Faith In Jesus Christ and how it applies to my life.
By: Bradley Joel Hintze
Today the Bishop has asked me to talk on having faith in Christ and relate it to my life. But before I begin I want to talk about something that took me many years to learn and that is to be teachable. I believe that this will be beneficial as you listen today, and every week for that matter, in church. In fact, this may be applied outside of church. As we listen to anyone we need to be teachable. By ‘teachable’ I mean let go of all of your beliefs and perceptions about the topic at hand. I have found that you can be taught, meaning someone is teaching you, true principles but you cannot learn, which is your end of teaching, those principle correctly if you have an incorrect view of the given principle. This will inevitably skew truth such that the principle that you take away is not truth at all. Letting go of your beliefs and perceptions is very difficult because, well, you believe them but if we ask for help, from Him where all truth emanates, we can be teachable.
Now onto faith in Christ and how it relates to my life. To give context, allow me to tell you about my physical condition. At my birth there were complications such that I was deprived of oxygen for some time. The doctors had no idea what the future would hold. I could have a myriad of problems such as mental, physical, social etc. Only the future would tell. It took me longer than usual to hit developmental milestones; for example, it took me twenty months to walk. As I grew up it was obvious that I had problems in my fine motor coordination and had a gait in my walk. When I started elementary I went to resource but it quickly became apparent that I had no trouble learning, my problems were limited to the physical realm. As a result the doctors gave me the ambiguous diagnosis of cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is just an umbrella term that doctors use when they see paralysis and have no ideas what else to call it.
As a child my only real limitations were writing, buttoning shirts, and anything that required me to work with small objects. When going through puberty I was hit with an additional condition known as dystonia. This condition was a lot more severe than the one I had grown to know. Dystonia causes the muscles in my neck to involuntarily contract causing my head to tilt and my speech to be impaired. Initially, it was hard to deal with the new condition but, with time, it became just another part of me. While there are some hardships because of my condition, for the most part I am able to deal with it similar to those who are unfortunate enough to have the inability to roll their tongue, it’s simply not a big deal. But, again, there are times of trial because of my disability.
One such trial, which is a just a fancy term for a learning experience, that I recently had was when a few of us in the ward made a video for Mother’s day. In the video we sang the Primary song “Mother I love you.” Some of you may have seen the video or were privileged enough to see the live performance. I think most of us have experienced that shock and perhaps horror when we hear our own voices or observe ourselves on video. Well, I have not seen much video of myself so when I saw the Mother’s day video I was taken aback. Seeing that video actually discouraged me quite a bit because of my awkward dystonic movements. While I am very aware of my physical condition, I have become quite use to it so I really don’t think as myself having such awkward movements.
The trouble I was having with the video was thoughts of low self-worth because of my condition. I am a guy who is always thinking, especially about spiritual matters. As I was contemplating on the situation I realized that something was not adding up. I had lived with this condition my entire life, sure it may have worsened when I was a teenager but that was over ten years ago. I had experienced relatively little distress relative to my condition; something was amiss. So, I decided to ask Heavenly Father for help so that this could be dealt with in a healthy way. As I was on my knees asking for help the Spirit revealed to me that I already had complete faith that everything would be fine and I would feel little to no distress because of what I saw on that video, complete faith. I knew that Jesus Christ had made this burden light in the past and would continue to do so.
The lesson here actually had little to do with my physical condition and how I dealt with it but rather was a lesson in what I will call situational faith. I compared the faith that I had about the Lord helping me deal with my condition to faith I had in other areas of my life and the contrast was stark. The Lord was teaching me that, while I had great faith in the help that He gave me in dealing with my condition, I needed to increase my faith in Christ in all aspects, or situations, of my life.
So how do we increase our faith in Christ? I am afraid the answers are nothing new; however, I invite you to listen nonetheless with an open hart and perhaps the Spirit will teach you something new. In other words, be teachable! I am going to share five aspects of increasing faith in Christ and then share personal experiences that I have had in each of those aspects.
Desire
In Alma 32 we read a great parable on faith where faith is compared to a seed that must be planted in our hearts. We oft times correlate this parable with receiving an initial testimony of the gospel but this parable can be applied by each of us daily to increase our situational faith. We learn that desire is enough to start. If we just desire to believe that Christ will help us in a certain situation you are good to go.
From the earliest I can remember, I’ve been blessed with a sincere desire to do what is right. Consequently, I sought the truth of the church early in my life. After reading the Book of Mormon when I was 14 I followed the council given in Moroni 10 to pray about its truthfulness. Because of that experience alone I can bare solemn witness that the Book of Mormon is true and the stories therein truly did occur. I know that Jesus is the Christ through which all happiness emanates. Desire is always the seed of truth. If we desire a testimony of anything we are on the right path, albeit at the beginning of the path.
Praying
What did I have to do to receive the witness of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon? I had to pray as Moroni instructed. Brothers and Sisters, prayer is a crucial aspect of exercising faith. Satan will try everything in his power to keep you from praying because by doing so he is depriving you of truly knowing your Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. If you truly knew Them you would know of the unconditional, endless love that They have for you. Satan does not want us to know Their love, for Their love is the ultimate motivation to live righteously. Pray daily, multiple times, privately, publically, and in your heart.
