Finding Meaning in The Gospel

One of the greatest pursuits that we have, as children of God, is the opportunity of engaging ourselves in scripture study. In the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, a prophet named Alma stresses the importance of scriptures by telling his son that they have been kept and preserved for a "wise purpose". So if the scriptures are kept for a "wise purpose", we might want to pay close attention to them.

Now that we have strengthened our resolve to read the scriptures we start putting great amounts of efforts into studying them. We take notes, write in cross references, teach others, and have a great zeal for studying the words of God. This excitement might last you a few days, a couple weeks, maybe a couple of months, or if your lucky, a year. Then one day you go to read the scriptures and you find yourself so board with them that you cut your study short and find something more exciting to do. The zeal to study the scriptures is gone, and the hopes of what ever was desired to learn is now faded away.

Have you ever experienced this before? Because I have, to many times to remember, as a matter of fact. I had good intentions, I put in some effort, I felt the Spirit, I learned things, and then is was all over. And this is where the problem is. Good intentions don't get us anywhere and "great faith has a short shelf-life."

Good intentions don't get us anywhere. The reason why this seems to finds its way to us is because sometimes we lack full commitment. "Those who are only sort of committed may expect to only sort of receive the blessings of testimony, joy, and peace. The windows of heaven might only be sort of open to them. Wouldn’t it be foolish to think, “I’ll commit myself 50 percent now, but when Christ appears at the Second Coming, I’ll commit myself 100 percent”?" (Brother, I'm Committed. Dieter F. Uchtdorf) The Lord wants us to learn to be committed to him 100 percent. That means that even when we have a bad day or things are not going well, we keep pressing on. I know that pressing on is hard, but I really do know that when someone keeps pressing on they will find great blessings.

Then in order to understand how faith plays a role in this you can read a blog that I posted called "Tips on Building Faith"

So now that we are well aware of how our scripture studying efforts have been so weak, we probably feel like we want to stop reading this. WAIT, DON'T STOP! There is a solution to this and here it is. PRAYER. We can pray and ask our Heavenly Father to helps us have to desire to keep going, we can explain to Him why we don't have the full commitment and seek direction on how to increase it. Plus, we usually have trouble reading the scriptures when our prayers are struggling too. So instead of trying to force your self to read your scriptures in vain, pray more and I promise that what you are looking for will come to you as you keep working at it.