Vivified Belief, Leading From A Secure Base, How To Approach All Things
The Disciple-Leader Newsletter #66
Discipleship
“A right faith is an excellent and valuable thing. But it is advantageous no further than it … leads us to live an holy and godly life.”1
Jonathan Mayhew
This is the doctrine of Christ: we exercise faith in Him and in return, He gives us access to His power.
The keyword being exercise.
Mere belief in Christ, devoid of exercising faith in Him,2 yields no power. Belief without faith is dead, or as James put it, “Faith without works is dead.”3
Even if you’re a believer, without the exercise of faith, you will go through life as if Christ hadn’t atoned for you.4 Why? Because you won’t have access to His atoning power. You will live, essentially, without God in the world.5 Your access to His power, love, and influence are readily available to you, but exercising faith is the process by which you gain that access, not through intellectual, passive belief.6
Exercising faith isn’t necessarily easy7, but it is very simple. It’s a choice. It’s a choice between being left to your own strength or living in the strength of God.8 This is the same God who created the world, the planets, and the galaxy. The same God who rose from the grave. The same God who knows all, has all power, and is eager to “give away the secrets of the universe”9, including the secret of how you can live in His power. Except He didn’t keep that much of a secret. He was very overt: “And Christ hath said: If ye will have faith in me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient in me."10
Leadership
“All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base.”11
David Brooks
At the core of leadership is lifting, building, and enabling others to the point where their base is secure. Then, once their base is secure, they feel like they can set off. Stephen Covey wrote about making investments into someone’s emotional bank account. This idea is similar. Every opportunity we have with someone else is a leadership opportunity. We can be complacent and apathetic towards them or we can actively lift, love, and treat them as Christ would. Each time you maximize those people-opportunities, you not only make an investment into the emotional bank account, but you strengthen the security of their base.
Think of someone as a boat and their base as a lighthouse. If their base is secure, or if their lighthouse is lit, they will be enabled to daringly explore. To go after their dreams. To do hard things. To fulfill the mission that God placed on their life. Each time you add to their base, it’s as if you are increasing the brightness of the lighthouse.
Neal A. Maxwell wrote, “None of us ever fully utilizes the people-opportunities allocated to us within our circles of friendship.”12 Though we don’t utilize them as we should, Christ always did. The disciple-leader works to close that gap.
Mental Performance
“He who invades the domain of knowledge must approach it as Moses came to the burning bush; he stands on holy ground; he would acquire things sacred. We must come to this quest of truth—in all regions of human knowledge whatsoever, not only in reverence, but with a spirit of worship."13
J. Reuben Clark
Let me emphasize one line from this J. Reuben Clark statement: “We must come to this quest of truth—in all regions of human knowledge whatsoever, not only in reverence, but with a spirit of worship.”
All means all.
What does it mean to approach life with a spirit of reverence and worship?
Approaching everything with a spirit of reverence. You revere and honor people and opportunities. What does this mean? One writer put it this way, “The word honor … my favorite definition in my study that I’ve come upon is to prize. Do you know what it means to honor someone? Oh sure, it means respect. It means recognizing the dignity of that person. But it means to prize.”14 Do you prize the person in front of you? Do you treasure the opportunity to learn, work, write, or whatever else it is you are doing that day?
Approaching everything with a spirit of worship. This means that you recognize that “all things unto (God) are spiritual”.15 “All things denote there is a God”.16 You acknowledge God in everything and you see God in everyone.17 Think about it. Jesus took upon Himself everyones pains, sicknesses, temptations, and ultimately, everything.18 That means when you see someone’s struggle, when you see someone’s joy, when you see someone’s anxiety, you are actually seeing Christ’s struggle, Christ’s joy, and Christ’s anxiety. During His agony, He literally experienced that exact scenario.19 If you approach everything with a spirit of worship, you can learn something about Jesus Christ from every single person and in any scenario you find yourself in.
This is how you should approach your life.
