the path to the outcomes we seek. They are the fullest expression of our as-yet limited understanding of what it is we seek and how it is we will go about obtaining it.

While placeholders can provide a needed stepping stone in our progressive realization of our desires, realize that they become barriers to what we seek the minute we realize they are placeholders. The purpose of waypoints is to get us to walk to them in order to walk closer to our eventual target. A placeholder may be the only way to get you to the next step, but once you’re at the next step, they will limit you to that step until you let them go. We need to courageously let go of what he reveals is not the fulfillment of our desire just as soon as he has shown us.

We can ignore the obvious signs that placeholders are not what we are seeking for. When we do this, we abandon our desires and settle for something far less. God does not settle. God promises to give us things at least as good as what we ask for. He promises to fill us to overflowing, not to half full. It is we who settle. We settle by responding to his revelation that further action will be necessary by refusing to act or by interpreting the discovery negatively. Will you be honest enough to let go of what you previously sought when its limits are revealed?

All too often, we pray and pray for God to advance us on the path we think will lead to what we desire. No amount of prayer can ever change the wrong path into the right path. We should pray about the destination and be very open to whatever path may be required to get there. We need to let go of our expectation of what the outcome will require.

We need to open-mindedly seek God to show us where to start, and to show us the next step.

As he reveals the limits of what we presumed to be the object of our desire, he shows us how we must increase the window of what we are willing to desire, the reasons we hold, and the actions we are willing to take, as our window is not yet as wide as it needs to be to fit the blessing we seek.

You won’t be able to progress further towards your desire until you courageously face emptiness instead of keeping a known placeholder in the slot of your desire. Hearkening back to the previous dating analogy, continuing to date people you know are insufficient for you won’t bring you closer to the right person; it will keep the right person away so long as you do it.

A placeholder will only lead you closer to your ultimate goal if it is actually in the path of that ultimate goal. Counterfeit placeholders will serve the opposite purpose: they will prevent you from taking steps towards the ultimate goal. The key to telling the difference between a productive placeholder and an impeding counterfeit placeholder is in being honest about the qualities of the placeholder. For example, suppose a person has an idea of the family life they would like to live, yet is dating someone they have ample reason to believe will never be capable of such a life. Remaining in that relationship will cause the person to block the very means God could use to orient them to the fulfillment of their goal. If you have valid reasons for how that object, person, or experience deviates from what you seek, you are obliged to let it go. Until then, embrace it as the real thing and enjoy what temporary fulfillment it may provide.

How will you know when you have obtained the real thing? Every placeholder you experience will increase your understanding of the real thing. Every placeholder you dethrone will increase your confidence when you have found the real thing, because it will increase your understanding of its properties. Your list of why previous placeholders were not right is also the list of qualities that will certify the situation that is.

Within each of us lies an influence that, for the most part, goes unused and even unrecognized. Deep inside of each of us lies the ability to dream. This faculty is significant, even though it is not embraced by many. This is the part of us that wonders what could be. It is the genesis of everything of deep meaning that we accomplish in life. Those who embrace this faculty will achieve things others don’t even dare imagine. Those who neglect or ignore it will endure relentless torment from its nagging whispers about what could have been.

In order to become all God intends you to be, you will have to dare to desire amazing things. Faith is a willingness to believe there is something better available, even if you already have something good.

You don’t realize it, but you are limiting what God can do through what you are willing to desire. You have to get to the point where you can boldly believe in a God of miracles—a God who does impossible things all the time. “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)

There is a path to every outcome, but whether we choose to seek, find, and follow that path is another question altogether. Faith is what makes one seek what no one else is willing to seek, find what no one else has found, and do what no one else is willing to do. All of this starts with daring to desire what no one else desires, then seeking the Lord with unrelenting open-mindedness so that he can reveal to you the path that will yield the outcome you seek.

Far too many of us significantly limit our faculty to dream by filtering out any potential outcomes that are not tied to what we experience in the physical world. Unlike our physical senses, our desires need not be dampened in any way by what we see before us. The spirit is an infinite, unquenchable channel. To obtain all that God would have us obtain, we must avoid imposing any limits to his infinity.

It seems that children most naturally embrace unbounded dreams. For them, everything is so new and untested that it takes far less to differentiate the fanciful from the practical than it does with adults. Somewhere along the line, children learn to limit themselves to what has already been done and to what they see manifested in the lives of those around them.

You have to relearn to dream without tethering yourself to your present circumstances. Faith requires looking and thinking beyond present bounds. Where you are right now is completely irrelevant to what you can obtain. Where you are right now only matters in the reason and action steps of the faith cycle. Don’t make the mistake of limiting your desires. Desire is about really being honest about what you want, not about finding out what it will take to get it or whether you are willing to do it.

In order to become all God intends you to be, you have to set aside the limits you place on yourself. Your accomplishments with God’s strength will surpass the many limitations you have. Solomon was not born the wisest man in the world. God brought him up to his wise stature. You will likewise have to rise beyond what you think are your limits. You will have to encounter and overcome things that you think are beyond you.

While we are limited in our physical resources, there is absolutely no limit to the ideas you can consider, and those ideas can be engineered to work within the constraints of the physical world to generate what was previously considered impossible—or not even considered at all.

Perhaps part of our discouragement comes from the realization that we, personally, are unwilling to do what it would take to have an unusually abundant life. Most of us are far less foolish than we act, and many will quickly realize that desires are attached to action. Having an ample list of things that they are not willing to do, many will quickly abort any desire that touches on this list in the earliest stages of ideation, usually without conscious thought. Unfortunately, the masses that so smoothly abort desires seem never to develop as smooth a satisfaction with the outcomes they consistently choose. Having turned away from something better due to an unwillingness to do what it would take to obtain it, they still writhe and complain about what they opted for instead, as if these things are not completely coupled.

In order to become all God intends you to be, you will have to courageously face bitter disappointment. Perhaps part of the reason for the gradual dampening of the magnitude of our dreams is the pain that comes from the realization that things and people are not what they seemed. Children 26.

begin life with a default willingness to trust. They have high hopes of people and outcomes. Their implicit trust attenuates over time through repeated disappointments. Eventually, their trust becomes something that must be won, not something that is automatically bestowed.

You can’t desire what your heart is not set on, and given the likelihood of your desire being based on incomplete understanding, you are bound to have your heart break when God shows you the insufficiency of the thing you thought would fulfill your desire. The more important and beneficial the subject of your desire, the more you can count on heartbreak. The heartbreak is unavoidable, because it is the only way you can be led on closer and closer to the thing you actually seek. The more important what you seek, the more times and more deeply your heart will break. Playing it safe will guarantee you never obtain what you seek. No matter how much you lie to yourself about settling for something less, the day will come when you are filled with regret and remorse for having done so. If you wait until it is too late to do something about it, that regret will be yours eternally.

For some, relentless disappointment of unmet expectations, crashing down incessantly like waves on a shore, coalesces in the realization that they possess an outsized longing that nothing in this world seems to be able to satisfy. Those coming to this realization possess an enormous gift. They alone will ever marshal the requisite desire to truly seek the Lord with all their heart, might, mind, and strength. It is Christ alone that is the only hope they have of ever satisfying the longing within. Unfortunately, though few ever get to this point, most of those who do will run from this realization by any means possible, too scared of what it means: that normality truly has nothing to offer, that they will never possess the vacuous happiness of the damned, that it is as tenuous and fleeting as they supposed, and that the relationships that will actually satisfy them are exceedingly few and will only be found through extreme and socially-rejected measures.

In order to become all God intends you to be, you will have to courageously and boldly do what is reasonable, even when it is unpopular, difficult, or unlikely. When you have faith, you will find yourself constantly doing things others dismiss as impossible. As you look back on a life of faith, you will find that nearly everything of value was an impossibly long shot. Still, there is a significant difference between actions of faith and unwise risk. Faith is always justified. Faith is not about acting without reason. Faith requires reasons. The question is do the reasons justify the action? The lack of bold moves in the life of the faithless is not about a lack of reasons to make bold moves, but rather a lack of honesty in assessing the value of potential outcomes and incorrectly confusing constancy or normality for lack of risk. For example, a mid-career change might be considered a leap of faith for those who value constancy, but only because they are incorrectly valuing constancy compared to the outcomes possible in a career move.

In order to become all God intends you to be, you have to face persecution from others. As a person exercises the needed courage to embrace and develop their dreams, they will find themselves surrounded by greater and greater resistance and persecution from others. The more a person dreams, the more they will find that others do not. Dreamers find themselves bombarded by constant evidences that other people do not think or feel the way they do. They learn quickly—usually around the age of puberty—that the easiest way to deal with their dreams is to shut them down in any way possible. But dreams do not die an easy death. No matter how much drugs, alcohol, travel, shallow relationships, sex, or other means are used to squash them, their roots will endure and issue a constant cry of what might have been.

In order to become all God intends you to be, you will have to subject yourself to continual change. Until you are like him, he has more to change in you. If your desires, reasons, and actions remain unchanged, your outcomes will also remain unchanged. Following “dead works” will never yield the same living, changing, growing, custom, interactive guidance as a real relationship with God will.

In order to become all God intends you to be, you have to set aside your preconceived notions about the path to become all you can be. Joseph, son of Jacob, was not born as the second most powerful man in the known world. God brought him up to that outcome through slavery, false imprisonment, and abject abandonment from all who should have cared about him. Do you have reason to believe your path will be any less surprising?

In order to become all God intends you to be, you have to submit to any timetable he may have. Abraham’s path towards a righteous son—which was the consuming desire of his heart—lay in waiting until miraculous old age to see it fulfilled.

Dreams, unattempted, will never fully die. They accumulate, and each one will relentlessly haunt the person for the duration of and even beyond this life. A significant portion of the torment of hell is an everlasting awareness of all the good outcomes that you had the means to bring about for yourself and others, but chose not to.

Dare to dream! Dare to set the ordinary life aside. Dare to listen to the sudden strokes of ideas that come to your mind. Dare to believe there is a path to anything you can imagine. Dare to be honest about the lackluster outcomes of what everyone else does. Dare to recognize faulty solutions to problems in spite of the fact that everyone else embraces them. Dare to reflect on, study, and critically think about life.

Chapter 3: Faith and Reason

Reason is a process of logically examining beliefs and supporting evidence in order to reveal information in the form of relationships of cause and effect between actions and outcomes.

In briefest terms, reason asks: Given what you want, are you doing the best you know to achieve it? What are you doing? Is it the best way you know to obtain what you say you want? Honestly asking these questions yields a more accurate understanding of possible outcomes, effective paths to them, and honest accountability of one’s behavior, thoughts, and desires.

If you are honest, you are probably noticing that the process of reason is far more involved than your typical approach to life. In fact, what is described here may overwhelm you.

Most beliefs held in this world were not intentionally or logically formed. They never graduated out of the desire phase. They were formed without sufficient reason and maintained beyond the point where sufficient reasons to disbelieve them were given.

Normal people take a passive approach to belief—one that applies only the lightest reason, or perhaps none at all. Normal people do not pay attention to what they do, could not give good reasons for why they do it, would likely lie if they did, have not honestly evaluated other approaches to the outcomes they seek, and actively resist superior positions when made available to them.

A master painter can create awe-inspiring works of art that are more colorful than most people can even imagine. One does not become a master painter by simply picking up a brush and mindlessly slapping paint onto a canvas. Life is significantly more complicated than painting, and yet most people assume that, somehow, we can create masterpiece lives by simply bumbling through the vast space of possibilities before us.

Overwhelming or not, your ability to extract value from the abundant possibilities before you in life will be limited to your ability to reason. The importance of reason, as defined here, is underscored in the scriptures— though the word wisdom is used in its place. There are far too many serious invitations to obtain wisdom sprinkled across scripture than can be quoted here.

The wiser a person becomes in this life, the greater the value they place on wisdom. Wise Solomon used his great resources to figure out the true worth of everything under the sun.

What Solomon found was that the things that normal people desire (money, romantic relationships, beautiful scenes, music, etc.) were nothing but “vanity and vexation of spirit.” Solomon spent more time and money than you will have in this life in evaluating the value of things. He found that wisdom was worth more than all of these. Perhaps he was onto something.

Reason is the toolset for gaining understanding. Only through reason can someone gain an idea of what is right, why it is right, and what it is worth in comparison to other beliefs.

Reason is the ability to mentally evaluate the accurate cost and benefit of potential outcomes of future actions based on information acquired through thought, study, learning, and experience. It is also the tool we use to evaluate how well previous actions matched expectations, and to enumerate changes in beliefs, desires, or actions as suggested by the observed results.

Desire answers the question of what you want. Reason tells you why you want it. Through reason, you enumerate the space of possibilities and estimate the value of each alternative. You collate and analyze the reasons to believe and disbelieve these possibilities, the putative paths you posit will deliver them, as well as the basis behind your estimate of their value.

Beliefs are not meant to be whimsical or based only on desire. Peter said.

To the degree that a belief is not backed by reason, it will lead the holder to outcomes less beneficial than would otherwise have occurred, impede possible improvement, and prevent them from learning from mistakes.

God created humans to act—to intentionally design and choose coherent courses of action—not to be acted upon, or limited to whatever outcomes they are handed in the form of beliefs detached from any reason for holding them. Beliefs that are based on desire and not backed by rationality cause the holder to be acted upon. Desire without reason, by definition, is not an action of intent, but a passive reaction.

A lack of reason will cause a person to desire things that are ineffectual.

You can’t know what will improve the most without reasoning through your options. You must attempt to figure out the cost and the benefit of each course of action. While this sounds mechanical, it is not only an act of great faith, it is a key component of the faith cycle.

By applying reason to the experiences of others and to your own, you can come to a more accurate valuation of outcomes, and that valuation can motivate you to desire things of greater worth than what normal people desire.

Desire without reason is worse than worthless. Desire without reason is the fullness of the baseness of fallen man. When coupled and exercised in their fullness, desire and reason are the propellant that will lead a person to eternal life. Reason alone is insufficient to do so, but reason never exists alone. It will always generate desire, and, unlike the default desire of mankind, desire from reason will lead a person to improvement and greater good to the extent they practice it.

Reason is not passive or emotive. It is active, intentional, deliberate, and logical. Reason reveals truth, which is immutable and transcendent. The truth doesn’t care how you feel about it, nor whether you even correctly understand it. Truth simply exists. How much we will act so as to discover and live according to more of it is our choice.

Reason rests on the assumption that you value truth more than anything else. Without truth as your highest ideal, reason will always be merely some shade of rationalization. Rationalization starts with a fixed desire and finds reasons to justify that desire, typically while ignoring plausible reasons that contradict that desire.

Reason is not rationalization. Honest reasoning requires that you are willing to change your desire.

Reason in the faith cycle is concerned primarily with discovering reality—things as they really are—while desire deals primarily in how we wish reality to be. Wishes have their place, but that place is not in reason, except as far as they motivate us to act in ways we otherwise would not to find and follow the pre-existent paths in reality that lead to outcomes we desire. Even in this case, ruthless reconciliation to reality is required to successfully obtain what we seek. If you have reason to believe that some ideas, situations, or people will detract from your goals, you must contend with them. Simply pretending they don’t exist will prevent you from obtaining what you desire.

Reason will root you in reality. Reason will help you be honest. Honesty is not an arbitrary quality. Because honesty is a measure of alignment with truth so far as you understand it, and because the truth determines relationships of cause and effect, honesty is also a measure of how effectively you are working towards outcomes you desire. Any degree of dishonesty indicates a person is intentionally deviating from what they believe is necessary to obtain what they desire.

Desire serves well as a priming force for reason. Desire can impart momentum to action in a way that is difficult for most people to muster through reason alone.

Desire can’t give you certainty. Desire is a feeling, not a fact. Reason takes a person from desiring to believe to actually believing.

Desire is fickle. No matter how intense, desire can never be as powerful a force for enduring as reason can be. No matter how intense it is, a desire can be undone instantaneously and unpredictably through the arrival of another potentially arbitrary emotion. A desire’s power stems from its intensity, not its goodness or substance. While emotions can be exceedingly powerful, there is no requirement that they be based whatsoever in reality. For example, imagine the pain you would feel to hear a loved one died, even if the news was—unknown to you—untrue. The intensity of emotions is not based on the degree of accuracy of the information generating them. In contrast, you can’t have logical confidence beyond the strength of the underlying reasoning. A strong rational reason cannot be undone without either superior rational reasons or dishonesty. Reason locks into improvement and can only be honestly undone through finding something better.

All honest reason leads the individual closer to God. Every good thing imaginable here on earth—no matter what it is—will lead you closer to reasons to believe that seeking Jesus is the core foundation of everything that matters here, and to the only place where all good things are found and endure.

Faith rests on the strength of confidence—confidence far stronger than anything that can come from mere wishing or mere desire. Consider this powerful, universal promise.

Unfortunately, this promise does not apply to those who have less than perfect confidence.

It isn’t possible to have such unshaken confidence based merely on desire. It isn’t possible to have complete confidence in what you are asking without any reasons to believe.

If you are wishing, you are not exercising faith. If you are guessing, you are not exercising faith. If you don’t know what you want or what it will take, you are not exercising faith.

Confidence comes through gaining and reconciling to information. Gaining faith requires gaining information. We read that the ancients had great faith because of their efforts in searching and obeying God’s recorded word.

Faith requires looking into every resource you have at your disposal to search for understanding of the subject.

This includes everything in the scriptures, as well as all good books and people you have access to.

Faith means daring to dream of outcomes that would otherwise not happen, searching for a path to obtain them, and exercising both obedience to the path and sufficient effort to obtain them. If you have not bothered looking into resources that you have the means to investigate, how can you expect God to show you what to do?

Desires are not fulfilled merely because we really want them. You can’t merely wish something were true and still manage to exercise the complete confidence necessary to obey God’s commandments. You can’t overcome ignorance or incompleteness with desire. You have to become: you actually have to know and you actually have to act.

The Lord cried in agony for the Father to spare him death on the cross.

Surely, if it were possible to have your desires fulfilled just because you want them fulfilled, the Father would have granted Jesus’ request.

Jesus said: “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26) All things are possible, but not in all ways. This is one reason why desire alone is not enough. Desire must be coupled to the effective actions that lead to obtaining the fulfillment of the desire. Reason is the only means whereby those actions can be discovered and a significant source of the motivation to complete them.

All outcomes have a path to obtain them. Unfortunately, the path to what you do desire usually includes actions you don’t desire. In other words, the gift almost always comes in packaging that you won’t like. You can usually have what you want or do what you want, but you can rarely have both. Reason is the only way you can objectively measure whether the outcome or the path is more important to you through logical examination of the value of the outcome and the cost of the path to reach it. Valuation of outcomes through reason will update your desires, showing you what you really want. Reason will show you what is worth the actions it requires. It will also resolve the frustration that comes when you erroneously think you want multiple mutually exclusive outcomes.

Many allegedly faithful people mistakenly consider faith and reason to be opposites. They will say things like “we just have to take it on faith” to explain something they do not understand. This isn’t faith at all!

One obstacle to understanding faith is our misunderstanding of certainty. No matter the domain, we are too prone to considering ideas as final. Ideas are estimates—mere snapshots of the continuum of understanding.

Too many regard faith as something that is rare and difficult to obtain because it seems difficult or inappropriate to act absolutely confident in the face of uncertainty. Disabusing ourselves of the myth of absolute confidence is necessary before understanding faith and reason’s role in it.

The truth is that everything you believe is uncertain. Uncertainty is inescapable. Everything you believe is either incorrect or incomplete. Confidence is a gradient without a positive absolute: you can have zero confidence in something, but you can never have perfect confidence in it.

Confidence is a question of the strength of your reasons for belief, not a question of whether you have discovered some final truth, of which there is no such thing. The only things that are final are those things that are past, and even then, our understanding of them can be infinitely incorrect or incomplete! Until something has happened, our beliefs regarding it can only be regarded as estimates, no matter how confident we may be about them. It is possible to be extremely confident and still be dead wrong.

As evidenced by the many things you are confident about, it is possible and fruitful to be confident about things in spite of uncertainty.

Spiritual matters and temporal matters alike share the same properties of certainty, though most don’t seem to realize it. It is rare to find anyone who invests the same effort of intentional reasoning in spiritual matters as they do in temporal ones. While most people are quite foolish in their assumed surety over temporal matters (assuming that their lives are as good as they can be, or that they are right about a great many things), some few are unusually humble, willing to assume that they are wrong and that there are others who know much more than they do about life. Yet, for some reason, even those unusually humble in temporal matters typically fail to exercise the same humility in spiritual matters. The difference between faith and knowledge isn’t in one’s effort in applying reason. The difference is that faith pertains to the future, and knowledge pertains to the past.

Doubt is a condition where what is right, or what benefits the most, is unclear. We are told that this is a condition that the faithful never need to endure.

Enumerating and quantifying the pros and cons of an idea and comparing it to alternatives is sufficient to make what benefits the most as clear as daylight is from night.

However, this comparison process is limited to both the degree of information you have and your interpretation of it. The existence of information and interpretation beyond what you are aware of creates a condition called uncertainty. Although most who consider themselves faithful would disagree, certainty is a position that is diametrically opposed to the faithful.

Certainty is a state of finality—an assurance that the thinking has been done. But those who have faith understand that there is always more information, and always a better interpretation of it. Most people who use the word “certainty” really mean “confidence.”

Confidence means to have conducted sufficient action, observation, and reasoning to conclude that a particular idea or relationship of cause and effect is true or a particular action is most beneficial.

The faithful possess the right to be supremely confident in all that they do, no matter how bold or courageous or unlikely or, frankly, crazy those actions may seem to those who do not possess the reasons or the interpretations they do.

Confidence can be small, such as when a theory has many plausible alternatives, and the supporting evidence for any one is not vastly superior than that in favor of another. Confidence can be great, such as when volumes of evidence exist to support a putative relationship of cause and effect, or when the net benefits of a course of action are enormous compared to any alternatives. Confidence, however, can never be perfect.

Confidence is a term that is permanently rooted in the perspective of the individual who holds it. It is never transcendent. Every assertion confidence can provide comes with the disclaimer: “given what this person has thought and experienced.”

The closest outcome to certainty is when an expected outcome is obtained in the expected way. Even then, one’s interpretation of events could be incomplete or incorrect. A baby could think that milk comesfrom crying, an incomplete idea even though milk does come after crying. A shaman could think that rain comes from dancing, an incorrect idea, even if it sometimes rains after they dance.

Uncertainty is commonly used as a synonym for doubt. However, it is a very different idea at higher resolution. Uncertainty means the absence of certainty, which can happen at any degree, yet uncertainty does not mean that there is insufficient reasoning and evidence to suggest a clear winner among options.

Put another way, there is always more information beyond what you know about and have access to, and what is right is only ever right according to the subset of information you possess and your interpretation of it. This is always true, and it is the reason you will never be able to categorically and finally list what is right and what is wrong.

Faith doesn’t provide certainty. Rather, it provides a way to act in confidence amidst the otherwise debilitating, yet unshakeable, truth that all things are uncertain. This ability to act under uncertainty is critical, because it is through this very action that more information or better interpretation is gained. To resolve doubt, one must engage in reason and action. Reason and action will also increase certainty, though unlike doubt resolution, this is a process that is never-ending.

Reason and action, in concert, are the only way to gain confidence. Reason alone can’t dispel doubt—doubt is only resolved by faithful action, when outcomes become indisputable past events. Action alone can’t provide plausible explanations of cause and effect; only reason provides understanding.

Reason works in conjunction with other actions. Thinking requires a supply of information through action. What happens in the mind depends on your interactions in the world. Each plays off the other, and neither can do its job in isolation.

Many people pray for increased confidence: to have courage to do what is right, or knowledge to know what is right. Prayer is a wonderful example of the many actions that one can take to dispel doubt and move towards certainty. However, not all prayers are equal. Some can be interactive conversations that yield new information revealed or recalled through the Holy Ghost. Most are not. Some can be intentionally and carefully structured inquiries that work through reason. Most are not. Some can be brutally honest admissions of true motives that would otherwise remain deeply hidden. Most are not.

Even good prayers are typically not enough to generate confidence. Jesus himself said.

He did not say “pray so that the Father can show you everything you should do before any action on your part.”

It is wrong to pray and ask God for certainty. It is right to search faithfully, including through prayer, to think and act so as to move towards certainty. If you want bold answers from God, the only way to get them is through honest, open-minded reasoning and bold action.

Faith is confidence in what has not yet occurred based on processes in the mind: reasoning based on information and past observation, but not yet proven through experience. Faith pertains to future events. The difference between believing something and knowing it is whether it is fully apparent in reality. Faith describes the future and new things. Knowledge describes the past and any future replication of the past. If it is still in your mind, it is faith. If it has already happened, it is knowledge, not faith. Repeating something is knowledge; creating something is faith.

Faith requires that you have all reasons to believe that certain specific actions on your part will yield certain specific outcomes. When you know that a certain specific action on your part will yield certain specific outcomes, that is not faith, but knowledge.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not a god of ignorance and whim. He is the God of reason. He does nothing arbitrarily. Our interactions with him are not mere pleadings for arbitrary favor, but requests for what is accordant with reality and his divine justice.

Because there is opposition in all things (see 2 Nephi 2:11), the existence of reasons in support of something is insufficient to gain perfect confidence in that thing. There will always be one or more reasons to support anything you can think of. The existence of supporting evidence is irrelevant. What matters is how the rational arguments of each option stack up in comparison to each other—stronger reasons are better than weaker reasons. Reasons supporting competing alternatives must be weighed against each other. What is right is clear not because it exists without opposing alternatives, but because, when adequate effort and skill is invested in reasoning through available information, a clear winner emerges.

