Faith and Trust

I think I made huge progress in learning to have Faith in God when our family took a 9 month business/leisure trip to Costa Rica and Chile.  I think I learned through the experiences and people we met there.  I'm reading the book Following the Light of Christ into His Presence and am loving it, it's helping me to add on to that faith line upon line.  This book is great just like his other book, the Triumph of Zion.  Quoting from page 74:

"Faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true." (Alma 32:21)



Faith does not bring a perfect, irrefutable knowledge.  It is essential to our progression that we not know perfectly until we have learned to submit ourselves to His guidance and have become like He is.  Faith somes as a result of contact with the Holy Spirit, which descends upon us because of obedience.  This divine contact brings us faith, hope and all other spiritual gifts.  These gifts purify and refine.  As spirituality grows, we are further refined, and we become more and more like Him.  When we have finally arrived at a point where we are ready to know with an absolute surety, our faith is so strong that it is a small step from faith to knowledge, and we are as nearly like Him as we can become in this life.  When we have become so purified by the companionship of the Holy Ghost that we ahve become like Him, then we will be readyt o be in his presence.  Once we have entered His presence, our faith in him will become dormant.  It will no longer even be possible to have faith in His existence, because faith will have been replaced with absolute knoweledge.  

It is the uncertainty of faith that motivates us to seek further and greater blessings.  Believing, but not knowing for sure, teaches us trust in Christ. We can't know the outcome of our obedience beforehand.  But we do learn by repeated experience that the Lord always blesses us when we obey.  He never sends us on a mission we are not equipped to complete.  He never asks us to do the impossible.  It is not possible for God to give us a goal we could never reach.  "All things are possible to them that believeth." (Mark 9:23)

Jesus Christ is faithful to deliver, and quick to honor those who love and obey him.

Not knowing of a certainty also give us both the opportunity to fail--and a pathway to succeed.  The very definition of agency is that we always ahve two paths to choose from-- right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice. (See 2 Nephi 2)

An absolute knowledge would effectively end our agency because we would have no reasonable choice.  Only the spiritually suicidal would choose to disobey such knowledge. 

The English language does not give us appropriate different words for intellectual faith and faith as a gift from God.  Intellectual faith is nothing more than a strong belief.  While it is possible to believe something so strongly you are willing to die for it, such belief is not faith.  One can believe a stone statue is God, and be willing to die for it, but this is not faith.  This type of belief is a logical conclusion and has no saving power.  It comes as a result of the churnings of the human mind.  

True faith, that which has power to heal, comfort, exalt, and raise the dead, is a gift of God and fills the soul with power and spiritual motivation.  Faith comes from the Holy Spirit as a result of righteous obedience to the still small voice of the Holy Spirit.  Since it is a gift from God, it only remains as long as we continue withing the influence of the Holy Spirit.