Chapter 10: The Importance of Alignment with God

Increasing the good you receive from God by increasing your alignment with him

God is the source and fulfillment of all good. Everything positive comes from and leads to God, and the concentration of its value increases the closer to him it is. Every positive experience and outcome flows from God through a conduit whose bandwidth is determined by how well aligned you are with God. God’s blessings come through righteousness, and those who seek to find greater outcomes through anything but learning more about and becoming more like him will be sorely disappointed.¹ It is impossible to describe anything more important than opening the aperture of the flow between you and God, as everything you accomplish, the strength and endurance with which you labor towards it, the joy you have during and after, and every other significant or meaningful thing will be determined by how aligned you are with God.

The conduit from God to you has several critical components, each of which requires tuning in order to maximize the quantity, quality, and longevity of blessings from him to you:

• The source
• The destination
• The bandwidth
• The distance

As you perfect each of these components, you will maximize the blessings that you receive from God.

The source

You begin to seek the blessings of God from where you are. Any limit you have in the accuracy and depth of how you see yourself will limit the flow of blessings from God to you.

You can’t be aligned with God more than you are aligned with yourself. It should be no surprise that while you are out of harmony with yourself, you cannot be in harmony with God.² In order to maximize flow from God to you, you have to be “pure in heart,” or aware of and aligned in what you think, feel, and do.³ You will only have God’s goodness in your life to the extent that you align everything that comes out of you with everything inside of you.⁴

As you learn who you really are and discover and remedy any dishonesty in how you think, feel, or act, you will remove barriers that prevent the maximal flow of good from God to you and, through you, to others. Complete honesty maximally opens the channel of God’s goodness in your life.⁵ As you live fully integrated in your mind, heart, body, and spirit, you will become an unimpeded channel for God’s light to flow into the world:

`I am the door, and if anyone enters in through becoming how they understand me to be, he will be saved, and I will flow into him, and I will flow out of him, and he will increase and expand in the pasture I provide. (John 10:9, Author’s Reflection)`

When you are in total alignment, God’s light can flow into, through, and from you without impedance.⁶

You can’t see God beyond how accurately you see yourself. You can’t see much of how God really is beyond how much you see yourself as you really are. Any inaccuracy in your self-awareness will limit your ability to see God. To the extent that you do not see parts of yourself correctly, you will likewise see God incorrectly. Your inner and outer selves are the canvas upon which more of God’s character is painted. Until you know who you really are in your desires, thoughts, and actions versus who and how you wish you were, you will not be able to identify, make, and apply the changes necessary to align with God.

You can’t see much more of God more than you see yourself. You can’t see the breadth of God beyond how extensively you see your own breadth. To the extent that you do not see parts of yourself at all, you will not see the pertinent parts of God.

You can’t see the depth of God beyond the depth of yourself that you see. You will never know God much more deeply than you know yourself. If you don’t yet know yourself, being far less than God, how can you ever expect to know God?

The gospel is about gaining greater awareness of God, and fully aligning yourself with him in how you act and feel. You can’t do that while you are still unaware of and inconsistent in how you think, act, and feel.

The destination

God is the destination you seek.⁷ Any limit you have in the accuracy and depth of how you see God will limit the flow of blessings from him to you. Ignorance or error in how you see God will create limits in the trust you have in God, the motivation you have for making changes to become more like him, and the accuracy of the changes you make to become more like him.

The Lord promised that we will encounter additional evidence to build our trust in him as we follow his example.⁸ Part of this evidence comes from receiving what we ask from him. The scriptures contain many promises from the Lord that he will grant us what we ask, believing it is right, and believing God will give it:

22 ...Have faith in God.
23 For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.
24 Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. (Mark 11)

And whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, which is right, believing that ye shall receive, behold it shall be given unto you. (3 Nephi 18:20)

...God...doth grant unto you whatsoever ye ask that is right, in faith, believing that ye shall receive..... (Mosiah 4:21)

...Whatsoever thing ye shall ask the Father in my name, which is good, in faith believing that ye shall receive, behold, it shall be done unto you. (Moroni 7:26)

If you do not receive greater evidence as a result of doing what you believe is his will, you should assume that something is significantly lacking in your understanding of God and search for those who have succeeded further than you. You will only do this to the extent you are honest. Very few people recognize or respond to these signals, but if you maintain enough humility to prefer a greater relationship with God through correction than you do the false pleasure of affirmation in your present beliefs about him, he will abundantly bless you with an increasingly improved idea of how he is.⁹

The depth, breadth, and accuracy of your knowledge of God is far more important than getting what you want. Greater evidence of the correctness of your understanding of God’s will is essential to having greater trust in God which, in turn, is required for him to lead you to making more significant changes to become more like him to receive even greater blessings.

