The Voice of the Lord

One of my favorite Mormon Message videos is one that shares a talk by President Faust called “Voice of the Spirit” (see here).  In it he spoke of the need for us to be able to hear the Spirit of the Lord in the midst of so many other voices in the world and that like the old radios, it would take careful tuning to hear the right message.  He said that we would be “suffocated with information”, a prophecy that came before the internet was in full swing and which was truly prophetic.  How suffocated indeed we are today!  With access to such a magnitude of information from any computer, it is no easy task to focus on that information which is of most worth.  The Lord told us to seek learning from the “best books”—and we could certainly extend that to “best websites”—and being good or interesting of entertaining was not the criteria (D&C 109:7).  We should spend our time only with that which is best, and discerning what that is comes only through the Spirit of the Lord. 

                President Faust spoke again about radios and messages in a 2004 conference talk entitled “Did You Get the Right Message?” (see here).  In it he said, “We must attune ourselves to the inspiration from God and tune out the scratchy static. We have to work at being tuned in. Most of us need a long time to become tuned in.”  One of the problems with our generation amidst the technology revolution is that it becomes harder and harder to do this.  We become so accustomed to have instant everything—instant downloads, instant movies and entertainment, instant answers to questions through the internet, etc.—that it is hard to have to wait for spiritual knowledge which has no instant label on it.  How many of us could really do what Enos did to pray “all the day long” and into the night?  If God didn’t answer after fifteen minutes, certainly it wouldn’t be worth continuing, right?  In another example, Nephi the son of Nephi “cried mightily unto the Lord all that day”, and it wasn’t until after this that the voice of the Lord came to him.  Even with such a pressing problem, at what point would we have stopped praying, or would we have had the patience and faith and determination to keep supplicating the Lord until He answered? 

                Ultimately if we don’t have the faith and patience to hear the messages that the Lord wants to give us, then the world will certainly fill in the gaps with plenty of ever-changing messages that it has to offer.  The world’s voices generally aren’t still and they aren’t small, but the Lord’s way to communicate does not adapt just because the world’s messages get louder.  It will always take careful tuning of our spiritual ears to hear the voice of God.  But we can get there and ultimately know that the path we are taking in life is pleasing unto God, for “thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it” (Isaiah 30:21).