Comparisons are also required between the reasons and the purported outcome—bigger risks are justified for bigger reward; stronger reasons are required for less likely outcomes, and so on.

When someone says something is according to their faith, or your faith, what does that mean? It means that something is in accord with the person’s understanding of what God wants, based on actual reasons.

For example, when Alma and Amulek were bound, beaten, and starved for many days, they prayed to God.

What he meant was “God, because of what we know about Christ, and how we have lived, we have reasons to be confident that you will now give us power to break these cords.”

Miracles happen according to the faith of the individual: the individual possesses reasons, belief in those reasons, and action according to those reasons that exceeds what others are willing to obtain and act upon.

A specific example of this principle is given in Helaman, the prophet general, and his soldiers. They were taught that “those who were faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord were delivered at all times,” (Alma 50:22) and they believed it!

Critically, these soldiers did not merely say they believed that those who were faithful would be prospered by God. Part of their reason to believe they would be protected was their knowledge that they had been perfectly obedient to God’s commandments: “Yea, and they did obey and observe to perform every word of command with exactness....” (Alma 57:21) Because of their faith, they were miraculously preserved.

Faith requires you to find beliefs supported by reasons, and to act according to those beliefs.

Knowing the best course of action is not meant to be a mystery.

The Spirit of Christ, given to every man in the form of reason and conscience, is the key to knowing the best course of action.

Your faculty of reason, or your ability to logically evaluate benefits and costs in the context of an understanding of reality, will make the right course of action obvious.

In plain, modern English, good and evil are questions of consequence. What is good is what benefits, what improves, what brings increased joy, and what increases resilience to suffering. What is evil is what harms, what degrades, what steals joy, and what increases susceptibility to suffering.

You can’t discern good and evil without discerning the consequence of action, and you can’t discern the consequence of action except through personal experience or the logical evaluation of the experience of others. What is good and what is evil depends upon a person’s understanding. Two important implications of this dependency are that the highest good can only be perceived by those with the greatest understanding, and that a more accurate perception of good and evil can come only through gaining understanding.

By default, the value we impute to things is arbitrary. Desire in its most naïve form is some mix of maximization of pleasure subject to minimization of pain. Unfortunately, the paths of greatest joy include massive pain. Through the exercise of reason, desire can transcend immediate cost and benefit and become the powerful tool towards good it is intended to be. For example, it is through desire seasoned by reason that a mother chooses to endure nine months of discomfort, hours of pain, and potential death in order to have a baby.

The greater the outcomes we believe will occur, and the more we value them, the greater the actions we will undertake to obtain them. The stronger the benefit you perceive, the more power you will have to obtain it. As others have stated, with a strong enough why, you can endure any what.

Valuing something through faith occurs in the reason step of the faith process. This is where you use your intellectual abilities to delineate the benefits and costs of potential courses of action and make the choice to adopt one or none of them.

What an honest person desires is based on the value they attach to it. Value is assessed through reasonably enumerating available options, assessing the pros and cons of each, and choosing the objective choice of greatest value.

Assessing the pros and cons of different outcomes requires listing the pros and cons of each. The more important the subject, the more critical it becomes to take sufficient time to research and explicitly examine the situation. In the most important matters, it is important to actually write out the pros and cons, in detail.

The choice of greatest value is calculated by measuring the net impact of each option. In general, the benefit of a situation will primarily consist of the outcomes, while the cons will primarily consist of the cost required to obtain them. Without this exercise, people tend to shy away from paths of great price. This is unfortunate, because the price of an option is not relevant in and of itself. What matters is the net benefit: what is left of the pros when the cons are subtracted out? It is a very simple question: are the pros greater than the cons, or not? Among multiple options, it is only slightly more complicated: which option yields the greatest net benefit? This is the path to follow until or unless something better becomes apparent. It’s really that simple.

As you assess value, don’t forget that the outcome is not the only thing you will get out of the path. The greatest value might not be what you get, but what you become in the process. Your outcome might be something that comes and goes. Who you become will endure and continuously bear fruit.

What is done through reason should only be undone by reason. Honesty requires the maintenance of a good conclusion until or unless new information appears or better reasoning occurs.

Write down your reasoning. You’ll find that this little step enforces some degree of honesty, as we often allow ourselves to be influenced by hidden desires whose explicit statement causes us sufficient discomfort to provide the necessary motivation to change. Keep what you write down, as it will help you to hold yourself accountable. You can refer back to what you’ve written, which will make it harder to excuse yourself in the moment of trial.

Writing down why you want what you want will help you prioritize competing outcomes, save you from ineffective action, and give you the courage to undertake difficult but worthwhile actions.

Writing down your reasoning will help you answer the question “is it worth it?” You can only answer this question if you know what it will take to obtain what you desire and what it will cost you to obtain it. Only when you see the value of the outcome as greater than the cost will it be worth it.

Writing down the reasons why you desire an outcome will help you avoid tossing away the reasons that persuaded you when inevitable challenges arise. Abundant living requires walking in paths that are hard.

Reason keeps you on the path even when it is hard, because the question is not whether something is difficult but whether it is worth it. Reason is the only tool that can assess worth.

Writing down the reasons you have around the topic you’re considering will free you from anxiety, depression, and unhappiness that will otherwise likely arise in the unfolding of your life. When you are surprised by outcomes, you will be able to intercept harmful, fruitless feelings that come, with a calm confidence that leans on the impartiality and discipline that is only possible when you engage in and continue in appropriate, rational due diligence. You can live in a state where you deeply understand that you can’t control outcomes, but you can control your performance.

Writing down any supporting reasons for the path is also important. If you focus only on the conclusion, you will miss the chance to improve your beliefs when your premises are called into question.

Written reasons also help you rationally evaluate the effects of new information. For example, a desire to lose weight may include as outcomes “so other people find me more attractive” and path-supporting reasons as “healthy eating and exercise have physical and mental health effects beyond weight loss.” Later, you might come to realize that other people finding you attractive is less important to you than eating delicious food whenever you want. However, the other benefits of healthy eating and exercise may outweigh your desire for instant carnal gratification.

Some hope that God will magically trick or force them into being better. This will never happen.

The only channel God has to stimulate change in you is information.

God will send information into your life, through your experiences, through your surroundings, and through people. He will first attempt to send you information by precept. Unfortunately, hardly anyone will make use of this information.

While it is possible for God to send information in more obvious ways, unless a person already loves truth and correction, it will hurt more than help. Most people react to more obvious information with anger, not gratitude.

The Lord told the story of a man who died and found himself in hell. He could see Abraham in heaven, and he implored him to send messengers to his family so that they could change their behavior before it was too late.

As Abraham said, the only thing we can expect to receive here is the information showing that something is right. Not only will God not send more than that—more than that doesn’t exist. Our situation is determined here, and will be determined hereafter, solely on our recognition of and reaction to truth.

Our perception can only change in two ways: through mental precept or through bodily experience.

Because so few people have developed sufficient faith to learn all that is available through precept alone, God graciously provides experiences.

Often, suffering is the only thing that will help a person shake from the apathy, ingratitude, and insensibility so prevalent in human nature.

Learning through experience is not as fruitful as learning through precept. The justice of God dictates that the more obvious a path is, the less rewarding it will be. No person who is compelled to value something will ever extract as much joy from it as the person who values it through precept.

The problem with learning value through experience is that it is almost always too late to experience the full measure of what it is you have come to see the value of, and it is usually too late to experience any of that value at all. For example, if a person decides to fill their lives with shallow relationships during their youth, preferring good looks and good times over a stable, successful partner, they will likely only discover their mistake when they are too old and in possession of too many emotional flaws to qualify for the stable partner they now value. The same sort of thing happens in nearly every good thing God offers to us in this life. The same idea applies for eternal blessings as well, as death brings with it the termination of opportunities to obtain a great many things that cannot be obtained outside of this world.

There is no reason to wait until motivation toward righteousness comes from experience. Through faith, it is possible to acquire and exercise that degree of motivation now, and receive tremendous blessings for doing so before being compelled to do so.

Reason is a mental exercise. Tremendous changes can come merely through honestly thinking about past, present, and future circumstances and modifying one’s behavior as if they were in the same situation.

Alma the younger described how reflection upon his own situation yielded an understanding of his true standing before God—along with the pain it brought—far beyond what his current experience yielded.

Faith is belief based on ideas, and ideas are not limited to what we personally experience. For example, a group of people long ago had a powerful experience while hearing accounts of people they had never before met.

Through reasoning alone, these people were able to marshal the same emotions and lessons learned as they would have had they passed through the same experiences themselves. We have voluminous material for such experiences in the scriptures. How often do you read them while sincerely placing yourself in the same situations? Do you faithfully project yourself into similar circumstances, extract reasons and desire from the account, and apply them to your present life with future outcomes in mind?

Beyond scripture, God will make information available to us by other media and through people we cross paths with.

Learning through reason opens to us a much wider learning channel than personal experience, not only because some mistakes in life are irreversibly constricting, but also because we are limited in experience by time and circumstances. It is very foolish to assume that what you understand through personal experience is all there is to know about the issue at hand.

If we will not learn through reason, God’s only remaining recourse is experience. Learning through experience tends to be slower and more irregular than learning through precept, which can happen instantaneously and as often as the person seeks it. Experience tends to be far more painful and permanent than precept. Even then, how one reacts to information is always up to them.

God has made you free to choose. No one is ever forced to believe. Every step in the faith cycle includes your choice. Desire is a choice. Reasoning is a choice. Acting according to reason is a choice.

The only thing that isn’t your choice is the outcome. This is determined by God’s law ordained before the foundation of the world. You choose the outcome by how you choose in the previous steps of the faith cycle.

God’s responsibility is to provide the opportunity to acquire sufficient information to know, as much as can be known ahead of time, the set of possible actions before you, and the outcomes stemming from each of them.

God’s responsibility is not to make the choice for you or to plainly dictate which path you should take. The more plainly God leads you, the less faith it is possible to exercise, and therefore the lesser the blessings possible. The opportunity to acquire information preserves your ability to exercise faith in ways that giving you the information directly could not. God, being wise and loving, will use every means he has to make as much information available to you as possible while still preserving faith. For example, he could make the information available through means that defy conventional wisdom, such as through a person that others think is foolish, or through a path that requires great humility, or in a way that requires great belief in him. Examples of these three include, respectively, outsider prophets like Elijah, Naaman the Syrian being instructed to bathe in a river he thought was below his stature, and Nephi seeking directions on the Liahona.

God’s responsibility is not to make it easier for you to choose one or the other, but if he mercifully does so, it won’t be by magic. It will be by increasing your awareness of the negative consequences of suboptimal choices through your own experiential suffering.

God has given each of us the immutable agency to choose what we desire and how to act. This is the test of mortality.

Desire is things as we wish they were. God has given you the power to reason in order to reveal more of reality, but he will not force you to desire what is of the greatest benefit. What you desire is your choice.

Reason will show you how to act, but reason will not force you to act. It is through reason that you are an independent entity. Reasoning is how you digest information from external sources into your own information. Information can come from anywhere, and it is your responsibility, and yours alone, to seek information, to evaluate information, and to assess its worth. You, and only you, can assess the worth and implications of information through reason. You get to choose to believe or reject reasons. You get to choose to assess the value of each piece of information. Choosing not to exercise this right does not absolve you of the responsibility of reasoning. It just means you will end up wherever the current leads you. It means you have abdicated the gift of agency. It is highly unlikely that one who takes the passive approach will get very far at all in or after this life.

How rare is the person who does only what they have a sufficient reason to do, will not relent while they continue to, and changes as soon as given sufficient reason to!

Chapter 4: Faith and Action

Faith is belief unto action. Action is what distinguishes faith from mere wishing. Desire can come passively, but actions are required to both discover and walk the path to obtain outcomes.

The purpose of faith is to obtain the outcomes that are obtained through it. While desire and reason form motivation, the entire purpose of desire and reason is to motivate someone to act in ways that are different or more difficult than what they would have done otherwise. Outcomes are completely obtained through actions.

Faith is a principle of power in that it yields the actions that result in outcomes that would otherwise not come to pass.

And Christ hath said: If ye will have faith in me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient in me. (Moroni 7:33)

If you want to exercise faith, you must counsel with God to find out what action is required. Every outcome in this universe occurs according to specific preconditions that are known to God.

The action step of the faith process is all about discovering, executing, and improving the actions that yield the outcomes you desire.

All things that you ask, believing, you will receive. Jesus said.

And yet, so many people ask for so many things and do not receive them. So many find themselves without their desires fulfilled because they either do not know the way, or they do not follow it.

Why don’t you receive what you ask for? Because you ask in lust, or without regard to what actions are required to obtain what you seek.

God will give anyone anything they desire, but he is not so liberal in his definition of desire as we are. When we think of what we “desire”, we include in desire any whim or wish or fancy. But God’s definition of desire is whether you are willing to do whatever it takes to find and obtain what you seek.

Asking doesn’t mean wishing. Wishes are desires disconnected from reason or action. Desires do not dictate actions. Rather, desires are meant to stimulate you to invest the effort to discover and follow the actions dictated by reason. If you try to dictate actions through desire, you are almost always guaranteed to fail in obtaining what you seek. The actual path will remain unknown to you except through reason and experience, and it will almost always be far different than you imagined.

Asking doesn’t mean simply praying. It doesn’t mean simply verbalizing your desire for something.

God will never do for you what you are unwilling to do for yourself. The principal purpose of prayer is not to tell God what you need. He already knows what you need (see Matthew 6:8). The key reason for prayer is for you to find out what more you can do to bring about what you seek.

If you believe that all he asks you to do is pray, you will never encounter the vast majority of good things that he desires you to have, because almost nothing he offers can be obtained just by verbally asking for it.

Asking means putting in the effort and obedience necessary to discover the path that leads to what you desire, then exercising the necessary effort and obedience to obtain what you desire.

The first part of acting is asking “what can I do?” What you can do includes developing characteristics, acquiring skills, making sacrifices, increasing effort, completing work, asking people questions, reading books, conducting research, and so on.

Effort alone isn’t enough. You must ask, seek, and knock to find, recognize, and act according to the path God provides to receive what you desire.

Don’t make the mistake of conflating work with progress. Effort that doesn’t lead to your goal won’t help you. You have to walk in the right direction.

You need to do the best you can to figure out how one obtains what you seek, using all the resources you have. The scriptures are a wonderful resource for this, as is the internet.

Only when you have exhausted the ample means at your disposal should you expect God to reveal the information you seek through revelation. Remember, he will not do for you what you are unwilling to do for yourself.

You can exert immense effort to obtain an outcome without ever obtaining it. No amount of effort will ever result in obtaining what you seek if the effort is applied on a path that does not lead to it.

God’s promise to give us according to what we desire is null and void if we do not honestly seek and follow the path he provides to obtain it, no matter how far outside our expectations it may lie.

Faith is the key to laying hold of the outcomes new to you, but experienced by others. God is no respecter of persons. In other words, all people are subject to the same divine laws of cause and effect. Can you find anyone else who has obtained what you seek? If so, ask them how they did it. If you don’t know anyone personally, do you know of anyone else that may have publicized enough about their lives for you to answer the question through reading or listening to their account? If you find out how someone else obtained what it is you seek, and do the same things they did, you will obtain the same result.

God does not respond to what you want, he responds to what you deserve. If you want to live a life of faith, you absolutely have to learn and live by the principle of justice. You will always eventually get what you deserve, nothing more and nothing less, no matter how impossible it seems.

God follows the law of the harvest. You reap what you sow.

If you only say you desire a harvest, but never get around to planting, you will never have a harvest. If you do not sow, you will not reap.

You only reap what you sow. You do not reap according to your fancy or your wishes. You reap according to what you have sown. If you sow peas, you will not get wheat.

You reap according to how you plant and care for what you have sown. If the effort you put forth does not match the outcome you seek, you will not reap what you intend. The effort must be the right type and quantity that leads to the outcome you seek. If you sow wheat, but do not do it in the way it must be done, you will not get the same harvest as the person who does it in the proper way.

If you are willing to do whatever it takes to obtain what you desire, you will find yourself with everything you desire. This is because God is just. This does not mean that you will have everything you desire in the minute you achieve what it takes to obtain it. In order to provide us with the opportunity to have faith, sometimes what we deserve is delayed. However, it will always come.

Some shrink at the thought of God’s justice. They recoil at the thought that they must do the works of Abraham to receive the reward of Abraham, or the works of Moses to receive the reward of Moses. However, the thought of God’s justice should cause rejoicing—that no matter where one starts in life, anyone can receive the reward of Abraham if they will merely do the works of Abraham, and anyone can receive the reward of Moses if they will merely do the works of Moses. As mere men, Moses and Abraham obtained the approval and blessing of God. If they can do it, anyone can.

Coupled with the beautiful truth that God has given all people the choice to ascend as high as the level of law they are willing to seek and obey, God’s justice becomes the pathway to every desire of a person’s heart.

It is not a light thing when God reveals to us the path to what we seek. Awareness of the path to what we seek comes with consequences for turning away. When we have access to this information, we are held accountable for it.

Those who refuse to act on the instructions God gives them will eventually be subjected to the removal of not just the outcome that was offered to them, but even what they had before.

The Lord explained this principle through the prophet Hosea by comparing Israel to an adulterous wife, whose righteous punishment not only terminated her marriage, but removed all she received through the marriage to that point.

Live so that the outpouring of God’s justice renders blessings to you. When you are searching for the path to obtain the outcome you seek, you should always ask yourself: “what set of actions would be sufficient so that someone could say they deserve this?” And then you should do all of those things.

God knows all things. It is his guidance you require to find the path to what you seek.

If you truly believe that God knows more than you, it would be no struggle to anticipate him instructing you to do what you would never have otherwise considered when you ask him how to obtain what you do not already have.

It is far too common to constrain the search for the path for what you seek to such an extent that you cut yourself off from it. Unwilling to consider the required path, you remain without what you seek.

Jesus said, “all things are possible to him that believeth,” (Mark 9:23), but he didn’t limit what would be required. In fact, he plainly taught that to receive all things from God, you must be willing to actually receive all things from God. Nothing can be off limits. The price of everything is everything, and the greater the blessing you seek at his hand, the greater the price will be.

All outcomes have a path to obtain them, but often only the path or the outcome is desirable, not both. Outcomes you desire will almost always require paths you do not desire, and paths you desire will almost always fail to lead you to outcomes you desire. It’s best to desire outcomes, not paths, because this is the only way you can be sure you will do whatever it takes to obtain what you seek.

Before you ask the Lord for something in prayer, you ought to prepare yourself to accept any path the Lord presents to you to obtain it. The answer to your prayer may come in the form of information that makes you uncomfortable or causes you pain. It may come in the form of invitations that you find repulsive, embarrassing, or difficult. It may even come as a fundamental challenge to your ideas of right and wrong, or your concept of who you are.

Often, he will send you exactly what brings the thing you ask for, but you won’t recognize it. It is astonishing to witness how directly God can answer prayer without the recipient noticing that their exact request has been fulfilled and placed right before them. At other times, he mercifully withholds what he knows you will reject out of hand because it doesn’t fit your preconceived notions, and because he knows that your knowing and not doing would cause you harm.

It is easy to ask and answer the question: “what do you want?” It is critical to understand that this is the same question as asking, “what are you willing to do to get it?” An outcome is inseparable from what it takes to obtain it. You can’t have one without the other.

When you are considering a particular outcome, consider what you are willing and not willing to do to obtain it. If there are things you are not willing to do to obtain an outcome, realize that any one of those things may permanently prevent you from obtaining what you say you seek. Likewise, if something required is not on your list of what you are willing to do, realize that omission will guarantee you never obtain what you say you seek. If you are not willing to do what is required to obtain an outcome, you can’t honestly say you desire that outcome—at least, not as much as you desire whatever you aren’t willing to displace.

The Lord used the mission of Ammon to bring thousands of people to abandon their murder and other wicked practices, but Ammon had to be completely committed. Many others had attempted to convert the Lamanites, but Ammon was the only one who was successful. The others failed because Ammon was willing to a pay a price they were not. Not only did he abandon the throne he was set to inherit from his father, he said it was his “desire to dwell among this people for a time; yea, and perhaps until the day I die.” (Alma 17:23) He did not expect honor and glory from them, but volunteered to be a lowly servant (see Alma 17:25).

You will learn as you act. You don’t always have to wait until a final outcome to start learning. Often, information starts manifesting early on. It is important to honestly assess this information.

As you execute the actions you enumerated in the reason step, you will begin to convert faith into knowledge.

Your actions will reveal the accuracy of your reasoning as outcomes manifest that align with or contradict your expectations. As Jesus said, “wisdom is justified of her children.” (Matthew 11:19)

It takes great skill and practice to learn to learn. On the one hand, it is easy to ignore clear signals that your reasoning was limited or incorrect. On the other hand, it is easy to exaggerate indications for improvement as a sign of total error when it’s still too early to say.

New information can change your desires and invalidate your reasons. However, don’t make the mistake of upgrading difficulty or discomfort to the same stature as new information. Faith requires you to confide in your conclusions until given sufficient reason to change them. You never, ever surrender unless you are given sufficient reasons to—which isn’t surrender at all, but improvement.

What you currently think is the path from where you stand to where you want to go is likely to be incorrect or incomplete. The more audacious your intended outcomes, the more likely you are to imperfectly know the path to obtaining them from the outset. This is not surprising, and it shouldn’t dishearten anyone.

If you aren’t failing to perfectly guess the path beforehand, you are being far too miserly in your desires. Remember, the good things God has prepared lie beyond your wildest imagination. If you don’t yet comprehend the outcome, it’s likely you don’t yet comprehend the path, either. The question is not whether you will fail, but how many times you are willing to fail in order to fine tune your path sufficiently to obtain what you desire. If the number of times you are willing to fail is less than however many times it takes, you are cutting yourself off from outcomes God desires for you.

Be prepared for your new perspective to reveal that what you sought is harder to obtain than you thought. Don’t be disheartened by this. Simply re-evaluate your original reasons for wanting what it is you seek, and ask yourself if it is still worth it.

From time to time, you have to revisit your understanding of the path you are on and the outcomes you seek. As you learn more about yourself, the world, and God, your understanding of what is required will change. Can you honestly say that you are doing what it takes to deserve what you seek? If not, what changes do you need to make to what you seek or what you are doing to bring them into alignment?

Many times, extra effort is justified by the revelation that the outcome sought is even better than imagined. For example, the people of Limhi were faithful and patient, but were willing to increase their exercise of both in order to secure a faster delivery from bondage.

God helps us gain the desire for what we should be asking for by revealing to us the pain and insufficiency in all other things. Abraham would not have desperately desired a son capable of rising up to the point of comprehending Abraham for all he was if he had not already tried unsuccessfully to share what the Lord had given him with hundreds of other people.

Only in acting to obtain what you think you desire will you find out if you really want it. As you learn more about what it will actually take to get what you desire, and as you learn more about what it is you thought you desired, you may find that you don’t actually want what you thought you wanted. You may find what you originally sought isn’t as glamorous as it once seemed. Rather than see this as loss, see it as a blessing, because it takes you closer to what you really want. Only in learning the limitations of your current bearing can you steer more accurately toward your goal. Desire is a zero-sum game: it is only through seeing a decreased value in other things that you can gain a perception of value in others. And, because you are seeking and submitting to an improved accuracy in your valuation, whatever changes occur in your perception are leading you to what is of greater value than whatever you sought before. It’s a wonderful thing!

Over time, we all come to the realization that we may not be willing to commit the long, hard sacrifices required to fulfill singular dreams. We may be unwilling to endure the maltreatment from others, who reliably seek to persecute those who strive beyond the norm. We may not be willing to carry both the ever-increasing load of what it takes to accomplish our dreams—the understanding of which expands as our experience unfolds—along with the growing persecution of others—which tends to increase proportionally. This, too, is a blessing. Why waste time seeking what we don’t really want? God is gracious enough to lead us to what we are willing to receive, free of any pretense of what we think we might want, but aren’t willing to receive.

A more accurate idea of what it takes to truly and lastingly fulfill your desire can be a fantastic channel for coming to see and avoid sin. Temptation is nothing more or less than an inaccurate idea of the cost and benefit of a potential desire or action. If you can honestly reconcile to your best idea of the true cost and benefit of something, keeping in mind that the actions required to obtain a desire are part of the cost, you can avoid sin.

Faith is what makes one seek what no one else is willing to seek and to find what no one else has found through doing what no one else will do.

Miracles are rare today, but God hasn’t changed. Miracles are just as workable today as they ever were. They are worked through the same mechanism they always were. They require the discovery of and practice of the underlying actions that generate them.

Miracles are rare today only because the people who are willing to pay the price required to work them are rare. Miracles work on faith, just as everything else that God does.

There is nothing magical about miracles. What makes the outcome more than ordinary is that the actor is willing to consider actions that others will not.

Obtaining outcomes that would otherwise not have come about can’t start from exerting effort in the same way anyone else would. The same path walked by others will always lead to the same outcomes everyone else receives.

People who turn to God in all things will have a radically different life than those who do not. This is not because they curry greater arbitrary favor from God than others. Instead, it is because they apply more effort in seeking direction from him, and more obedience in following it.

It was not the fact that Alma and his people prayed for his son that caused God to send an angel, but the fact that he prayed with greater faith than others might have.

It was not the prayers of the sons of Mosiah that resulted in such great miracles, but the fact that they had sought for and were willing to do much more than their countrymen.

Faith requires acting for as long as it takes. Most stories of faith in the scriptures spanned a long time—sometimes more than a single lifetime! If you want to obtain outcomes beyond what others have obtained, you must be willing to search or act for as long as it takes.