Only to the extent that you know God can you accurately compare and contrast yourself with him to then enumerate improvements by which you can become more like him:

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. (John 17:3)

As you pay attention to your idea of how God is and fully live up to it, you will receive ample feedback indicating where your understanding of him is lacking or incorrect.

The bandwidth

It is important to understand that total alignment with God is a functional requirement: it opens the gateway to greater flow of God’s goodness into your life. The Lord taught that:

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. (Matthew 6:22)

This passage is recited more often than it is understood. The Greek words translated as “eye” and “single” are significant contributors to the confusion. “Single” here means united, whole, without complication or contradiction, and clear. To have a single eye is to be fully aware of what you want, why you want it, and how to get it. It requires working fully to obtain it, without any hidden motives or dishonest perspectives. To have an eye single to God is to be an integrated, honest person whose central, transcendent purpose is to learn and accomplish the will of God.

The bandwidth of the connection with God available to us spans an enormous range. While all people are born with a baseline connection to God,¹⁰ it is possible to expand this connection to such an extent as to have constant and complete access to the very next increment of anything God could possibly tell you.¹¹

The bandwidth of the conduit between God and you is much like a riflescope: its usefulness depends on what you point it at and how well you align the scope to it. What you think, feel, and do are interrelated. The more they are aligned and focused on God, the faster you will grow in his knowledge, wisdom, and power. The more aligned you are with God, the more you will be able to do what others can’t. Jesus was able to do what others couldn’t¹² because he was better aligned with the Father than anyone else. This is why Jesus was able to cast out devils that his disciples could not,¹³ and even as a child had greater wisdom than the most learned elders.¹⁴

The more aligned you are with God, the more God’s goodness will flow into you independent of whatever is happening outside or around you.¹⁵ God’s influence will enliven, improve, and enhance everything in your life. Everything will be better.¹⁶ You will feel greater strength to persevere when you are down,¹⁷ and when you feel good, you will feel better for longer.¹⁸

The more coherent you are in what you think feel, and do, the more you have aligned these with your understanding of God, and the more correct your understanding of God is, the greater your bandwidth with God will be.¹⁹ To the extent any of these tunings are lacking, you will see much less of God and receive much less from him.

The distance

Almost no one honestly considers the abundant evidence they have of their distance from God. In the scriptures, we regularly read of examples of people whose lives were full of the undeniable, significant, and abundant fruits of a rich relationship with God. Because God does not change,²⁰ those who enjoy anything less should admit that their distance from God is much greater than that of those they read about in the scriptures.²¹

The distance between you and God is a result of your lack of understanding of how he is, which is itself due to your unwillingness to live up to what you already know about him. Each way in which you think, feel, or act less than the best you know creates impedance between you and God.²² Every difference between how you are and how you believe God to be creates an obstruction in the flow of God’s goodness to and through you.

It is possible to close the distance between you and God. This is done as you learn about and make whatever changes are necessary to become more like him. In order to begin increasing the flow of God’s goodness in your life, you must first live up to the goodness he has already revealed to you.²³ To move towards God requires you to consistently think, feel, and do what you perceive as best and to improve your understanding of what is best. To clear the obstructions between you and God and maximize the flow, you have to pierce and tear the barriers, obtaining a “broken heart and contrite spirit” through fully emulating the example of God, as far as you understand him to be:

8 Verily I say unto you, all among them who know their hearts are honest, and are broken, and their spirits contrite, and are willing to observe their covenants by sacrifice— yea, every sacrifice which I, the Lord, shall command— they are accepted of me.
9 For I, the Lord, will cause them to bring forth as a very fruitful tree which is planted in a goodly land, by a pure stream, that yieldeth much precious fruit. (D&C 97)

God will reveal himself even further to those who seek out and take advantage of opportunities to learn more about him.²⁴ Learning more about him includes learning more about reality and what is best. All things testify of God.²⁵ To the extent that you turn away from opportunities to learn more about reality, you turn away from opportunities to learn more about God.²⁶ God is the spirit of truth.²⁷ To the extent that you fail to live up to any truth you know, you fail to live up to what you know about him.²⁸ To the extent that you reject the truth in anything, you reject him.²⁹ To the extent that you allow absurdities to be proclaimed without standing up for the truth, you fail to stand as a witness of Christ,³⁰ and he will be ashamed of those who are ashamed of him.³¹

As you exercise the faith of obeying his example as far as you see it and search to learn more about God, you will grow nearer to him.

