I’ve
always found it interesting that I’ve been asked to speak at four baptisms and
all four talks were on the gift of the Holy Ghost. But in going through my lesson manuals and
other materials in preparation for this talk, I realized that I’ve taught more
than my fair share of lessons on the topic as well. All of this might lead one to wonder if I’m some
sort of expert in receiving answers from the Holy Ghost, but I think it’s
closer to the truth to say that I’m an expert in all the ways of doing it wrong.
So I’ve chosen to focus my remarks on how to avoid the pitfalls and
obstacles that can stand in our way.
The
first obstacle is a pretty simple one:
we might be asking for unrighteous desires. I remember being on a family road trip when I
was about four years old, playing checkers with my big brother in the back seat
of the station wagon, and praying that I would beat him. Not surprisingly, that prayer did not receive
the answer I wanted—both because it wasn’t a righteous request, and because
four-year-olds are typically not very good at checkers. But fortunately, it is relatively easy to
know if this is a problem for us: as we humbly and honestly evaluate our own
hearts, and grow in our understanding of the teachings of the Gospel, we can
determine whether or not they are in harmony.
However,
this does point to two other potential stumbling blocks: we must be humble in order to receive
direction, and we must fill our minds with the principles of
righteousness. One function of spiritual
promptings is to bring to mind scriptures, articles, conference talks etc. that
will help us in fulfilling our church or family responsibilities. But that is a lot harder to do if we never
read those scriptures, or heard those conference talks, in the first place. It is our responsibility to give the Spirit
something to work with.
Another
obstacle is pointed out in my favorite scripture, which is Proverbs 3:
5-6: “Trust in the Lord with all thine
heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall
direct thy paths.” Trusting in the Lord
and acknowledging Him in all ways comes easily to me, but letting go of my own
understanding is less easy.
I
learned a powerful lesson on the importance of this shortly after returning
from my mission. I was a student at BYU,
and I had just returned from class and was planning to attend the temple. I
changed into my dress and was just gathering up my things when I felt, quite
strongly, that I shouldn’t go to the temple.
As you can imagine, this was pretty perplexing, especially since it
really felt like a genuine prompting, rather than the “natural man” voices that
can sometimes discourage us from righteous actions. Somehow I wound up sitting cross-legged on my
bedroom floor, still in my dress, trying to figure out what to do. I sat there for some minutes before I heard a
knock on my door. It was my roommate
Robyn, who was not a member of the Church.
She told me that she was meeting with the missionaries that evening,
which she hadn’t told anybody, but she was starting to feel nervous about it and
asked if I would go with her. I quickly
understood that while God knew that I could, and would, attend the temple another
day, Robyn would never again have a first missionary lesson, and she might not
have gone at all if I wasn’t there to accompany her. I was extremely grateful that although I had
questioned it, I did obey that prompting, as contradictory as it seemed to be
at the time.
I have
learned a similar lesson in trust over the past few years, as I muddled my way
through trials that I would never have imagined I could get through alive. Somehow I did, but as you can imagine, my
pleas for guidance were intense, sincere and frequent. In my mortal wisdom, I felt that if ever
there was a time for a loving, merciful Father to reach out to his daughter
with clear, precise answers, this was it.
But
that’s not what happened. Not even
close. I remember telling my sisters in
one moment of extreme frustration, “Okay, who knew that it was possible to feel
a burning in the bosom and a stupor of thought AT THE SAME TIME??”
In
retrospect, I can see what the Lord was actually telling me in those moments of
apparent contradiction, but since it’s specific to my situation I won’t
elaborate on that. (editor’s note: the message I was getting was “Yes, it’s a
righteous desire, and I know that you need to try in order to have peace. And no, it’s not going to work.”) The
principle is that sometimes, even though we are asking the proper questions,
with righteous desires and absolute faith, and doing everything we can on our
end to assure that the message gets through, we simply can’t get an answer to
our question in the way that we would like.
Maybe it’s as simple as a trial of our faith, or a chance for us to
practice decision making on our own. Or maybe we are trying to make a decision
in chapter two that will make no sense at all based on the plot twist in
chapter four—God sees the end from the beginning, and we do not. For whatever reason, sometimes the answers we
seek simply do not come. And the lesson
I learned was to take to heart the words of the hymn: “Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see the
distant scene, one step enough for me.” Elder
Dallin H. Oakes offered a comforting promise when we find ourselves in this
situation: “We are often left to work out problems,
without the dictation or specific direction of the Spirit. That is part of the
experience we must have in mortality. Fortunately, we are never out of our
Savior’s sight, and if our judgment leads us to actions beyond the limits of
what is permissible and if we are listening to the still small voice, the Lord
will restrain us by the promptings of His Spirit.”
