Our Own Sacred Grove

President Nelson said this about receiving revelation, “The Prophet Joseph Smith set a pattern for us to follow in resolving our questions. Drawn to the promise of James that if we lack wisdom we may ask of God, the boy Joseph took his question directly to Heavenly Father. He sought personal revelation, and his seeking opened this last dispensation.”  President Nelson then asked, “In like manner, what will your seeking open for you? What wisdom do you lack? What do you feel an urgent need to know or understand? Follow the example of the Prophet Joseph. Find a quiet place where you can regularly go. Humble yourself before God. Pour out your heart to your Heavenly Father. Turn to Him for answers and for comfort.”  Indeed the young boy Joseph gave us an excellent example to follow of how to turn to the Lord for revelation.  We each need to have our own Sacred Grove where we can turn to commune with the Divine. 

            There are several principles that we learn about seeking revelation from the Joseph Smith story.  First, he diligently sought answers from the means he had available to him.  He was searching in every way he knew how to understand the messages of the various religious parties, and said, “In the midst of this war of words and tumult of opinions, I often said to myself: What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it?” (JSH 1:10)  When he struggled to get answers from the people around him, he next turned to the scriptures: “While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists, I was one day reading the Epistle of James, first chapter and fifth verse, which reads: If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” (JST 1:11)  He didn’t just read a single verse, but he recorded that the passage of scripture came with great power to his heart.  He said, “I reflected on it again and again, knowing that if any person needed wisdom from God, I did; for how to act I did not know, and unless I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know” (JSH 1:12).  This is surely how the Lord wants us to study and ponder the scriptures, such that we reflect on them again and again until they penetrate our hearts.  After this of course he turned to prayer.  This was not a 30 second prayer to the Lord that he offered, but he prepared for a long time, even choosing a place in advance of the actual event, for he said he “retired to the place where I previously designed to go.”  He found a quiet place, alone, where he “kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of [his] heart to God” (JSH 1:15).  After seeking, reading, pondering, likely for months, he poured out his heart to God and received the answer that he sought.  That grove of trees became sacred because of his diligence in seeking the Lord, and we can each follow his example to find the Lord’s answers to our own questions.  Each of us can indeed have our own place of refugee where we can turn to the Lord and find our own sacred grove experiences.