Hear Him Heal You

Trust Falls with God

• Morgan & Joel • Season 1 • Episode 21

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Have you ever considered that our modern understanding of faith might be missing a crucial element? In this illuminating episode, Joel explores a revelation that changes everything about how we approach our relationship with God: the Hebrew Bible doesn't actually have a word that directly translates to "belief" as we understand it today.

What ancient Israelites had wasn't casual belief—it was deep trust, loyalty, and relationship. God wasn't an abstract concept requiring intellectual acceptance; He was a living reality they trusted daily. This single shift in understanding transforms faith from a passive mental state into an active principle that naturally produces corresponding actions. Through personal experiences and scriptural insights, Joel shares how replacing "belief" with "trust" in our spiritual vocabulary changes everything.

The trust fall becomes a powerful metaphor for authentic faith. When someone asks you to fall backward, claiming you trust them while refusing to fall reveals the truth—despite your words, you don't actually trust them. Similarly, claiming faith in God while refusing His guidance demonstrates a lack of genuine trust. As James taught, faith without works isn't just incomplete—it's dead. True faith, as trust, inevitably manifests in action.

This episode challenges listeners to move beyond intellectual belief to develop genuine trust in God's promises and power. When we truly trust that Christ can empower us through any challenge, addiction, or seemingly impossible circumstance, we access divine strength that transforms our lives. If you've ever felt disconnected from your faith or struggled to bridge the gap between belief and action, this perspective provides the missing piece to revitalize your spiritual journey. Listen, reflect, and discover how trust-based faith can become your most powerful motivating force.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Hear Him. Heal you with Morgan and Joel. This podcast is for those that are imperfect, rough around the edges, but are still wanting to come unto Christ. Join us to get out of the mental mire, find meaning in emotion and leave bad behind. This is where we hear Him to be healed.

Speaker 2:

Okay, what's happening, little flock, it's Joel here, just me. Today this is another part of that series where me and Morgan are just doing individual episodes for just topics that we feel like don't merit an entire discussion but were just intriguing or things that we found in our studies this week. And what I wanted to talk a little bit about today was faith and what faith really is as a motivating principle in our lives. So what inspired, I guess, my interest in this topic of faith was I've been going through a series I've already gone through this series once, but it's called who Wrote the Bible, specifically the Hebrew Bible, by Dr Richard Elliott Friedman. He has a book on it and then he also has a series up on YouTube. It's just his lectures from his college class that he's posted to YouTube, but they're really good if you want to get a pretty, a more secular view and understanding of the Bible and, from the Hebrew view of things, how it came to be, the view of its writers and kind of understanding the world which created the Hebrew Bible. So in that series, something that he mentioned that was kind of interesting to me was that in Hebrew there isn't a true word for belief. So whenever you read belief in the Hebrew Bible it's actually I want to say it's pronounced amen or amen, I'm not really sure it's A with that line over it M-A-N and so, and that's the root of it. And really it's been said that it's actually more attributed to loyalty, trust, a relationship, things like that. And it was really cool to kind of look at it from that view that they didn't, because to the Israelites they didn't believe right in God In the Canaanite areas, right in religions. It wasn't like someone would go up and say, hey, do you believe in God? No, god was just a reality of their day-to-day lives. It wasn't like I believe in this abstract idea of God. And it was very fascinating to me because I'm like what if we lived our lives like that that God is? And instead of believing in God, we did more trusting in God.

Speaker 2:

And that idea was actually introduced to me by my bishop where he said we need to stop using the word have faith so much and start saying to have trust. He goes, because that's what it really means and if we have trust in God, then we're going to act backs. That up is in Moroni 7. And in Moroni 7, 33, it says and Christ hath said If ye will have faith in me, ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient in me. So I think that is a really profound scripture, what he's saying. Let's replace that faith and say if you have trust in me, you will have power to do whatever thing I ask you is expedient right.

