Discernment in a Time of Deception
Editor’s Note: This is the next-to-last essay in Richard’s 18-article series on the insights and benefits of viewing the Restored Gospel through a familycentric lens. Meridian is grateful for this illuminating perspective and for the many comments and responses from our readers. (to see all of the earlier articles in the series, click here.)
Author’s Note: Thanks for all your attention and comments throughout this series. I hope today’s installment on discernment and deception will help us all to retain and add to the truth we each have. And I might also mention that my lifelong friend Craig Peterson is writing a Meridian series called The Screwtape Text Messages 2025 that is highly relevant to my essay today. Watch for it—you will love it and be scared by it.
I will be pleased to conclude next weekend with a very personal and vulnerable wrap up.
Following that, I will try to continue unfolding the familycentric paradigm through an introductory online class that is free to senior Meridian readers. Check it out and sign up if you would like at https://valuesparenting.com/how-to-live/.
The Deceiver and the Discerner
The adversary has many names—each of them accurate and each of them frightening: Satan, The Devil, The Accuser, The Anti-Christ, The Deceiver.
Without dwelling on him (C.S. Lewis said there are two mistakes we can make regarding Satan, “one is thinking about him too much, the other is thinking about him too little.”) let us focus for a few moments on the last name in that list—The Deceiver.
Could our parents, at our age, have imagined a time when AI and Social Media could put in front of us (and of our children) videos that are apparently authentic and accurate of people saying things with their faces, their mouths, and their voices that they never actually said?
Could even C.S. Lewis, who wrote a whole book on satan and his methods (The Screwtape Letters) have possibly envisioned the vast and powerful deception-tools available to him now?
And if we, as parents and grandparents are Gospel-grounded enough to see through the temptation and deception, how do we teach our kids and grandkids the kind of spiritual discernment they will need just to simply recognize truth and to distinguish it from error and cunning counterfeits?
We are, by ourselves, no match for the adversary. Only one thing is: a member of the Godhead.
And fortunately, that is exactly the gift that we and our baptized children and grandchildren have received—The gift of the Holy Ghost who is called, relative to this discussion, The Discerner of Truth.
The Discerner can overcome The Deceiver. Perhaps, in future days, He is the only thing that can.
Our Prayers for our Children
When we pray that our children and grandchildren will be able to distinguish the difference between true and false, between right and wrong, between genuine and counterfeit, between light and dark, between safety and savagery, between beauty and ugliness, between love and hate…what we are praying for is the Holy Ghost.
When confirmation blessings are given in English following baptisms, we say “Receive the Holy Ghost.” In some other languages, the word used for “receive” sounds less passive and more active—and means something more akin to “grasp” or “seek” or “find” or “obtain.”
The gift is the right to have, but that right is not automatic—it requires desire, and pursuit, and constant request. As we pray for the Holy Ghost to be with our children, can we also teach them to value it, and want it, and ask for it, and live worthy of it.
For it is the gift that is needed now more than ever before.
And it is a gift that, in addition to revealing truth, can enhance every aspect of our lives. Parley P. Pratt put it this way: “The gift of the Holy Ghost…quickens all the intellectual faculties, increases, enlarges, expands, and purifies all the natural passions and affections, and adapts them, by the gift of wisdom, to their lawful use. It inspires, develops, cultivates, and matures all the fine-toned sympathies, joys, tastes, kindred feelings, and affections of our nature. It inspires virtue, kindness, goodness, tenderness, gentleness, and charity. It develops beauty of person, form, and features. It tends to health, vigor, animation, and social feeling. It invigorates all the faculties of the physical and intellectual man. It strengthens and gives tone to the nerves. In short, it is, as it were, marrow to the bone, joy to the heart, light to the eyes, music to the ears, and life to the whole being.”
What a gift!
And how marvelous that the power that protects us from deception is the same one that fills us with unspeakable joy!
Feeling and Knowing
Imagine this multiple-choice question on a Gospel test:
What is our deepest Personal Challenge regarding the Restored Gospel?
- To Find It
- To Follow it
- To Feel It
- To have Faith in it
- All of the above
Most Church members would answer “e”.
But of these four F’s, perhaps the one we focus least on is “c”.
We want to find and to follow and to have faith, but do we understand that each of these involves feeling the Holy Ghost?
