Answer

How Do I Follow a Prophet When I Still Have Questions?

You sustain the prophet and you still have a question you cannot resolve. Perhaps it is something a leader said decades ago, or a teaching you find hard, and you have started to wonder whether an honest person in your position should still be raising their hand in sacrament meeting.

You do both at once, and the restored gospel expects that rather than merely tolerating it. You are not asked to believe prophets are flawless in order to believe that Christ speaks through them. He gave you the Holy Ghost precisely so that following them includes your own study and revelation rather than replacing it.

Eternal Truths

The Lord ties His own voice to His servants’ voices, and He also says they are mortal. “Whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same,” He declared, in the same revelation where He acknowledged that these are weak things and men who make mistakes (Doctrine and Covenants 1:24-38). Both statements are in the preface to the Doctrine and Covenants, side by side.

Personal revelation is part of the design, not a workaround. President Russell M. Nelson taught in “Revelation for the Church, Revelation for Our Lives” that through personal revelation you can receive your own witness that the Book of Mormon is the word of God and that this is the Lord’s Church, whatever anyone else says or does. A Church that wanted unthinking obedience would not have given that right to everyone in it.

Not everything a leader has ever said is doctrine, and the Church says so itself. Its statement on approaching Latter-day Saint doctrine explains that a single remark by one leader is not the settled teaching of the Church, which is what the First Presidency and the Twelve teach together and consistently. That is not a loophole. It is how the Church has always described its own teaching, and it is why the Proclamation, issued over fifteen names and taught continuously for thirty years, carries the weight it does.

What Can Make This Confusing?

The adversary rarely works on the question itself. He works on the loneliness around it: the suggestion that you are the only faithful person who has ever wondered this, that asking is disloyal, and that the honest thing would be to leave. All three are false, and the first one is spectacularly so. President Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s invitation in “Come, Join with Us” was to doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith, which is a different thing from pretending you have none.

Questions to Think About

• Is this an open question I can carry, or a wound I have not talked to anyone about?
• Am I studying what was actually taught, or mostly what people said about it?
• Who could I ask who would not be alarmed by the question?

What You Can Do

Write your question down in one sentence this week, as precisely as you can, then find the primary source and read it whole. Take what is left to someone who will look for the answer with you rather than telling you to stop asking. The essay behind this Answer goes further into how questions and sustaining fit together.

Jesus Christ leads this Church through imperfect men on purpose, and He can teach you His voice while you are still waiting on an answer.