Where you are now matters in the path to get to where you want to go. Every journey starts with one step. Reason helps you accurately estimate where you are and what specific path can get you to the outcomes you desire. Faithful action requires taking one step at a time along that path and going back to reason by updating the path as you learn more through experience.

Part of faith is learning to freely desire things without limiting your dreams by what you think is possible. If you find you are much further away from where you thought you were—which is more likely the more valuable the outcome—you may decide that what you seek has a higher cost than what you are willing to pay.

If you limit what you consider to be possible to where you are right now, you will be extremely limited. This is why it is critical to divide this process into discrete steps. You have to be able to separate imagination of what is possible from thinking about what it would be worth and what it would take to get there.

Your distance from your goal is not relevant to your ability to obtain it. The possibility of your success relies only upon your ability to discover the path and your willingness to walk it.

It isn’t difficult to desire more than the outcomes obtained by those around you. People tend to live far below their potential in temporal and spiritual things alike. Very few have obtained even a fraction of what God plainly offers in terms of joy, love, and fulfillment. If the outcome you seek is so rare that you can’t find anyone who has obtained it, you will have to discover the path without human aid. Use the gift of revelation to apply to God directly for your answer. If you have an open mind, are doing all you can by keeping all his commandments and searching what resources you have available, and you believe he will tell you, he will.

What is possible is not so much defined by what we consider to be possible as it is by what we consider to be actionable. There is a path to every outcome, but whether we choose to seek, find, and follow that path is another question altogether.

Faith requires doing all things in your power. If you really desire something, you have to get it with all your ability. It is ok to desire something less than totally, but be intentional with what you set ahead of it, and also be aware that some outcomes will not take second place: if you don’t want them more than anything else, you will not be able to obtain them.

Relative difficulty compared to others is irrelevant. Whether it is harder or easier for you compared to another person is completely independent to whether it is possible for you.

Determining both worth and actionable steps has to involve dispassionate research and introspection. If you try to do that without the required effort or try to integrate that into the creative step of imagining what is possible, you will prematurely remove good and possible outcomes from the realm of possibilities.

Those with faith live a life filled with things that are difficult and unlikely. Their lives are an unbroken chain of long shots. In absolute terms, they have missed many more shots than normal people. But their success in life is not the ratio of wins to losses, which is much worse than normal people’s, but rather the sum of their wins. People with faith fail more, but they are the only ones who ever bother trying what other people consider impossible. Because they try, they discover that many impossible things are only difficult. In trying what others dismiss as impossible, and by pushing past where others quit, they encounter experiences and outcomes that others never see.

The time to act is as soon as you have reasoned as much as needed to be convinced. If you know what you need to do, it is time to act.

If you delay action, the belief will fade, the desire will fade, and even the reasons will fade. Delaying doesn’t change the facts, but it will change your belief. Light cleaves to light. If you resist or delay acting to conform yourself to your beliefs, you will lose light. Your belief will diminish.

Get moving now—no matter how small the first step. If you do small things now, you will do great things later. If you don’t do small things now, you won’t do even the small things later.

But how do you know when your reasons are sufficient to act?

One dimension of faith is the degree of action in response to the degree of signal. How well do you have to understand the outcome before acting? Do you act once the outcome is obviously beneficial, or do you wait until you have a perfect knowledge of it? Remember, a perfect knowledge is not faith, and requiring that degree of detail will preclude many desirable outcomes which can’t be had by playing it safe. Something can be rationally justified even if the reasons are small or faint, and this can be the case even when the implications are enormous: “by small means the Lord can bring about great things.” (1 Nephi 16:29)

If you follow the faith process, the Lord will always show you what is right (see 1 Nephi 15:11 and Moroni 10:5). However, God is only required to show you a sufficient reason. He makes no promise to show you the full implications of the decision, or to present the evidence in as compelling a light as the implications merit. In fact, we are told the opposite: “by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise.” (Alma 37:6) The greater the action in response to lesser signal, the greater the outcomes possible.

One example of this is the outcome that resulted from the mission of Ammon and his brothers, who made the decision to go based on far smaller expectations of outcome.

It is of utmost importance, therefore, to pay attention to the information you have access to, and interpret it honestly! Whether through the intervention of others or your own experience, you aren’t likely to listen when presented with signals that contradict the outcome or paths you desire.

Humans don’t want to hear the truth. They don’t want to hear the way to obtain something better. They want to hear that what they are already doing is good enough, that what they have is all there is to have, and that the evidence that these things are not true is a figment of their imagination.

It takes faith to believe that what God has is superior. It takes faith to notice the information he gives you, and to trust in reason rather than what you wish were true.

Do the best you know, and pay attention to adapt to any new information as it comes.

Dictionaries define courage variously. In the faith framework, we can define courage as a willingness to act according to honest reason.

Courage is nothing more and nothing less than preferring reason to the senses. It is to do something for mental reasons in spite of negative physical sensations. It is to act toward a rationally expected end in spite of the presence or expectation of fear, pain, grief, anxiety, depression, or sorrow. It is to persist in a well-reasoned path no matter how far away the desired outcome is in time, appearance, or experience.

One way of living courageously is: Do everything that is worth the cost. Due to limits on resources, this probably also implies: Don’t do anything that isn’t worth the cost.

Courage, as defined here, is one and the same as trust in God. Trust in God is not some kind of superstitious willpower, despite the vast number of people whose beliefs limit it to that. Trust in God is a rational affair: do you have sufficient reasons to believe? If so, are you willing to follow them in action and desire, even when it requires actively changing how you feel about the issue at hand? Are you willing to reframe your perception of reality according to the evidence you possess? Or do you choose to embrace what your experience has shown is not true?

Some describe courage as an ability. Some describe it as a quality. In reality, it is a choice. Anyone can choose to be courageous.

The choice is not an optional one. Normal people consider courage an admirably rare trait. In reality, courage ought to be as common as breathing, as it is just as essential to a successful life. While ceasing to breathe requires contradicting what is quite the natural impulse, the exercise of courage requires doing what most people choose not to do. It is not automatic, and it is not easy, but it is absolutely essential.

It is impossible to have great faith without great courage. Great faith will consistently lead you in paths that require courage.

The receipt of the benefits of the rational process almost always rely on the exercise of courage. What feels good is only sometimes what is actually good. Were it not so, the rational process would yield no benefit over sentimentality, whereas in reality it is the distinction between the natural man and the spiritual man. Because our feelings have no obligation to follow reality—and even tend to do quite the opposite— courage is the conduit to achieving a higher order life than what could be obtained otherwise.

Courage and reason reinforce each other. Courage is needed when the cost benefit is not solely sensory. The rational process most clearly defines both cost and benefit outside the realm of the physical senses.

Courage is strengthened with the perceived worthiness of the cause, while the rational process provides concrete arguments for a cause’s worthiness. Courage drives action, which increases observations, which fuel further analysis with reason.

Courage is self-reinforcing. The more you trust God, the more he will prove himself worthy of your trust. As you trust him more and more, you will find yourself more and more willing to trust him in all things. He will never give you any reason not to trust him. He will never fail you.

The faith cycle involves rotating between desire, reason, and action until the outcome is achieved or abandoned. Following the faith cycle provides a way to find the best action given your present understanding, as well as providing a path to learn more about more effective future actions.

Faith does not require you to know the end from the beginning. In fact, faith is designed to enable you to act in the present for greatest future benefit in spite of the fact that you don’t know all things pertaining to the future.

God knows the end from the beginning.

The faith cycle is the means he has provided us to make use of his knowledge by obtaining outcomes whose paths lie beyond our present understanding.

The faith cycle provides a way of merging the best understanding you have now with the best understanding you may have later, through present action. For example, when Nephi was commanded to build a ship, he exercised his current knowledge and sought additional understanding when doing anything less than this would have been insufficient in obtaining the outcome he sought.

Note that he needed more information often.

It is not infrequent that we don’t know the whole path from where we are now to the culmination of the desired outcome. Actually, it is the exception that we know the whole path.

For example, after fleeing Jerusalem in obedience to God’s command, Nephi was commanded to return to obtain a copy of the scriptural record. He knew why it was so important that they have a copy of God’s word. He knew his first action was to return to Jerusalem. He did not know when he left—or even after he arrived—exactly how he would obtain the scriptures. His first attempt failed, but he had confidence in the outcome and reason for it, even if he still did not know the action he should take. He said: “I was led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.” (1 Nephi 4:6)

Particularly with more valuable outcomes, it is almost always the case that we will require frequent revisions of our idea of the set of actions that will be required to obtain the outcome. This is because we obtain more of God’s knowledge line upon line and precept upon precept. Even when we obtain what seems to us a vast tranche of information all at once, it is merely a drop of what God knows, and it is limited in breadth and scope.

Knowledge has prerequisite requirements. These include receiving, believing, and obeying all prerequisite knowledge upon which the next increment depends.

Those who await perfect confidence and perfect detail in expected outcomes will miss out on much of what is available in the gospel. There are far more outcomes that require action under uncertainty than those that offer perfect initial clarity. From Abraham leaving his homeland “not knowing wither he went” (Hebrews 11:8) to Mormon abridging the record of his people “according to the workings of the Spirit of the Lord” yet admitting he did “not know all things” (Words of Mormon 1:7), many of the great products of faith in this world only exist because of the willingness of people to act decisively in tentative situations.

Being able to switch contexts from desire to reason to action and back again is a monumental test of faith. To honestly focus on the appropriate step requires setting aside the natural way of considering how we feel, what we do, and how we think—which is not to consider them at all!

Switching from a passive approach to life to an intentional one is not easy. It requires the ability to relentlessly focus on the specific task at hand while smoothly pivoting to reason or desire when there is appropriate new information to update previous perspectives.

Consider the journey of Moses, which consisted in three forty-year periods, each concentrated enough to fill a full life.

Moses never lost faith. Through his monumental faith, he was able to manage both surreal spiritual situations as well as so many daily challenges along his lengthy life’s work.

Noah spent a very long time building the ark and was able to balance between the long-term goal of building the ark and the short-term actions of each day. Imagine juggling the responsibility for the welfare of the human race with the intricate and mundane details of building an enormous boat, without the aid of technology or power.

The temptation to mismanage context switches is constant. You will want to switch contexts when there is insufficient reason to, because it will seem more pleasant than digging in and completing the difficult task at hand. You will want to avoid switching contexts when given a sufficient reason to, because it will seem easier to keep barreling along with what you are doing, thinking, or feeling than to make changes. These constant struggles provide ample opportunity for you to learn to rely on intentional faith rather than passive plodding. Paul called this walking by faith, not by sight (see 2 Corinthians 5:7).

Faith gives you the means to deliberately progress along any path, no matter how far away the outcome may be. There is no such thing as a task too big for someone with faith. Before one has power to move mountains by speaking, one must have faith to move mountains one shovel at a time.

Faith chops interminable challenges into discrete, daily, consistent progress. Faith is what enables a person to face infinite challenges while knowing their finite limits. Faith transcends all terminal tasks.

Faith is not only the key to particularly difficult or lengthy paths. Faith is required to bridge the gap between finite action and infinite outcomes. Faith gives you the means to derive finite actions from any outcome, no matter how grand it might seem in scope, timeline, or probability.

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. (Hebrews 11:13)

Faith is the only means to keep moving in the face of an unending journey. The gospel is an infinite journey. Following God’s will requires walking in unending paths, as this is what the “eternal” in “eternal life” means.

Chapter 5: Faith and Knowledge

Many people incorrectly think of faith as a general property. They say, “I have faith,” or “he is a faithful person.” In reality, faith is a process. It is a tool that can be applied to any topic, situation, outcome, level of knowledge, object of desire, or depth of desire. For example, faith is always exercised at the level of particular beliefs, and beliefs are specific. Beliefs can explain one or very many things, but each and every belief must take the form of a mapping of specific causes and specific effects.

When you exercise faith in a belief, you will either find yourself proving your belief by receiving the intended outcome or you will find yourself revising your understanding of the belief so as to bring it into accordance with new information you have learned in the process.

Faith is not knowledge. Knowledge is the product of faith. Faith converts belief into knowledge.

When you see the outcomes you predicted via reason occur through your actions, your faith will convert to knowledge.

There are many examples of the transition from faith to knowledge in the scriptures. For example, one righteous man found that, after a lifetime of faithfully seeking Jesus, he obtained such great confidence in his existence and character that he could no longer be kept from seeing him.

Faith gives people time to come up to greater knowledge. The consequences for disobeying knowledge are higher than the consequences for disobeying faith.

Faith is a gift from God designed to help you leverage God’s justice to acquire greater outcomes than you would be able to were you given experiential knowledge of all things all at once.

Those who wait to believe until they are compelled to believe will find themselves held accountable for much in the event that they are unprepared for what they learn.

There are degrees of joy that can only be experienced by those who exercise exceedingly great faith. In many things, experience alone can never provide the same lessons and benefits as experience preceded by faith. For example, the sons of Mosiah—who conducted a tremendously faithful mission to a hopelessly deprived people—experienced such joy upon the completion of their mission, when their faith produced massive results in the form of the heartfelt conversion of thousands of people.

Those who seek and act in faith will receive greater outcomes than those who only act when compelled by knowledge.

Only those who act in faith will seek God and obey him to the degree required to learn everything necessary in this life to enjoy eternal life hereafter. Only those who act in faith here will feel comfortable dwelling in God’s presence, because they will find rest in the knowledge that they sought and heeded everything God tried to teach them here, through their own free choice, and not because they had to.

Faith provides a way for us to feel as though we did our part while acknowledging the insignificance of even our best efforts compared to God’s contributions.

This blessing can never be merited by us, because his initial, continued, and constant contributions to our faith make it impossible for us to get to the point where we deserve what he offers, even though we must obey all he commands.

The necessity of confidence was constantly taught by Jesus. He showed that there are many outcomes that simply can’t come to pass without it. For example.

Note how Jesus did not say “believe that you can command trees and mountains, and it shall be done.” He said “ if ye have faith, and doubt not...” If you have insufficient reasons to believe that the trees and mountains will obey you, they won’t.

Jacob explained that this kind of confidence can only come through going through many cycles of learning more and acting accordingly.

Both faith and knowledge provide confidence, but the difference is found in its source.

Faith draws confidence from rational thought. Through the mental processing of information from any of various sources, the faithful person comes to the point where they can say that they have sufficient reasons to believe that a certain set of actions will lead to a certain outcome to the extent that they are willing to act accordingly.

Knowledge provides confidence from physical experience. The individual recalls what they have seen or experienced and assumes that repetition of the conditions will yield the same result.

The domain of knowledge-based confidence is the physical world. The domain of faith-based confidence is the realm of thought.

Faith is a mechanism of action, but it is not the only mechanism for action. Actions come from faith, but they can also come from carnal knowledge.

Carnal knowledge doesn’t mean secular or temporal knowledge. All knowledge comes from God. Carnal knowledge, rather, is the subset of knowledge that excludes knowledge that comes from thought alone. Animals act almost exclusively via carnal knowledge. Of all God’s creations, humans are the most gifted in our ability to think abstractly and critically. However, no one forces us to use these faculties. We are completely able to act no different than animals, and many people choose to do exactly that.

Neither knowledge nor faith are immune from limitations in understanding or perception. History is replete with examples of human knowledge that was incorrect or incomplete, and we can presume that much of what we consider to be sure knowledge today is likewise incorrect or incomplete. Similarly, much of what people have done and continue to do based on faith was and is incorrect or incomplete.

While we can’t prevent incorrect or incomplete beliefs that are based on our best, honest understanding, we certainly can and should minimize the influence of beliefs based on insufficient reasons—whether mental or physical—and outright abort beliefs that are clearly contradicted until information arises that suggests otherwise.

How does one reconcile faith with the fact that what you initially confide in will often prove incorrect or incomplete? It is highly unlikely that your initial faith target will be correct, or that it will endure all future additional information you might learn. This in no way should deter you from exercising great faith and attempting to learn everything you can.

While “doubting nothing” is going to prove a mistake until you discover all pertinent information regarding what you seek and how to obtain it, having confidence through faith is the only way you’ll discover improved information beyond what you otherwise could not realize was imperfect or incomplete.

Consider shooting targets with a rifle. If your aim is poor, you still may be able to hit close targets with the gun’s default sights. Increased aiming skill will be required to hit a distant target with those sights. If you aim at distant enough targets, you will not be able to distinguish between aim that will hit the target and aim that will not: both sight pictures will be indistinguishable. With the aid of a scope, you can resolve between aims that will hit the far target and those that will not. So it is with faith.

It is always good to know everything you can, precisely because of the fact that greater knowledge will reveal errors and limitations in you that you would not otherwise realize. When you seek, “doubting nothing,” you will find that sometimes you are wrong. That is the point! It is the only way you will discover limits that you would never have noticed if you never bothered seeking in the first place, or if you did so only half-heartedly. The point is not to be correct at first, but to be correct eventually, and to be as correct as possible in the meantime. Those who refuse to be wrong now can never be right later.

We don’t tend to get into trouble for believing things we shouldn’t. We get into trouble when we refuse to change our beliefs when given good reason to. If we truly believe them for honest reasons, we will act according to them, and very quickly discover our mistake.

We only have a limited time to exercise faith. Life is.

This whole world was created for the precise purpose of providing a space where mankind could exercise faith.

Faith in a particular belief can only exist until that belief has been physically proven through reaching the expected outcome. Experience is in some ways like sand through an hourglass—rendering beliefs into knowledge.

If you only act according to what is physically obvious, you’re wasting the opportunity of mortality. This is not manifested merely in the spiritual sense.

Consider the temporal outcome of those who refuse to do anything they aren’t forced to do. They live their lives in the squalor of the minimum required.

Consider those who refuse to think critically, sacrifice the present for sake of the future, and otherwise prepare now for what will happen later. They are reliably surprised by some disaster that was completely predictable.

If the principle of faith pays such dividends in temporal applications— and it does—consider how much it matters in spiritual applications, where one’s state will forever be determined through their willingness to exercise faith while in mortality.

What does it look like to make no sacrifices except those that seem absolutely necessary here and now? What does it look like to do only what is required spiritually? Ironically, Jesus never set a minimum standard because what that looks like is as infinite as the number of possibilities that are afforded through faith, but lost through inaction. He made plain that he requires not just everything we have, but everything we can be.

The time and place for faith is here in life. Even within this life, there are many situations that can only be affected through faith for a specific window of time. There are things you can do when you are young that you can no longer do when you are old, things you can do in plenty that you can’t do in privation, things you can do in health that you can’t do in sickness, and things you can do when you are single that you can’t do once you have a family.

Similarly, because knowledge deprives you of the opportunity to have faith, there will be times when your lack of faith in something has resulted in the loss of your opportunity to exercise faith in that thing.

If you find yourself in a situation where you are compelled to believe in something—a situation where life presents to you such sufficient evidences of something that it becomes a sure thing to you, then the time to exercise faith has passed. You can no longer have faith in that thing, and the blessings available for doing so have passed you by.

As Jesus was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, he prayed and thanked the Father for hearing him. He then said.

It is fascinating to consider Jesus’ surety of the Father always hearing him.

This was not a statement of knowledge, but one of faith. The Father had not yet given Jesus this knowledge—at that time, he still exercised belief that it was the case.

Many people incorrectly assume that Jesus had special access to heaven. In reality, he “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15) Jesus experienced angels ministering to him after his forty-day fast and as he bore the sins of the world in the garden of Gethsemane. He heard the voice of the Father testify that he was his son at his baptism and on the mount of transfiguration, where he also saw and spoke with two heavenly messengers. But Jesus obtained these experiences as we do—through first exercising faith. His tremendous experiences came not to provide him with tremendous faith, but because he already had tremendous faith.

Understanding that Jesus, too, was subjected to the need to exercise and grow in faith in his mortal life should cause you to read accounts of his behavior in the New Testament differently. For example, can you ever imagine a situation where you would be so bold as to publicly proclaim something that was based on reasons—but not knowledge—as he did in the foregoing example? Can you imagine yourself having sufficient reasons— but through belief only—to publicly pray to the Father and then attempt to raise someone from the dead? Realize how much more there is to faith than you previously assumed!

Faith can grow into knowledge.

However, we ought not underestimate the duration of the path that leads to knowledge. For each and every target of faith, there is a path one must walk for it to become knowledge. One might have sure knowledge in one area, and still walk by faith in another.

For example, mighty Alma, who at this point had seen an angel, seen the light of God, preached the gospel among the entire country, endured great persecution, received sacred records and seer stones, and been appointed chief judge, still contended in battle against a wicked man.

Isn’t it jarring to consider that this man of God still battled with a sword, that he needed to offer this sincere prayer, that he was at the point of being defeated when he did, and that God’s power in this instance had to be used in such a crude manner?

The juxtaposition of great knowledge with enduring faith ought not be so jarring. A central point of mortality is that, through faith, men and women can transmit great manifestations of light here from heaven, even while remaining in the midst of this fallen world. After all, the holy Lord Jesus Christ still went through the humiliating mortal experience of having to use the bathroom every day of his life.

The purpose of this life is to obtain, through faith, all things that can be obtained through faith. Until we obtain each possible outcome through faith, it is good for us to remain in our mortal limitations in that thing. This life is like a recipe: the completion of one step does not imply the completion of the recipe. While we yet live—while there remains some piece of knowledge we have not yet obtained—there is still work for faith to perform.

Many times, faith becomes knowledge all at once, after the trial of faith, such as when the Lord appeared to the brother of Jared.

Once the Lord had appeared to the brother of Jared, he knew and did not merely believe the Lord’s previous promise that he could be shown anything (see Ether 3:26). Because of this, in the moment he first saw the Lord’s finger, he also obtained access to everything else.

The greatest blessings come to those willing to endure pressure cooker experiences—trials which build and build without any release until they are finished.

This operates according to the justice of God, who must give a greater reward to those who exercise greater faith. The efforts of people who endure prolonged trials of faith are compounded and yield a much greater blessing than the shorter trials or trials which are punctuated by periodic confirmations of the path.

The greatest outcomes of faith are only available to those who are willing to endure prolonged trials of faith, with few—if any—signs along the way. The greatest knowledge is available only to those who will desire and do the greatest things through faith.

#Chapter 6: Examples of the Faith Cycle.

As you learn the faith cycle, you will see it everywhere. You will see it in your life, and you will see it in the lives of others. You will see it all over the scriptures. Let’s consider a few examples from the scriptures to get you started.

An ancient priest named Jacob reported the following description.

Jacob described how reading the scriptures yielded many personal communications of information from God and had inspired him and his people to accurately predict the future.

Each time they tested a putative relationship of cause and effect listed in the scriptures, they saw it fulfilled and gained the attendant knowledge. This cycle reached the point where they could read and believe the causes given for such great miracles as commanding trees, mountains, and the sea to the point where their practice of such was as efficacious as it was for those they read about.

Jesus once met a man who had been born blind. In the presence of the man, “his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) Jesus said.

The Lord made mud by spitting on the ground, and rubbed some on the eyes of the blind man. He said: “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.” (John 9:7)

The man born blind was given a reason, through what Jesus said, to believe that God had a purpose in his being born blind, and a reason for him to no longer be blind.

On the one hand, the man’s willingness to allow a total stranger to rub spit-mud in his eyes and his willingness to make the long walk to where Jesus told him to go demonstrated an immense open-mindedness. Spitting was considered an extremely crude act at that time, and the pool of Siloam lay far enough away that the instructed walk constituted a significant challenge for a blind man. On the other hand, perhaps he was just honest. He was blind and begging. What did he have to lose? Either way, in obeying Jesus, he was healed.

When those who had known him asked him how it happened, he was honest.

He was not gushing with praise for Jesus. He merely said what he had reason to say.

Next, he was brought to the Pharisees, who he surely knew hated Jesus. In spite of this, he told them the same thing. They asked the man who he thought Jesus was, to which he replied, “a prophet.” (John 9:17) The Pharisees were not happy about that, and told the man that Jesus was a sinner. He replied with the reasons he had to believe otherwise—reasons the Pharisees had not managed to displace.

The Pharisees pushed him dishonestly, asking questions that feigned sincerity. The man directly and appropriately challenged them on their dishonesty.

Instead of exercising honest reason and considering the objective weight of the man’s points, the Pharisees ignored everything he had said, appealed to a false understanding, and kicked him out of the synagogue.

When Jesus heard that he had been cast out, he went to find him.

Jesus called attention to the fact that this man had honestly acted in accordance with the reasons he had been given to believe something other than what he previously believed.

From this example, we see that belief is much more logical than most assume. Faith is not some marvelous thing. Though it leads to marvelous outcomes, it does so step by step, through measured and justified reason. We are not condemned for lack of extraordinary belief, but for refusing to believe what is plainly manifest to us.

Our final example is found in the woman Jesus met at Jacob’s well.

It was highly irregular for a man to ask a woman to fetch water for him, and downright scandalous for a Jewish man to ask a Samaritan woman to do so. The woman’s humility was witnessed by the fact that, instead of running away or even ignoring him, she answered him to ask him why he was acting so strangely.

Jesus responded to her reasonable consideration of what she had experienced by acting even stranger, saying that he had something called living water. Though she was confused, she did not respond by ignoring him or pretending to understand. She asked yet another two questions. Honest reason requires paying due diligence to evidence provided and asking as many questions as merited by what is observed.

Jesus’ response to the woman was to provide even more information. Though she certainly did not understand who he was yet, she responded to the evidence he had shown that he possessed something of value to her by requesting it of him. This was the exactly appropriate response for such evidence as was presented, showing her to be a reasonable person.

Jesus provided her with greater evidence to show that the value of what he possessed was greater than she could know based on the information she already possessed. To this, she made the appropriate response, increasing her assessment of the value he possessed.

