Alma 13

(March 25, 2014)
I wonder if the standard explanations that we have for faith (and why it is necessary) are accurate.  I used to think that faith was something that we had to have in order to be properly tested.  Now I wonder if that is true.  After all, the Lord knows our hearts, and could judge us perfectly without the necessity of our exercising faith.  If we knew the end from the beginning, perhaps we would be inclined to attempt deception on the Father, but certainly that would be impossible.  The other possible conclusion is that we would know the judgments of God are just (because we went through the process of acting by faith), which has some validity.

But I am thinking that the development and necessity of faith is more for making us into who we need to be than to demonstrate who we are.  The Lord works by faith – and faith is a principle of power.  We could not accomplish our eternal destiny without the development of faith.  Just as a child needs to develop the confidence to act on their own in order to be a properly functioning adult, so too a Child of God needs the opportunity to act by faith in order to develop sufficient faith to act in the eternities.

I feel I am explaining my thoughts poorly, but they are swirling just out of reach of a better explanation.  But the key to take away from this is that faith is not (or not solely) a mechanism for testing but is also a mechanism for developing us for the eternity ahead of us.