130 - D&C 65-66 CFM - Sign Seeking VS Seeking a Witness - E25B Jun 16-22

22 days ago

Witness vs sign seeking One way to view faith, is to break it down into four stages. 1. Desire: attending church, reading scriptures and saying prayers 2. Prompting: the verse of scripture or church speaker prompts you to do a specific action. Like Moroni’s challenge or a missionary’s challenging and investigator to do something. Or the spirit will enter your mind and heart and prompt you to do an action that pertains to your life. 3. Test/trail : Then the Lord steps back and see if we will perform the actions. Joseph Smith acted on his strong prompting to pray and went to the woods. Plus Joseph persevered when the darkness tried to commune him. 4. Witness : This is a bigger experience than the prompting. For Joseph Smith it was God, the Father and His Son. For the brother of Jared it was first the stones being touched after the had prepared them. Ross Baren did a BYU-Idaho forum teaching this concept of faith with a Q&A after if you want it explained better. Sign seeking is trying to avoid the test or the uncomfortable part when you second guess yourself. The person is trying to get the witness without first proving to God that they will be faithful to the witness. Also, as I listened to your podcast I thought of a person committing adultery would think they will get away with it. They might think I’m going to continue with this until I get caught or burned by it. A sign seeker could also be living in sin, not having the desire to change. They might be feeling the prompting do better but choosing to ignore it. It is too small of a signal to be from God. They plan to continue in it until they are shown a big sign, signaling to them that they are caught or in error and really need to change.

Kenneth Hart

27 days ago

I had an idea about the difference between sign seeking and a sign being a witness. A witness may be recognizing the gifts of the spirit as a confirmation of faith, rather than seeking a sign to create faith.