God Loves You

Elder Levi Soller
Oct 3, 2016
2 min read

Hey Y'all!

This week was pretty slow which is kind of frustrating, but that's because Elder Luker and I alternated having a sore throat over the course of several days. We are both feeling better now. I hope you all had a wonderful week. There is not much to report of this week because of that sickness, but General Conference was this week!!!

Okay, I do have a funny story, so the other night, Elder Luker and I were biking home (we are in a biking area) and had just turned off the road onto a bike path that is more convenient to take sometimes, however, when we took this path, Elder Luker's bike pedal fell off!!! We tried to put it back on with the pliers I had, but 10 yards later it fell off again so we had to call and get a ride! Super funny experience trying to watch him pedal with only one pedal.

There seemed to be a theme from all the talks. The theme that I caught was that your Heavenly Father loves you which is why he sent his Son to suffer everything for all of us. This love is so incredible and we can't comprehend the extent of it, however even though he loves us so much, he will not force us to choose righteousness, he will not force us to repent, we must choose those things and make those choices. One analogy of this is the following:

In our lives, we must use faith and works. To help us better understand this, what is each?

Faith:

Alma 32 "21 And now as I said concerning faith—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."

Hebrews 11 "1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

Works:

He that doeth the will of my Father shall enter into the kingdom of heaven: Matt. 7:21

Faith without works is dead: James 2:14–26

They must be judged of their works: 1 Ne. 15:32; ( Mosiah 3:24; )

Teach them to never be weary of good works:

Alma 37:34

Essentially works are anything that we do that will bring us closer to Christ. Service is a work. Prayer is a work. Even repentance is a work.

Both of these things are good, but are essentially useless without the other. If we are only doing good deeds but don't have faith in Jesus Christ, what's the point? Are there people that do this, absolutely. I'm not saying they are bad people, what I am saying that if we turn the reason behind our works to a Faith in Jesus Christ, there will be a greater understanding we will gain. On the contrary, if we only have faith in Jesus Christ and are not repenting, not serving, not praying, not reading, Christ will not be very pleased with us. We have to use both of them together otherwise like in the rowboat we will 'spin circles' and we won't get anywhere.

I love you all and hope you have a wonderful week.

Pictures - District Basketball #districtunity