Revelation Gone Wrong

“Hal, if you want to get revelation, do your homework.”

Harold B. Lee, as recalled by Henry B. Eyring, “Waiting upon the Lord”

Picture a young couple who have known each other for a few months. They each fast and pray about getting married, and they each feel a warm, peaceful assurance. They take it as a confirmation from God and set a date. Nobody asks whether they’ve talked about money, or children, or how they handle a fight. The Spirit has answered. What else is there to discuss?

I have watched marriages begin on nothing more than a “confirmation of the Spirit,” and I’ve watched some of them progress from their start to their bitter end. I’ve seen the same pattern with job changes, home purchases, investments and moves.

None of this means prayer is bad or that faithful people are fools. It means we’ve built a habit around personal revelation that the scriptures themselves don’t support. In this essay I want to show you that habit, and offer a better one. I call it applied thinking.

“Living by the Spirit”

There’s a common belief in the church that “living by the Spirit” means receiving impressions about the small details of our lives, almost as though God would micromanage us if we’d let him. Seeking that kind of constant revelation is treated as a sign of being close to God.

I’ve seen that belief turn, far more often than you might think, into a need for frequent emotional highs. I’ve seen admirable, devout members follow it to the point of dissolving otherwise healthy marriages. I’ve seen others become so proud of their “connectedness” with God that they alienated the people who loved them most.

But this kind of relationship with God flies in the face of other basic church doctrines. Consider what the Lord says in the Doctrine and Covenants: “it is not meet that I should command in all things; for he that is compelled in all things, the same is a slothful and not a wise servant” (D&C 58:26). We’re to be “anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of [our] own free will,” because “the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves” (verses 27–28).

Imagine a parent who encouraged their child to seek approval for drawing every picture, washing every dish, cleaning every part of their body, and more so as the child grew older. What kind of person do we think God is trying to raise?

It is not in the destiny of man to be spoon fed by God.

Do your homework

Here’s what I’ve noticed. As members, we tend to skip our responsibility to study, reason and use sound judgment, and we look instead for a feeling that will tell us what to do. And we do it most when careful thinking matters most: whom to marry, whether to have a child, whether to change jobs or make a large purchase. We often put less research into those decisions than into a college exam. We suppose that if we just pray, God will give us the shortcut.

The scriptures say otherwise. When Oliver Cowdery failed to translate, the Lord told him, “you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me.” He was to “study it out in your mind” first (D&C 9:7–8). Study and reason aren’t the opposite of revelation. In fact, they’re often the prerequisite. Trusting your God-given capacity to think is not “trusting in the arm of the flesh.”

Notice, too, the story behind the epigraph. A young Henry B. Eyring asked President Harold B. Lee how to get revelation, and the answer was “do your homework.” He went to another person for counsel, not only to God. We should do the same: seek counsel from science, from friends, from subject matter experts, even from people we’re tempted to think of as beneath us. Ninety percent of what they offer may be no better than what we already have. I believe we’re meant to find the other ten percent there, not wait for heaven to hand it to us.

So here’s the principle, plainly. A prompting or confirmation described by feelings and emotions should not displace the role of applied thinking, especially in weighty life decisions.

Feelings make poor guides for those decisions. I’ve felt anxiety and fear before some of the best choices I’ve ever made. I’ve felt eager, hopeful and at peace about choices I’m glad today that I didn’t follow. Had I treated either feeling as revelation, I’d have gotten both wrong.

Personal revelation is ordinary

Then what is personal revelation? Here’s the claim that tends to startle people: personal revelation is not special. It’s ordinary, commonplace and unremarkable.

Look at how the tradition itself describes it. Joseph Smith said that “when you feel pure intelligence flowing into you, it may give you sudden strokes of ideas” (Teachings: Joseph Smith, ch. 10). He didn’t say they had to be epiphanies, or secrets unknown to the rest of humanity. By that standard, the sudden urge to go to the bathroom might as well count.

Mormon said, “that which is of God inviteth and enticeth to do good continually” (Moroni 7:13). President Hinckley taught that “that which enlighteneth, that which buildeth up, that which is positive and affirmative and uplifting and leads us to better thoughts and better words and better deeds is of the Spirit of God” (Teachings: Gordon B. Hinckley, ch. 7).

If that’s the test, then every good thought counts. The urge to stop what you’re doing and hug someone you love. The resolve to restart that diet. The moment a hard concept finally clicks. The calm you feel about marrying someone after you’ve honestly evaluated the relationship. We don’t need to distinguish between good thoughts and inspired thoughts. In fact, they’re the same.

That makes personal revelation less special, but not less important. Doing good can have far-reaching effects on our lives. We should act on our urges to do good. We should just hold them with modesty, and stay teachable and correctable.

Prophets are not the template

So where does the habit come from? I think it comes from the stories we love most.

Lehi led his family into the wilderness. Nephi set aside his own moral judgment to slay Laban. Noah built an ark on dry land. Abraham laid his son on an altar. In each story, revelation required something that defied common sense or even the law.

When we imagine that personal revelation works the same way, we’ve made a mistake. We start to treat a feeling about a car, a house or a spouse as if it carried a prophet’s authority, and no rational argument can dissuade us. Our culture sometimes even praises the most intense practitioners of this kind of faith and holds them up as examples. But intensity is not the same thing as health. That’s where revelation goes wrong.

Back to the couple

So was our young couple wrong to pray? No. Praying wasn’t the mistake. Skipping the homework was.

Picture them again. This time they talk about money. They meet each other’s families. They ask people who love them what they see. They watch how they handle a disagreement. Then they pray. If they feel peace, that peace means something: it’s the calm that comes from having done the work. And if they don’t feel peace, they still have everything they learned.

Nothing in this essay asks anyone to stop believing. It only asks us to think before we feel our way into the biggest decisions of our lives.

For more on what that warm feeling actually is, read The Things We Feel. For where I stand with the church today, see my letter to my Mormon family and friends.