The woman demonstrated a sincere attempt at reconciling what she was learning from Jesus with what she knew from previous reasoning and experience. Jesus provided her with even more information, finally plainly telling her that he was the Messiah. Having made several iterations through the faith cycle during this conversation, she was now ready to hear the truth plainly, and demonstrated this by the appropriate response to such information: going and finding everyone who would listen to come hear him.

#Chapter 7: Faith and Belief.

Outcomes and the actions that lead to them are laws. These are the rules of reality. They were established before the foundation of the world.

Reality is just like a chess game: the rules are established before the game begins. The objective of the player is to navigate those rules to obtain the outcome they seek. They have to learn the rules, make a plan, act to win, and adjust based on new information.

Belief is the purported relationship between cause and effect. A belief consists of an outcome, actions expected to bring it about, and reasons to believe that such is the case.

People hold all types of beliefs—strongly reasoned beliefs, weak beliefs, wishes, and lies. A belief can have any quantity of reasons, from zero to many, each with some degree of strength or lack thereof.

A belief that has no known reasons is a wish. Wishes may, in fact, be true. An absence of known reasons does not imply that reasons don’t exist. However, without good reasons to believe them, beliefs will not inspire the believer with sufficient confidence to do hard things—at least, not for very long.

Beliefs can be true even when there are reasons not to believe them. However, unless there exist stronger reasons for believing than disbelieving such a belief, it is dishonest to continue to believe such a belief until or unless new information is found.

Belief can come through reason, desire, or both. Beliefs founded on desire alone are not as powerful as beliefs founded on both reason and desire. You won’t act for very long or against much opposition unless you have both reasons and desire.

Belief founded on reason alone will not always win over alternatives based only on desire—you are always free to choose what to believe.

Unbelief is the opposite of belief. Unbelief is to refuse to believe something even when given sufficient reasons to.

As humans, we are constantly working against strong psychological and cognitive biases that prevent us from considering new ideas, especially those that contradict things we hold as important.

A prerequisite for belief is a willingness to consider beliefs other than those you already believe.

While this seems obvious, it is a big problem.

In modern times, there is an all-out assault on both religious and secular belief. We are paradoxically told that long-standing historical beliefs are false and were always so, in spite of objective positive outcomes, while we are simultaneously told that modern, extreme deviations from these beliefs are true, have always been true, and will always be true, in spite of any supporting evidence to that end.

One of these new beliefs is that we are all the same—that any objective differences we see are either figments of the imagination or the vestigial effect of past injustice, and that no one should think or act differently than how they are told.

Belief, whether in the form of desires, reasons, or actions, will always differentiate people, because people will always choose to have different desires, find and accept different reasons, and take different actions.

Those who desire more than others will always live a different life than those who are satisfied with a lesser life. Those who reason more effectively than others will always develop more wisdom and knowledge than those who reason less effectively. Those who act more than others will always achieve more than those who are idle. The products of these practices are outcomes, and those who exceed their peers in one or more aspects of faith will always obtain outcomes beyond those who do not.

Don’t disbelieve anything you have been given sufficient reason to believe. Don’t believe anything you haven’t been given sufficient reason to believe at the cost of anything you have. Don’t buy into the lie that beliefs don’t matter. Ideas do, in fact, have consequences—massive consequences that extend through every outcome in life and in eternity.

Faithful steps tend to build on each other, magnifying the differences in outcomes between those who rightly wrangle with them and those who do not. Those who are willing to open-mindedly consider new information and walk in uncertain paths when given sufficient reason to will have much more abundant lives than those who are not.

Belief is a property that has to do with the perspective and choice of the holder, not the actual underlying truth of the belief itself with respect to reality. This is a strange idea, and yet it is critical to understand if one hopes to achieve more than mediocre outcomes in life and eternity. You can believe and yet not desire, and you can have reasons for a belief and yet choose not to believe it.

Belief exists across layers of confidence. The ability to have high confidence in a belief is based on your perception of the reasons that support the belief, not the set of all reasons (which may, in fact, contradict the belief) that transcend your perception. Your perception of reality is always severely limited compared to all that really is. Even when you are as certain as someone can be about something, your belief could be (and is, in fact, likely to be) incomplete or incorrect.

And yet, incomplete or incorrect beliefs can be highly effectual. All of science and religion alike attest to that fact.

To have unshakable belief in something, you must have reasons. However, those reasons will never be sufficient to finally prove your belief. Only experiencing the outcome can do that.

The uncertainty of belief is extremely important for several reasons.

First, you have to learn to act with the degree of confidence justified by your reasons. You must learn to shift your threshold of action from some concept of fundamental and unchangeable truth to what is sufficiently supported to justify specific actions.

Faith doesn’t operate on a yes or no basis of truth. Faith operates with sufficiently strong reasons to undertake the actions that seem to lead to the outcome at hand, as best you know, for now. That threshold of sufficient confidence for action will be different for every outcome: You don’t need massive reasons for taking a tiny action, and weak reasons are insufficient for massive actions. If you are locked into a cruder gradation of truth, reasons, and actions, you will be as limited in the number and goodness of outcomes you can attain as a child is in what he can build with big wooden blocks versus a full set of Legos.

Second, uncertainty affords you the opportunity to do more than simply walk across some minimum threshold of action. Uncertainty allows you to leap when the reasons support it. This is one meaning of what Jesus meant when he referred to the faith of a child.

We tend to excuse ourselves from belief in big things because we become aware that, while the reasons we know of are clearly in one direction, we simply don’t know everything. Is this not as true in any situation? If you applied that same standard to every situation, you would never act in anything. The question isn’t whether you know everything. The question is: based on what you can learn for now, does reason suggest that a specific set of drastic actions will lead to an outcome that you desire? If so, execute.

The ability to take bold, believing actions in spite of uncertainty is critical to obtaining the best outcomes in life. While God promises to make what is good and what is evil as plain to us as the difference between day and night (see Moroni 7:15), he does not promise that the gravity of the decision will be revealed to us at the outset. In other words, while he will show us which fork in the road is better, he will not typically show us by how much.

Those who will act in the most reasonable way will learn, over time, that what they thought were small decisions have made massive differences in their lives.

Third, uncertainty keeps you extremely open to the fact that your belief is incorrect or incomplete. Nascent beliefs, when honestly considered, will either grow until they are sufficient to suggest action, or fade under inspection.

As you execute the faith cycle, you will learn more and have many opportunities to revise your belief by changing your desires, reasons, actions, and outcomes. It is all too easy to prefer flawed but comfortable beliefs to uncertain but potentially better ideas. Life is full of scenarios where promising but unknown paths must be preferred to lesser but wellknown paths. Lean on reasoning. Always reconcile yourself to the full implications of what you presently know.

Fourth, there are mechanisms in this universe that operate based on the belief of the actor, independent of the absolute truthfulness of the belief. This property is much more common than you think. Rather than thinking of it as an exception, come to recognize it as the rule. The requirement of so many miracles, for example, is that you believe. While belief is not merely guessing or desiring, it doesn’t require knowing God’s will exactly. Belief means that you have sufficient reasons to believe that what you are asking will actually happen. On the one hand, you need a reason to believe. You will never be able to exercise perfect belief in something you have no reason to believe, or something you have good reason not to believe. Ignorance cannot generate perfect belief. On the other hand, if you have sufficient reason to believe, and insufficient reason not to believe, you must honestly have high confidence in your belief, until given a reason not to.

The ability to steadfastly believe in what you have reasons to believe is not something that is specific to any given belief. It is an extremely accurate indication of one’s honesty, in the most profound sense. One who is integrally honest will be perfectly reconciled to all their beliefs in all things at all times. One who falls short of this standard can’t exercise full faith, because they will always lack the belief necessary to act towards the same outcomes in the same ways as someone who is.

Belief requires shutting down doubt. Doubt is an obstacle to belief, but it is not insurmountable and it is not a bad thing.

Doubt and belief can’t coexist, but the way to vanquish doubt is not through willful insistence (also known as wishing). Instead, it is through learning: through greater observation and reasoning.

When the Lord said, “If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done.” (Matthew 21:21), he wasn’t saying “if you wish really hard, you can move mountains.” He was saying that the presence of doubt belies a lack of understanding how it is that mountains are moved and why trees are withered when cursed, according to God’s knowledge and purposes.

As long as it is honest doubt and not unbelief, doubt is a helpful indicator that suggests you need to spend more effort reasoning about that particular belief. If you find sufficient reason to overcome the doubt, you will have more confidence than previously. If you fail to find sufficient reason in spite of appropriate effort, you have gained freedom from a poorly supported belief, at least until sufficient new information is available.

Like unbelief, belief is infectious. It is easier to have faith around those who have more faith than you. You will see this effect everywhere you look, in all aspects of life. Wise men and women of all walks of life have realized this truth, and they will tell you things such as “the people you surround yourself with will influence how you are,” and “the ideas you expose yourself to will determine your identity.”

Beliefs come from outside of you: from other people, or from God, or from the devil. These all operate in you, but they don’t start there.

Faith “comes” by “hearing” (see Romans 10:17). In this case, “hearing” means perceiving any invitation to believe in something that you don’t currently believe. It is possible to experience an invitation to believe without perceiving it. The scriptures are full of injunctions to “see” and “hear” these invitations: “Hear, ye deaf; and look, ye blind, that ye may see.” (Isaiah 42:18) During his mortal ministry, Jesus repeatedly lamented his audience’s unwillingness to perceive in spite of their ability to do so.

He commended those who responded to the invitations they were capable of perceiving.

“Hearing” is not limited to what you audibly perceive with your natural senses, though it includes that information. “Hearing” means receiving these signals in the multiple ways they can manifest, across the infinite breadth and infinite depth of information they can transmit. It means paying attention to them so that you can perceive them. It means honestly responding to them as justified by their content as soon as you perceive them.

The possession of beliefs by one person will make it easier for others to believe the same. In the idea phase, a belief can be spread from one person to another. Once put into practice, a belief generates evidence, making it easier for others to believe it. Or, as Jesus expressed, “wisdom is justified of her children.” (Matthew 11:19) A belief is hard won in the mind of the first person who receives it, but it is much more easily transmitted from person to person, just as it is easier to use an invention than create one.

The transmission of true beliefs through other people provides a way of catalyzing action in others that would not otherwise occur. This is how faith spreads: first appearing in the minds of those who exert the extreme effort necessary, then more easily spreading abroad to those who are unwilling to do the same.

Because the foregoing passage refers to faith in Christ, you may be tempted to assume it does not apply to all circumstances where one could have faith. Realize that “faith in Christ” refers to the full set of anything anyone can have faith in. Anytime you see someone catalyze action towards an otherwise unobtained outcome, you see this pattern in play. In all places and all circumstances, faith rests on the laws of cause and effect as they really are. These laws were generated by and fulfilled in Christ. Faith can be applied in any circumstance by any person, and it is fully applied when that person realizes that Christ is the fullness of the laws of cause and effect in all situations.

The transmissible nature of beliefs is a benefit with true beliefs, but causes great harm with false beliefs. While those with more faith than you boost the signal, those with less faith than you attenuate it. Your exercise of faith will be impeded by the presence of those with less faith. Jesus couldn’t do great miracles in places where people had little faith (see Mark 6:5), and when he did work miracles, he noted how “virtue [went] out of [him].” (Luke 8:46)

Avoiding the presence of those with less faith is one way to mitigate their negative influence. For example, when Jesus went to raise a young girl from death, he first dismissed those who would not believe from the room.

Sometimes, it is not practical to separate yourself from those with less faith. In such cases, what becomes important is the duration and frequency of time you can spend apart from them. The more faith you have in comparison to those around you, the more often you will have to do this. Jesus routinely left everyone to be alone with the Father. All of the righteous ancients did the same, to some extent.

When you are figuratively or literally in the mountains, this is the place and time where you access the deepest, fullest faith to obtain, articulate, distill, and refine ideas. These times away from those who would detract from your faith are like jumping in zero gravity. You will have an easier time obtaining, developing, and refining ideas regarding your desires, reasons, actions, and outcomes. Leverage that time to capture those ideas and carry them back into times and places where you interact with others of less faith. Always have a means to write down and revise everything you can while there. At the conclusion of these sessions, you can go back into the world and act from your recorded plans, leaning on your preparation to push back against the faithlessness of others around you.

The choice to believe can be a substantial form of action in and of itself. For most people, the difference between a known and unknown path is separated by a gulf of belief that is excruciatingly difficult for them to cross, even when very strong reasons and desires exist to suggest it should be done.

No one is forced to exercise faith. Everyone has the choice to believe or not.

Jesus routinely counseled his followers to not only act, but also choose to believe (see, for example, Mark 5:36). Some substantial outcomes require tremendous belief, but hardly any physical action. For example, mountains can be moved, the dead can be raised, the sick healed, and many other mighty miracles, by speaking only if one believes.

Actual belief is such a deep test of the heart. If you can say something and truly believe it, it will be done. This isn’t a blank check, because sincerity constrains what can be done through.

Your knowledge of God. If you know that you know nothing about God, how can you be confident in your belief? You can’t believe in God completely in ignorance. Your obedience to God. Your confidence will be commensurate with the degree to which you have fully reconciled to God in your desires, thoughts, words, and actions.

If you can’t describe what you believe in detail, do you really believe it? Could you explain your reasons to others? Can you make a coherent, cogent case as to why you expect these actions will generate the outcome you seek?

One reason some struggle to believe is that they have not done the work to lay out a plausible path to the outcome they seek. As described elsewhere in this book, the more audacious your objective, the less likely you are to know all the details of how it will actually come to be (see, for example, Figure 2). However, if you can’t describe one way that it might come to be in such a way that it is plausible to believe it could happen, you are highly likely to fail to act sufficiently to bring it to pass.

As you learn more details through acting, you can and should revise your best understanding of a plausible path to your outcome.

The more vivid your expectations, the more motivating they will be. Details can pull you through almost any obstacle.

If you don’t have details, you will never have strong enough desires to achieve the outcomes you desire. If you don’t have details, you will never have strong enough reasons to persevere through obstacles that tend to increase in frequency and intensity commensurate with the value of the outcome. If you don’t have details, you will never make all the right choices necessary for the outcomes you seek, which tend to increase in frequency and importance commensurate with the value of the outcome.

Details are not without cost. The more vivid your expectations, the more you will be tempted to be disappointed when you are proven wrong. Don’t be. Every additional piece of revelation is a step that brings you closer to what you seek. Being correct from step one does not yield your outcome. Learning where you need to improve to get there does.

#Chapter 8: Faith Exists by Degrees.

Reading descriptions of faith such as those found in Hebrews 11 may lead a reader to think that faith is a binary attribute that you either have or don’t have. That is not the case.

Faith is not a binary attribute. Faith is a continuous attribute. It exists by degrees. You can have a little, or you can have a lot, or anything in between. This is why faith is described variously as great or weak, sufficient or lacking.

Different people have different amounts of faith. Everyone has some faith. Faith is inseparable from action. All actions happen through faith. Having no faith at all would rob you of the ability to act of your own volition. You would merely be acted upon.

You have yet to meet a single person who has no faith, no matter how evil they may be, and no matter how much of an enemy to God they are. Even Satan is full of faith.

His faith, like ours and like God’s, is the source of his power. You can’t have power without having faith.

Faith varies in which aspect of the faith cycle it is manifested and in degree. You can have great or small desires, great or small reasons, or great or small actions. In concert, these will determine the greatness or smallness of the outcomes you receive.

Those who are “more faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord” will be “favored of the Lord,” receiving manifestations of his power such as answered prayers and miracles (see Mosiah 10:13).

Great faith makes it possible to receive great outcomes. For example, the brother of Jared saw the Lord many years before his birth because of his “exceeding faith” (see Ether 3).

What does it mean to have great faith?

Great faith means taking the next logical step beyond what you were explicitly told. So often we limit our faith by refraining from the logical extensions of our belief. The centurion who sent his friends to Jesus to request him to heal his servant had great faith.

The centurion not only recognized that, if Jesus could heal others, he could heal the centurion’s servant, but also realized that anyone who had power from God to heal would also be able to do it without being present. Great faith means acting as extremely as your reasons suggest. In order to reach Jesus, a group of four lowered their handicapped friend through the roof of the house where Jesus was. Some might consider their actions excessive.

Yet, was there anything excessive about it? If you cared about your friend, you believed there was a way he could have a normal life, and you found a man who was healing the sick, would you not do this and more to get in front of him? Most people today will go through more trouble than this just to see their favorite band play or to go on vacation.

Great faith means pushing forward with the reasons you have in spite of strong opposition and abundant reason for hurt feelings. One woman was commended for her faith when she pressed forward in spite of several rounds of poor treatment from the apostles and even Jesus.

The woman pushed forward in spite of the apostles telling her to leave, Jesus telling her to leave, and Jesus calling her a dog. The fact that she didn’t turn away from her still-valid reasons for believing Jesus was capable of healing her daughter evidenced her great faith.

Great faith means you will have a willingness to act on information received, even if it is new or strange. So often we won’t take the necessary actions to further investigate new possibilities just because they are different from what we already believe. A willingness to believe must precede new knowledge. An ancient queen exemplified a willingness to act on information received when she set aside her status and her previous beliefs after her servants suggested that a man named Ammon was a prophet and could perform miracles.

She believed that he could raise her husband from his coma in spite of the fact that the only reason she had to believe stemmed from the words of her servants and this foreign missionary.

Great faith means you conduct multiple traversals through the faith cycle without resisting or rejecting. It means you seek and obtain all value from all people and situations you have access to. In the case of messengers from God, this means learning and living everything they know about God that you don’t. Jesus commended the Nephites for their faith because, in one sitting, they had listened to and believed everything he had taught the Jews over several years.

The more consistently and speedily you make it through the faith cycle without resisting or rejecting, the more abundant your outcomes will be in frequency and quality.

What does it mean to have little faith?

You have little faith when you are so concerned with immediate circumstances that you can’t make decisions with respect to long-term consequences. Jesus said that our whole desire must be completely focused on the glory of God.

There is no space in the life of a disciple of Christ for worldly desires, except as couched in and subordinate to the desire to seek and follow God’s will in all things.

You have little faith when you fail to exercise your capacity to reason. Jesus chastised the disciples for having little faith when they opted not to understand his teaching about the leaven of the Pharisees, even when it should have been very easy for them to understand.

You have little faith when you refuse to believe, even when given sufficient reasons to. Jesus chastised his disciples for having little faith because they did not believe him when he told them they had power to heal the sick.

Jesus also chastised the eleven apostles after his resurrection because they did not believe the account of those who had first seen his resurrected body.

You have little faith when you abort the process of faith by remaining in an emotive state, failing to advance to reasoning about cause and effect.

Jesus chastised his apostles for being so afraid and worried when their boat was caught in a storm.

What makes this story even sadder is remembering that several of the apostles were fisherman who surely had experience weathering storms, and thus had even less justification for being worried.

You have little faith when you doubt a course that was rationally designed without receiving new evidence sufficient to motivate a change or to cause doubt. Peter suffered from little faith when, after seeing that Jesus could enable him to walk on water, he ignored reason and succumbed to fear.

Faith can fluctuate. There are choices you can make to lose it, and there are choices you can make to increase it.

Gaining faith happens internally. Faith happens in you, not to you. It happens in your mind and in your heart, as you introspect and pay attention to what you think and what you feel and why. It happens as you act on what you already know. It happens as you change your desires and augment your reasons.

You lose faith by refusing to act when given sufficient reason to. You gain faith by acting when given sufficient reason to. Faith increases as you seek God and as you reconcile yourself to what he teaches you.

Calling on God as you contend with the challenge of reconciling to what you know is a sign of faith, and will bring more faith, so long as you are sincere.

Calling on God without an intent to change and without sincerity will not help you build faith. When a father pled with Jesus to help his son, Jesus said, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.” (Mark 9:23) The man didn’t have sufficient faith, but he used what he had to implore the Lord for help.

The father did not delay—he asked straightway. He did not weakly request—he cried out. He was not limply emotionless—he said it with tears. You lose faith by ignoring opportunities to learn more about reality. You gain faith by making the most of every opportunity to understand more about reality. Rather than thinking of faith as a gift from God, think of it as a matched gift. You can’t beg God for faith and expect him to magically give you more without your contribution.

Success in life is not a function of your ability to beg God. A successful business person is not just another homeless person who happened to beg more or make a more convincing sign to hold up. He found the rules of the game, and he played the game better than those who were less successful. If you want success in life, you will obtain it in the same way. You will discover the rules God lives by, and you will choose to live by them. The more effort you put into discovering the rules, and the more closely you obey them, the more you will progress towards being all that God is and, because of that, having all that he has.

An ancient military leader wrote about how he gained faith in his challenges through calling upon God.

This man was praying in belief with great effort and the intent to act accordingly. He wasn’t begging God to magically change outcomes. He was praying for confidence to act and wisdom in knowing how to act. He was asking God to magnify his own willing contribution.

You lose faith by intentionally acting contrary to the best you know how. You gain faith by acting in the best way you know. Faith will not increase against your will. To increase in faith, you have to start by doing what you already know.

When a group of prisoners were enshrouded in supernatural darkness, they cried out in horror, presuming they didn’t know what to do about it. One of their fellow prisoners reminded them that three missionaries had already taught them what they should do.

Faith exists by degrees. Only those who develop great faith will encounter all outcomes available to us in this life and beyond.

Chapter 9: Things Unseen Make Things Seen

Faith is the process that creates, fleshes out, and revises ideas in yourself and others sufficiently to generate actions that would not otherwise occur, yielding physical outcomes that would not otherwise be.

A person’s faith can therefore be measured in terms of the frequency and degree of outcomes that have occurred that would never have otherwise come to pass.

Detractors claim that “ye cannot know of things which ye do not see.” (Alma 30:15) However, things which we don’t yet see are an integral part of all progress in life.

It is essential to understand that the outcome of faith will always include actions, thoughts, and feelings that are different than what you had before you exercised faith. If they did not change, it would be impossible for you to bring to pass anything different than what you were capable of before exercising faith.

Faith creates reality independent of what already exists.

We receive no evidence of a belief until after we test it by first living it. Even adopting something we have observed to work for another has no guarantee of reproducibility until after it is tried. We live according to the belief that you can know of things which you don’t see every single day. To claim that this principle somehow doesn’t apply to spiritual things in the same way it does to everything else in our lives is simply absurd.

All things in our physical world were first created spiritually.

For example, we read how God created all plants before they existed here.

As another example, the Lord told Jeremiah that he existed as a spirit before he was born.

Not everything that exists or can exist spiritually has been manifested in the physical world.

Faith is the mechanism that creates in the spirit and that, from spirit, creates in the physical world.

The ideas existing in the spirit are far greater than those here. Faith is the process by which these things come forth into existence here.

It is only through faith that they can come into being.

You exercise deep faith by creating outcomes here based on desires and reasons that exist only in the spirit.

Reason, desire, and action are the nexus between the spiritual and physical world. Reason and desire drive the creation of new things on earth and the reconciliation of things on earth to things in heaven.

For example, through desire, the Lord can drive us to search to fill longings that surpass those which satisfy normal people. Every person has within them a faint but pervasive memory of God—planted deep within them from their interactions with him before birth. In a way, every desire we have—no matter how base or carnal—is an attempt either to satisfy or silence that deep drive to reconnect with the divine.

Some few manage in this life to make explicit this divine longing, coming to realize what it is and that normal life cannot satisfy it. For example, Peter pointed out that, after learning from Jesus, nothing less would do.

Paul similarly remarked how learning about the Lord decreased the value of all not found in him.

It is in the mind that our access to the spirit provides us greater understanding over what we observe in the physical world, as well as the physical instantiation of the limitless information we have access to in the spirit. Physical objects are limited instantiations of the infinite spirit. Physical objects provide a filter through which specific facets of the infinite are discretized and made more apparent to our limited understanding.

Reason transforms carnal experiences and observations of the real world into the space of the mind, where higher-order analysis can take place. Higher order reflections on reality include, for example, the motives, means, and feelings of sentient beings. In all things, higher order reflections include relationships between the parts of the whole and different objects. For example, higher order thought is not limited to the eye’s view of a drop of water, or to the feeling of wetness, but includes the microscopic bustle of the countless small organisms and molecules comprising the droplet yet invisible to the naked eye, as well as questions about why droplets are physically drawn to each other, or why they roll down a vertical surface in the way they do.

Reason is the link between matter and mind. Reason projects the contents of the mind into the physical world. Reason is the means through which information is channeled from the physical world into the mind, and from the mind into the physical world. This transmission happens through action.

Action is required to observe and think about the physical world. Action is required to act on information thus extracted. These actions generate further observations to provide updates to desire and reason.

So, we see that, without each component of the faith cycle, it is not possible to bridge the gap between the spiritual world and the physical world. While the Christian world continues the long-standing debate about what James meant exactly when he proclaimed “faith without works is dead” (James 2:20), we could further complicate the controversy by adding that faith without reason is dead, as is faith without desire.

The Lord taught that we should pray that his “will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10) Much of what happens here does not reflect his will. When Jesus came here, he did things no other man had done, because he did and said all the things the Father would do were he in his place. As we keep the Lord’s instruction to bring about the Father’s will here on earth, we will—like Jesus—obtain outcomes that have never before been obtained. Faith is what causes us to notice God’s unfulfilled will here and attempt to do what no one else has done to bring it to pass.

In the parable of the talents, the king suggests that, at a minimum, the slothful servant could have put his money into a bank to earn interest (see Matthew 25). This is like using what is already here to obtain beneficial outcomes. However, God wants us to produce much more than this, which is like multiplying what he has already given us. We do this through faith.

