Faith

When we were in Hermiston last time, mom and dad had the sister missionaries over for dinner. At the end they did a very fun object lesson. We did it with the kids last night.

The object lesson is on faith and the love of our Heavenly Father. What is it, where does it come from and why do we need it?

The Apostle Paul taught that "faith is the substance [assurance] of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). Alma made a similar statement: "If ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true" (Alma 32:21). Faith is a principle of action and power. Whenever we work toward a worthy goal, we exercise faith. We show our hope for something that we cannot yet see.

I put a tower made out of paper on Alyssa’s hand.

Asking her what she knows about fire, of course she states that it burns things...if I lit the tower on fire in her hand it would burn her unless she moved her hand away. This is knowledge…she has knowledge from prior experience that when things are lit on fire they burn and that if she kept her hand there she would get burned. I then told her that I was going to light the tower on fire and she was not to move, no matter how close it got to her and how much she felt like it was going to burn her she was to have faith in me that she would not get burnt. So I lit the fire.

Now Alyssa had tremendous faith. She kept her hand still even when the flame was really really close to her hand and she could feel it. Like Paul’s teaching on faith, she had faith in me, she hoped the fire wouldn’t burn her and that I was honest in telling her it wouldn’t, she had never seen the fire just rise off her hand, but it was true…she didn’t get burned. We can liken this to having faith in our Father in Heaven and our Savior. He is there, even though we have not seen him with our eyes…he lives and is there. We must have faith in that.

We also need to remember that our Father in Heaven and Savior are there to help up. As life gets hard and things are tough we may feel that the fire is going to consume us at anytime…however, our Savior will lift and remove that fire from us. He keeps us from being consumed if we let me.

When we sin we may feel like the fire is consuming us….that there is no way out. We just need to remember that the Savior has already atoned for us. We just need to ask for forgiveness and repent and that fire will be lift up and extinguished and gone.

There are so many ways we can use this object lesson to teach but those were just a few of my thoughts.

Thanks again for the missionaries for sharing that will us….it was very cool.

Now for the disclaimer….I hope they don’t mind me sharing their secret but it is such a cool object lesson I feel bad keeping it hidden. The paper they used was a tea bag…it CAN NOT however be just any tea bag…they said it has to be Bigelow brand.