Works Without Faith

"Faith without works," is an oft-quoted phrase at church...but is there such a thing as "works without faith?"  In other words, going through the motions of keeping the commandments without really believing it.

When children are tasked with household chores, they often do as little as they think they can get away with. That is because children are not cleaning in order to live in a clean house, they are cleaning just to complete an assigned task.

Similarly, many of us as adults are keeping the commandments just to fulfill an assignment, rather than to become celestial beings.  This is perhaps a symptom of the backward thinking that we get points for keeping commandments.  In fact, the benefit of keeping a commandment is who you become as a result, not some superficial blessing you receive as a reward for doing it.

I don't think we are blessed separately just for coming to church while we play games on our phones through sacrament meeting.  The blessing is in the meeting, if we find it.  Do we expect a separate blessing for adherence to the Word of Wisdom, other than good health?  The list could go on, but perhaps there are more half-hearted “works without faith” going on in our lives than we realize.

I think it is possible to know something but not believe it.  That may sound backward but it may not be.  Belief is the action that certifies what we know.  I can tell my kids that their lives will be better if they don’t participate in certain behaviors and then they know it’s true because I told them; but they may not believe it.  So, they go out and make the same mistakes we all did as teenagers and then they believe what they really already knew.  This is what happened to us in the pre-existence.  The all-powerful God of our universe surely told us what is right and what is wrong; so we all knew it because he said so.  But it was not possible for us to believe it until we came here to Earth to experience it for ourselves.

Even if you know something, you have to have a great deal of faith or belief in it before you can carry it out consistently and in front of others.  Peter knew that Jesus was the Christ, yet he denied him three times because his faith in that knowledge was not yet strong enough.

We are not saved as a church.  We are saved as individuals.  It takes enormous personal effort in living the commandments, not just obeying them; so that we can come to believe what we know to be true.

Moroni 7:8
For behold, if a man being evil giveth a gift, he doeth it grudgingly; wherefore it is counted unto him the same as if he had retained the gift; wherefore he is counted evil before God.