Normal people react to the rest of the world. Faithful people act upon the world. A person with faith does not subvert the choice of others. However, a person with faith will relentlessly see and do things that others will not see and do. Invariably, they leave in their wake outcomes that never would have otherwise occurred, notwithstanding the agency of all other people with which they have interacted.

Normal people conform their thoughts to things that act upon them. The faithful conform things to thoughts, through action. Faithful people act upon other people and things to bring about outcomes that would not otherwise occur.

Normal people live in such a way that the world would be no worse without them. The faithful remake the world in their own image. God made man in his image, not the other way around. Those who act like him will do the same.

Normal people react to their space of possibilities from the finite space of their surroundings. Faithful people create their surroundings from the infinite space of ideas.

People act according to what they are willing to do and what they believe is possible. A faithful person will act very differently than a normal person because they will gladly do anything God wants them to (see Psalm 112:1), and they believe God when he says all things are possible (see Matthew 19:26).

This world was created out of utter darkness. Things seen were created from things not seen.

In other words, God stared into the darkness and, through faith, saw everything this world could and would be. He created the earth based purely on potentiality.

His faith is so great that when he looks into complete darkness, he cannot help but see inevitable success based on principles he unshakably knows.

With an understanding of the faith process, we can avoid the trap of believing that creation happened through magic. As God contemplated what would be, he did so, based on reasons and desires. That information is the key to imitating in our scope what he does in his.

You are created in the image of God. You are created in such a way that the same process that God used to create everything you see is available to you. As he created things seen from things unseen, you can create things seen from things unseen. As he channeled what existed only as an idea into tangible reality, you can generate ideas and instantiate them in the physical world. This is what Jesus meant when he taught that our prayer to God should be: “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10)

Normal people do not do this to any remarkable degree. You must see the same darkness as everyone else does, but interpret it very differently. You must see a world of divine potential and act relentlessly to bring it into reality.

When you have faith, you interpret things differently than other people do. When you have faith, you see the opportunity in what others see as affliction. You see afflictions as opportunities to show your love for God, for God to show his love for you, for you to show others God’s love for them.

As a missionary-turned-servant, Ammon found himself among the other servants of the king when troublemakers came to scatter the flocks they were responsible for guarding. While the men were bitterly upset, knowing that the king would severely punish them for losing his sheep, Ammon rejoiced for the opportunity it would give him to show the power of God.

Without this setback, Ammon could never have shown God’s power to these servants and to their king through his miraculous defeat of so many men.

The example of Ammon may seem particularly religious in nature and unlikely in occurrence. However, consider Paul who, through faith, remained cheerful when shipwrecked and imprisoned.

So many bleak situations exist where faith can create bright light in the midst of darkness. Faith is needed to rise to the challenge of finding joy in life when most people are miserable, of finding love when most marriages end in divorce, and of finding success when most businesses fail and most people are poor.

When you have faith, you see potential where others see only limitations. God does great things through weak people. Faith lets you see the possibility of outcomes beyond the limits of your flesh—that the goodness of God is not limited by the nothingness of man, so long as you believe, think, and act. This is why David fought the bear and the lion and how Samson pulled down the columns he was chained to.

When you develop faith, you develop the ability to do everything you see yourself doing, independent of anything in your past and anything other people think about you.

In order to see things as they could be, you have to begin by first seeing things as they really are. All too often, we are sadly mistaken in our perception of ourselves, others, and the world around us. We think that we are better than we are in some ways, we think we are worse than we are in others.

The starting point of all things desired is wherever you are right now. You will never find the right path to what you desire without first ensuring you really are where you think you are. Anyone with experience using a map and compass will attest to this fact.

The thoughts of the faithful always begin with the current state of things—not to limit themselves to the present situation, but in order to devise an accurate starting point for their journey of faith. They are concerned with the chain of actions between how things are and how things could be.

The faithless will keep their dreams well separated from their daily actions. They would rather hold onto hope in what they have no reason to believe is possible than risk failure in attempts to obtain it. The faithful, in contrast, dare to stare at what needs to be done to accomplish what they set out to do. They don’t shy away from discovering the path, no matter how horrible it might be. If their hope is misplaced, they want to know so that they can improve by choosing a better thing to hope for. If their current actions are insufficient to obtain what they seek, they want to know so that they can do what is necessary to obtain what they seek. They actually seek what they say they seek, not just the vapor of false hope that comes from intentionally vacuous dreams.

When his fancy bow broke, Nephi was left without the means of obtaining food (see 1 Nephi 16). His brothers complained. Nephi turned to God in faith. It didn’t matter that he was as hungry as everyone else, or that he had to bear the extra burden of their complaints. He courageously faced reality—he would have to find a way to hunt. He made a bow and arrows, which is not an easy feat, even when you have a full belly and plenty of time. He sought God with a willingness to do what was necessary, and he responded to the instructions he received to climb a mountain to find animals to shoot. It didn’t matter that he was quite hungry at that point, having gone days without food. He simply did what needed to be done. Nephi could have done what normal people would do by complaining instead of doing anything about it. Instead, he realized that the choice was either doing the difficult or dying of starvation. He opted to do what was reasonable, in spite of it also being difficult.

People with faith will do hard things, because they decide what to do not based on whether or not it is difficult, or how long it will take, but based on whether it is worth it. Because they do things based on whether they are worth it, they do things that no one else will do.

Faith promotes ideas to the same strength of evidence as experience. Through desires and reason, you can come to take the same actions you would if the outcome were already experienced.

To begin exploring this concept, consider that those who believed in Christ before he came to earth as a mortal received the same blessings as those who believed in him after giving his life as a witness to his reality and mission.

This kind of faith doesn’t just apply to forgiveness of sins through Jesus. Abraham exercised this kind of faith by leaving his homeland and traveling to a new land—two explicitly temporal actions—even though he had never seen it and did not know how to get there.

Note that, in these cases and all besides, these people were still acting on information. They weren’t guessing or wishing. The difference between these situations and those without faith is that the information was ideological, not experiential: it consisted of desires and reasons concerning the future, not physical sensations experienced in the present.

There are outcomes God possesses and desires to share that can only be obtained through faith. If one does not act in faith before obtaining the knowledge that renders faith impossible, they cannot obtain the same standing as those who believed before having that information. Those who require a physical witness before acting can’t have the same results as those who are willing to act on ideas only. Once you see it, you can’t have the same share of blessings as those who believe and act without seeing it. Those who believe without seeing are blessed more than those who first see and then believe.

For example, after his resurrection, Jesus explained how those who believed him because of the words of his apostles would be blessed above those who believed because they had seen him.

Note here that believing in the words of those who testify of ideas superior to your own is not the same as outsourcing your faith to another. Hearing comes by faith, but faith is not limited to merely hearing. Hearing must be followed by obtaining and evaluating reasons to believe and acting so as to obtain the firsthand knowledge that will always come from living truth.

Those who are willing to act for mental reasons to the same extent as they would for physical reasons obtain greater outcomes because of the law of justice.

They are willing to do more with less, therefore they will obtain more.

Most people do not look ahead. Most people do not see or think about new things. Most people do not actively seek to increase what they perceive and understand. Most people deny even what is obvious in their present experience.

Even when people pay attention to what is evident before them, they still routinely overlook what is beyond their immediate experience but fully within their capability of understanding through reason.

Too many people treat life as if it were comprised of static resources. They live their daily lives as if things will always be exactly how they presently are.

In Proverbs, we read.

The problem with avoiding plowing in the cold is that the season of cold weather is exactly when you need to plow. If it were already warm, it would be too late to plow. There are more productive things to do in the season of warmth, like sowing seed, but that requires that you have already plowed. Spring rains will germinate seed, but only if it has already been planted.

Furthermore, the fact that cold weather is unpleasant is totally irrelevant to whether or not one should plow. The question is: what will be the future need for grain, and will the benefits of having it then outweigh the costs of sowing it now?

This proverb is also useful in highlighting the fact that present abundance does not imply that present action is unnecessary for future benefit. While harvested grain provides a store of food, it also provides the seeds for next season’s crop. The presence of a store of grain does not indicate that there is no need to plant again this season.

Those who act based only on the present will not only miss out on many outcomes available only to those willing to think of the future, they will also lose even their present situation when unforeseen challenges invariably strike.

Honest reflection causes us to recognize that things can change in extreme ways, whether over time or suddenly.

Faith helps us gain improved future outcomes through sacrifice of the present. Faith means obtaining outcomes beyond what is presently before you by preferring desires, reasons, and actions that are beyond what is presently before you.

If you can mentally visualize what you want and what it will take to get it, you can choose to willingly sacrifice present pleasure for future gain. If you can mentally visualize potential future changes in your circumstances, you can choose to willingly sacrifice present comfort for future preparation.

We apply a discount to future benefit. Faith requires you to value future outcomes as if they were in the present. All faithful people submit to present discomfort for the sake of the future.

This “torture” can and does consist of much broader experiences than mere literal torture. The torment of life for a faithful person includes a litany of affliction, ranging from loneliness to betrayal to sickness to deep unfulfilled yearnings.

Abraham had faith in the future when he submitted to the sacrifice of Isaac.

Moses had faith in the future when he preferred to be a servant of God over being a prince in Egypt.

The ability to value future outcomes as if they were in the present is something that manifests through nearly every aspect of a faithful person’s life. A person who values future outcomes as if they were present will act very differently in things big and small in their lives.

Future-believing people don’t do things that are well-known to have bad long-term outcomes. They don’t ignore them because of their obviousness.

For example, they will not do things like smoke cigarettes, because they clearly view the future health problems that they would have by smoking. No rational person would opt to trade a diminishingly effective nicotine hit for lots of wrinkles at a young age or a high probability of cancer if these things were immediate.

Future-believing people honestly assess the consequences of present choices. Ammon and his brothers had great faith because they understood the ramifications of their work: “...for they supposed that great was the work which they had undertaken.” (Alma 17:13)

Future-believing people react promptly to subtle indications of major long-term effects. For example, they will notice if they are heavier than they were a year ago, and they will make necessary changes to reverse the trend because they see this will lead to obesity, and no rational person would opt for that.

Future-believing people make daily small contributions to major longterm outcomes. They understand that “by small and simple things are great things brought to pass.” (Alma 37:6) For example, they will spend time each day focusing on God, knowing it will provide a tremendous treasure of familiarity with his word. They will save a little money every day, seeing future opportunities to invest and knowing that will require capital that can only come from consistent sacrifice long before then.

Future-believing people do not stop once they’ve accomplished something. They continuously seek the best present course of action for the best future outcomes. They do not seek to “finish”, but rather they seek to continuously do the best they can with whatever resources they have. For example, Alma never ceased preaching, even after a lifetime in God’s service.

Future-believing people do things in the present that will have absolutely no effect for a long time. For example, they do things like plant nut trees, which can take seven years or more just to bear the first crop, and sugar maples, which take forty years of growth before they can be tapped for maple syrup. Nephi and his descendants invested significant time and effort in engraving their spiritual records into metal plates for the benefit of people who would live many generations after them.

A miracle is an outcome whose means are generally unknown. However, miracles are not magic. Though the means of miracles are generally unknown, they are known to some, and they are available to all. All outcomes are determined by specific preconditions stipulated from before the foundation of the world.

Miracles, which are a subset of all possible outcomes, are not an exception to this rule. Even miracles are subject to laws. The difference between a common outcome and a miracle is not the existence or absence of a law of cause and effect, but our awareness of such.

We know miracles can happen because they are plainly described in scripture and because Jesus said that they are a permanent fixture of the gospel. Why are they rare? Are they meant to be?

Since outcomes are predicated on specific conditions, uncommon outcomes can only be uncommon because their specific conditions are only rarely fulfilled. This is just as true with miracles as any other outcome.

Miracles are rarer than other outcomes because their conditions are less known than those of other outcomes. They are less known because people are rarely willing to do what is required to learn those conditions or even willing to fulfill those conditions when they are plainly taught to them.

Rather than think of miracles as exceptional and mystical phenomena, we ought to think of them as no different than any other instance of the faith cycle, except that the actions and reasons are beyond the understanding of most, and the outcomes are greater than most are willing to desire. They are, in a sense, the purest example of the faith cycle because they result in outcomes that can’t come except through the exercise of great faith. If one can work miracles, they are expert enough at the faith cycle to obtain any lesser outcome. The reverse is not true. Though all outcomes are obtained through faith, those most common do not require very much desire or reasons or action. Miracles require extreme desire, reasons, and action.

Miracles, like every other outcome, happen through faith. Miracles occur as a result of the faith process: desire, reason, and action. There is never a miracle except as the result of someone having more desire, stronger reasons, or different actions than they otherwise would have had. This description of what causes miracles to occur is also the prescription for causing them to happen.

Melchizedek used faith to obtain miraculous outcomes that were not automatically available, such as stopping the mouths of lions, quenching fire, etc. He did not have a right to those outcomes through some arbitrary power he received from God. Rather, he first had faith to envision these potential outcomes in spite of a lack of a known path to obtain them, and he worked according to his knowledge of God’s power and character. Melchizedek learned from God what he could do to bring about God’s will, leaning on God to carry whatever part of the transaction only he could.

People don’t gain faith by performing miracles. They have to have faith before that happens.

God can only work miracles after faith because those things that are possible without faith in God consist of desires and reasons that are already present on earth. Outcomes that are unattainable with presently available desires and reasons require additional desires and reasons. These can only come through revelation.

Only faith engages God to bring about what would not otherwise be possible. Only faith changes what it is possible. Everything else is just a rearrangement of pre-existing parts.

God will only reveal new information to those who believe in him.

He reveals new information to those who believe in him, so they can use that information to work mighty miracles, signs, and wonders, to give them greater reasons to believe themselves in God.

Miracles are a part of our faith when we have sufficient trust in God and knowledge of his character to seek him to find the way to the outcomes whose actions we do not yet know.

Faith is much greater than knowledge. Knowledge obtains an outcome through the faith of the person who obtained and revealed the causes of that outcome. Faith is an appeal to, receipt of information from, submission to, and participation with God in the obtaining of outcomes.

So much and so many of the wonderful outcomes possible through God have not yet occurred because people here have not exercised sufficient faith.

Chapter 10: Faith in Jesus Christ

To this point in the book, we’ve attempted to explain, as far as possible, the idea of faith in a general context, equally applicable to all outcomes, not just those that explicitly involve faith in Christ. Faith is a process that yields improved outcomes in any context. This is not because it is a principle that is independent of God. Rather, it is because it is very much a part of who he is, and because he is in and through all things, faith is a mechanism of action in all things.

God is merciful in allowing all people—whether they believe in him or not—to benefit from applying the faith process to any aspect of their lives they care to. However, there are many aspects of faith that cannot be explained, understood, or applied fully outside of the specific context of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

What does it mean to believe in Christ? Realize that a phrase like “believing in Jesus” is used by many people to justify very different ideas. How do you make a distinction between different meanings of this phrase or others like it? Belief is the same, and faith is the same process, no matter the target of that belief or faith. Belief in Christ is just a special case of belief in general.

Just as general beliefs can vary in correctness, efficacy, value, and so on, beliefs purported to be in Christ are not all equally valuable.

Not all purported belief in Christ is equally desirable. Some beliefs in Christ promise very different outcomes than others. Most purported belief in Christ offers nothing substantially different than what is already manifest. For example, the difference in joy and peace in a person who is an atheist and a person who merely wishes in a God who will magically save them from all bad things is not substantial, particularly in the inevitable times of affliction that will come upon them, when their shallowly-rooted, false hope evaporates.

Not all purported belief in Christ is equally likely. What makes one belief more likely than another? Stronger reasons to support it.

Not all purported belief in Christ motivates the same actions. Anyone with any experience with more than one organized religion realizes that vast differences exist in the practices of different sects. And, any honest analysis of the scriptures will reveal significant differences between the practice of former disciples of God and modern churches or synagogues.

Because not all purported belief in Christ motivates the same actions, not all belief in Christ leads to the same outcomes.

Not all purported belief in Christ is equal in effect. What makes one belief more correct than another? The rate of successful attainment of the intended outcomes.

The path to a more accurate and effectual belief in Christ lies in iterative application of the faith cycle. Through improved desire, reasons, actions, and outcomes, one will grow closer to the full bounty of belief in Christ.

What is the outcome of faith in Christ? Does your answer for what “faith in Christ” means consist of a rational path to the outcome you intend? If not, it isn’t faith.

Is your outcome peace? Joy? Heaven? What, exactly, do you mean by whichever words you use to describe your outcome? Would you even recognize the outcomes you say you seek if you obtained them?

Even if you can define outcomes, what reasons do you have to believe they will be as you expect? Is your understanding of what these outcomes are like based on the descriptions of those who have obtained them, or just your imagination?

Are you confident that you will actually enjoy and value what you seek? Why?

Faith in Jesus Christ offers us everything that the Lord has. It is the mechanism to claim our joint inheritance from the Father.

We can receive all that the Lord has only by becoming like him. Faith in Christ is not just about believing he lived, died, and was resurrected, but also learning about his character and believing that we can be like he is.

The faith cycle causes us to gradually become more and more like Jesus.

Those who continue in faith in Christ will obtain eternal life.

Eternal life—to be as he is and to be with him forever—is the greatest outcome.

What reasons do you have for believing what you do about the Lord? During his mortal ministry, Jesus continually provided reasons for people to believe in him.

He said things more clearly than anyone had.

He did things that no one else had done.

He told them the future.

He was killed publicly.

He was publicly resurrected from the dead.

Those who have faith in Christ have reasons to believe that Jesus can forgive them of past sins.

Those who have faith in Christ have reasons to believe that through him they can abstain from all future sin.

For most Christians, the intended outcome is that they will go to heaven after they die. Unfortunately, the actions they have chosen to obtain this outcome—some mix of verbal profession of God, occasional obedience to some of his commandments, and possibly having some idea of some of his word—are disjointed from what the scriptures and all who have obtained heaven have said regarding the path to eternal life. Wishing is not a sufficient reason to believe you will go to heaven.

Does your faith in Christ include both the actions that you believe will lead to the outcome you expect and strong reasons for them? If not, it isn’t faith.

What reasons do you have to believe that the actions you have in mind will lead to the outcome you expect? Where did you get the idea that those actions would lead to the outcome? If you made them up, it is unlikely that you are correct. If you heard them from someone else, what reason do you believe they knew what they were talking about? Have they already obtained what you seek, or are you getting directions from someone who, like you, does not yet know the way? “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” (Matthew 15:14)

Those who have faith in Christ act according to their faith by obeying all of God’s commandments.

They completely and constantly obey all they currently know.

They diligently seek further instruction from God.

They persist in obeying and seeking God for their entire lives.

What would it be like to never feel guilty again? What would it be like to never feel shame again? What would it be like to feel a deep, peaceful satisfaction, all the time, no matter how intense life gets? What would it be like to feel complete contentment and peace at all times and in all places? What would it be like to be free of stress and to have the confidence to boldly march into the hardest of your endeavors? What would it be like to be completely free from anxiety and depression, except in the concern you feel for others and the sorrow you feel for their poor choices? What would it be like to be absolutely immune to temptation? What would it be like to be stronger than any substance, person, or situation—to be truly free to act and feel how you choose?

This is what Christ offers to you.

Those who have faith in Christ desire to be forgiven of past sins and desire to abstain from future sin.

In seeking and obeying God, the objective of the faithful is not just to obey arbitrary rules, but to actually be like Jesus in how they act, what they desire, and who they become.

The Lord told us to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” (Matthew 22:37) He said this was “the first and great commandment.” (Matthew 22:38) If we desire the Lord with all our heart, soul, and mind, then we won’t desire anything else above him. Like Paul, we will “count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.” (Philippians 3:8) It is what David described when he said: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” (Psalm 42:1)

If we desire Christ, we will do all things and suffer all things, even unto death, if that is what it takes. This consummate desire is what the Lord described as hungering and thirsting after righteousness, which he indicated is the price required to receive what is sought.

Seek the Lord with all your heart, might, mind, and strength, and you will find him.

Chapter 11: Forgiveness Through Faith in Christ

Sin consists in actions that deviate from the most beneficial path. Sin causes guilt. While this guilt can be ignored or covered in this life, it is constant, permanent, and plain after this life.

As with all other gifts from God, forgiveness of past sins comes through faith in Jesus Christ.

It isn’t necessary to believe in God to desire forgiveness for our transgressions towards other people. Guilt and other negative consequences of sin spur us to seek after peace and contentment. Experiencing negative emotions or consequences is quite common, though it does not typically yield lasting change, and it is certainly insufficient to entice a person to undergo the harrowing transformation that is required for a person to experience joy in the presence of God.

An understanding of the love of God cannot be obtained or increased in a way that yields joy except through faith. God could reveal his love to anyone, at any time, to any degree, but doing so outside of the faith process would fill the recipient with indescribable agony due to the inescapable guilt with which it would fill them. Faith is the only mechanism through which a person can gain an understanding of the love of God in a way that yields joy because the need to choose and act on the part of the participant releases them from the guilt they would otherwise feel. One who has faith in Christ will not only gain a greater understanding of the love of God, but they will also reform their beliefs and actions to conform to their understanding of God as it improves in accuracy and depth.

Whenever a person is truly converted to God, it is through an increased understanding of his love. There are many examples of this in scripture.

When Alma began to understand the love of God, he was so racked with his guilt that he laid on the ground in paralyzed silence for three days. He said.

When the Lord appeared to Paul and told him that his zealous persecution of the Christians was wrong, his turmoil was so great that he went without food and water for three days (see Acts 9:4-9).

When Zeezrom heard the gospel preached by Alma and Amulek, “his soul began to be harrowed up under a consciousness of his own guilt; yea, he began to be encircled about by the pains of hell.” (Alma 14:6)

The guilt experienced by those who, through faith, have gained an understanding of the love of God is a measured dose of what we will feel at judgment if we are not reconciled to God. If we take that dose and use it to come to a full understanding of the reality and contents of judgment day, we will believe that hell is worse than any pleasure offered by sin.

Jesus pointed out that those who are forgiven of much will be much more grateful than those who are forgiven of little.

One interesting aspect of this account is that both debtors would have been under the same consequence of prison or enslavement for their debts. While our gratitude indeed differs, it only does so commensurate with our perception of the degree of offense we have committed. In reality, all sin is equally sufficient to cause eternal torment: a sinner in one is a sinner in all: “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.” (James 2:10)

Desire for Christ must be consummate in order to bring about forgiveness. For many outcomes, a light desire is insufficient, and when it comes to a desire for forgiveness of past sins, nothing less than everything will do. Anything less than an absolute, sincere surrender to God will not free you from the guilt of your past sins. You “must bow down before him, and worship him with all your might, mind, and strength, and your whole soul.” (2 Nephi 25:29)

The scriptures provide examples of what this looks like in practice. When a proud king was taught the gospel.

Forgiveness of past sins not only frees a person from the guilt of knowing that they could have done better, but also provides motivation for abstaining from future sin. One cannot be forgiven by God without recognizing a greater portion of God’s love, which in turn makes them love him more (see Luke 7:47).

Without forgiveness of past sin, future sinlessness could not bring the peace and contentment it qualifies for, as the guilt and sorrow for past sins would endure no matter how perfect one’s future actions might be.

Because perceived value leads to desire, one’s degree of understanding of the value of forgiveness through Christ will determine one’s desire to obtain it. One who desires to change because of the love of God will do more for longer than one who does not. One who understands the love of God will value aligning their actions with his more than anything in this world.

Jesus is “mighty to save and to cleanse from all unrighteousness.” (Alma 7:14) He provides evidence of his ability to forgive sins in the form of personal evidence and outwardly visible evidence.

The strongest evidence for Jesus’ ability to forgive sins is the fact that when one follows his prescribed instructions, they will receive the undeniable peace that comes. The greater one’s recognition of their true situation, the more obvious the alleviation from guilt and sorrow will be when forgiveness is obtained.

A recognition of one’s receipt of forgiveness is something internal to the individual, but the actions it motivates can be seen by others. Those who are forgiven do not act contrary to their understanding of God’s character. They do what they believe he would do in their place at all times and in all places. The jarring difference in their behavior and their sudden ability to do and endure very difficult things attest to the internal change wrought by obtaining forgiveness from God for past sins.

While many of these changes will go unnoticed by others, some of these actions fall into the category of miracles. During his mortal ministry, Jesus performed miracles in order to provide reasons to believe that he had the power to forgive sins.

In our day, the Lord has likewise provisioned servants to the earth demonstrating the miraculous signs that he promised would attend all believers in order that mankind might have faith that Jesus has the power to forgive sin.

The actions associated with obtaining faith in Christ are fully surrendering to him, forsaking sin, and asking forgiveness.

Asking for forgiveness can’t be the first step in this process. Asking for forgiveness doesn’t change you. It doesn’t force you to abstain from sin, nor does it place you in a state where you can continue to sin without the previous consequences. Rather, forgiveness is a blank slate that allows you again to choose whether you will keep all of God’s commandments for the rest of your life.

Actual change must precede forgiveness. It is for this reason that repentance comes before baptism.

God’s forgiveness figuratively washes your garments clean.

However, God’s forgiveness does not prevent you from once again staining your garments through repeated sin.

People who have faith in Jesus not only obtain forgiveness, but they also abstain from future sin.

After this life, it will be impossible to lie to yourself about whether you have completely obeyed God or not.

It is “because of [our] faith in the Lamb of God [that our] garments are made white in his blood” and we become “righteous forever.” (1 Nephi 12:10) You don’t actually believe in Jesus if you don’t do what he says.

God has made us free to decide how to choose, and just as you were able to choose sin in the first place, you will remain free to choose to sin in the future.

If you recommit a sin at any future date, you stand in the same state as you were before you were forgiven.

As long as you re-stain your garments through choosing to sin, you cannot dwell with him.

