Faith, Agency, and Knowledge

I believe that most of my readers will be already be familiar with the fact that I am now dating a very pretty and active young lady by the name, Kara Wheat; I am very happy about this. I'm happy to have her as a good influence in my life.

I recently finished reading "The Lectures on Faith" written by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. It's about eighty pages of deep reading. Oftentimes you need to stop and think about what you've just read.

In the lectures, it says that three things are needed for faith to be productive and fruitful. They are 1) a belief that God exists 2) a correct knowledge of His attributes and perfections and 3) a knowledge that one's life is in harmony with the Lord's will. In part of the book it is explained why we need to have an understanding of each attribute and perfection of God and how a lack of even one of them weakens our faith. It reminded me that I need to perfect my own personal testimony of each one. So while I was reading this, I thought about the relationships between faith, agency and knowledge. Last week, I was teaching my family history class and I needed to make fill the rest of the time that my lesson hadn't. So I got a discussion going with my class about this and other things from the lectures on faith. I showed them a simple diagram I came up with to help visualize the relationship.

I should mention that for one of my classes we have to diagram cause and effect for each theory we read so I feel it's getting to me, in a good way.

We discussed the diagram and found that I was missing Incentive. In the end the diagram looked like this.

We found that agency well used increases faith and agency poorly used has the opposite effect. We talked about faith or lack of faith can effect our agency and what we do or don't do. We then talked about how if we have more knowledge of good things then it will increase our faith. The more we develop faith then it will finish by becoming a perfect knowledge. We decided that as our knowledge increases that it then gives us more incentive which in turn increases our agency. It then becomes obvious that we can then use our agency to gain more knowledge. Honestly I think that this fascinating to reflect upon but then again I may just be a gospel nerd.

I hope and pray that we can do a little better at exercising our faith and enlarging our knowledge. I know that as we do so accompanied by humble prayer that the Lord will bless our efforts. I hope that this has helped someone better understand faith and its effects. May the Lord bless your faith is my prayer.