Our Guide to Truth

By President Dallin H. Oaks

First Counselor in the First Presidency

From an October 2004 general conference address.

From your position on the road of life, you have many miles to go and many choices to make as you seek to return to our Heavenly Father. Along the road there are many signs that beckon. Satan is the author of some of these invitations. He seeks to confuse and deceive us, to get us on a low road that leads away from our eternal destination.

I wish to share how you can avoid being deceived. First, you have been taught righteousness and assured of its truth, so stay with it. Hold fast to the scriptures, whose teachings protect us against evil. Second, it is not enough to have received the truth. We must also take “the Holy Spirit for [our] guide” and “not [be] deceived” (Doctrine and Covenants 45:57).

How do we take the Holy Spirit for our guide? We must repent of our sins and renew our covenants by partaking of the sacrament each week with clean hands and a pure heart. Only in this way can we have the divine promise that we will “always have his Spirit to be with [us]” (Doctrine and Covenants 20:77). That Spirit is the Holy Ghost, whose mission is to testify of the Father and the Son, to teach us, and to guide us to truth.