I have
also learned through hard experience the dangers of ascribing additional
meaning to the promptings we receive. We
can probably all relate to this to some extent:
when we receive a confirmation about applying for a certain job or a
certain school, it can be tempting to assume that we will be accepted for that
job or that school. Similarly, if we
feel prompted to befriend a young man or woman, that doesn’t necessarily mean
that we are meant to marry that young man or woman.
On
occasion, this guidance will come in very forceful ways, as I discovered while
doing errands one Saturday. I needed new
shoes for church, so my plan was to stop at a shoe store on my way home. But when I reached that store and should have
slowed down to turn, I just kept driving.
I thought, “Well, that was odd … but, okay, I’ll just wear a different
outfit tomorrow.” I continued home, and later that evening I heard on the news
that that same shoe store had been robbed at gunpoint at the approximate time
that I would have been shopping there.
It’s
important to note that I still had a choice. I could have dismissed the warning
and turned my car around. The Spirit will never force our hand, but if we are
striving to live worthily of its influence, the promptings will sometimes be
very powerful, and very clear.
However,
most of the time, the messages take a much more subtle form, which leads to another
very common pitfall: telling ourselves
that promptings are “just our imagination.”
I took comfort in learning that even President Joseph F. Smith had that
reaction, before acting on a prompting that saved him from serious injury. But this begs the question: isn’t it possible that sometimes the thoughts
that cross our mind really are just our imagination?
Well …
probably so, yes. But in the September
1999 Ensign, Elder Lionel Kendrick taught a principle that I had never really
thought of before: “Our spirits carry with them a capacity to comprehend and to
receive the things of the Spirit. This
was given to us with our spiritual birth in premortal life. Elder
Marion G. Romney (1897–1988), then of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, spoke
of this capacity: ‘I believe that, notwithstanding the fact the spirits of men,
as an incident to mortality, are deprived of memory and cast out of the
presence of God, there still persists in the spirit of every human soul a
residuum from his pre-existent spiritual life which instinctively responds to
the voice of the Spirit until and unless it is inhibited by the free agency of
the individual.’”
The
phrase that really struck me was “this was given to us with our spiritual birth
in premortal life.” We know that we were
born as spirit children to our heavenly parents before we were physically born
to our earthly parents. When we received
our bodies, most of us received physical senses that allow us to hear, see,
smell, touch and taste physical things.
So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that our birth as spiritual beings
endowed us with spiritual senses, allowing us to perceive the things of the
spirit. In other words, as long as we
are not corrupting those spiritual senses, perhaps what we refer to as “our
imaginations” are far more in tune with divine communication than we might believe.
Speaking
of corrupting those spiritual senses, that is of course the primary obstacle to
receiving promptings from the Spirit.
Obedience to the commandments is a vital prerequisite to uninhibited
communication with the Holy Ghost. I didn’t always understand this principle—as
a child, the idea that we have to behave a certain way in order to receive this
communication seemed a bit pouty, almost manipulative: a sort of “I won’t give you what you want until you give
me what I want.”
Fortunately,
as I matured, so did my understanding, and a key aspect of that was when it
really clicked for me that the Holy Ghost is truly a member of the Godhead. He is HOLY in every sense of the word, and he
works in DIRECT association with our Father and our Savior. And as we know, these other two members of
that Godhead went to tremendous lengths, and made unimaginable sacrifices, to
safeguard our right to make our own choices.
So when our hearts and minds are set in defiance of the things of God, the
Godhead will respect that, and keep away.
Which means that, far from pouting, the third member of the Godhead is
in fact respecting our wishes and our choice.
As Joseph F. Smith stated, “The only safe way for us to do, as
individuals, is to live so humbly, so righteously and so faithfully before God
that we may possess his Spirit…”
So, to quickly
summarize what we can do to receive, recognize and understand promptings from
the spirit: first and foremost, we must
faithfully obey the commandments and fill our minds & hearts with the
things of righteousness. We must be
humble and teachable, and honest about our true motivations and desires. We must avoid relying on our own judgment,
either to question these promptings or to decide what “else” they might mean.
This is certainly not
an exhaustive list, and most us will probably make mistakes as we learn to
recognize and interpret these promptings.
But I know that God is infinitely loving and patient, and expects from
us only the best that we can do. His grace is sufficient for the rest.
