Bishopric Message – August 2017
How Does the Holy Ghost Communicate with You?
The Gift of the Holy Ghost is an amazingly wonderful and generous gift from a loving Heavenly Father who knew that we would need this help to navigate through mortality and successfully return to Him. A common concern I see in the Church, and specifically as I talk with youth and other ward members, is understanding HOW the Spirit communicates with us personally.
My own experience is that as we make a personal decision to do our best to understand the spirit and make that commitment to follow what we perceive as its promptings, then the Lord sees that sincere effort and will reward us with additional and more clarified guidance. Its just like learning any language—the more we apply ourselves and put ourselves in situations where we can hear it, and practice and use it often, the better we become at understanding it.
The first, and most important piece of the formula for learning how the Spirit communicates with us is to put ourselves in situations where we can hear the language. That means spending time daily in prayer, and regular study of the scriptures. It means attending church weekly and participating in youth activities. It means serving others. One of the best ways I have found to keep the Spirit in my life is through temple attendance. The Spirit is present at an increased level in the temple and as we go there often we gradually become more expert in the language of the Spirit.
As we regularly do these things we start to understand, “Oh, this is how the Spirit communicates with me!” Maybe its subtle impressions, maybe its joyful feelings, maybe its tears, maybe its laughter, maybe its peace, maybe it’s those “A-ha!” moments, maybe its simply the feeling that says, “Yes, this is right and true.”
The wonderful thing to realize is that the Lord WANTS us to figure it out and He is just there waiting patiently and lovingly, and He will nudge us and help us along gently, but we need to put ourselves in those places where we will hear the language of the Spirit and thus become better at understanding, and then in time, better at speaking that language in a way that allows us to help others feel it and learn for themselves how the Spirit communicates with them. Isn’t God’s plan beautiful?!
