Revelation and You
Some of us fail to live so that we can understand the message that comes from eternity when God speaks, but if each of us could commit ourselves to obey God’s commandments and live as we should, a wonderful change would be effected in us, and we could then hear the messages from the unseen world.
I had that illustrated some years ago when I served as a stake president. We had a very grievous case that had to come before the high council and the stake presidency that resulted in the excommunication of a man who had harmed a lovely young girl. After a nearly all-night session that resulted in that action, I went to my office rather weary the next morning and was confronted by a brother of this man whom we had on trial the night before. This man said, “I want to tell you that my brother wasn’t guilty of what you charged him with.”
“How do you know he wasn’t guilty?” I asked.
“Because I prayed, and the Lord told me he was innocent,” the man answered.
I asked him to come into the office and we sat down, and I asked, “Would you mind if I ask you a few personal questions?”
He said, “Certainly not.”
“How old are you?”
“Forty-seven.”
“What priesthood do you hold?”
He said he thought he was a teacher.
“Do you keep the Word of Wisdom?”
“Well, no.” He used tobacco, which was obvious.
“Do you pay your tithing?”
He said, “No”—and he didn’t intend to as long as that terrible man was the bishop of the ward.
I said, “Do you attend your priesthood meetings?”
He replied, “No, sir!” and he didn’t intend to as long as that man was bishop.
“You don’t attend your sacrament meetings either?”
“No, Sir.”
“Do you have your family prayers?” and he said, “No.”
“Do you study the scriptures?” He said his eyes were bad, and he couldn’t read very much.
I then said to him: “In my home I have a beautiful instrument called a radio. When everything is functioning properly we can dial it to a certain station and hear the voice of a speaker on the other side of the world, but after we have used it for a long time the radio tubes begin to wear out. The radio may sit there looking just like it did before, but because of what has happened on the inside, we can hear nothing.
“Now,” I said, “you and I have within our souls something like what might be said to be a counterpart of those radio tubes. We might have what we call a ‘go-to-sacrament-meeting’ tube, a ‘keep-the-Word-of-Wisdom’ tube, a ‘pay-your-tithing’ tube, a ‘have-your-family-prayers’ tube, a ‘read-the-scriptures’ tube, and, as one of the most important—one that might be said to be the master tube of our whole soul—we have what we might call the ‘keep-yourselves-morally-clean’ tube. If one of these becomes worn out by disuse or inactivity—if we fail to keep the commandments of God—it has the same effect upon our spiritual selves that a worn-out tube has in a radio.
“Now, then,” I said, “fifteen righteous men living in the stake prayed last night. They heard the evidence and every man was united in saying that your brother was guilty. Now you, who do none of these things, you say you prayed and got an opposite answer. How would you explain that?”
Then this man gave an answer that I think was a classic. He said, “Well, President Lee, I think I must have gotten my answer from the wrong source.” And, you know, that’s just as great a truth as we can have. We get our answers from the source of the power we tend to obey. If we are following the ways of the devil, we will get answers from the devil. If we are keeping the commandments of God, we will get our answer from God.
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