Discernment and Doctrine
How to Avoid Deception
The One Question I Ask Before I Follow Anyone
There have never been more Latter-day Saint voices than there are right now. Books, podcasts, YouTube channels, Zoom firesides, blog posts. The Come Follow Me commentaries alone must number in the hundreds, and most of what I have watched has been good. I have learned things from nearly every one of them. I do not have many complaints about that end of it.
It is the other end that concerns me.
There is a growing group of people teaching on the fringe of things, and the list of subjects is endless. Sometimes the connection to the Church, or to the gospel, or to the plan of our Heavenly Father has to be stretched so far to make it fit that you can hear it creaking. And when I watch closely, the real goal often turns out to be views, likes, and a following.
I have watched this happen for years now. Someone has a real insight. People respect it. A group forms around them. They are looked up to, listened to, and asked for advice. And then, slowly, pride goes to work. They begin to believe they know more than the leaders of the Church. Some of them get to where they believe they know more than God does.
Paul saw exactly this and warned about it in language that has not aged a day:
“That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.” (Ephesians 4:14)
The First Warning Sign
The trigger for me is always the same. It is the moment a teacher starts telling the Church how the Church ought to be run.
That is the point where I stop listening. Not because the person is a bad person, and not because every criticism they raise is wrong on the facts, but because they have stepped out of their stewardship and into somebody else’s. Once you begin announcing what the Brethren should be doing with the funds, the buildings, the policies, the temples, or the doctrine, you have quietly appointed yourself to a seat you were never called to.
This is the oldest pattern there is. Lucifer did not stand up in the council in heaven and announce that he was opposed to God. He came forward with a better plan.
“Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down; And he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive and to blind men, and to lead them captive at his will, even as many as would not hearken unto my voice.” (Moses 4:3–4)
Doing things the way we want them done instead of the way God wants them done goes clear back to the beginning. It has never once produced anything good.
The Question
So here is what I recommend. When somebody comes to you with a claim, a vision, a dream, a decoded prophecy, a date, or a new understanding of the last days, ask them one question.
Did you take this to your stake president?
That is it. That is the whole test. You do not have to out-argue them, out-study them, or track down every source they cite. You only have to ask whether they were willing to hold their message up against priesthood authority and let a servant of God look at it.
Watch what happens when you ask. The answer will tell you almost everything you need to know. It works alongside the other test I use constantly, which is measuring a claim against the sequence scripture actually gives instead of against this morning’s headlines. I laid that one out in The One Framework That Keeps You From Being Deceived.
Why That Question Works
The Lord has never run His work through freelancers. When the burden grew too heavy for Moses, the Lord did not tell him to handle it alone or to let anyone with an opinion carry it:
“And I will come down and talk with thee there: and I will take of the spirit which is upon thee, and will put it upon them, and they shall bear the burden of the people with thee, that thou bear it not thyself alone.” (Numbers 11:17)
When the Savior organized His Church, He did the same thing:
“And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:11–12)
And when a man in the early days of the Restoration began receiving revelations for the whole Church through a seer stone, the Lord settled the matter permanently:
“But, behold, verily, verily, I say unto thee, no one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church excepting my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., for he receiveth them even as Moses.” (Doctrine and Covenants 28:2)
“For all things must be done in order, and by common consent in the church, by the prayer of faith.” (Doctrine and Covenants 28:13)
None of us can walk into the office of the prophet or an Apostle and ask for a private ruling. We do not need to. Authority runs down the line and it is available to every single member. It starts with the elders quorum president or the Relief Society president. From there it goes to the bishop, and from the bishop to the stake president. Every member of the Church has access to that line. Nobody is locked out of it.
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President Dallin H. Oaks taught the balance between our personal revelation and that priesthood line, and gave this caution about the personal line: “in its fulness the personal line does not function independent of the priesthood line.” Both lines are real. Both are necessary. The one does not get to overrule the other.
So when a person will not take his message to that line, he is telling you something about himself. He does not want to be told no. He does not want to be corrected. He does not want anyone with keys anywhere near the thing he has built, because the thing he has built might not survive the inspection.
I Had to Answer That Question Myself
I am not asking anyone to apply a standard I dodged.
I had just finished building a complete PowerPoint presentation on Revelation chapter twelve. That was the study I was in, and it had nothing to do with politics or with any living person. Then that night came the experience I describe in the book, and what I was shown was that Donald Trump was somehow tied to that chapter. I came up off my knees and said out loud, “What? What does Donald Trump have anything to do with Revelation chapter twelve?”
I was not handed the answer. I had to go find it. There are many symbols in that chapter and I did not know which one applied. It took two years and two months of study before I finally understood where he fit, and when I saw it, it stopped me cold. I said out loud, to nobody in the room, “I can’t publish that.”
People hate Donald Trump. They were going to hate me. That was my first and only thought.
So I called the stake executive secretary and made an appointment with my stake president. I told him the whole story. I told him the Lord had asked me to publish this and take it to the world, and I told him what I had just learned. Then I told him the truth about what was coming: “You are going to get people calling you and demanding my excommunication, because I am not the prophet, and I am not supposed to know this.”
That has since happened, by the way.
His counsel was this. “Kelly, follow your heart. Don’t publish it as doctrine. Publish it as your opinion.” Then he added, “But I have never heard this before either.”
I have tried my best to follow that counsel ever since. I have not been perfect at it, because I do not know how to say something I know without some measure of testimony behind it. But in every book, article, and video, I have made it clear that I am not the prophet, that I am not publishing doctrine, that I hold no authority over anyone, and that no one is obligated to follow me. That meeting is what gave me the confidence to move forward. The longer version of the whole account is in The Question I Couldn’t Walk Away From.