Dishonesty impedes the flow of goodness to you from God

Every aspect of the good that flows from God to you depends on your honesty with yourself, others, and God. Any lack of honesty precludes the full flow of God’s goodness into your life. You will never experience a substantial increase in the flow of God’s goodness into you and your life while you are still a dishonest person. You can’t be honest without growing towards God, and you can’t grow towards God without first being honest.

Dishonesty precludes many types of goodness from flowing into your life, including being born again. The devil is the father of lies, and you can’t be born again while you are one of his children:

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. (John 8:44)

God does not lie,³² and you can’t be very much like him while you still do.

Dishonesty doesn’t just slow down the flow of God’s goodness into you—it makes invisible the path to greater goodness. You can’t identify what is best or improve your understanding of it without being an honest person. Dishonesty will cause you to lose the ability to see the ways in which you knowingly deviate from God’s example and will in your life.

Honesty is recoverable, but requires a process more difficult than living according to the truth in the first place. You regain honesty by correcting the ways you knowingly deviate from God’s example.

Tuning the source: Be yourself with God

A crucial step in achieving honesty is to be yourself with God. Hiding from God is silly because he already knows everything about you. Nothing you do can hide who you really are from God.³³ He sees and knows everything about you, including and extending beyond all you know about yourself. He sees the parts of you that you can’t see,³⁴ won’t look at, or won’t truthfully acknowledge.

There is no benefit in pretending you are better than you are with God. Hiding from God doesn’t change what he sees; it only reduces what he can do to help you. You won’t escape from God’s judgment by pretending to be better than you are, but you will distance yourself from God’s goodness. Hiding from God won’t reduce God’s ability to see your badness, but it will reduce your ability to see his goodness.

You perceive, receive, and appreciate God’s goodness to the extent that you fully open ourselves to him. God can only sanctify what you expose to his light. The desire to cover our faults will always distance us from God and the miracles he could work in our lives. Only through freely admitting even the worst parts of ourselves can you draw nearer to him and be healed. Like the man with the shriveled hand and the crowd of onlookers, you must decide whether to draw nearer to God by exposing yourself to him or recoiling from him; showing how you really are or pretending to be someone else:

And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it out: and his hand was restored whole as the other. (Mark 3:5)

The healed man and the stubborn onlookers responded to Jesus in opposite ways. While the man who would be healed stretched out his deformed hand toward the Lord, the observers hardened their hearts. The “hardness” of the hearts of the observers, as translated from Greek, means insensible, dulled, and covered with a callous. God already sees exactly how you really are, but you won’t view yourself the same way until and unless you cease attempting to hide from him.

Are you ashamed of what you want, what you think, what you believe, what you say, or what you do? Some laugh when discussing how Adam and Eve attempted to hide from God after their rebellion in the Garden of Eden. But how many do these same things? We all face the same tests as Adam and Eve, and very few have overcome the test of facing God in their nakedness:

His disciples said, “When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?” Jesus said, “When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the son of the living one, and you will not be afraid!” (Gospel of Thomas 1:37)

The problem with hiding from what makes you ashamed is that it creates within you a downward spiral of decay, both in the quality of your character and your ability to discern the process of degradation. The more ashamed you are of yourself, the less you will pay attention to and address the actions or qualities that make you ashamed, which creates greater blindness, more problems, more shame, and more hiding. Guilt from these particulars will creep into your general disposition. It is best to confront who you really are and seek to correct the things about yourself that you are ashamed of.

Are you honest with God about what you want, why you want it, and what you are willing to do to get it? Do you say you want something when you actually want something else more? Do you say you want something while being unwilling to pay what it costs? Do you say you want something for one reason, but actually want it for another? All of these lies will significantly impede what blessings God can send you. How can he help you draw nearer to what you actually want if you won’t be honest about what you actually want? How can he teach you more about what you should want if you aren’t honest about what you say you want, how badly you want it, or why you say you want it?

Don’t attempt to hide yourself from God in prayer by saying anything but what you truly think and feel. Communication with God can only change your standing with God to the extent you honestly open your heart and mind in full vulnerability. Acknowledge that he already knows everything you will say to him, all you have and have not done, why you are the way you are, and how you really feel about it all. Only those who interact with God in sincerity will find him:

...thou didst hear me because of mine afflictions and my sincerity... (Alma 33:11)

Those who pray insincerely are not praying as a means for God to make them better, but to feel better about how they already are. Both will receive what they seek.³⁵

Don’t attempt to hide yourself from God in how you live your life, pretending to be something you’re not. Fake good is accounted by God as evil.

