When you go to the temple with an open heart, wanting to learn, and seeking whatever knowledge the Lord desires to give you, you can’t help but receive revelation.  The revelations you receive come through the Holy Ghost as little bursts of pure knowledge.  They don’t come as grandiose, panoramic views such as those received by Enoch, the brother of Jared, Nephi, or Moses.  Those revelations to those chosen prophets had special purposes.  For the rest of us, instruction normally comes “here a little, and there a little.”

We have to be looking for it, or we’re likely to miss what the Lord desires to teach us at that specific time and place.  These things are done according to the Lord’s timetable and the Lord’s wisdom.  They can’t be forced.  If our minds are open, and if we’re looking for instruction from the Lord, whether in the temple or elsewhere, it will come.

The best place for receiving these bursts of pure knowledge is in the temple.  For instance:

I was impressed many years ago by what Marjorie’s sister, Mary, learned from her visit to the temple.  She was sitting in an endowment room looking at a beautiful mural that filled a wall.  The Spirit said to her that one day she would need to know everything necessary to enable her to create a blade of grass.  That’s a stunning thought, with all sorts of ramifications about our need to continuously be educating our minds.

Last week in the temple I wondered about Eve’s partaking of the forbidden fruit.  Why would she have done that when she’d been specifically warned not to?

The thought burst upon my mind that we don’t know how long Adam and Eve were in the garden.  For all that we know they might have already been there for an eon, diligently and childlessly obeying the commandment to not partake of the forbidden fruit.

Eve had been commanded to multiply and replenish the earth.  She’d been promised that she would have children.  Where were they?  Why wasn’t she having babies?  Like many barren women, she desperately wanted a baby.  She couldn’t become the mother of the human race unless she had a baby.  She realized that the commandment about the forbidden fruit was standing in the way of her promised motherhood.  Heavenly Father would not force them to enter mortality with all of its risks, pains, and sorrows.  Mortality had to be their choice.

“There is no other way,” she decided, broke the commandment, partook of the fruit, and began having the babies she’d longed for.

Was she deceived?  Maybe, to a certain extent.  But to my way of thinking she worked her way through a conundrum, and chose the necessary path even though she knew it would lead through hardship and sorrow.  She put an end to what might have been an eon of innocence and childlessness, and took the only possible remedy that could cure her barrenness.

Yesterday at the temple I received another burst of knowledge from the Spirit.  I was officiating an endowment session when it burst upon me that we’re never going to be without the need for prayer.  Prayer isn’t just for this earth life.  “Nor prayer is made on earth alone,” a line from our hymns says.  (Hymns, Prayer Is the Soul’s Sincere Desire, page 145).

Jesus continued to pray to His Father after His resurrection, as evidenced during His visit to the Nephites.

Additionally, I very much like the following statement by Elder Melvin J. Ballard which shows that those beyond the veil are praying for us.

“It was made known to me that it is because the righteous dead who have received the Gospel in the spirit world are exercising themselves, and in answers to their prayers elders of the Church are sent to the homes of their posterity so that the Gospel might be taught to them, and that descendant in the flesh is then privileged to do the work for his dead kindred.”

Thank goodness for prayer.  Nothing momentous or noteworthy takes place without prayer.  The Lord waits for us to ask, and then pours down knowledge.

Joseph went to the grove to pray, and the First Vision happened.  Nephi sat pondering (a form of prayer) upon the words of his father, was caught away into an exceedingly high mountain, and was shown in vision the entire future history of his people.  The brother of Jared prayed for the Lord to touch the sixteen clear stones with His finger, and ended up seeing the Lord’s whole person.  President Joseph F. Smith sat alone in his room pondering upon the words of Peter when he received the Vision of the Dead as recorded in Doctrine and Covenants section 138.  Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery dropped the veils in the Kirtland Temple, knelt “in solemn and silent prayer,” and were visited in succession by the Lord, Moses, Elias, and Elijah who each committed the keys that they held.  (D&C 110).

Prayer precedes revelation.  Revelation happens most easily in the temple.  We are blessed with the sacred privilege of going to the temple, and with the sacred opportunity to talk directly with our Father in Heaven, and to receive divine instruction through the Spirit.