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.