Speaker 2:

And so sometimes I've struggled in my life feeling like how am I supposed to do this? This feels like impossible, and I realized it came down to a lack of trust, a lack of trust in God, a lot of lack of trust in Christ and what he could do in my life, and trusting that he can truly empower me to overcome whatever things that I need to. And so, going more into that side of things, I read up a little bit on the lectures on faith, I believe, which were some earlier teachings that used to be in the canon, that are no longer in the scriptural canon, but they're still really good to read and they were, I believe, delivered to the School of Prophets in Kirtland, ohio, and Joseph Smith talks a lot about faith in that, as obviously it's called lectures on faith. That was a dumb thing to say, anyways, but he goes into faith being that enabling power, that motivating principle that moves us forward. And there was a cool line I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially he says you wouldn't do anything if you didn't believe it could be accomplished. And he, he, even he compared it to saying you wouldn't be seeking to learn these things if you didn't believe that you could receive them. So, to make that more more visual, I have a pen right here in front of me and I'm picking it up. Now I'm holding the pen. Why, ultimately, did I pick up the pen? Because I believed I could right. I trusted that as I moved my hand and grabbed it, I'd be able to lift it up. And so, deep down, that's what faith is.

Speaker 2:

Whenever we act in faith right, it means that we believe or we trust that when we do a specific action, we're going to receive a specific result. And so when you look at our counterparts in the whole of Christianity, especially in the Protestant vein of Christianity, you see a lot of people who teach this dogma called sola fide right, or faith alone. And essentially I've talked to people like well, I don't need to be baptized, I'm saved by my faith alone and I don't need to do this because I'm saved by my faith. I said I believe and I'm saved right. And that's why it was so important to me when I heard that the word belief in the Old Testament wasn't even really supposed to be translated into belief, but rather into trust, right. And so it's really saying we're saved by our trust in God. Right, that's what saves us. And so if we trust in God, we're going to listen to Him. Right, you're going to obey Him.

Speaker 2:

And so I think about it in the analogy of a trust fall when someone comes up to another person and says hey. In the analogy of a trust fall when someone comes up to another person and says hey, let's do a trust fall. There's two parties the one who is asking you to do something right, I want you to fall backwards and trust that I'm going to catch you. They're saying I promise I'm going to catch you. The second party has to make the decision do I actually believe or trust that this person will catch me? And so, say, party one asks party two to do this, and the second party says you know, I believe you could catch me, or you could, right, or maybe I believe you will, but I don't want to do it, and no matter how much party two says they trust or believe party one, party one is not going to believe that the second party actually trusts them.

Speaker 2:

So if we say to God, god says to us, the Father says to us be baptized in my name, in the name of my Son and in the name of the Holy Ghost, and someone says I don't need to, I believe that you'll save me, father, I believe it right, but I don't need to, I just believe that you will. God's not convinced. God told you to do something. Show that you have faith and act on it. And that's what I think James was really trying to get at when he said faith without works is dead. If you don't act on that faith, do you really believe?

Speaker 2:

So we go back to our analogy in that trust fall, and if that person refuses to fall backwards into the arms of the person offering to catch them one, it can't happen. He can't catch if you don't take the step forward to fall right and he doesn't believe that you even want to or believe that he can. So let's kind of write that back into our analogy of now. Heavenly Father asks us to make covenants with him. If we don't act, we can't make the covenant If we don't move forward and you know, metaphorically fall towards the covenant, God can't catch us, he can't redeem us. He can't redeem that which is not brought to him.

Speaker 2:

So, when it comes to these discussions with others who say we're saved by faith alone, that's true, we are saved by our faith, but our faith is dead without any actions.

Speaker 2:

It's dead unless we show that it is a trust in God. And so that's really what I wanted to share today in this quick episode was how important it is that we take that faith and we let it motivate us, that we let it move us to do good, move us to have a trust in God, that we can overcome our sins, that we can overcome addiction, that we can overcome any trial. I know personally in my life, as I've sought to give my trust over to God and to act believing that he is going to keep His end of the bargain. I've seen many blessings in my life because of that. I know that all of us are entitled to that as sons and daughters of God. So have faith, trust in God, know that he's there with you and that His power is real. Let it move you to do great things there with you and that his power is real.

Speaker 1:

Let it move you to do great things.

Speaker 2:

Remember little flock despair, not build upon the rock, do good and always hear him. Hey, little flock. If you found this episode beneficial to your testimony, remember to leave a review, share with others and follow for more.