My talk (spiritual promptings)

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.