Our empirical, data-driven world underplays feeling. We want to see it, or hear it, or have it proved to us, yet our eyes and our ears frequently deceive us, sometimes by the design of the deceiver. Feelings from the Holy Ghost are more reliable than seeing or hearing, so much so that we know something so surely in that moment that it is impossible to deny.
The problem is that these feelings are fleeting. We can remember having them, but we cannot recreate them at will. We have to re-experience them once again—by asking, listening, worshiping.
And this is a gift that can become a spiritual skill. One that can inform our decisions and direct our lives—and those of our children.
The simple truth is that there are two ways of knowing—and the two ways can be simplified to the things we know with our brains and the things we know with our hearts.
I have a younger friend—someone I have sometimes tried to mentor—someone who is almost like a son in some ways—who decided, during the pursuit of his doctorate at an elite university, that he would not believe in anything that could not be proven to be true. He meant, of course, proven to his “brain.” I have urged him to accept the possibility of another kind of knowing—about things too big to fit in our brains—knowable only through the “heart.” I’ve asked him to leave room for a little magic, for something beyond his capacities, to acknowledge that there could be something bigger, something wiser, that can cause us to know by feeling a deeper truth than we can “prove.”
It is this other way of knowing, namely the Holy Ghost, that we need even more and ever-more in today’s world where the poisonous deceptions are so competent and compelling and confounding that the only antidote is spiritual discernment.
Indeed, spiritual “feeling” is another way of “seeing.” The scriptures refer to the “eye of faith,” and Enoch “beheld also things which were not visible to the natural eye.”
We talk a lot of what it would feel like to be with Jesus (Elder Kearon referenced it in His last conference talk) And though seeing Him and hearing Him would be amazing, those senses wouldn’t hold a candle to the way we would feel in his presence.
The Nephites, after spending just a single day with Christ, wanted nothing more than to keep feeling what they had felt when He was there. And the only power on earth that could make that possible was the constant presence of the Godhood in the form of the Holy Ghost.
A friend of mine once had a dream that she can never forget (nor can I, having heard about it). It was a simple dream, in which she was seated on a rocky hillside, listening to and seeing someone speak. She then realized in her dream that it was Jesus who was speaking and that she was in attendance at the Sermon on the Mount. But what she remembers from her dream is her feeling of fear that He would look at her, that He would see through her, into her, to her selfishness and flaws and sins. She kept her head down, making herself small like an unprepared child in a class trying not to be noticed or called on by the teacher.
And then, in the dream, Christ looked at her, looked directly into her eyes, and what she will never forget is the feeling, the complete love and acceptance and familiarity, and the deep longing that He would never look away.
Christ and Beauty
Can the paradigm of discernment be known and felt only through religion or theology or prayer to God? Or does our Heavenly Father give all of His children the Light of Christ, whether they know its name or not, and the capacity to recognize through our feelings the difference between truth and error?
Sometimes poets say spiritual things just as well as prophets.
Keats said, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”
And he doubled down by saying, even more provocatively, “Truth is beauty, beauty truth, that is all we know on earth and all we need to know.”
To one attuned to the Light of Christ, and even more to one receiving and applying the Holy Ghost, all things that are true, all that is of God, is beautiful; and all that is false, or of the adversary, is ugly. This may sound like an oversimplification, but it may in fact be the simplest form of discernment.
A Good Double Standard
Is it possible to teach our children a kind of divine and beneficial double standard—to be careful, guarded, even skeptical and questioning about things of the world—about trends and fashions and the philosophies of men—and yet to be faithful and obedient and childlike about the Gospel and the things of God—accepting, guided, obedient, reliant and dependent on Christ and the prayed-for feelings of the Holy Ghost? Can we be, as Christ invited us to be, “wise as serpents and harmless as doves?”
Yes, I believe it is. Yes, I believe we can. Yes, I believe we can teach our children and grandchildren to receive this gift. And yes, as Moroni remembers his Father teaching him, we can “lay hold on every good thing.”
We can follow, and teach our children to follow, the example of 3 Nephi 19: “And they did pray for that which they most desired; and they desired that the Holy Ghost should be given unto them.”
Richard Eyre is a New York Times #1 Bestselling Author who lectures throughout the world on matters of family, life-balance, and the spirit.
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