KevinSim wrote:I asked that question; I asked God if the LDS Church was true; and it's because of God's answer that I believe Joseph Smith's truth claims. I don't have faith in Smith; I have faith that the good God that controls the universe told me the truth about Smith; and therefore I believe what the LDS Church teaches about Smith.
But you don't know it was God speaking to you.
You asked a question and you got a feeling.
You chose to allocate that feeling as an affirmative answer being generated by God to answer the question you asked.
As far as I know from what you've said, God didn't use words to speak to you. So you chose to believe that you interpreted a feeling correctly.
Now was that feeling a burning in the bosom? If so, Apostle Oaks has never had an answer from God.
What does a “burning in the bosom” mean? Does it need to be a feeling of calorific heat, like the burning produced by combustion? If that is the meaning, I have never had a burning in the bosom. Surely, the word “burning” in this scripture signifies a feeling of comfort and serenity. That is the witness many receive. That is the way revelation works.
If God speaks via feelings of comfort and serenity then God did indeed tell me the Church wasn't true.
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Apostle Oaks also seems to allow for God using different feelings to different people to confirm the same messages.
"That is the witness many receive"
The key word being 'many'. If God chooses to communicate to people via feelings which are notoriously unreliable as a decision making method, why would He further cloud the issue by using multiple types of feeling? Unfortunately, within Mormonism particularly, this lack of clarity on the matter leads to all sorts of conjecture. Even down to people allocating God's hand in the locating of mislaid car keys. It also leaves us with the reality that we really cannot describe how God communicates to us in distinction to any other self generated feelings we might produce. When I score a goal playing football (real football, using a round ball and feet) in a really important match I get a burning in the bosom. When I hear people at testimony meeting describe the "witness" they have received they are describing the feeling I get when scoring that goal. No different. Are they both from God? Is God confirming to me that I scored and He is pleased? Or perhaps, is something else to account for why the same feelings can be given differing meanings....