As mentioned earlier, I’ve always had a deep desire to live righteously. It may sound silly now but the naive boy that I was thought that my biggest spiritual struggle in life would be something like thinking bad thoughts. As I grew up certain experiences taught me otherwise. This realization was devastating to me, and ‘devastating’ here is most definitely an understatement; it hurt like nothing I had felt before. While praying one night when my heart was truly in pain I felt the love of the Lord despite my imperfections. Words cannot describe the love of the Lord. I’ve tried; I attempt to describe his love as greater than the sum of all positive emotions that we can feel but still, this description doesn’t began to describe His love. I know that he loves ALL in the exact same way and invite you to ask Him to feel of His love.
Work
In James 2 we read that faith without works is dead. Just as we cannot expect help from the Lord on a test that we did not study for, we cannot expect the Lord to distill knowledge upon us just because we ask, even if we do so with all sincerity. Whether its gaining a testimony of the Temple or increasing faith in Christ we must work at it. Faith, itself, is a word that should conjure up scenes of action, such as, studying, writing down things you learn, teaching, serving and so forth.
Since all my spiritual examples of work would take to long to tell and are perhaps too personal to relate I’ll tell of a temporal example that certainly can be paralleled to the spiritual realm.
In the fall of 2006 I volunteered at a feed station for a cycling race know as LOTOJA, which stands for Logan to Jackson. It is the longest single-day United States Cycling Federation sanctioned race, 206 miles. As we handed out food and drinks to the 1,000 cyclists, I saw a few tandem cyclists. I turned to my buddy, Bryan, and suggested that we do LOTOJA tandem that next year. He got very excited and said absolutely. A month later I dropped an undisclosed amount of money on a really nice road bike and started training.
The training waned in the winter but picked up again in the spring. Bryan and I put several thousand miles of training in the summer of 2007 in preparation for the big race. We worked very hard in our training. When the day of the race came we were ready to go. We left Logan at 7:45 in the morning. The ride was longer and harder than I had expected. However, The training that we did allowed us to cross the finish line 13.5 hours later.
If one were to say to me that I would complete LOTOJA a year or two before I participated I would have laughed at them on the basis that I simply had not the strength nor endurance to complete such a feat. However, months of hard work proved to provide sufficient strength and endurance for me to complete LOTOJA. Is there any righteous desire in your life that you believe is beyond you? If you work at it hard and long enough you might well find that nothing is beyond you, with the Lord’s help, of course.
Study the words of the Lord
We have been commanded and are consistently reminded to read the scriptures each day. The constant reminders are not meant to nag but are rather a plea from those who care for you and your happiness. The scriptures provide yet another way, a crucial way I might add, in which we can come to know Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. The words of modern day prophets are yet another resource we must study. Applying what we learn through our studies will increase our faith in Christ as well as His words. In this last General Conference Elder Christofferson said “In the end, the central purpose of all scripture is to fill our souls with faith in God the Father and in His Son, Jesus Christ—faith that They exist; faith in the Father’s plan for our immortality and eternal life; faith in the Atonement and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which animates this plan of happiness; faith to make the gospel of Jesus Christ our way of life; and faith to come to know “the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom [He has] sent” (John 17:3).”
A scripture that helped me through my realization many years ago that I would not be perfect in this life is found in 2 Nephi chapter four 17-21.
• 17 Nevertheless, notwithstanding the great goodness of the Lord, in showing me his great and marvelous works, my heart exclaimeth: O wretched man that I am! Yea, my heart sorroweth because of my flesh; my soul grieveth because of mine iniquities.
• 18 I am encompassed about, because of the temptations and the sins which do so easily beset me.
• 19 And when I desire to rejoice, my heart groaneth because of my sins; nevertheless, I know in whom I have trusted.
• 20 My God hath been my support; he hath led me through mine afflictions in the wilderness; and he hath preserved me upon the waters of the great deep.
• 21 He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh.
Experience
The last aspect of increasing your faith in Jesus Christ is perhaps not typically a separate topic covered in this context and that is experience. So far I have covered desire, prayer, work and studying the words of the Lord. Are these not all experiences? We have many experiences throughout our lives, some good and others seemingly bad. We are the ones who get to decide what we will learn from a given experience. It is easy to say I learned a great lesson from a given miraculous spiritual experience but what about the so called ‘bad’ experiences? Here we have a choice. Am I going to learn something of value and move forward or become a tad more bitter and move backward?
In my life I’ve had to learn how to take lessons from seemingly bad experiences that were great trials in my life, trails totally unrelated to my physical condition. In hindsight these experiences, although horrible and painful at the time, were crucial to increase my faith in Christ. D&C 122: 7, although way too dramatic as it relates to my experiences, rings very true to me:
7 And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.
I would exhort you all to keep a journal, a journal in which you are not afraid to pour your soul into. While it is fun to look back and read things that were seemingly trite when they were written it is more important that we write down our spiritual experiences.
Although the following quote from Joseph Smith was directed at leaders of the church it certainly applies to our individual lives.
“Here is another important item. If you assemble from time to time, and proceed to discuss important questions, and pass decisions upon the same, and fail to note them down, by and by you will be driven to straits from which you will not be able to extricate yourselves, because you may be in a situation not to bring your faith to bear with sufficient perfection or power to obtain the desired information; or, perhaps, for neglecting to write these things when God had revealed them, not esteeming them of sufficient worth, the Spirit may withdraw, and God may be angry; and there is, or was, a vast knowledge, of infinite importance, which is now lost.”{To Draw Closer to God pg. 124}
Write down your testimonies no matter what stage that they are at and write it down often. Write about spiritual experiences; write what you learn. These writings then should be read in the future again and again. Doing so, I believe, will do much to increase our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and perhaps increase the faith of our posterity.
Testimony.
