Revelation is the transmission of information from God to you. Revelation is a more accurate finite estimate of infinite reality. Note that this definition means that revelation is inherently circumstantial. It is true up to your level of awareness, but may not be true beyond your awareness. Also note that revelation is indistinguishable from learning. While all truth comes from God, this does not mean that all truth will be religiously oriented or found in explicitly religious channels. In other words, truth is truth no matter where it is found or how it is wrapped.
Because truth is infinite, while you can have no revelation on a subject, you can never get all revelation on a subject. Everything you think you know is either incorrect or incomplete. Even the most amazing revelations are only partial packets of truth.
Revelation can come as impressions, feelings, thoughts, ideas, words, sentences, understanding, visions, voices, and visitations, all of which are expansions of awareness or increased comprehension of good and evil.
Revelation from God is not external to your understanding. It is not something that comes from outside of you. It comes from within in response to what is outside of you. The light within you is the source of the revelation you receive.
The light of Christ is within you, to the degree of your awareness. It will show you all things that you should do (see 2 Nephi 32:2 and Moroni 10:5). Identifying situations where your current awareness does not provide sufficient information to know God’s mind on an issue provides you with opportunities to “search in the light of Christ” (see Moroni 7:19).
What is the light of Christ? It is your conscience; it is the quantity of light God has given you. When you obey God and seek for more light, he will increase this light within you, until you eventually obtain the awareness that God has (“the perfect day”, see Proverbs 4:18 and D&C 50:24).
Your conscience is an incredibly valuable resource. It is what you feel is right, not how you feel about what is right. It is the answer to “what is right”, not “what makes me feel good.” This is sometimes referred to as the burning of the bosom:
8 But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.
9 But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong; therefore, you cannot write that which is sacred save it be given you from me. (D&C 9)
The idea of revelation as coming from an internal source has important implications, one of which is how your level of awareness determines how and what you receive via revelation.
The Holy Ghost reveals the truth of all things according to your present level of understanding. God will speak to you in your own language:
Behold, I am God and have spoken it; these commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding . (D&C 1:24)
Your “language” doesn’t refer to English, Spanish, etc. It means that he will speak to you in terms of your present awareness. Your present awareness constrains the tools he can use and the breadth and depth of ideas he can explain to you. The Lord explained how he reveals further light and truth to us:
10 And now come, saith the Lord, by the Spirit, unto the elders of his church, and let us reason together, that ye may understand;
11 Let us reason even as a man reasoneth one with another face to face.
12 Now, when a man reasoneth he is understood of man, because he reasoneth as a man; even so will I, the Lord, reason with you that you may understand. (D&C 50)
New revelation always comes just beyond your present level of awareness. The lower your awareness, the more basic the revelation you are capable of receiving.
Therefore, the way to learn the truth of all things is to seek to understand all things. This is why it is so detrimental to have an incorrect understanding of the importance of learning. The simpler you are, the more limited you are in what God can teach you: “But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God.” (2 Nephi 9:29)
It is good to have awareness if you reconcile how you use it to God’s will. Not only is it incorrect to see knowledge as bad, it is impossible to grow in God’s light until and unless you acquire more knowledge. Yet, the possession of knowledge does not dictate how you use it.
Note that in order to apply the light of Christ, you have to study it out in your mind and ask if it is right. Too many oversimplify this process into literally and simply asking “is this right?” The Lord himself has clearly stated that this is not the way to obtain revelation: “Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me.” (D&C 9:7)
If getting revelation were as easy as just asking yes-or-no questions, why would God have said so much regarding learning to discern good from evil? Why would so many scriptural passages be dedicated to the evaluation process, if it were as simple as asking yes-or-no questions?
The vast majority of God’s awareness can’t be communicated through simple yes-or-no questions. If you limit yourself to this narrow channel, you will also cut yourself off from most of what God wants you to know. Furthermore, yes-or-no answers via feelings are the easiest to be mistaken on.
Searching in the light of Christ takes work. If we mistakenly assume it is as simple as asking yes-or-no questions, we will end up either with a very small set of truth, or a cloud of manufactured answers.
Even if we expand our understanding of the domain of revelation to include questions with more complicated answers, we still dramatically restrict our capacity for obtaining further light and truth. Revelation is increased awareness and increased light. It does not necessarily consist of an answer to a question, but of the information you need to “search in the light of Christ”—or to decide what is good and what is evil—beyond what you previously understood.
While it is a mistake to think that it is wise or acceptable to make educated guesses absent sufficient revelation to know God’s will, it is the case that there will be many situations where we can’t sincerely and confidently say that we know which outcome or course of action or idea is right. Rather than throw up our hands in revelatory nihilism, we should instead see every situation where we lack sufficient light as an opportunity to seek more.
