I am shocked and often surprised by the ways some of us often use the word faith. I hear a missionary in Vienna say, “Come on, Elder (or Sister), where’s your faith? Why, if we had the faith we could baptize this whole city!” I watch with some sorrow as the well-meaning but insensitive souls explain to a grieving mother and father that if the family had sufficient faith, their fifteen-year-old daughter, who has struggled with multiple sclerosis for five years, would not be forced to suffer longer. Faith is not the power of positive thinking. Faith is not the personal resolve that enables us to will some difficult situation into existence. Faith is not always the capacity to turn tragedy into celebration. Faith is a principle of power, of God’s power. We do not generate faith on our own, for “it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). We do not act ourselves into faith, for faith comes to us by the Spirit (see Moroni 10:11), given by God to suit his purposes and bless his children.

People act in faith when they act according to the will of God. To say that another way, I can have sufficient faith to move Mount Timpanogos to the middle of Utah Lake only when I know that the Lord wants it moved! I remember very well sitting with my mom and dad watching television one warm June evening in Louisiana only a few months after I had returned from a mission. The phone rang, and my father was quickly summoned to the hospital to give a priesthood blessing to someone. A sixteen-year-old boy, a friend of my younger sister, had suddenly collapsed on the softball field and had been rushed to the hospital. My dad was told that the boy had been diagnosed with a strange, degenerative nerve disease and that if something didn’t happen soon, he would die. We rushed to the hospital, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and hurried through the doors that opened to the waiting room. We were greeted by the sorrowing friends and loved ones; the young man had died. We did our best to console the mourners and then made our way home.

As we walked in the back door, my sister asked, “How is he?” I answered that her friend had passed away. She came right back with: “Well, why didn’t you raise him from the dead?”  Being the seasoned and experienced returned missionary that I was, and having most of the answers to life’s hard questions, I stuttered for a second and then turned to my father: “Yeah, why didn’t we raise him from the dead?”

Dad’s answer was kind but firm. It was also very instructive: “Because the Spirit of the Lord didn’t prompt us to do so,” he said. I have to admit that at that moment a piece of cynicism made its way into my conscious thoughts, and I said to myself: “That’s a bit of a cop-out, isn’t it?” In the years that followed, however, I came to know something about my dad’s faith: he had been with his father when in fact the Spirit had prompted and the dead had been raised to life again. He knew when to move and when not to move. He had faith.

The Prophet Joseph Smith taught that working by faith is working by the power of mental exertion rather than physical force. I am persuaded that the mental exertion of which he spoke is not merely a cognitive exercise, but rather a demanding, strenuous effort, a spiritual search to know the will of God and then to accept and abide by that will. “Working by faith is not the mere speaking of a few well-chosen words,” Elder Bruce R. McConkie has written. “Anyone with the power of speech could have commanded the rotting corpse of Lazarus to come forth, but only one whose power was greater than death could bring life again to the brother of Mary and Martha. Nor is working by faith merely a mental desire, however strong, that some eventuality should occur. . . . Faith cannot be exercised contrary to the order of heaven or contrary to the will and purposes of him whose power it is. Men work by faith when they are in tune with the Spirit and when what they seek to do by mental exertion and by the spoken word is the mind and will of the Lord.”