In order to retain the Lord’s forgiveness, you must continue to forsake all sin, all the time, and you can do this by retaining in remembrance God’s greatness, his goodness, his love for you, and your nothingness before him.

There is no point in obtaining forgiveness for past sins without first choosing to become the kind of person who will not repeat any of the past sins forgiven. It is only after you have decided to forsake your sins that you should cry to God to forgive you of your past sins.

Many will fall short in their attempts to obey all of God’s commandments after asking for forgiveness. The Lord’s mercy makes provision for this. As often as you repent, you will be forgiven.

However, any who willfully sin and die will carry their guilt eternally, as if Christ never came.

When it comes to obtaining forgiveness, the rules of the game, as it were, may seem unfair, given that all live for different lengths of time, all learn these things at different times, and all have different circumstances, but there is no unfairness with God. God is perfectly just, and provisions exist for every circumstance.

For example, those who choose to wait to obtain forgiveness for past sins just before they die have not cheated the system. They can never enjoy the joy, peace, and happiness that those who have lived a long life of dedication to God enjoy because the deathbed repentant can’t acquire a lifetime of experiences, lessons, and sacrifices in the short time they have. Likewise, those who die without the time or opportunities to live such a long life of discipleship are judged according to their circumstances.

Chapter 12: Holiness Through Faith in Christ

Repentance of the sins we know of is the first part of exercising faith in Christ, but obtaining forgiveness of one’s sin is not the end of the journey. It is merely the beginning.

Forgiveness of sins makes possible the reception of the Holy Ghost, which is the mechanism through which the Father successively reveals everything you yet lack to become like him, commensurate with the degree of faith you exercise.

Obtaining the Holy Ghost enables you to enter into the lifelong path of learning more from God line upon line.

There is a difference between being forgiven of past sins and being holy. Forgiveness of past sins comes as you forsake those sins and reconcile yourself to what you presently know about God. Being holy goes beyond reconciling to what you presently know about God. You become holy as you become more like God is, not just how you presently believe him to be. Becoming holy requires learning more about God and assimilating everything you learn about him into your own character.

There is no other way to obtain eternal life except through a lifetime of learning more about God and unfailingly implementing it.

Willful sin occurs when you deviate from the best path you know, while sin in ignorance occurs when the best path lies beyond your present knowledge. For sins committed in ignorance, Christ’s “atonement satisfieth the demands of his justice.” (2 Nephi 9:26) However, the atonement of Christ does not violate the law of cause and effect, and therefore cannot deliver the outcomes of paths not taken.

Forgiveness is the removal of a just outcome—the punishment you deserve, not the delivery of an unjust outcome—eternal life you don’t yet deserve. Even if you are forgiven for not obeying what you do not know, you can never obtain all God offers without actually becoming like him.

The only way to become more like God is to seek, obtain, and obey more of his commandments.

God’s voice comes to you through various means. The Lord said: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27) Do you hear it?

God’s voice is the voice of improvement. Everything that invites you to be better is from God. The Lord said.

We are steeped in incessant invitations for improvement, both from within and without. From without, we are surrounded by evidences that something better than what we have and are exists. We see and smell and feel beauty in nature that exceeds what we create and enjoy in our daily lives. In our experiences with other people, and even in media, we hear and see and feel love and peace and beauty beyond what we have, give, and receive. From within, a subtle but recurring message comes through a still, small voice that paradoxically whispers with the strength to shake us, suggesting to our deepest core that we can live up to and become whatever good we become aware of.

We ought to interpret these flashes of good observable all around us as they are: the voice of God calling us to be better.

The most important source of God’s instruction to you is found in your conscience. Through your conscience, God will show you what is right and what is wrong according to your present understanding. Through perfectly obeying this influence all of the time, in all things, you will unlock the Lord’s ability to teach you more about himself, yourself, and the world, enabling you to reach outcomes far better than otherwise possible.

The channel of your conscience will be informed by external resources, including God directly, and how he acts through your experiences and interactions with the world. Seeking more of God’s commandments requires finding those you know who know God better than you. You have access to many such people via their writings in scripture. The scriptures will yield greater insights about God’s character and commandments, leading you to more of the outcomes he intends for you.

God will also send into your life living people who know him better than you do. These people will share with you even more insights about God’s character and commandments that will lead you to even more of the outcomes he intends for you.

The Lord’s voice is not limited to one finite message. He said: “...my works are without end, and also my words, for they never cease.” (Moses 1:4)

These ubiquitous signals can easily be ignored, but never silenced. They are the voice of God, relentlessly calling us towards improvement. This voice is deliberately woven into the very fabric of our lives, being in and through all things from the creation of the world. Faith is what this voice is calling us toward—the revelation of the prospect for improvement and the invitation to discover the path that will bring its fulfillment: to take upon yourself these improvements; to become as good as you now know is possible; to acquire the attributes of God as quickly and completely as he reveals himself to you.

When you ignore these messages, you are engaging in a deeper commitment than you probably realize.

Without faith in Christ, we would lose hope in ourselves and others and stop acting in the face of delayed outcomes or unclear paths. Faith in Christ allows us to relentlessly revise our actions through trust in his loving character and his attainment of all the Father has. We can continue to learn and grow and try until we become all he has promised we can because we know that he desires us to have the same fulness of joy that he enjoys.

It is extremely important to realize that salvation is not just obtained through Jesus, but in him.

It is insufficient to believe in Jesus. One must also be like him. It is possible to become like he is.

The Lord commanded.

While we remain in ignorance of what God knows, how can we be perfect as he is?

We do not become like him instantly. It requires a lifetime of learning, one that invests the consistent application of “all the energy of heart.” This purification process is what enables people to “become the sons of God; that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as he is pure.” (Moroni 7:48)

The Lord will continue to teach all who will continue to listen to him. During his mortal ministry, he prayed that the Father would “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” (John 17:17)

The Lord’s word sanctifies those who seek after, believe, and live according to it.

In the day of judgment, we will not be measured by whether or not we asked for forgiveness. We will not be measured by comparing ourselves to others. We will be measured by how well we lived up to God’s available instructions.

Paul described how living by faith is required to be just, or to obtain knowledge of and live according to God’s character. He explained how we are accountable to live the extent we know.

In the day of judgment, the question will be whether we have sought after and followed God’s word or not.

As we humbly and tenaciously seek and implement God’s word in our lives, he will continue to teach us, and we will become more and more like him.

Your faith in Christ is a catalyst to bring about change in the world through seeing, working towards, and inspiring others to act to bring about outcomes that would not otherwise occur.

The Lord taught that we should pray by saying.

You help bring his kingdom by reconciling the world to God—by gaining greater understanding of God, and by actively interacting with the world to bring it into closer alignment with what you learn.

Are you living the best way you know how? Are your desires and actions fully and consistently reconciled to the purest idea you have of what is possible for humankind? Are you fully reconciled to every example of what is good that you have observed, at all times and in all places?

You can improve yourself through faith. Are you as good as you can be? How could you be better? Why should you want to be better? What can you do to make it so?

You can improve the world through faith. Is everything as good as it can be? How could it be better? What can you do to make it so? What can others do to make it so? What can you do to help them do it? Why should you care?

You can improve other people through faith. Are others as good as they can be? How could they be better? What can others do to make it so? What can you do to help them do it? Why should you help them?

Through faith in Christ, you can conquer all sin. Jesus said.

John wrote.

People, by default, love the world: “For all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ’s.” (Philippians 2:21) Through faith, a person’s desires can be turned away from sin.

Through faith in Christ, many people have become sanctified to the point that they were disgusted by sin.

The root of why we find pleasure in sin lies in our ignorance of things as they really are. Sin is not desirable to those who know the true value, cost, and benefit of things as they really are.

Your desires are not changed by magic. Desires only change through information—believed through precept (reason) or through experience. You don’t desire what you believe will harm you. You don’t desire what you don’t believe is worthwhile. Unless you are a liar, you don’t desire things that you know are a lie, or are a counterfeit to the real thing. Only a fool finds mirth in folly. Only the ignorant or dishonest find pleasure in sin.

God brings about remission of sins through belief in him—not through a magic change that comes independent of you changing, but because he gives you the reasons to change in what he teaches you about himself, and because you choose to believe them.

One may ask: if sin is only desirable to those who either don’t know or intentionally ignore true value, cost, and benefit, why is sin so prevalent, even among those who profess to believe in God? The answer lies in the almost universal lack of faith in Christ.

Until a person seeks more information through faith, they will not be able to learn what prevents them from seeing the true cost of sin.

Obtaining more knowledge about reality is not for the faint of heart. It requires immense trust in God, as well as effort in seeking and diligence in obeying what is learned in order to learn more about reality.

Learning more about reality is the most harrowing experience life has to offer. It requires a great deal of faith to endure—let alone seek—God’s instruction on how things really are.

As God reveals to you the true cost and true benefit of what is available in life, you will find far less value in what everyone tends to value. You will find severe cost in what others consider innocuous. You will yearn for deep things of eternity. You will find very little satisfaction or joy in the things of this world. The moorings of all things considered valuable to the world will be violently ripped from your heart. What’s worse, the removal of desire for the things of this world must occur while there is as yet nothing to replace it. One must truly be empty to be prepared for God to fill them, and it might take decades of enduring the emptiness before you are finally filled with the truth you seek.

Sanctification is the process of learning—through faith—the truth of all things, while necessarily reconciling your desires, reasons, and actions to that truth. As you learn more and more about reality, you will obtain a more correct understanding of what is good, what is evil, the true cost of things, who pays it and how, and the true benefit of things. This will create in you a greater willingness to learn more about and submit wholly to God through an increased awareness of your nothingness and his loving sacrifice in the face of reality. In the scriptures, this is called a “broken heart and a contrite spirit.”

When you realize that what you thought was good in and around you is really not very good at all—and may actually be evil—your heart breaks and your spirit becomes submissive.

When you realize that, through your “trespasses and sins,” you are “dead,” that your actions were “according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air,” or according to “the lusts of [y]our flesh” and the “desires of the flesh,” and that you are doomed to the “wrath” of eternal punishment for your choices, you will develop a broken heart and a contrite spirit. You will realize that God, in his rich mercy and “his great love,” has extended his grace and kindness towards you through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as a gift from God. You will realize that you did not and could not deserve his gift of reconciling you to the Father through your forsaking of sin, and this will cause you to have a broken heart and a contrite spirit.

Willingly submitting to this incrementally increasing knowledge is as desirable as subjection to immense pressure is to a lump of coal. Without faith—perceiving and believing what is far from your sensual experience with unshakable certainty—you will only be able to see sanctification as immense, and purposeless, pain and sorrow. But if you see the end of your suffering with the eye of faith, you will see how it is the only possible way to convert you into something much more valuable. A lump of coal cannot see its potential as a diamond, but through faith, you can see enough of the divine potential God makes possible in you to endure and even desire the unimaginably intense experience necessary to realize it.

Willingly submitting to the truth of all things is a burden so sore that it is impossible to imagine except to those who have done it. Try to imagine what it is like for your concept of what is good to expand closer to the fullness of who and what God really is. Try to imagine what it would be like to realize that everything you thought had value has far less (or even negative) value than you had supposed. Imagine everything you previously valued moving farther behind you, causing you the pain of loss and robbing you of all the crutches you have leaned on to shelter you from your weakness, while what you previously considered to be God moves farther ahead of and away from you than you previously thought possible. This is what Daniel meant when he said, “my comeliness became corruption.” (Daniel 10:8)

Imagine walking further into the dark, through faith only, while simultaneously letting go of the flicker of what you supposed was a bright light. It is a trial so completely harrowing—both in its intensity and consummate duration—that only those who experience it can comprehend it, and yet it is required of all who will come to Christ, as it is the very way we do.

Without walking in faith towards a more accurate understanding of the truth and value of things, we can never marshal sufficient desire for eternal life and every good outcome, which are the same. If we do not have sufficient desire, we will never have the required mindset or motivation to engage in the content or intensity of reason required for eternal life and obtaining every good outcome. Without sufficient reasons, we will never exercise the actions required for eternal life and obtaining every good outcome.

Sanctification is not an optional process. It is the incessant iterative application of the faith cycle to every aspect of life. It is walking deeper into the darkness in order to obtain more light. It is gaining a greater understanding of the truth and value of all things. It is letting go of what God has shown you is lesser for what—in the eye of faith—you now see as better. It is discipleship. It is what it means to have a broken heart and contrite spirit. It is what it means to walk by faith and not sight.

Chapter 13: Jesus is the Author and Finisher of Our Faith

Jesus Christ is the shepherd of our faith. He is the source of and orchestrator of all faith. He is both the beginning and the end of all faith; the author and finisher of our faith (see Moroni 6:4).

Jesus makes faith possible through what he does before, during, and after our exercise of faith. The Lord provides the foundation upon which we build our faith, he has created and empowered everything necessary for us to exercise faith, and he continues to work after and according to our faith.

The Lord is the reason we have faith, he is the ultimate subject of all faith, and he is the source of all improvements in faith.

Faith begins with an idea—a desire or a reason. As Paul said, “faith comes by hearing.” (Romans 10:17) All faith begins with the idea that something more than what is present is possible. This idea is necessarily absent from the mind of the believer previous to the beginning of faith. It is from this seed of an idea that the individual begins to consider and desire an as-yet unattained outcome. This idea can come from anywhere, and yet it is all from God. God is “in all things, and is through all things,” (D&C 88:41) and “all things bear record of [him].” (Moses 6:63) Everything provides an invitation to exercise faith through stirring a desire to obtain an outcome beyond what you have experienced, providing reasons to believe such exists, and giving reasons to believe certain actions on your part will result in obtaining it.

Every single action stands informed by the sum of exposures to all the signals an individual receives and perceives to that point. These signals consist of the experiences they have had with the world, the interactions they have had with other people, and their previous reactions to these stimuli.

Because everything we do is in response to some sort of enticement, all faith begins with the actions of someone other than you. Faith is an endless chain of ideas rippling through all time and eternity. God is the source of all such ideas.

The amazing thing about faith is that no matter where you currently stand—no matter your past or your present situation—God has already done his part to initiate your next faith cycle. Whether in the experiences he has sent you, the people he has sent you, or the resources he has provided you, he has already made available to you the information you need to plant the seed of faith and water it through developing your desires, reasons, and actions until you obtain the outcome you seek or find something better to seek instead. He has done so in the way he has designed and created this earth, in the information he seeded by teaching Adam in the garden of Eden, and in the information he continues to send to the earth, whether through the insights and understanding he gives to people who seek it or through the ministry of angels.

Faith is a principle of action, and while it is all autonomous—we are free to choose—none of it is independent.

Through who he was and is, and what he was and is, God provided the framework of faith. When it comes to faith, God has already acted. We exercise faith by responding to what he has already done, what he continues to do, and what he will yet do.

Before anyone exercised faith on this planet, God decreed all laws of cause and effect. Before you ever exercise the slightest faith, God has already appointed the law that guarantees the outcome, sent messengers to give you the idea of the path to the outcome, and created circumstances perfectly suited to you to ensure the greatest possible likelihood of your success. When you exercise faith, you are merely discovering and acting according to what he has already created.

Every aspect of the extensive creation, spanning all we know in both time and space, is the intentional work of Jesus Christ designed precisely and exclusively to provide us the perfect and necessary environment to exercise faith. Anyone who glances at the stars on a clear night, or contemplates the expanse of time, or the details of their life ought to be filled with indescribable awe and wonder at God’s immense and incalculable wisdom and kindness in what he has done to provide a way for us, through faith in him, to secure much greater joy than we could otherwise possess.

God transmits the ideas that form the seed of faith to us through his spirit via our minds, our hearts, and creation—including other people.

It is through these “preachers”—whether they be men, angels, the spirit, or reality itself—that God speaks and injects into us the ideas from which stem every act of faith.

Those who are receptive to faith become a conduit through which God catalyzes faith in others. The Lord uses these “chosen vessels of the Lord” to help “the residue of men...have faith in Christ.” (Moroni 7:3132) They become pipes in the network of light that flows from God to and through all things.

Jesus Christ was the perfect preacher, and, in condescending to come to earth as a man, he provided in his life and death the strongest possible contribution to our faith.

The Lord’s teachings and actions provide an example to us both of the pinnacle of what we can become in this life and why we ought to gladly pay any price to do so.

God’s voice is the voice of improvement. However it arrives to our perception—whether in our minds, in our hearts, in the words of another, or in the manifestation of something in the world—his voice calls us to consider the idea of outcomes better than what we previously believed possible for ourselves, others, and the world.

The recipient of an invitation toward improvement may or may not notice it, and may or may not notice that it comes from God. Every exercise of faith is inseparably coupled to Jesus Christ, whether the participant realizes it or not. He is the source of everything that makes faith possible and the source of everything that can make it better.

Faith creates light in the darkness. Just as God’s spoken word catalyzed the creative potential of the dark void to bring forth this living world, his word spoken into us generates new creative potential in our spirit. As we follow this voice, we will design and follow the actions that lead to obtaining the outcome we imagined.

Every outcome has a path that leads to it, as ordained by God before the world was. Every outcome is like a lock, and there exist a certain set of conditions which comprise the key.

God knows the path to what you seek.

He provides instructions for how to act.

He does everything in his power to invite and entice you toward the path that leads to what you desire.

As our desires grow towards outcomes of higher value, the cost of walking the paths to these outcomes increases.

The greatest outcome—obtaining and being filled with the love of God—costs everything. As we ascend in the object of our desire, we will need stronger tools to cope with the darkness that comes attached to greater light.

Hope in God can help us in hard times. In the hardest times, hope in God is the only thing sufficient to endure. It is through reliance upon the character of Jesus Christ that we find the motivation to endure the most bleak and hopeless situations.

Promises from God are another tool that helps us endure more difficult paths. When we faithfully carry out the Lord’s instructions, we obtain promises from him.

It is through our faithful action that we guarantee the fulfillment of the promises we obtain.

He strengthens us with the promise that all things we endure in obedience to him will be for our good.

At all times and in all places, no matter how hopeless things may seem, God is at the helm. He is not aloof. He is not merely allowing things to happen. He perfectly knows the outcome of every situation. His law perfectly controls all things while providing free choice of all men. His perceived absence is not his actual absence, and like all other things, it is perfectly calculated to advance our benefit.

When you trust in God, you can lean heavily on the promises you have obtained. These consist of both general laws and promises, as well as things he has taught to you personally.

God’s promises to Abraham inspired his faithful actions over a lifetime. For example, he complied with God’s commandment to sacrifice Isaac because he believed God’s promise that through Isaac God would raise many nations.

It is hard to imagine a more impossible situation than believing that your young son would have uncountable posterity as you raise a knife to kill him. Yet, Abraham believed. Abraham knew what it means to walk by faith, not sight.

Another tool to assist us through hard trials is trust in God’s justice. Faith is not used to bypass the laws of justice, but rather to make a way for people to benefit from justice and entice people to come up to it. Obtaining the greatest outcomes requires leveraging the law of justice. Some outcomes require the Lord to subject you to unmerited suffering, figuratively hiding his presence from you, for a time, to give you the blessing of exercising faith and choosing to act even against great opposition.

Even during the most intense trial of faith, when we may be tempted to feel completely alone, we are assured by God’s word that he is still completely in control of our situation. Even when you feel a complete absence of his presence, you can rely on your idea of his character, the evidences of his past involvement with you and with the world, and the rational reasons you have for believing he is worthy of your trust. Even when his presence is not obvious to us, he is so thoroughly involved that it is by him that we are kept alive from one moment to another.

The flesh tempts us to judge after our sight, which is to say according to our present and past experiences and the culture and customs we have received. Faith inspires us to believe according to the ideas God has given us of the future, and according to our past observation of the fulfillment of his promises.

Faith provides an alternative to relying on how we feel in the midst of a fallen world. It provides us a path to act contrary to human bias, deprived culture, limited predisposition, blind prejudice, and present pleasure. In so doing, faith expands our potential for action. Faith motivates us towards choices that improve us.

God does not ask for our faith for his own benefit. Everything he asks of us is for our own benefit. Our faith is not for his sake, it is for our own.

Faith is the gateway through which God works with man. God works “unto the children of men according to their faith.” (Ether 12:29)

Faith is the means that God uses to bring to pass his will. While God has done tremendous things prior to our faith, and while he supports us with a mighty hand during our faith, it is in what happens after our faith that his will is fulfilled.

God has all power to bring about all outcomes, but he can’t do so in all ways. His power comes as a result of his acquisition of and alignment with all truth. Part of that truth is the law of justice, which binds outcomes to what is deserved.

To merely give away all he has would violate the principle of justice. In lieu of this, he sends all he can as soon as he can and pays every price that can be paid by him. He also sends uncountable servants to do everything they can.

Having done what must be done prior to faith, God awaits what each individual will do before he can do what he can only do after they have faith. He only “workest after men have faith.” (Ether 12:30)

When an individual exercises faith, they enable God—through justice—to bring about outcomes in their behalf that exceed the price they have paid for them. It is in this way that, through faith in Christ, we become and receive more than we ever could of our own accord. It is God who has gifted us with the agency of choosing whether to exercise faith in him, it is God who created this world where things operate with enough delayed or obscured justice to allow us the exercise of faith, and it is God who gives us the reason to exercise faith. Truly, no matter who we become and what we obtain, it is all through and of him.

As you open the door to the blessings God has paid the price for through your faith, he will shower you with things you never could have had without his sacrifice, goodness, mercy, and might.

Every iteration through a faith cycle will bring an individual closer to God than they were before. Every faith cycle enables a greater faith cycle.

It is a misconception to think that people who are mighty in faith arrived at that point all at once. It is a misconception to think that people with mighty faith were born in some way that makes it easier for them.

They all began no different than you. “In the first place they were on the same standing with their brethren.” (Alma 13:5)

The only difference between them and you is “their exceeding faith and good works.” (Alma 13:10) These people are only different than you in what they came to think about God. They believed that God was great enough to make them like him, if they obeyed him. Do you?

Every servant of God begins their faith journey in humble, almost imperceptible circumstances. It is through successive faith cycles that they come up to the mighty faith they are renown for. You can be just like them as soon as you submit to the same frequency and intensity of faith cycles that they have.

Melchizedek provides an example of this iterative process. As a child, he completed sufficient faith cycles to work several considerable miracles. He then was approved by God, and only after all of this was ordained a high priest and enabled—through more faith—to perform even more miracles in the Lord’s name—from breaking mountains to dividing seas to quenching fire, etc..

Enoch provides another example of this iterative process. Having left his home after living a modern lifetime worth of unremarkable faith to fulfill some nondescript yearning of his heart, Enoch.

Enoch left his home in faith. He was given powerful language, but not until after his faith, believing that there was something the Lord could use him for, for the benefit of the people who did not live with Adam.

It is important to realize that these accounts are radically condensed. Faith is a long journey.

Jesus is the end of faith. Through multiple faith cycles, you will be sanctified. Those who continuously submit to faith cycle after faith cycle will eventually find themselves like he is. They “see as they are seen, and know as they are known.” (D&C 76:94) You will draw closer to God while becoming more like him. You will realize that Jesus Christ is the outcome of faith: knowing him, being like him, having all faith converted to knowledge, and all belief converted into being.

Chapter 14: Faith in the Character of Christ

The Lord’s commandments can be viewed as invitations to desire, think, and act more like he does. They can be found in rules that are either obeyed or disobeyed, in principles that should guide our decisions, or as extensions of his character that we can emulate. Out of these three, his character is the basis from which we can gain the most extensive and accurate understanding of his commandments and from which we can draw the most strength when exercising our faith in him.

Faith is required to advance from obedience to rules, to adherence to principles, to transformation of character. The objective in each case is to know God more than one presently does, and this can only occur through first obtaining and then acting according to a correct idea of what is not presently known.

The greatest faith can only be exercised once a person understands and believes in God’s character. At this point, they have full trust in him— not because of their exact knowledge of why what they are going through is good, but because they know that given the Father’s love and knowledge, anything that comes from him must be good, no matter how bad it seems. This is how a person “...[puts] off the natural man and [becomes] a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.” (Mosiah 3:19) It is through this unshakable confidence in God that we endure all things, obey all things, and become as he is.

Considering the Lord’s character traits individually can increase our faith in him. The Lord’s character is a composite of various specific attributes. This chapter will investigate how we can have faith in the Lord’s mercy, knowledge, justice, and love.

Desiring God’s mercy. Desire for God’s mercy comes from sincerity, borne of desperation.

And thou didst hear me because of mine afflictions and my sincerity; and it is because of thy Son that thou hast been thus merciful unto me, therefore I will cry unto thee in all mine afflictions, for in thee is my joy; for thou hast turned thy judgments away from me, because of thy Son. (Alma 33:11)

Those who seek God’s mercy don’t merely ask for it—they cry for it. They do so as if their lives depend on it.

It was this sort of authentic desire for God’s mercy that caused two blind men to cry to Jesus: “Thou Son of David, have mercy on us.” (Matthew 9:27)

It was this sort of authentic desire for God’s mercy that one group had after they “viewed themselves in their own carnal state, even less than the dust of the earth.” They understood the urgency and necessity of what they sought.

And they all cried aloud with one voice, saying: O have mercy, and apply the atoning blood of Christ that we may receive forgiveness of our sins, and our hearts may be purified; for we believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who created heaven and earth, and all things; who shall come down among the children of men. (Mosiah 4:2)

Reasons for God’s mercy. God has provided many examples of the mercy he gave to people in the past. His past mercy for others gives us reasons to expect he will also be merciful with us under the same conditions.

Acting according to God’s mercy. The mercy of God is conditional. It comes to those who seek after and obey God.

But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him... (Psalm 103:17)

It is to those who seek after and obey God—and to those only—that his mercy comes.