Sincere reconciliation to your best knowledge is not the same as an educated guess. If you believe, without doubt, that you know what God would do in this situation (which is not the same as actually knowing what God would do), that is good and what you should do. If you aren’t sure what he would do, you have not yet sufficiently sought his will. You have to search for more revelation to know.
The Lord said: “Without faith you can do nothing.” (D&C 8:10) Asking in faith certainly requires looking into every resource you have at your disposal. This includes everything in the scriptures, as well as all good books and people you have access to. If you have not bothered looking into resources that you have the means to investigate, how can you expect God to show you what to do?
How to get revelation
Revelation comes through the mind and through the heart: “Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart.” (D&C 8:2) “Through the mind” refers to our thoughts. Our thoughts work in conjunction with our efforts to investigate: to study, to think, to reason, to test. All reason tends toward what is right, but is only as good as our honesty. We will selectively include or exclude observations and twist interpretations to the degree that we are willing to lie. “Through the heart” refers to our feelings and desires. These interplay because our feelings are useful only inasmuch as our desire is toward good continually. Inasmuch as we lack trust in God and/or desire what is not according to our best understanding of right and wrong, our feelings will lead toward evil.
Some things are revealed without our seeking them. These types of revelation are rare. Most revelation comes commensurate with the amount of consideration we invest. The Lord said that he will expand our awareness if we ask him to: “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.” (Jeremiah 33:3)
Many times the Lord has invited and instructed us to ask, seek, and knock. What does this mean? It means to consider there is more to be aware of than you presently know, and to seek God for it. It means to ask him questions with the intent to have your awareness expanded, knowing that many times this will include the replacement of things you currently regard as true with something better.
We get revelation most often according to the topics we desire. Our desire is like a flashlight pointing a specific direction in the dark. It both actuates our learning and constrains it.
It seems that we all constrain the topics and content of what God can reveal to us. There are things we would rather not know. Don’t fear God. He has never given you a reason to, and he never will. He alone is worthy of your perfect trust. God will never reveal something to you that you are incapable of obeying, and he will never reveal something to you that isn’t precisely calculated to yield the greatest joy you are prepared to receive.
By having a radically open mind, you will not constrain what he can tell you. Having an open mind does not mean ignoring everything you have learned to this point. It means being willing to question those things and replace them when sufficient reasoning is provided. Being open-minded opens the flood gates, admitting the consideration of all things, both true and false. Constricting that aperture will successfully reduce the quantity of falsehood you consider, but will do so at the expense of truth you’ll never get to.
The solution to false positives is not dogmatism (a constricted aperture), but discernment. Discernment is the ability to evaluate truth. The evaluation of truth is discussed in another chapter.
Discerning source and meaning
There are two challenges in discerning revelation: discerning the source and discerning the meaning. Revelation is not uniformly easy to perceive, understand, or test. It is vital to accept and correctly interpret real revelation while discarding all other putative messages. Learning these techniques is like developing a spring you find in the woods. Everyone is blessed with the light of Christ, or a water source. It is up to you to develop it. With a spring, you do this by digging out the mud, lining the hole with rocks, and building a reservoir to store the water. There are similar tactics to develop your channels for revelation.
It is vitally important to discern the source of a putative revelation. It is not enough to simply weigh the type of message (dream, vision, visitation, impression, etc.). Counterfeits exist at all levels of revelation. There is opposition in all things (see 2 Nephi 2:11), and revelation is not excluded. Opposition in revelation comes from counterfeit revelation. Revelation comes from God. Counterfeit revelation comes from Satan or from our imagination. The devil can appear as an angel of light, revealing wonderful new truth to you (mingled with error) in more glory than you’ve ever seen and tell you he is God. If he can do this, certainly you can be mistaken about faint impressions and everything in between.
Each source has a channel into your decision-making center. Each channel expands or contracts based on how much you seek it and how much you listen to what comes through it. Your body will tell you to do things that feel good. It has no altruism, and it is unconcerned with others except as tools to influence how you feel. The channel to Satan will tell you to do and feel things that draw you and/or others away from God and God’s purposes, whether you recognize it as such or not. God will do the opposite. While the body’s desires occur at a more or less constant rate, both God and Satan will send information intermittently. A person with a wide channel to God may go from minding their own business in one moment to having a sudden revelation about another person in the next. A person with a wide channel to Satan may go from completely rational in one moment to completely emotionally unhinged in the next. Each rational source (God and Satan) will use their resources strategically in the most likely way to bring about their desired outcome: Satan wants to maximize misery, and God wants to maximize joy.
