What We Desire

The scriptures teach that ultimately we will receive according to our true desires.  This is perhaps most succinctly stated by Alma, “I know that [God] granteth unto men according to their desire, whether it be unto death or unto life….  He that knoweth good and evil, to him it is given according to his desires, whether he desireth good or evil, life or death, joy or remorse of conscience” (Alma 29:4-5).  He later taught his son Corianton that each person is “raised to happiness according to his desire of happiness, or good according to his desires of good” (Alma 19:7).  Both of these scriptures refer to our ultimate destination: we will receive salvation and happiness in eternal life if we truly desire it.  But I think this principle of the Lord granting our desires extends to our lives here and now.  Of course we can’t expect that the Lord will grant us something that is against His will, and we may have righteous desires that simply are not in God’s plan for us, but in many cases perhaps we desire too little of the Lord.  In the example of Enos, the Lord granted his desire after he showed it was truly what his soul yearned for.  Wrote Enos, “And it came to pass that after I had prayed and labored with all diligence, the Lord said unto me: I will grant unto thee according to thy desires, because of thy faith” (Enos 1:12).  This was not a flippant request of the Lord: Enos prayed and labored will all his heart before the Lord granted him his desires.  Nephi showed us the same thing as he fervently desired spiritual knowledge: “Having great desires to know the mysteries of God, wherefore, I did cry unto the Lord; and behold he did visit me” (1 Nephi 2:16).  Later on their journey to the promised land and with the same goal for spiritual knowledge he wrote, “I, Nephi, was desirous also that I might see, and hear, and know of these things, by the power of the Holy Ghost, which is the gift of God unto all those who diligently seek him….  After I had desired to know the things that my father had seen, and believing that the Lord was able to make them known unto me, as I sat pondering in my heart I was caught away in the Spirit of the Lord” (1 Nephi 10:17, 11:1).  The Lord visited him in a powerful way because of his deep desire to know the things that his father saw.  The Lord will likely not grant all our righteous wishes in mortality, but how much do we fail to receive blessings and spiritual knowledge from the Lord because we do not seek and desire and ask like Nephi and Enos?  Our attitude should be like that of Moses, “I will not cease to call upon God, I have other things to inquire of him” (Moses 1:18).