'Epigraph', Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (2014), Oxford Academic, 23 Oct. 2014
There is a difference between belief and faith. James E. Talmage in his book The Articles of Faith wrote: “Belief may consist in a merely intellectual assent, whilst faith implies such confidence and conviction as will impel to action … Belief is in a sense passive,—a mental agreement or acceptance only; faith is active and positive,—such a reliance and confidence as will lead to works. Faith in Christ comprises belief in Him, combined with trust in Him. One cannot have faith without belief; yet he may believe and still lack faith. Faith is vivified, vitalized, living belief.”
I previously wrote about this idea here.
James 2:26. “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”
President Dallin H. Oaks added, “Faith without works is dead. Works without faith is deader.”
Aside from the fact you’ll be resurrected, as said in Alma 11:41. “The wicked remain as though there had been no redemption made, except it be the loosing of the bands of death.”
Mormon made this point clearly in Moroni 7:38. “For no man can be saved, according to the words of Christ, save they shall have faith in his name; wherefore, if these things have ceased, then has faith ceased also; and awful is the state of man, for they are as though there had been no redemption made.”
Alma 41:11. “And now, my son, I would that ye should understand that all mankind that are in a state of nature, or I would say, in a carnal state, are in the gall of bitterness and in the bonds of iniquity; they are without God in the world, and they have gone contrary to the nature of God; therefore, they are in a state contrary to the nature of happiness.”
See footnote 2.
Although it gets much easier once you realize the difficulty of the consequences that come from not exercising faith. As Elder Bednar taught, “Living the gospel is not hard, NOT living the gospel is hard.”
Helaman 4:13-16, 24-25. “And because of this their great wickedness, and their boastings in their own strength, they were left in their own strength; therefore they did not prosper, but were afflicted … And they saw that they had become weak … and that the Spirit of the Lord did no more preserve them; yea, it had withdrawn from them because the Spirit of the Lord doth not dwell in unholy temples—Therefore the Lord did cease to preserve them by his miraculous and matchless power, for they had fallen into a state of unbelief and awful wickedness; and they saw that the Lamanites were exceedingly more numerous than they, and except they should cleave unto the Lord their God they must unavoidably perish.”
Also see In The Strength of The Lord. Talk by David A. Bednar.
Meek and Lowly. Talk by Neal A. Maxwell.
Moroni 7:33
Democracy & Solidarity, The Trinity Forum. David Brooks quoting John Bowlby.
Brim With Joy. Talk by Neal A. Maxwell.
J. Reuben Clark Jr., “Charge to President Howard S. McDonald,” Improvement Era, January 1946, 14.
Daily Honor. Sermon by Judah Smith.
Doctrine & Covenants 29:34
Alma 30:44
Jesus asks that we see others this way. Matthew 25:40: “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
Alma 7:11-13.
“The Savior descended beneath all sins, all transgressions, all ailments, and all temptations known to the human family. He knew the sum total of the human plight, not just because He witnessed it, but because He embraced it. The Savior’s plunge into humanity was not a toe-dipping experience. It was a total immersion. He did not experience some pains and not others. His life was not a random sampling, a spot audit; it was a total confrontation with and internalization of every human experience, every human plight, every human trial. Somehow His sponge alone would absorb the entire ocean of human affliction, weakness, and suffering. There would be no godly powers exercised that would shield Him from one ounce of human pain. Christ’s Atonement was a descent into the seemingly ‘bottomless pit’ of human agony. He took upon Himself the sins of the most wretched of sinners; he descended beneath the cruelest tortures devised by man. His downward journey encompassed the transgressions of those who ignorantly sinned; it incorporated the agony of loneliness, the pain of inadequacy, the suffering of infirmities and sickness. In the course of his divine descent he was assaulted with every temptation inflicted on the human race. After our futile attempts to explain the awesome depths of this terrible trip, we come back again to those simple but expressive words of the scriptures, “He descended below all things” (DC 88:6). Said Truman Madsen “I bear testimony that you cannot sink farther than the light and sweeping intelligence of Jesus Christ can reach. I bear testimony that as long as there is one spark of the will to repent and to reach, He is there. He did not just descend to your condition; He descended below it, ‘that he might be in all and through all things, the light of truth’ (DC 88:6).” - Tad R. Callister. Excerpt from The Infinite Atonement.