The Priestcraft Charge
One man accused me of priestcraft. The scripture he had in mind is one I take seriously:
“He commandeth that there shall be no priestcrafts; for, behold, priestcrafts are that men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world, that they may get gain and praise of the world; but they seek not the welfare of Zion.” (2 Nephi 26:29)
My answer to him was simple. I took this to my stake president. He did not tell me to stop. He did not tell me to repent. He did not tell me to put it away. He told me to follow my heart and to be careful how I framed it, and I have done that.
So I told him plainly: when you demand that I be silenced, you are claiming an authority over me that my own stake president did not claim. He said he was doing no such thing. He said he was only following the scriptures. But that is exactly what he was doing, and he could not answer it. He simply did not like what I was saying.
The Prophet Who Was Not a Member
Another man came to me insisting he was a prophet and that the Church needed to be set in order through him. He was angry that he could not get an audience with the Apostles.
I asked him my question. “Did you talk to your stake president?”
He said, “No. I am not a member of your church.”
That did not fit, so I kept asking, and eventually he told me he had been excommunicated. That explained the whole thing. He had been deceived, and the revelations he was receiving were coming from the other side.
“We Don’t Do That Anymore”
I heard a story once about a group of people who were visited by a being claiming to be an angel. To their credit, they knew the Lord had given us a test for exactly that situation:
“If it be the devil as an angel of light, when you ask him to shake hands he will offer you his hand, and you will not feel anything; you may therefore detect him. These are three grand keys whereby you may know whether any administration is from God.” (Doctrine and Covenants 129:8–9)
So they raised the question of the test. And the visitor told them, “We don’t do that anymore.”
And they believed him.
They had the protection in their hands. They knew the rule. They set it aside because a persuasive voice told them the rule had been retired, and real harm followed. The Lord gave us those keys so we would not have to guess. They only work if we use them.
This Applies to Me Too
Let me be as plain as I know how to be. Nothing I have written obligates anyone to accept what I say as gospel truth.
I have no priesthood authority to direct anybody. I do not take the place of the prophet, the Apostles, your bishop, or your stake president. I hold no station that anyone needs to defend, and I am not building a seat for myself. I was commanded by God to write this book and publish it to the world, and I have given what I was taught. That is the entire extent of my claim.
Do not pray about my book. I have never asked anyone to do that, and I am not going to start. The Lord attached a promise to the Book of Mormon and He honors it. He has attached no such promise to anything written by me, and it would be a strange thing for me to borrow one.
Pray about the scriptures instead. Open Isaiah 52 and read it slowly. Open Revelation 12. Open the sections of the Doctrine and Covenants that deal with the last days and go through them for yourself. Those are His words, and He answers for His own words. If something I have written sends you into a passage you had never looked at closely, that is the whole of what I am after. What you come away with belongs to you and the Lord, and I have no part in it.
Weigh all of it against the words of the living prophet, whose counsel outrank mine every time and on every subject. If my reading of a passage does not hold up, set it down. The scripture stays either way, and that was always the more valuable thing. That objection deserves a full answer rather than a shrug, and I gave it one in Would God Tell You Before Telling the Prophet?.
The Savior gave us the measure Himself:
“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:15–16)
Apply that to the fringe. Apply it to the mainstream. Apply it to me.
Why This Matters Right Now
I am pressing this point today because deception is going to get much more expensive than it has been.
The most astonishing events this world has ever witnessed are close. The greatest event in all of history is the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and nothing will ever displace it. Second to that, I would put the flood of Noah. What is coming in the near future is everything short of the Atonement itself. Worldwide cataclysm, and beautiful prophecies fulfilled at last.
None of that has started yet, and saying so is not optimism. It is what the text requires, which I walk through in No, We Are Not in the Seven Seals Yet. We still have time to get ready, and that is precisely why deception is so costly right now. Time spent chasing a false alarm is time not spent preparing.
I cannot wait for Zion. But most of us have no idea what Zion is going to require of us, and the law of consecration is the part almost nobody is thinking about. We have attempted it more than once in this dispensation and it has not yet held. Living it will demand a shift in how we think about everything we own. I have written about what that covenant actually asks in The Covenant Almost No One Is Ready to Live. The Lord has not left the terms open to negotiation:
“And Zion cannot be built up unless it is by the principles of the law of the celestial kingdom; otherwise I cannot receive her unto myself.” (Doctrine and Covenants 105:5)
Too many of the Saints are living as though the next fifty years will look like the last fifty. Bigger house, better job, newer car. Good things, all of them, and none of them are the point right now.
I am doing what I can to help people get ready. I am one voice among many, with no authority and no claim on anyone. That is exactly why I want you armed with the question. There will be no shortage of voices in the days ahead, and some of them will be very persuasive. Ask them whether they were willing to sit down across the desk from a stake president. Ask me. Ask anyone.
Then follow the prophet, and hold on.
I say this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Keep Reading
- What You Believe Colors Everything You See
- Testimony Is Not Enough
- My Testimony of the Book of Mormon After Forty Years of Daily Reading
- The Covenant Almost No One Is Ready to Live
Sources and Links
- Ephesians 4:11–12, 14 (King James Version)
- Moses 4:3–4, Pearl of Great Price
- Numbers 11:17 (King James Version)
- Matthew 7:15–16 (King James Version)
- 2 Nephi 26:29, Book of Mormon
- Doctrine and Covenants 28:2, 28:13, 105:5, 129:8–9
- Dallin H. Oaks, “Two Lines of Communication,” General Conference, October 2010: churchofjesuschrist.org
Related: Why People Leave the Church: There Is Only One Real Reason
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