What God would do in your place is not meant to be an educated guess.267 You need to know God’s will in order to exercise God’s power. You can’t have faith when you ask for something that is contrary to God’s will, but you also can’t have faith if you aren’t confident that your desire matches what God wants.
The secret to gaining more of God’s power is not just in learning more of what he knows, but also in perfectly aligning your actions to what you have high confidence is his will. If you do not have extreme confidence in what you ask of God, you should focus your requests on learning more about the situation rather than asking him to intervene.
Those who receive great priesthood power learn how to restrict their requests to what they have high confidence is the will of God. When the Lord proclaimed that Nephi would be given whatever he asked, he said the reason was that Nephi would not ask anything contrary to his will.268 He did not mean that Nephi knew everything God did, but that Nephi would refrain from asking anything from God that was not perfectly in alignment with his sincere, best understanding of God’s will. Nephi only desired what he had sufficient reason to believe was God’s will.