If you have faith in God’s mercy, you will fulfill the conditions of obtaining it by forsaking all your sins and seeking God with all your heart, might, mind, and strength.

Outcomes of God’s mercy. God’s mercy provides forgiveness of your sins, reveals the path to improvement, and provides reasons to believe you are capable of attaining it.

Desiring God’s knowledge. It is wise to seek God’s knowledge.

All things in life are obtained through living according to the conditions God set for receiving them. Knowing what he knows will aid you in obtaining whatever it is you desire, making happiness more attainable.

No matter what you desire, the greatest outcome is to have eternal life. God’s knowledge is the key to eternal life.

Reasons for God’s knowledge. God knows all things.

God wants you to know all things.

He has provided the means to transmit his knowledge to you through this mortal life and the gospel of Jesus Christ, through which his spirit is available to you.

Acting according to God’s knowledge. Because God knows more than we do, and because everything he commands is for our benefit, sinning against his instruction is merely sinning against ourselves.

Outcomes of God’s knowledge. As long as we trust in our own knowledge, we will come miserably short of the knowledge and outcomes we have access to through God’s knowledge. When we fully trust God, he will lead us to outcomes that lie beyond the limits of our present knowledge. He will teach us more of what he knows, and he will guide us to more of the outcomes he enjoys.

Desiring God’s justice. The righteous seek for God’s justice, because it will result in their blessing.

Reasons for God’s justice. God is perfectly just.

Justice requires knowing right and wrong. It requires knowing the true value, cost, and benefit of all things. God is the only fair judge, because only he knows all things.

God will reward the righteous with the blessings they deserve and pay back the wicked with the punishments they deserve.

Acting according to God’s justice. Those who have faith in God’s justice will act as if justice will be immediately and fully paid. Even though they realize that God’s justice is sometimes delayed, they know that even when it is, he will make everything fair, including compensating for any delay in retribution.

Outcomes of God’s justice. One who has faith in God’s justice will obtain everything that God gives man, because it is through justice alone that these things can be obtained.

Desiring God’s love. God’s love is “the most desirable above all things.” (1 Nephi 11:22) God’s love “is the greatest of all the gifts of God.” (1 Nephi 15:36)

Reasons for God’s love. We have many reasons to believe in God’s love. The strongest evidence for God’s love is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

He doesn’t do anything that isn’t calculated for the benefit of the world.

He unfailingly prefers the happiness of his children over his own happiness. More accurately, he has chosen to define his own happiness in terms of the happiness of his children. We can therefore trust him in all things, knowing that whatever he asks of us or subjects us to is designed solely for our benefit. Because he also knows all things, we need not trust only in his motives: he not only desires for us to be benefited, but he also knows the best possible way for that to come to pass.

Acting according to God’s love. Faith in God’s love enables you to have total trust in him, joyfully submit to all trials, and do mighty works in his name.

Outcomes of God’s love. A person filled with the love of God will give anything and everything to help others obtain a greater knowledge of the love of God. It is through sacrificing themselves for the benefit of others that knowledge of the love of God is propagated through the world (see 1 Nephi 11).

We read.

Do you truly believe that God doeth nothing save it be for the benefit of man?

We read.

Do you truly believe that all things happen for the good of those who love God?

We read.

Do you truly believe that God knows everything, and that nothing happens except he already knew it would?

We read.

Do you truly believe that God overcame the world?

If you truly believe these things, you can, will, and do endure all things through your faith in Christ.

Faith in Christ converts the strongest yearning into powerful patience and the strongest pressures into unbreakable hope.

Living according to everything you believe will invariably lead to God revealing to you more about the good things you have not yet received that are far better than what you thought possible. This can be extremely painful, because you will desire those things so deeply that it will rob you of the joy you feel in present placeholders. Living according to everything you believe will invariably lead you to experiences that feel as if they will overwhelm you. When you are crushed by an indescribable weight that burns beyond all comprehension, faith in Christ strengthens you through the assurance that this is the precise path to outcomes that are not just improved, but so much better that they will make the present pain more than worth it.

When your heart yearns for what you know you can’t currently have, faith in Christ assures you that God is not just leading you on the exact path to this outcome, but rather to something even greater than what you presently comprehend.

God gives us what we need through what we want. What we need will lead us to far greater joy than what we presently want. He knows this, but we must trust him to come to see it ourselves.

Faith in the character of Christ is powerful because, in his mercy, the Lord came to this earth and suffered in ways we could see and understand so that we would have faith in those aspects of his character that we do not see and which lie above our present comprehension.

As we come to the Lord, placing in him all our desire and consistently acting according to how we sincerely believe he would in our place, we will feel as if it is more than we can bear. In response, he will show us the prints in his hands and say, “I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.” (Isaiah 49:16)

While we may not understand how the journey could possibly be worth it, the physical witness of God himself suffering and dying for us assures us it is by mercifully manifesting his promises in ways we can understand in spite of our woefully limited understanding of the eternal. There is nothing God will withhold from those who trust him enough to receive what they desire.

Chapter 15: Faith Determines How Much You Receive From God

The Lord and his servants pray that the Father’s will be done on earth and in heaven. Faith is the means that determines to what extent this actually happens. In order for reality to align more closely with the Father’s will, someone has to feel, think, and do what they would otherwise not do.

Although the Lord has power to work all miracles, he can’t do them in all circumstances. The manifestation of God’s power on earth is limited by the faith of men.

When he visited the Americas after his resurrection, Jesus indicated that the great faith of the people made it possible for him to show them things he could not show those in Jerusalem.

Faith is the means by which God’s will is achieved. With faith, actions are taken to transform what is to what could be. No good thing can be obtained or maintained except through faith: “...by faith all things are fulfilled.” (Ether 12:3)

Your faith determines the frequency and intensity of God’s work to, in, and through you.

Do you truly believe that “the gate of heaven is open unto all, even to those who will believe on the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God?” (Helaman 3:28)

Do you truly believe that the only limit to your experiences with God is your faith?

God has explained that he is happy to send to us everything we are willing to receive.

God will always give us everything we are willing to receive.

We are willing to receive what we are willing to desire, willing to understand, and willing to obtain. We are not willing to receive that which we are afraid of desiring, unwilling to learn sufficiently about, and unwilling to act in the necessary ways to obtain.

When it comes to what God is willing to give us, the water is already in the pipe, and there is more water than we can ever use. It will never run out. We control the flow of the water by turning on the faucet.

You control the flow of God’s blessings to you through the degree of faith you are willing to exercise. You control the flow of God’s blessings through what you are willing to desire, how well and how much you are willing to reason, and the set of actions you are willing to take.

Each of the components of faith are continuous attributes. How much desire do you have? How many reasons do you seek, acknowledge, and appreciate? How much are you willing to act given the reasons you have? How much knowledge have you accumulated?

The window of what we are willing to receive is comprised of what we are willing to desire, what degree of reasoning we are willing to apply and act according to, and how much we are willing to endure for how long to obtain what we seek.

The point of faith cycles is to persuade you to widen your window of receipt by becoming willing to suffer more, for longer, with less carnal support, with more thanksgiving, and with greater hope.

How much desire do you have? You can quantify desire in terms of what you are willing to sacrifice to obtain what you seek.

One story from the life of a missionary named Ammon illustrates how desire varies. When Ammon had defeated a king in battle, the king offered him half his kingdom to spare his life.

Later, when Ammon’s brother taught the king the gospel, the king offered to give away his entire kingdom to know God.

In offering everything he had, the king showed that his desire for Christ was greater than his fear of death.

There is no limit to how much desire you can have. It is possible to have so much desire that you can conquer any challenge possible in this life. In fact, to overcome all things and obtain eternal life, you must desire to seek and obey God more than anything else.

Jesus plainly taught that obtaining all he offers requires a fullness of desire.

For some reason, in spite of the plainness with which God has explained the totality required to obtain him, people consistently swap out something less than everything in their understanding of what it takes. One such person came to Jesus professing reconciliation to God and was surprised when Jesus pointed out what should have been obvious to him— that he was holding back a great deal from God.

If you can think of anything you wouldn’t want to go through if that were the price of obtaining what you desire, then your desire is limited. If your reasons and experiences revealed that the suffering you are unwilling to endure is in fact required to obtain what you say you desire, you will either have to increase your desire, or accept that you do not actually want what you say you want. Instead, what you really want is to avoid the suffering that has waylaid you. There will always be suffering beyond what you yet know, which is why there is no limit to the amount of desire you can have.

What are you holding back? Are you scared to desire the greatest things, because you think you can protect yourself from disappointment by doing so? A desire that is limited to only some things will never generate the actions needed to obtain all things.

Do you hold back obedience to some potential improvement you already know of? Those who limit what they will do for God limit what God can do for them.

Do not underestimate the power or potential of desire. If you open your eyes, you will see those around you with incredible desire. You may even know someone who exercises a fullness of desire. This degree of desire is within the potential of all people, but exceedingly few dare to exercise it. Most prefer to cower before the fear they have of daring to dream—of daring to believe that God truly is as good as we’ve been told by people who know him better.

Do you believe God can give you all things? The Lord said: “Whatsoever thing ye shall ask in faith, believing that ye shall receive in the name of Christ, ye shall receive it.” (Enos 1:15)

Those with great faith have great desire. They do not constrain their desires through unbelief. They dare to dream. They are happy to have God point out to them the limits of their present desires so that they can learn to desire better things.

If your eyes are open to seeing, you will eventually realize the limit of your desire, whatever that desire may be.

You can, through thought quickened by God, produce strong enough reasons to overcome any limit to desire, provided your desire is sufficiently aligned with God. The greatest suffering we know of is what Christ endured in condescending to earth and living as he did (see John 3:16).

He succeeded because he was willing to face the terrible truth that there was no other way to save mankind, and that no one else would do what he was willing to do (see Matthew 26:39).

Perhaps you don’t have any reasons for your desire. Perhaps it is an emotion, and you don’t know where it is from or on what it is based. You just know it is there. Your challenge in increasing that type of desire is still the same—you must develop and use your faculties of reason in order to discover why you desire this and potentially modify what you desire.

Always remember that desire is a sorted list. If you reach the limit in one desire, don’t overlook the fact that this means, by definition, you want something else more than the thing you are limited in your desire for. In other words, all of us already have infinite desire. The question is merely: in what is it placed?

The content and order of your list of desires isn’t likely to be immediately apparent to you because it is abnormal for most people to spend sufficient time introspecting or to have sufficient honesty to find it out.

The story of the rich young man who came to Jesus is a wonderful example of how, in seeking him, God will reveal the next thing on our list that we don’t realize separates us from him because we assign it a higher priority than we do him. To the best of his understanding, the young man had kept all of God’s commandments. He asked Jesus what else he lacked that kept him from eternal life.

By revealing more to the man about what a desire for God required in action, the man realized that he actually desired being rich more than he desired eternal life. While wealth is one potential desire, it is not the only one, and this story would be just as valid if it were about any other desire— the desire to be liked by others, the desire to be comfortable, the desire to have it easy, the desire to avoid loneliness, etc.

If you want to increase your desire, you’ll have to find out what is on your list and in what order, and you’ll have to decide whether or not to change the contents or order of that list. It is up to you.

It is critically important to desire the best things. If what you desire is less than the best thing you can imagine, you will never do what it takes to obtain all that is available. In fact, desiring even the best that you can imagine is not enough.

We are plainly told that what God has to offer lies beyond our wildest imagination of what is good.

In order to obtain all that he has, the limit of your actions must exceed what the greatest outcomes you can imagine would be worth. In order to obtain all God offers, you will have to achieve everything humans are capable of. This boundary lies far beyond what is worthwhile for the greatest outcomes you can imagine. This kind of faith requires complete trust in God.

If your faith were a set of monkey bars, you would get further by advancing to the next bar than you would by staying still, and further still by skipping bars as you continuously advance, but the greatest blessings of all are reserved for those who are willing to fling themselves towards the other side.

Paul said, “...he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6) Those who have not yet attained complete trust in God can never rise to receive all God desires to grant them, because doing so requires you to walk through afflictions so overwhelming that their purpose can’t be understood prior to overcoming them.

Reason is the ability to logically represent and analyze situations. It is the ability to correctly answer the question, “what benefits?” Reason can be quantified in terms of the degree of complexity of the situations you can correctly understand.

Wisdom is the process of applying reason. While it is difficult to overstate the cost of wisdom, it is equally difficult to overstate the benefit of having it. Wisdom is a gift that will pay unlimited dividends; it will flow benefits in every situation.

You can quantify reason by what outcomes you can successfully predict and to what degree of accuracy. One who has great wisdom will know paths of great value, and will correctly predict things that no one else sees coming. The greater the wisdom, the more routinely this will occur. Because of this ability, people with great powers of reasoning tend to be successful in the worldly sense, because they see opportunities and ways to leverage them that others do not.

Most people can successfully reason through simple situations. As the situations become more complex, the number of people who have sufficient reason to correctly understand the situation quickly diminishes. Factors that limit wisdom include limits in IQ and the ability to overcome natural human bias. In both cases, one’s limits will inhibit their ability to see things as they really are. Unfortunately, in both cases, the limits of awareness include awareness of those limits. In other words, those hamstrung with a lower IQ or an ignorance of their biases do not understand the limits that come with it. They neither see their own limits, nor what would be possible without them.

As with all good things, God grants some measure of wisdom to certain people as a gift (that is, by nature). However, like all gifts from God, it is not just present in those who have received it in the form of a gift. It can also be cultivated.

God will give wisdom amply to those who seek it. No matter how much wisdom you find yourself with, God provides a path for you to acquire and apply more reason. There is no limit to how much reason you can have. It is possible to have so much reason that you can conquer any challenge possible in this life. In fact, to overcome all things and obtain eternal life, you must have sufficient reasons to seek and obey God at all hazards.

God has said in plainness that all good things are available to all people: “And Christ hath said: If ye will have faith in me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient in me.” (Moroni 7:33) Some people actually believe this.

These people manage to live incredible lives, finding great joy and satisfaction in envisioning, desiring, working towards, and obtaining the good things God has prepared for those who love him.

Unfortunately, instead of thinking conscientiously about what they really want, why they really want it, and how to get it, most people live their lives as if what they receive has nothing to do with what they feel, think, and do.

Everything from God comes commensurate with how diligent you are willing to be in seeking it and how humble you are in responding to what you learn.

Faith is what determines both how much effort you are willing to exert in seeking God and how obedient you are willing to be to God. Limits in effort will result in limits in learning. Limits in humility will prevent learning more about who you really are, who God really is, how reality really is, and how other people are. Lack of humility will prevent you from seeing the areas you can improve in yourself, and will therefore cut you off from making the changes that stand in the way of your obtaining what you seek.

God said that anyone who seeks him will be shown how to obtain what they seek.

What does asking, seeking, and knocking look like? It means you actively search for the path to obtain what you seek, you honestly and consistently do what lies on the path and abstain from what takes you off of it or slows your progress on it, and you update your understanding of the path as you learn more about it through time and experience.

We limit what God can give us through our reasoning: what we are willing to consider, what effort of reasoning we are willing to apply, what powers of reasoning we are willing to develop, and how audacious we are willing to be in adhering to what reason suggests. What are you willing to question? How far are you willing to go in asking questions and seeking answers? How much effort are you willing to spend developing the ability to reason? How strong are you in turning away from conventional wisdom when you have strong reasons to? Are you willing to act according toreason even if it brings the ridicule, persecution, and even violence of others?

Those with great faith have great powers of reason. They are able to see the true relationship of cause and effect to a greater degree than most because they exercise more effort in learning how to reason and in reasoning about life. They do not allow their emotions to direct their paths, but do all things with reason. They are happy to have God point out to them the limits of their present understanding so that they can gain wisdom.

The way to increase in reason is to find and apply all you can.

Wisdom can be sought directly from God and through the example of those who have more than you do.

Do you believe that God can show you all things? God told the brother of Jared that “if he would believe in him that he could show unto him all things—it should be shown unto him; [and] he knew that the Lord could show him all things.” (Ether 3:26) The Lord has said that when we exercise the same degree of faith, he will show us everything.

If you have faith in Christ, and you believe what he has said, you will desire and work harder to receive wisdom than those who do not have that faith.

As God quickens your understanding, you should pay attention to things, questioning how things work and what their effects are.

You should seek those who have more wisdom than you, and study what they teach: “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise...” (Proverbs 13:20) You should consider what they say and do, ask why, and apply what you learn to yourself.

Reason is given in accordance with the degree of effort and obedience exercised. If you invest sufficient effort to search out what is right and are then obedient to what you find, you will overtake the wise people you know. If you do not exercise greater effort and obedience than they do, you will remain less wise than they are.

Two people can be oriented towards the same goal, yet receive different outcomes if they act differently. For example, many people in the Book of Mormon desired that the Lamanites would come to know and love God. Nephi, his brother Jacob, and Jacob’s son, Enos, all desired this outcome, and took many actions to secure it, but they each failed to obtain it. Enos’ reflections were typical of the three. He made many excuses for why they were unsuccessful.

The truth is less flattering. Many years later, Ammon and his brethren, having the same goal, were successful where others before them had failed. Ammon and his brethren worked against the same exact challenges their predecessors faced. Ammon and his brethren were willing to sacrifice far more than Jacob and Enos. Every action Ammon and his brothers took lay beyond what their predecessors had considered possible. Ammon and his brothers gave up the kingdom they were heirs to, moved into Lamanite territory, and offered themselves up as prisoners and slaves to the Lamanites until God’s justice afforded them the opportunity to preach to the Lamanites and convert them through the visible miracles that they could have obtained in no other way.

Action can be quantified by production, which is the confluence of magnitude of effort and accuracy of approach. Effort and accuracy of action could be called “intentionality.” Focusing on just one aspect of intentionality is insufficient, as discussed in the chapter on action.

Intentionality is the measure of how aligned your actions, desires, and reasons are. Intentionality is reconciliation to one’s beliefs. It is coherence. There is tremendous power and peace in coherence, which comes from the constant assurance that you are on the right path, doing the right things for the right reasons, no matter what the rest of the world says or does or thinks, so far as you know. It is the key to accomplishing amazing things while being totally free from anxiety, depression, and guilt.

Intentionality is the degree to which you reconcile your desires to your actions. Intentionality means you don’t just occasionally consider what it is you want. You hunger and thirst after it (see Matthew 5:6). You take the time to honestly assess what you want, prioritize the list, write it down, and actually act accordingly, all the time, until you explicitly decide to make a change. It means not lying to yourself in the moment by excusing deviations from what it is you say you want because it is easy, convenient, or comfortable to do so.

Intentionality is the degree to which you apply your capabilities of reason to your actions. Intentionality means you explicitly formulate and analyze the results of your actions. It means you act intentionally. It also means you don’t act unintentionally. You abstain from those things that detract in any way from what it is you want, why it is you want it, and how it is you think you’ll get it. If your intent is to lose weight, you won’t just act to work towards your desired outcome in the form of exercise. You will also avoid acting in ways that detract from it, such as drinking lots of alcohol or eating too much or the wrong types of food.

One who does precisely what they have a good reason to do, and does nothing they have a good reason not to do, could be called an intentional, authentic, honest, upright person. These types of people will do things that other people are unwilling to do because they are willing to submit to reason instead of being swayed by the desire to be comfortable, or popular, or ignorant. The greatest blessings are reserved for those who react to the earliest, weakest signal suggesting something better. God holds back everything he can for as long as he can in order to favor the righteous, who will obtain what can only be obtained by those who react early and completely to the weak signal.

Intentional people will also abstain from things that other people readily do. They won’t do things just because other people are doing them. They won’t act contrary to their principles, even if everyone else does.

If you want to increase your action, you must gain more information and submit more fully to it.

The Lord knows that all things are received according to the law of cause and effect. He knows the causes for every outcome.

Having created all things, the Lord knows exactly how we can obtain whatever we seek.

Action begets action. You increase action through acting according to what is available—both in seeking more information and changing or adding actions to bring yourself into accordance with what you learn.

Quantifying our desires, reasons, and actions makes room for God to show us where adjustments need to be made in our application of faith. Because there is always more God desires to give us, receiving more requires us to humbly and continually acknowledge and change what currently prevents us from obtaining everything he desires us to receive. He will show us the insufficiency of the actions, reasons, and desires we previously believed sufficient to obtain those things. He will do this by showing to us previously unconsidered actions and obstacles that require more from us than we supposed. This revelation that what we seek will require more or different desire, reason, or action than we thought is called correction.

We ought to love and seek correction.

If you truly believe that God works according to laws of cause and effect, how can you do anything but rejoice when he reveals to you a more accurate path to what you seek?

The belief that God operates according to the laws of cause and effect, coupled with the idea that he loves us and desires for us what will bring us the most happiness and joy, should motivate us to continuously appeal to him for guidance and correction in receiving all he has to give.

Chapter 16: Without Faith, You Cannot Please God

God knows all things.

Included in his knowledge is our entire range of potential experience.

While we do not comprehend the joy he feels, because it far exceeds anything we have either experienced or imagined, he completely understands our present and potential joy.

The greatest joy we can experience is the joy that he feels.

Everything he does is calculated to take us as far towards his joy as possible.

God can only experience a fullness of joy if his children partake of the same. This world and everything in it was created to give us an opportunity to obtain more joy: “...men are, that they might have joy.” (2 Nephi 2:25) Because how he feels is a result of who he is, God can’t give his glory—his joy or light or love or truth or happiness—to others.

The way God enables others to share his glory is through giving them commandments, showing them how he is, and giving them the opportunity, through faith, to imitate him.

The pattern of receiving approval through the persistent and iterative application of faith is present in all of God’s creations, not just humans. In the creation, God iteratively instructed each aspect of the physical world we know, approving of it once it had reached its potential through faith in him.

Through iteratively obtaining and following God’s instructions, everything finds favor in his sight.

It was Enoch’s consistent and persistent seeking and obeying of God that resulted in his approval by God.

Melchizedek also followed this pattern (see Genesis 14, JST, previously quoted).

We obtain that joy to the extent that we are willing to desire, reason about, and do what leads to it. We will not be forced into greater joy than is justified by the desires, reasons, and actions we choose.

The faithful advance through proximate improvement opportunities that lie directly within their understanding. The faithful resist the temptation to “look beyond the mark” by evading the obvious improvements before them in order to feign interest in more advanced changes—changes which will never come while already-obvious opportunities for improvement are ignored.

Most believe God is an arbitrary deity whose favor is fickle. The Lord has made clear that only those who seek him, better learn from him how things really are, and live according to what they learn will obtain improved outcomes, and that those outcomes will only be obtained to the extent this is done. The only way to obtain God’s approval is through the persistent and progressive exercise of faith: “For by [faith] the elders obtained a good report.” (Hebrews 11:2) This “good report” comes iteratively, piece by piece, layer by layer.

Because faith is the means by which God makes you more like he is, you can’t please him without faith.

God can only be pleased inasmuch as we become like him because he has chosen to make his joy a result of our joy, and we obtain joy only inasmuch as we obtain and follow the instructions he provides to that end.

Chapter 17: Enduring All Things Through Faith in Christ

The wicked are harmed by the consequences of the paths they choose. God’s commandments lead a person in the most direct path possible to what they desire. Only in complete obedience to God can a person be assured that any suffering they encounter is absolutely necessary to obtain what they seek and precisely calculated for their greatest benefit.

God is graceful in consistently providing us evidence of the benefit or harm of the paths we take. Through faith, the Lord teaches all those who seek him how to obtain what they seek, and how to avoid all unnecessary suffering along the way. The righteous are not disappointed in their hopes, and they obtain everything they seek and more through God’s love, knowledge, and justice.

God has given us the gift of choice, and we can choose to notice the ample evidence of good and evil all around us, or we can choose to ignore or act contrary to that evidence. Those who persist in harmful desires, flawed reasons, dishonest reasons, or unwise actions will fail to obtain the outcomes they seek. Instead, they will encounter increasing portions of the consequences of their suboptimal paths, whether in the lack of what they seek or the violent removal of what they thought they already had.

Although God delays the full weight of the consequences of both beneficial and harmful paths to enable faith and repentance, the consequences of life’s choices are always eventually revealed, whether gradually or suddenly. While a surprising number of people have an astonishing capacity to hide from the truth in life, whether here or hereafter, every person will come to an inescapable realization of things as they really are. The righteous will thrive in a constant joy fueled by a knowledge of the trust in and love of God they exercised in life, as well as a full view of the benefit others received from their sacrifice on their behalf. The wicked will be constantly tormented by the revelation of the harm they have caused, the evidence of the greater good they could have done, and the comprehension of what they could have had if they hadn’t rejected abundant opportunities.

The revelation of the truth causes pain to the wicked because it causes them to experience the loss of what they thought they had—either by its removal or the revelation that what they have is less than they thought. In contrast, the truth causes rejoicing in the righteous, either because it delivers to them the fruit of their faith, or if not, still shows them a better path to obtaining what they seek.

Those who choose paths that lead to unnecessary suffering will unavoidably experience the sorrow of the wicked. The outcomes they obtain will differ from what they expected.

Harmful desires cause unnecessary suffering. Paths that deviate from things as they really are will always result in misery, not happiness.

Flawed reasoning causes unnecessary suffering. Flawed reasoning can be sincere, but its incorrectness or incompleteness will make it just as ineffective as willful rebellion from truth. Those who follow inadequate reasoning will find themselves surprised by the outcomes they obtain, which will differ from what they desired. They will be disappointed by not receiving what they thought they would, and pained by what they receive instead.