6 For behold, God hath said a man being evil cannot do that which is good; for if he offereth a gift, or prayeth unto God, except he shall do it with real intent it profiteth him nothing.
7 For behold, it is not counted unto him for righteousness. 8 For behold, if a man being evil giveth a gift, he doeth it grudgingly; wherefore it is counted unto him the same as if he had retained the gift; wherefore he is counted evil before God.
9 And likewise also is it counted evil unto a man, if he shall pray and not with real intent of heart; yea, and it profiteth him nothing, for God receiveth none such.
10 Wherefore, a man being evil cannot do that which is good; neither will he give a good gift. (Moroni 7)

It is much better to be sincere about who you really are in your interactions with God (even if you have little to offer) than it is to pretend to be better than you really are (even if you are pretending to be very good). This is why the Lord commended the widow’s small donation over the larger donations from the Pharisees:

43 And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury:
44 For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living. (Mark 12)

Be honest with God. Act in acknowledgement that he knows everything about your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Rather than hide from him, go to the opposite extreme. Willingly open yourself to him.

Tuning the destination: Adopt God’s purpose

Learning and living the Lord’s purpose is a central aim in life. In adopting God’s purpose, we accept his invitation to become one with him (see John 17).

In order to align with God, you have to adopt his purpose in place of your own:

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, reconcile yourselves to the will of God, and not to the will of the devil and the flesh; and remember, after ye are reconciled unto God, that it is only in and through the grace of God that ye are saved. (2 Nephi 10:24)

Many people are aware enough of themselves and God to know that there are many ways in which their purpose differs from God’s. They may shy away from the task because of the magnitude of change required to align their purpose with God. No person should ever feel they are beyond his ability to lead them closer. After all, “he has all power to save every man that believeth on his name and bringeth forth fruit meet for repentance.” (Alma 12:15)

Total preference for the purpose of God above your own is not meant to be something rare or exceptional. Adoption of God’s purpose is non-negotiable for any disciple of Christ:

37 He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
38 And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.
39 He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. (Matthew 10)

It is only when you are in full alignment with God that you will fully receive the goodness that he has the ability to flow into your life. Because his glory and power are completely coupled to his character attributes, the concentration of God’s goodness on those sincerely aligned with him is not arbitrary. God’s goodness is always dispensed for and in accordance with what he would do in your place. In order to have more of God’s power and glory in your life, you need to “call upon his name”—that is, seek for and submit to his character in all things:

Thus we may see that the Lord is merciful unto all who will, in the sincerity of their hearts, call upon his holy name. (Helaman 3:27)

When you work in concert with God’s purpose, you contribute to and benefit from the efforts of everyone else who does the same, astronomically boosting what you are capable of accomplishing and becoming. The more deeply you learn and adopt God’s purpose, the more deeply God’s goodness will flow into every facet of your life.

Increasing the bandwidth: Quickening

The wide-ranging effects of the spirit are referred to as quickening. The quickening of the spirit increases the level of detail you are able to perceive, the speed with which you can process information, and the correctness of your judgement of ideas, opportunities, things and people. As God quickens you, you will perceive more details about yourself, others, and the world around you. Your ability to notice and weigh strengths and weaknesses of arguments will increase. You will notice connections between ideas, objects, or effects that you did not before. You will detect motives in people that you did not previously detect. The value you appraise in different options of action will change, as will the cost and benefit of anything you do. Each change from quickening will bring your mind and heart to a state more similar to God’s.

The more God’s spirit flows into you, the more you will learn about what he thinks, feels, and does:

6 This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood, because he needed to take upon himself a mortal body of water and blood—as we all do—and sanctify it by obtaining and yielding to the Spirit—giving us all an example of what we must also do. And the spirit is the conduit that makes known the will of the Father, teaching all truth.
7 For there are three that manifest God in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one.
8 And there are three that manifest God in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood. These three were reconciled in the body of Jesus Christ, and provide an example for us to follow in doing the same in each of our bodies, that we might become one with Jesus Christ as he is one with the Father. (1 John 5, Author’s Reflection)

As you give your all³⁶ for the greatest possible benefit of the world,³⁷ as far as you know,³⁸ God will do all he can to magnify your sacrifice³⁹ into something even greater.⁴⁰ He will salt your sacrifice.

Most people who have experienced powerful spiritual experiences do so through something external—something they do not cause to happen, but which happens to them. The spirit of God is not an arbitrary external entity. Rather, it operates within you through your own faculties of thought and feeling.⁴¹ These faculties form your conscience, a precious gift from God that acts as a compass capable of identifying what is best to you.