How do you discern the source of a putative revelation? The Lord prescribed the following:
10 Behold, thou hast a gift, or thou shalt have a gift if thou wilt desire of me in faith, with an honest heart, believing in the power of Jesus Christ, or in my power which speaketh unto thee;
11 For, behold, it is I that speak; behold, I am the light which shineth in darkness, and by my power I give these words unto thee. 12 And now, verily, verily, I say unto thee, <u>put your trust in that</u> — <u>Spirit which leadeth to do good yea, to do justly, to walk humbly, to judge righteously; and this is my Spirit.</u>
13 Verily, verily, I say unto you, I will impart unto you of my Spirit, which shall enlighten your mind, which shall fill your soul with joy;
14 And then shall ye know, or by this shall you know, all things whatsoever you desire of me, which are pertaining unto things of righteousness, in faith believing in me that you shall receive. (D&C 11)
What is just, what is humble, what is righteous, what is good—all of these things vary according to the understanding of the individual. The Lord says to trust in your honest current understanding of these concepts, according to your mind. In plain language, the Lord said that to obey your conscience is to obey him.
What about things that lie outside of your moral understanding? For example, what if you get an impression of a future event? Another way to learn his voice is to learn what revelation from God is like to you. Describing this to another person is like explaining color to a blind person, or explaining to a man what it is like to be a woman. Some things you have to experience for yourself. Here is the process: Pay attention to what you think is his voice, then see what happens. The Holy Ghost is a revelator. It will reveal the future among anything it says. Soldiers use tracer rounds in a machine gun to guide their fire to the target. By paying attention to the trajectory of the tracer rounds, the shooter can tell where the non-tracer bullets are landing, even without seeing them. The impressions you get about the future during revelations will give you checkpoints you can use later to evaluate the source of truth. If the prophecies come to pass, use that as an indication that you are developing your discernment. If they don’t, mark that experience down as false.
Evaluating putative truth requires active thought and a developed intellect. Revelations ought to make sense. The Lord said: “Come now, and let us reason together.” (Isaiah 1:18; see also D&C 50:10-11). While it isn’t always possible to ask someone who is trying to share new truth with you to banter with you long enough for you to be persuaded, this is a reasonable and requisite practice with God, and can prove invaluable in our evaluation of putative revelation. Back and forth conversations with the Lord about a revelation he has provided are common enough in the scriptures. Don’t hesitate to provide him with the observations you have that don’t seem to square with your putative revelation. If he resolves them all, you can move forward in reconciliation to the light you have. If “he” doesn’t or can’t, your “he” might not be who you think it is.
The devil’s revelations, which are based at least in part of falsehood, always reach a breaking point when exposed to reason. For example, when the devil lied to Eve in the garden of Eden, he didn’t and couldn’t counter the argument that God had given to not eat the forbidden fruit. He sidestepped her complaint, and she didn’t bother bringing it up again:
1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: 5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. 6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. (Genesis 3)
Note how Eve did not honestly evaluate this situation. Instead of catching the devil’s lack of addressing her valid contention to his invitation, she ignored it because she saw something she desired independent of her understanding of what was right. Missing from the list of pros in verse 6 is any addressing of the issue of God’s having told them not to eat it.
You can misunderstand a revelation, even if it is from God. Many times, we will overlay what we wish he is telling us onto what he is actually telling us. Be careful of what your desires are, as discussed above.
Revelation can come through low information or high information events. Understanding the information value of a message is important in discerning its source and content. Information is a function of content (low to high) and intensity (low to high). Content means how much there is to the revelation, and intensity means how strong it is. For example, a waking vision is high content and high intensity. The voice of God with a short message is low content and high intensity.
The lower the information, the easier it is to be mistaken about the source or content of a revelation. High information revelation is much more readily tested than low information revelation. If I say that sometime in the future it will rain, I will be 100% correct, but this does not mean that this was anything but a guess. If God tells you that on a certain day, the sun will stand still in the sky, it will be very clear whether or not this is true.
The higher the intensity, the lower the odds of misinterpreting the revelation. The higher the content, the lower the odds of misjudging the source.
The importance of the message is not determinable by the information content or intensity level of it. Your whole life could swing on a little hinge of a faint impression. Consider that Lehi was warned of the impending destruction of Jerusalem in a dream. Would you have packed up your family, left all your belongings, and moved into the desert based on a dream only? Yet, had he not, he and his family would have been killed. Joseph’s dream saved the entire nation of Egypt, and many others beside. Most of Daniel’s powerful revelations came through dreams. God gives incredibly important instructions through impressions, voices, and dreams. Denying them may very well be the difference between blessing and cursing, life and death.
You can know something is right and still feel awful about doing it. Feelings are usually insufficient to indicate revelation because they are a very low information channel. You can feel good about bad things, and bad about good things. In fact, you are likely to feel bad about good things because good things will tend to push you beyond your comfort zone and challenge what you presently believe. When the scriptures refer to feelings, they are not referring to feelings in general, but the specific feeling you get when you reflect an idea off the light that is within you. Jesus did not feel excited when he prayed for the Father to take the bitter cup away from him, but he knew what he was being asked to do was the right thing. The importance of this point can’t be stressed enough! What you are after isn’t how you feel about it, but what the light in you says about it. Contradicting your traditions or public sentiment will always feel bad, but God’s will lies in the strait and narrow path.