Dishonest reasoning causes unnecessary suffering. Those who deceive themselves turn away from the suggestions of honest reason, preferring the sweet lie that they can somehow break the relationship between cause and effect, obtaining a different outcome than that of anyone else who did the same thing they plan to do. Those who lie to themselves achieve nothing except the temporary denial of reality, and even this fleeting pleasure comes at the cost of the future debt of disillusionment, where the pain of violent reconciliation to reality and the undeniable knowledge that you lied to yourself are suffered in addition to the consequences of walking a suboptimal path. Additionally, for dishonest people to remain in their delusion requires them to flee from or push away any situation or person that sheds light on things as they really are. Unfortunately, people in this situation fail to realize that their situation is far from unique. It’s an extremely common reaction pattern known from the foundation of the world.

The sorrow of the wicked comes from obtaining the consequences appointed for the desires and actions they choose—consequences which are dictated by the immutable law of cause and effect declared by God before the foundation of the world, and which differ from what the recipient wishes were true.

God never said that the righteous would not suffer. In fact, he said quite the opposite. The Lord said that those who love him will suffer greatly: “we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.” (Acts 14:22) He said that the servant is not above the master, and that we should not be surprised when the world treats us the same way it treated him.

Suffering increases with righteousness. Paul described the suffering of those who were so righteous the world “was not worthy” of them.

The more righteous a person, the more the wicked will hate and persecute them, and the greater their suffering will be. Similarly, the more righteous a person, the more willing they will be to suffer greater things for the benefit of others.

While the righteous suffer greatly, they do not suffer in the same ways as the wicked. They enter into suffering because they are willing to do what is right, while the wicked suffer because they are unwilling to do what is right. Consequently, the righteous are both spared from all unnecessary suffering and they are given all strength and power through faith in Christ to overcome all suffering.

The righteous will avoid all unnecessary suffering through keeping God’s commandments. In faith, God also provides the righteous with the greatest support possible to enable them to endure suffering which cannot be avoided in their journey towards the knowledge God possesses.

Having afflictions “swallowed up” does not mean they don’t exist. It doesn’t mean they don’t cause extreme pain. As evidence of this point, consider that the same phrase is used to describe how resurrection saves the faithful from the finality of death.

Many righteous people have and will die. Yet, faith in the mission, character, and teachings of Christ change a faithful person’s experience in death. Those who die with faith in Christ do not experience the bitterness felt by those who do not have faith.

The sting of death is “swallowed up” by their understanding of how their experience—no matter how painful—is for their benefit.

“Swallowed up in Christ” means that faith in Christ can provide a counterbalance to the pain. It means that, through Christ, the afflictions can be made worthwhile.

Only the righteous will possess the requisite purpose to find joy in the midst of the greatest of suffering.

Unlike that of the wicked, whose suffering will continue until they learn from it, the suffering of the righteous ends when justice is meted out by God: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.” (Psalm 34:19)

The exercise of faith actually contributes to the joy one obtains after walking the path of godly suffering, as the retrospective awareness that you pushed forward based only on faith provides you with joyful satisfaction in what you have obtained. It is the confidence that you remained fully faithful to God at all hazards that gives you the “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus.” (Hebrews 10:19) It is your willingness to suffer—"to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon [you], even as a child doth submit to his father” (Mosiah 3:19)—that gives you “a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men.” (Acts 24:16) Your willingness to endure all necessary suffering through faith in Christ gives you “boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.” (Ephesians 3:12) Through following the example of Christ “at all times and in all things, and in all places” (Mosiah 18:9)—through any suffering that might require, even if it requires your life—you will “have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world.” (1 John 4:17)

God has many things prepared for the righteous that exceed the comprehension of all who have not yet received them. As you are faithful to God in all times and places, he will reveal to you the good things that await the righteous. Through faith, you can accept the preview of what you otherwise would not bear to know exists, while not yet having it. You will then do and endure all things necessary to obtain what God has given you the idea of.

The burden of knowing of these things without having them, which is a necessary prerequisite to obtaining them, is immense. We can find peace in remembering the example of Jesus Christ, who experienced this burden to a greater extent than any can in this life.

Jesus experienced the greatest loss possible on this earth, leaving his glorified, immortal life in the presence of the Father to be born as a man on earth.

Though none of us came from as exalted a station as the Lord, many here did willingly sacrifice some degree of glory by coming to this earth. Many have some degree of God’s goodness revealed to them in this life, and have to remain here with less than what they now know is possible. This was the experience of Alma, who saw in vision God’s throne and felt his love. He said.

Everyone who obtains eternal life will first know the pain of knowing something about the glory of God on his throne, longing to be there, and knowing that they must instead remain here to do the things that God has appointed them to do.

Some take the initiative to willingly abdicate other things in their lives for the benefit of others. For example, some willingly leave the presence of good people so that they can help those who are not yet good. Enoch left his righteous family in order to minister to the rest of humanity. Nephi, the son of Helaman, ranged through the entire land preaching to the hard-hearted people. Samuel the Lamanite left his people to preach to iniquitous Nephites. And so on.

Consider, in detail, just one such example—that of the sons of Mosiah, who abdicated their thrones to dwell among the hate-filled and idolatrous Lamanites.

The willing abdication of what one qualifies for in order to bless others is something known to many, not just those who have had supernatural experiences. Anyone who has given hard-earned money to those who could not pay them back, or to those who were not willing to pay the price to obtain it themselves, or to those who could not even appreciate the cost of what was given, has experienced this. Those who learn what these experiences are designed to teach and put those lessons into action will invariably be given experiences of greater magnitude until they find themselves being tutored in the glory of God. Unfortunately, most people run as fast and as far as they can from the initial experiences.

The righteous suffer in order to bring about greater joy in themselves and others. By subjecting the faithful to unmerited suffering, God makes a way—through justice—to exalt them and to bless others through them.

God often subjects the righteous to unmerited suffering in order for them to merit even greater future blessings.

When God blesses you with unmerited suffering, he gives you the opportunity to amass treasures in heaven through your abdication of what you deserve, in faith preferring what is hereafter over what could be had here and now.

Through your “not accepting deliverance” you qualify for “a better resurrection” (see Hebrews 11:35). When you prove faithful in affliction, God can work through your faith to bless you with what justice requires.

Though willful unmerited suffering is the key to obtaining the greatest outcomes for yourself, more importantly, it is also the only way for you to obtain the greatest outcomes for others.

Through unmerited suffering, you will invariably obtain the eventual positive payout of God’s justice, and in so doing, gain the ability to testify of the goodness of God beyond what others who have not suffered what you have can say.

During and after your trials, you can transfer to others the deferred blessings God has promised you. You gain the power to ask God to transfer your blessings to others. The scriptures are full of examples of this, from Moses imploring God to spare Israel for his sake, to David staying the plague God sent by standing in the midst of the people, to Noah saving his wife and sons from the flood.

Another source of suffering for the faithful is found in increased perception of the evil in the human heart. The suffering of the faithful consists largely in suffering from a greater awareness of the depth and breadth of evil that exists in this world while enduring the lack of an equally enhanced awareness of good. Their awareness of the wickedness of the hearts of men causes them to suffer in their desires to free people from the grip of sin.

It was said of Jesus that.

How did he know? From constant, repeated experience. As a young child, he naively assumed that all people were like him, or even better than he was. He was continuously disappointed in his projection of his inherent goodness onto others, who bitterly disappointed and betrayed him over and over again throughout his whole life.

Those who will be disciples of Christ will experience the same to the degree they love him and follow his example in all things. Some prophets have written of their discovery of human nature.

The righteous must endure great persecution. They are attacked because of the light that is in them, and many of those who harm them do not realize what they are doing or why.

Those who follow Jesus will feel the pain of others wasting what they have paid the price to bring them. Those who have sacrificed the most to obtain and give away the most will feel the most pain in seeing what they offer underappreciated, resisted, or rejected.

The righteous suffer “with great anxiety even unto pain” for the welfare of those who choose wickedness and their victims (see Alma 13:27). The limited benefit and great cost of things sought after in the world are continuously before those who have sought after and found God, causing great sorrow. Still, what hurts more is the knowledge that they possess the key of deliverance from chains, yet the enslaved will not take it.

Joy comes from value. Value comes from suffering. Because God desires for each of us to obtain as much joy as we are willing to receive, we are required to suffer, but this suffering is very different than the suffering of the wicked. Joy is preceded by the suffering required to obtain and live according to the knowledge and character of God.

Faith is central to the mechanism for obtaining greater joy in at least two ways. First, faith helps a person walk into a path of greater suffering in order to obtain greater joy. Joy comes from learning and living according to beliefs that produce it. However, the greater the joy, the less obvious the way, because discovering and walking paths that lead to greater joy causes greater suffering. Only faith will prove sufficient to help you endure what must be endured to encounter the joy that lies on the other side of the willful suffering that permeates the life of the righteous. Only faith will enable you to do what is required for you to encounter the greatest joy. Through faith, you will do harder things, endure longer paths, and suffer more than you would without faith.

As you subject yourself to affliction through your faith in Christ, you will enable God to lead you to greater outcomes and to teach you what you can understand in no other way.

A person can’t be saved in ignorance. “It is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance.” (D&C 131:6) Rather, as one becomes a disciple of Christ, their life transforms into a school where God teaches them, little by little, more about how he is and about how the world is.

As you develop and retain complete trust in God and exercise complete obedience to him, he will teach you what you need to know to be capable of experiencing complete and continuous happiness in spite of the depth and breadth of suffering in this world.

In so doing, he will prepare you to continue to be this way forever after this life, when all people will be eternally exposed to things as they really are—a degree of knowledge containing far more pain and sorrow than the uninitiated can endure in this life (see D&C 19:1-22).

Power is required to endure that level of pain and suffering. Faith, hope, and charity are tied together as corequisites to enduring in acting according to your understanding of God’s character as he continuously reveals more of himself and more about reality to you.

Enduring all things here causes you to gain the unspeakable power of God that can be felt, but not spoken, by those who can sense the burdens you have carried, even if they can’t see them.

Endurance can only come through faith and it is through faith that a person endures what is required to learn about and become like God. Through repeatedly receiving more information about God from others, evaluating what they’ve heard through reason, and implementing the elements that have support, a person will gain more and more knowledge of and trust in God and will acquire his character and attributes.

Chapter 18: Hope Through Faith in Christ

Hope through faith is much more than an ephemeral wish that someday things will be better. Faith is not wishing. It is much more than a baseless desire. It is the result of reasoning. Hope through faith is not just about what you hope will happen, but why you expect it will. The stronger your reasons, the stronger your hope.

The journey of faith will take a person far afield of normal life. In just a short time of seeking, they will find far more in outcomes than is common to those around them. It is as this point that hope becomes a critical piece of enduring the journey of faith.

The faithful will frequently find the Lord showing them that what they thought was good is less so than they expected. He will show you the limits of things, situations, and people so that you gain the incentive to search for the worthy fulfillment of your desires.

Hope carries us through times of perceived loss. Hope will carry us when, in our journey to learn more and more truth, God reveals to us the limits of what we thought was desirable.

What God offers the faithful far exceeds what we begin the journey of faith in search of. No desire borne of the carnal mind can compete with the great things that God has prepared for those that love him. Through faith, you will accept that you don’t have what you thought you had—a realization which must precede a willingness to do what is still undone to obtain the real thing.

Through faith, you will continuously let go of what you thought you knew in preference for what you can’t learn until you’ve done so.

If we intend to continue the journey of faith beyond where those of a carnal mind would stop short—beyond satisfaction with far less than all that God offers—we must attain and practice the attribute of hope.

It is through hope that a person finds reason to believe in the great things God has prepared for those that love him.

Because these things exist beyond the limits of one’s present awareness and imagination, one must lean on their trust that God honors his promises, even if he does so in ways we can’t understand. This kind of trust is like a massive, unseen weight on one side of the scale. Heavy enough to counterbalance anything found in your life, this kind of hope becomes an anchor to you, mooring you against any temptation and any temptation to give up or stop short of your very best, no matter how hard it becomes.

Faithful hope helps us continue to act on what we know right now, even when we don’t know what comes next in our journey to what we seek. This was the faith that empowered Abraham to leave his homeland without having a full knowledge of where he would go.

This was the same faith held by Nephi and his family, who also left their homeland without a full knowledge of where they were headed. Nephi practiced this kind of faith at both macro and micro scales. When he went to fulfill God’s commandment to obtain a copy of scriptures from their custodian, he said he was “led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.” (1 Nephi 4:6)

Hopeful faith “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) because it enables action and endurance beyond what would be otherwise possible. It helps us maintain belief, desire, and actions through providing reasons, in spite of those reasons being based on ideas (the word of God) and not our present experience.

It was this faith that enabled Abraham to maintain his belief that God would give him a child of promise in spite of his age, his wife’s age, and the utter failure of the over 300 people in his household to obtain the same promises from God that he had.

Hopeful faith will make future things seem as valuable and sure as they would be if they were in your present experience.

Hopeful faith helps you to prefer what is more valuable—though it has not yet happened—over what is already present, but less valuable.

This sort of faith manifests in diverse ways. It was this faith that caused Jacob to bless both of his grandsons, and even to worship God, in spite of being so old and weak that he could not stand on his own.

It was this faith that caused Joseph to make his children promise to carry his bones back to Israel as he was dying.

As Joseph experienced, true trust in God means that you continuously act in full assurance of the fulfillment of God’s promises, no matter how far off or unlikely they may seem. This was Abraham’s faith when he was willing to take Isaac’s life due to the perceived infallibility of God’s promise to provide as-yet unborn righteous descendants through him.

The Lord frequently tests our faith through tests and trials.

Like everything God does, these are for your benefit.

The Lord’s tests of faith are not arbitrary. They are absolutely essential stepping stones to bring us to the desired end, when we have full and consistent trust in God. Their purpose is to reveal to you the limit of your trust in him, so that you can use this life to make the changes necessary to trust in him fully. He will continuously try you until you are “willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon [you], even as a child doth submit to his father.” (Mosiah 3:19)

While anything in life would detract from your trust in God, you can be assured that you are not prepared to be in the presence of God. God is perfect, and his presence brings with it an excruciating knowledge of your imperfection. Dwelling in the presence of God without perfect trust in him is a much more harrowing experience than anything in this life. The only way to have peace and joy in God’s presence is if you truly and absolutely trust him. When you truly and absolutely trust him, you will repent of all of your sins by ceasing to commit them, and you will believe Jesus when he says he will forgive anyone who does so.

Once you develop perfect faith in Christ, trials will still occur, but they will be very different. Because you are limitlessly willing to endure all things he sends, he will be able to free you from afflictions very quickly because of your humility and because of the law of justice.

There is purpose in every trial: to teach you what you don’t know, to show you what you don’t see, to help you appreciate what you don’t value, and to accrue the justice of God. In the event that an unavoidable trial endures in length or intensity, you can have perfect assurance that the outcome the Lord is working through it is great, indeed.

If a person travels in this path with steadfast effort, before long they will find themselves confronted with afflictions that surpass their natural coping ability.

If you want to increase in your trust in God, you should pay attention to the way God has always supported you and others in all trials, according to their faith.

As you are willing to trust God in the things presently before you, you will accrue confidence in him that will enable you to endure much greater afflictions in his name.

Nephi provides a wonderful example of hope. Having gone through many previous afflictions, Nephi found himself without complaint against God in the midst of an onerous situation.

Nephi was tied up for four days by his brothers—who he had helped unceasingly despite their constant abuse—on a ship that he had built himself, with little help from them, in the midst of a storm that he had the ability to end. What an example of trust in God to endure such a situation without complaining!

Paul said: “...he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6) It is essential to trust God, and to know that everything he does is for your benefit, even when (and perhaps especially when) you can’t see how that could be, and even when you feel as if you can’t take any more. To all those feeling this strain, the Lord says.

Faith gives you the ability to denominate your well-being in terms that involve more than the here and now. Powerfully, the worse things seem in the moment, the more reason a faithful person has to hope. Because of the justice of God, misfortune becomes akin to compressing a spring: the more difficult the affliction, the stronger the eventual positive response is guaranteed to be. It is for this reason that those with faith in Jesus Christ hope for better things. It is through this hope that one with faith in Jesus Christ endures all things, and stands in the stream of teaching and experiences that God must necessarily lead them through to be prepared for eternal life.

Chapter 19: Charity Through Faith in Christ

Scriptural discussions of faith often include the topic of charity. For example.

Charity means caring for others more than you care for yourself.

While the efficacy of your charity depends on the breadth and depth of your knowledge of reality, whether you are motivated or not by the welfare of others is a yes or no question. Charity is a quality that is binary: you either have it or you don’t. You either care about other people more than yourself, or you don’t. You can’t be partially interested in the benefit of others. If you only care about others when it is convenient for you to do so, you still care more about yourself than you do others.

God is charitable. He is solely motivated by the welfare of others.

Charity is required both to become like the Lord and also to see him how he really is.

If you are not charitable, you are not yet like him.

You can’t receive what he has without being like he is.

Unless you, too, are solely motivated by the welfare of others, you will never experience and learn what you need to become like he is.

While many outcomes are available through faith alone, the best are not reachable through self-centered motives.

Faith alone will take you to and through what, in light of God’s justice, you must endure for your own benefit. However, faith alone can’t motivate you to seek and endure the experiences and lessons that are for the benefit of others.

When the Lord was suffering the burden of the sins of the world in the garden of Gethsemane, he said.

He wanted his suffering to be taken away from him, but he knew that the only way he could redeem mankind was to embrace the fullness of his mission until it was complete. Charity enticed him to do what faith alone would not do. His concern for others was greater than his concern for himself.

You do not have to atone for the sins of mankind in order to find the limits of faith without charity. In things big and small, only charity will motivate you to act, think, and feel as God would in your place.

In the passage from 1 Corinthians 13 quoted above, Paul described the limits of faith without charity. If you pay attention, you will see situations each day where the lack of charity will keep you from doing the right thing. Your carnal appetites will present you with endless situations where the lack of charity will cause you to put your own welfare before that of others. These little things are in fact only the small end of much bigger things. One who can’t put others first in little things will not put others first in big things.

The big things seem less common, but their consequences are so immense that choosing improperly has eternal impact.

The sacrifice of Ammon and his brothers was motivated by charity. He said he desired “to dwell among [the Lamanites] for a time; yea, and perhaps until the day I die.” (Alma 17:23) These were no idle words. Ammon and his brothers faced the mocking of their countrymen, the likelihood of suffering, and even death, at the hands of the iniquitous and dangerously violent tendencies of the Lamanites, as well as actual starvation, imprisonment, and beating at their hands.

Ammon and his brothers would never have endeavored such a mission without caring more about the Lamanites than they cared for themselves. Their sacrifice was consummate, and nothing less would have worked. This assertion is not theoretical—others tried to minister to the Lamanites without charity and failed. These men—Jacob, his son, Enos, and many others—failed in their significant efforts to preach to the Lamanites, in spite of the fact that they had “unshaken” faith.

Your faith without charity can do mighty miracles, but you will always eventually encounter situations where it is insufficient.

Charity is required to attain a fullness of faith because only charity can motivate the actions required to receive a fullness of joy. The most valuable outcomes can only be reached through charitable faith.

Charity isn’t optional. Charity is required to enter the kingdom of heaven, because without it, you will not be able to remain there, as you will encounter situations where your faith is insufficient to continue to be who you need to be to comfortably dwell in the presence of God: “And except ye have charity ye can in nowise be saved in the kingdom of God;” (Moroni 10:21)

When the writers of the scriptures speak of gaining charity, they speak of praying for it.

It is through gaining a greater understanding of Christ’s love for you that you will gain that same love for others. When you pray for charity, you are praying to better understand the love of Christ for you.

In order to understand God’s love for you, you must understand more than you presently do about God’s greatness, God’s suffering, and your contributions to God’s suffering. While learning these things causes great joy in God’s goodness, it causes immense pain to learn of your wickedness.

The experience of Alma provides a wonderful example of the pain that comes with the revelation of one’s wickedness, as well as the joy that comes with the revelation of more of God’s goodness, as well as the invariable desire for the welfare of others that comes with it.

This experience is not unique to Alma. All believers who have come to comprehend their past sins and God’s love for them come away with a love of all mankind. Consider Enos’ experience.

Enos prayed first for his own soul; second for his countrymen; third for his mortal enemies. He had developed a love for all mankind.

Ammon and his brothers learned of God’s love in the same way.

Ammon realized that only those who had come to a knowledge of their sins could come to see the love of God the way a sinner does.

Previously, the example of Enos was given to illustrate how he gained charity through God forgiving him of his sins. While Enos loved the Lamanites, he did not love them more than he loved himself. Enos would have expressed greater love by giving up his normal life and risking everything to go among the Lamanites on the outside chance some of them might listen, as Ammon and his brethren did. Love only becomes charity when it is unconditional, meaning that there are no limits placed on the amount of suffering of the individual compared to the benefit it will render to others. Non-charitable love is willing to sacrifice something on the altar. Whether the sacrifice be a dove or a bull, little or great, it is still limited to the convenience of the giver. Unconditional love has no limits. Everything is in play. A charitable person will not only sacrifice everything they have. Having sacrificed everything they have, they will also climb onto the altar and give themselves if it will benefit someone else.

It was this type of love that Jesus said was the greatest.

The Greek version of this verse conveys much more than the various English translations. It would be more correct to word this verse as.

In order to pre-empt opposition to the use of “all mankind” in place of “his friends,” note that Jesus taught that a man’s neighbors included all people within a person’s potential influence (see Luke 10:25-42), and that you should love not just those that have the potential to benefit you, but more especially those who “hate” and “despitefully use you”—commonly known as “your enemies” (see Matthew 5:44).

Love is denominated in how much you are willing to suffer for the benefit of others. In this world, the greatest love you can show is to give everything that can be given in this life for the benefit of another. It is this sacrifice that Jesus made, not only terminating his life for our benefit, but living every day of his life previous to that event in perfect obedience to the Father.

It is this consummate love that Jesus commands us to have for others.

Jesus proved with his life that it is possible for a person to have this kind of love for all others, including their most bitter enemies.

His true servants have followed his example, and you can, too.

The entrance requirement to heaven is charity. To dwell in the fullness of God’s presence, one must also make their love unconditional, their sacrifice for others total and unrestrained.

When you come to perceive the love God has for you, it generates love in you for others. John wrote succinctly that our love of God comes because of our awareness of his love for us: “We love him, because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) It is this love that causes us to increase in our love for others.

Like love, faith is contagious. The more faith you exercise, the easier you will make it for others to do the same.

You can help give other people desire by helping them imagine outcomes that never before would have crossed their minds.

You can help other people reason through situations beyond their possession of wisdom.

You can help other people act in ways they didn’t think possible.

You can help other people identify outcomes that they obtained through faith beyond what they would have otherwise recognized.

None of these things need take a lifetime of work to accomplish, though you would be hard-pressed to spend your life in a better way. It is amazing to see just how great of changes you can help bring to pass in the lives of others by taking advantage of passing opportunities for a kind word, a helpful suggestion, or sharing enabling resources.

People need your example in order to know what improvement is possible in life, and, through your example, to have a reason to believe it is possible. Through your faith, you can “lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees.” (Hebrews 12:12)

The people within your reach need you to “teach them to never be weary of good works, but to be meek and lowly in heart....” (Alma 37:34)

Help other people see things as they are really are, then help them see how they could be. This will not be pleasant to any but the meekest of individuals, but it will yield joy for all who listen.

Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. (Hebrews 12:11)

For every person you encounter, ask yourself, “what is the best possible outcome for this person? If they were to build the most abundant life they could enjoy, what would it look like?” Then ask yourself, “given where they are now, what is the smallest possible step they could take towards that outcome?” Then ask yourself, “what can I do to make it easier for them to take that step?” If you incessantly repeat this process with everyone you meet, you will quickly affect a staggering difference in this world.

Teach other people to deserve your efforts. Teach them that they will reap what they sow, that your time is precious, and that your resources are limited. As you exercise more and more faith, you will possess greater shares of the love of God within you. You will happily give everything you are, have, could be, or could have for the benefit of any soul, but that doesn’t entitle anyone to what you have to share so long as there exist people who will make better use of it. You are obligated to do the best you can with what you have, and that requires you to prioritize those who will do the most with what you give them.

The greatest joy in life can be found in helping someone feel more of the love of God—which exceeds all other good things on earth. Once you taste this joy, nothing else on earth can compare. Alma described this as “exceedingly great joy”.

While some accounts illustrate the kind of sudden awareness God can give us of his love, his love is far greater than what can be revealed all at once. A one-time revelation of his love can be jarring enough to empower great sacrifice on our part for the welfare of others, but the faithful disciple will be showered with constant, progressing understanding of God’s love for us.

As we travel the path of faith, we will accrue additional evidence of God’s love for us that gives us the strength to push beyond previous limits, and to truly bear, believe, hope, and endure all things, particularly in our pursuit of helping others to feel the same.

The journey of faith begins when the individual is given an idea that some better outcome exists. It continues through the successive attainment of increasingly better outcomes.

No matter where one’s faith begins, all paths will converge on Jesus Christ. When correct ideas about the Lord are obtained and followed, they will lead the individual to learn and experience things they would otherwise not be willing to endure. The pinnacle lesson in this path is to acquire charity.

As the individual seeks God with all their might, mind, and strength, they will find themselves facing and overcoming monumental trials. As they do, they will see how nothing can stop God’s love for them, and this will give them the strength to show God’s love to others through all barriers.

In this way, they will come to endure all things, and obtain all that God gives.

All people who continue in the journey of faith will find it culminates in the singular experience of knowing Jesus Christ, becoming like him, and dwelling with him.

Seek God with all your heart, might, mind, and strength. Continuously emulate what you learn about him in your life. Press forward, growing in your faith and in your love of God and your fellowmen, and you will find joy beyond all comparison.