I would like to tell you about my friend Harvey. Harvey was a LDS boy who was enthusiastic about missionary work. He would constantly stop and talk to others about the gospel of Jesus Christ. However occasionally Harvey would get stumped on a question. He just didn’t know the answer. Well the people asking the question would then use that to prove that he didn’t know about his own religion. Like Harvey, often while going through my daily life I am questioned on my religion. Often I do not know how to answer their questions. Many other people, who aren’t LDS, go through this same thing. I am happy to answer anyone’s questions, but sometimes you can tell that they aren’t really interested in the gospel. Those people are just trying to get at you. Sometimes it just gets old or you just don’t know the answer to their question. Why does all this pressure from the world fall upon us? Well the answer is simple, Satan knows that we know the truth. He knows that we are on the straight and narrow path and he will do anything to get us to get off the straight and narrow path. One of his techniques is to try to get others to make us feel inadequate by having them dog pile us with questions we don’t know. How do we get past these questions without being told we don’t know the gospel of Jesus Christ? My Teachers quorum leader Michael Doyle told me something, which has made the most dramatic change at the way I answer people’s questions of the gospel. He said this:
“If you do not know the answer to their question don’t be afraid to say ‘I don’t know…,but I can find out.’ Then go home and read your scriptures, pray, and ask you parents,leaders and teachers until you do know. Then go back and tell them what you have learned.”
Who knows where that may lead? Maybe they will feel that you cared for them so much that you answered their question out of the many questions you get every day. One example I love of how to answer someone who is trying to get at you is from Elder Boyd K. Packers talk called The Candle of the Lord. Here is a section from it.
I will tell you of an experience I had before I was a General Authority which affected me profoundly. I sat on a plane next to a professed atheist who pressed his disbelief in God so urgently that I bore my testimony to him. “You are wrong,” I said, “there is a God. I know He lives!”
He protested, “You don’t know. Nobody knows that! You can’t know it!” When I would not yield, the atheist, who was an attorney, asked perhaps the ultimate question on the subject of testimony. “All right,” he said in a sneering, condescending way, “you say you know. Tell me how you know.”
When I attempted to answer, even though I held advanced academic degrees, I was helpless to communicate.
Sometimes in your youth, you young missionaries are embarrassed when the cynic, the skeptic, treat you with contempt because you do not have ready answers for everything. Before such ridicule, some turn away in shame. (Remember the iron rod, the spacious building, and the mocking? See 1 Ne. 8:28.)
When I used the words Spirit and witness, the atheist responded, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” The words prayer, discernment, and faith, were equally meaningless to him. “You see,” he said, “you don’t really know. If you did, you would be able to tell me how you know.”
I felt, perhaps, that I had borne my testimony to him unwisely and was at a loss as to what to do. Then came the experience! Something came into my mind. And I mention here a statement of the Prophet Joseph Smith: “A person may profit by noticing the first intimation of the spirit of revelation; for instance, when you feel pure intelligence flowing into you, it may give you sudden strokes of ideas … and thus by learning the Spirit of God and understanding it, you may grow into the principle of revelation, until you become perfect in Christ Jesus.” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, comp. Joseph Fielding Smith, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1977, p. 151.)
Such an idea came into my mind and I said to the atheist, “Let me ask if you know what salt tastes like.”
“Of course I do,” was his reply.
“When did you taste salt last?”
“I just had dinner on the plane.”
“You just think you know what salt tastes like,” I said.
He insisted, “I know what salt tastes like as well as I know anything.”
“If I gave you a cup of salt and a cup of sugar and let you taste them both, could you tell the salt from the sugar?”
“Now you are getting juvenile,” was his reply. “Of course I could tell the difference. I know what salt tastes like. It is an everyday experience—I know it as well as I know anything.”
“Then,” I said, “assuming that I have never tasted salt, explain to me just what it tastes like.”
After some thought, he ventured, “Well-I-uh, it is not sweet and it is not sour.”
“You’ve told me what it isn’t, not what it is.”
After several attempts, of course, he could not do it. He could not convey, in words alone, so ordinary an experience as tasting salt. I bore testimony to him once again and said, “I know there is a God. You ridiculed that testimony and said that if I did know, I would be able to tell you exactly how I know. My friend, spiritually speaking, I have tasted salt. I am no more able to convey to you in words how this knowledge has come than you are to tell me what salt tastes like. But I say to you again, there is a God! He does live! And just because you don’t know, don’t try to tell me that I don’t know, for I do!”
As we parted, I heard him mutter, “I don’t need your religion for a crutch! I don’t need it.”
From that experience forward, I have never been embarrassed or ashamed that I could not explain in words alone everything I know spiritually. The Apostle Paul said it this way:
“We speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.”
“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Cor. 2:13–14.)
One place in the scripture that shows someone who couldn’t speak is Jeremiah 1:4-10:
4The LORD spoke his word to me, saying:
5 "Before I made you in your mother’s womb, I chose you.
Before you were born, I set you apart for a special work.
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations."
6 Then I said, “But Lord GOD, I don’t know how to speak. I am only a boy.”
7 But the Lord said to me, “Don’t say, ‘I am only a boy.’ You must go everywhere I send you, and you must say everything I tell you to say. 8 Don’t be afraid of anyone, because I am with you to protect you,” says the LORD.
9 Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth. He said to me, "See, I am putting my words in your mouth.
10 Today I have put you in charge of nations and kingdoms. You will pull up and tear down, destroy and overthrow, build up and plant."
I would like to bear my testimony I know that when faced with a question we don’t know the Lord will help us to find the truth. I know that if we are bold enough to stand up for what we believe in we the Lord will help us to understand and deliver that message to the people who need to hear it. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ amen.
Sources
http://www.collegebaseballtoday.com/2010/06/13/five-more-teams-scan-their-tickets-for-omaha/
https://www.lds.org/ensign/1983/01/the-candle-of-the-lord?lang=eng
https://www.lds.org/ensign/1983/01/the-candle-of-the-lord?lang=eng
I haven't heard a question that I can't answer YET, but your well written article has provided me with more ammunition to my portfolio. Thank you very much for sharing.
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