Your conscience is both a result of and a driver for your awareness of reality. It illuminates the landscape of reality like a lighthouse, shining outward into a world draped in the darkness of ignorance. The light is focused through what you choose to attend to and think about, and it elucidates what was, what is, what could be, how to make it so, and why it matters.

Your conscience is a critical lifeline that will grow more and more as you develop, consult, and honestly apply it, showing you what is best in greater accuracy and to a greater extent. Strictly speaking, your conscience includes the scriptural senses of both mind and heart, though few would see it as both, and some would not make this connection at all.

The conscience can operate on several levels, all of which are functions of the spirit of God operating upon and within you. At the least intentional level, the conscience provides feelings of guilt or confidence. These feelings come whether the individual wants them or not, and in spite of how well or poorly they understand them. Those with greater intention or awareness will experience the conscience as something which provides reasons. A conscience upgraded to explicit reasoning will grow faster and is capable of informing better decisions than one limited to raw feelings.

Your choices grow or diminish your conscience. To the extent you recognize and ideally respond to what it illuminates, your light will grow brighter. To the extent you choose what is less than best, given everything you can and have seen, it will fade.

7 Woe to the world because of their offense. It is necessary that all be exposed to increased light until they reject it, but woe to those who are offended by it!
8 If some aspect of what you do or how you are causes you to be offended by the revelation of greater truth, no matter if it is as integral to who you are as your very hand or foot, cut it off from you and forsake it! It is much better to enter into the life that I give crippled or lame than to be cast into eternal fire into as you were.
9 If some aspect of how you perceive things to be causes you to be offended by the revelation of greater truth, no matter if it is as integral to who you are as your very eye, gouge it out, and forsake it! It is much better to enter into the life that I give with one eye than it is to be cast into hellfire with two eyes. (Matthew 18, Author’s Reflection)

As you do more to incorporate the influence of the spirit into your life, the less that influence will wane.⁴² Instead of experiencing surges of God’s influence from time to time, it will approach constancy and build in intensity and effect.⁴³

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. (John 4:14)

The more you honestly interpret and apply what God teaches you through your conscience, the more he will teach you.⁴⁴

Closing the distance

Everyone who has experienced the effects of the spirit is familiar with how they come and go. But the changes from quickening need not be limited to those that suddenly arrive and suddenly depart. While the spirit is like the wind,⁴⁵ it is also like a never-exhausting spring of flowing water.⁴⁶ Increasing the second type occurs as you choose differently as a result of experiencing the first.

You can retain the changes that come through quickening through changing how you think, feel, and act to align with the thoughts and feelings that come through the quickening. The more you modify how you think, feel, and act to align with what you learn from spiritual experiences, the more of them you will have.

Falling out of alignment with God

Living in alignment with God is a consummate activity. You are always either increasing towards God or decreasing away from him— always growing or always decaying. You either reconcile your beliefs, desires, and actions to what you understand is best, or you don’t. Turning away from God is both a decision and a process. The decision to turn away from the path toward God in any way at any time removes us from it. Recall that this is precisely how honesty works, because honesty is just one facet of the path to God, and each facet follows this pattern.

Failing to acknowledge and live up to your idea of what God would do in your place will always result in the diminishment of your ability to see and know what is right with the same accuracy and to the same extent that you previously could:

3 But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:
4 In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is in the image of God, should shine unto them. (2 Corinthians 3)

When you disconnect yourself from the True Vine⁴⁷ in anything , you distance yourself from him in everything . All at once in one way and by degrees in another, you join the spiritual walking dead. Despite how normal some aspects of the lives of these people may sometimes seem, the signs of their internal misalignment from God quickly become apparent as soon as you get to know them. They are recurrently depressed and riddled with anxiety. They are stressed to the point of overwhelm by reasonable regular life events. They have no goals for the future, and if they do, they have no reasonable path of concrete steps to attain them. The only happiness they know is short-term pleasure, completely controlled by the chance circumstance in which they find themselves. Instead of providing an inexhaustible battery of confidence and meaning, their past choices cause nothing but guilt and regret. These symptoms in life predict the still worse condition that awaits them in death:

Now this is the state of the souls of the wicked, yea, in darkness, and a state of awful, fearful looking for the fiery indignation of the wrath of God upon them; thus they remain in this state, as well as the righteous in paradise, until the time of their resurrection. (Alma 40:14)

The more fully we align with the light, the more fully we can grow into the light. The more we retract from the light, the less we can grow into the light, the more we will attenuate in our vigor, and the greater the risk we place ourselves in of dying. Anything less than full alignment results in a degradation of the light in a person. This darkness increases in intensity until it is all that remains.⁴⁸