The deeper you go, the clearer His voice becomes

I want to talk about something I see all over the internet and it genuinely bothers me — not because the people doing it are bad people, but because they are often very good people who are missing something they do not even know they are missing. I call them gospel skimmers. They attend church faithfully. They keep the commandments. They pray every day. They love God and want to do right by their neighbors. And yet somehow, in all that sincere religious activity, they never seem to find the time to sit down with the scriptures and actually dig.

I see them online sharing exciting topics, passing along prophetic theories, chasing whatever is alarming or wonderful or strange at the moment. Some of what they share is interesting. Some of it is flat wrong. But I can tell almost immediately that these are people who are connected to excitement rather than connected to God, because the depth is not there. The roots have not gone down. You cannot fake what comes from years of sitting quietly with the word of the Lord.

The Day Something Hit Me

About forty years ago I made a promise to the Lord. It came after listening to President Ezra Taft Benson speak in the April 1986 general conference. He was talking about the Book of Mormon, and he quoted a sobering passage from the Doctrine and Covenants:

That condemnation was first revealed in 1832. President Benson told us plainly in 1986 — 134 years later — that it still rested upon the Church. That landed on me like a stone. I had read the Book of Mormon a couple of times. I had served a mission and taught from it constantly. I had taken religion classes at BYU and loved every one of them. I had attended seminary as a teenager, though I was not what anyone would call an outstanding seminary student. I loved the book. I just had not taken it as my personal guide. My Liahona, if you want to use that word.

That day I promised the Lord I would read it every single day. And I have. In the approximately forty years since, I have missed sixty-six days. Many of those days I still read my other scriptures — I just missed the Book of Mormon specifically. I am not telling you this to brag. I am telling you this because of what comes next, which is the part I am far less proud of.

The Part I Am Not Proud Of

I have not always listened.

Looking back over my life, almost every significant problem I have faced can be traced to a moment when the Spirit was speaking clearly and I chose not to hear it. The instruction was there. The warning was there. I just did not act on it. Not listening to the Spirit is not a small sin. It may be one of the larger ones, precisely because the light was given and still rejected. That is something I have had to sit with, and I want you to know I am not writing this from a position of having figured it out. I am writing it as someone who has been severely humbled by his own choices and still has to fight every single day to stay in the word.

I say all of that so you understand that this article is not coming from someone who thinks forty years of daily reading makes him better than anyone. It is coming from someone who knows firsthand what happens when you have the light and do not follow it, and who still believes with everything he has that daily reading of the Book of Mormon is worth every effort it takes to do it.

The Phone in Your Pocket

Now let me come back to the gospel skimmers, because the problem has gotten dramatically worse in the last fifteen years for a reason everyone understands but few people want to confront directly. The cell phone has invaded our lives completely. We cannot go anywhere without it. We depend on it for everything. And it is engineered — deliberately, by very smart people with a financial incentive to do so — to grab your attention and keep it. Every notification, every scroll, every alert is designed to trigger something in your brain that says more. Stay. Keep looking.

I am not a neurologist and I will not pretend to explain the exact chemical reactions involved. But I know what I have experienced, and I can tell you that what happens when you sit quietly with the scriptures and feel the Spirit teach you something personal — something meant specifically for you on that specific day — is not serotonin or dopamine. It is something different. It is something the phone cannot give you, no matter how perfectly its algorithm understands your preferences. That kind of connection with God does not come from scrolling. It comes from sitting still and reading carefully and being willing to let the Lord show you things.

The phone has given us a world of gospel skimmers because it has trained us to consume information in fragments. We see something that sounds prophetic, we share it, we move on. We take the gist of something and think we understood it. I have had people tell me, after I spent somewhere around two thousand hours writing and rewriting this book, to just send them the chapter that puts it all together. Give me the highlights. Let me run it through AI and get an overview.

That is not learning. That is skimming. And when we stand before God, we will not be able to skim our way through that conversation.

Surfing and Diving

I want to use an analogy here that I think captures something true about this, even though I freely admit I have never tried either of the things I am about to compare. Surfing looks absolutely incredible. The board under your feet, the curl of the water behind you, the speed and the balance and the thrill of it. I understand completely why people love it. But when you are surfing, beneath you in that water is an entire world of coral and fish and sea life that you will never see. You are riding the top of something vast and deep and complex, and the surface is all you experience.

Diving is a different sport entirely. Different goals. Different rewards. When you go deep, you encounter things that no one riding the surface ever sees. That is what deep scripture study is. The surface of the Book of Mormon is already remarkable. The story is compelling, the doctrine is clear, the testimonies are moving. But the depth of that book rewards the person who keeps going down. There are things in there that only reveal themselves to someone who has been reading carefully for years, who has brought their own life experiences and heartbreaks and questions to the text, and who is willing to sit quietly with what the Spirit says.

I have had passages of scripture light up on the page in a way I can only describe as the Spirit saying: this one is for you. Not for the Lamanites in that story. Not for the ancient audience. For you, today, in your specific situation. That experience does not happen to someone who skimmed the chapter headers on their way to a podcast.

Why the Book of Mormon Specifically

I want to be clear that I love the Bible. Everything in my book on prophecy started because God asked me to read the book of Revelation. I love the Bible deeply. I love the Gospel of John. I love Isaiah. I love Genesis, Deuteronomy, Acts — all of it. The Bible is the word of God and I would not diminish it for anything.

But the Bible has a problem that is not its fault. The hands of men have removed sections of it across the centuries. That is not a conspiracy theory — it is a historical reality, and it helps explain why there are thousands of different Christian denominations that all read the same book and arrive at contradictory conclusions. The original text has been diluted and in places corrupted. That is not the case with the Book of Mormon. It came through a single translation, under divine supervision, sealed by the testimony of witnesses, and we have it today essentially as it was received.

Joseph Smith said a man can get closer to God by abiding by its precepts than by any other book. I can testify to that personally. Not because I have everything figured out — I clearly do not — but because forty years of daily reading have shown me, again and again, that this book has a power to speak to the human soul that is unlike anything else I have ever encountered.

Fifteen Minutes a Day

President Benson's recommendation was fifteen minutes a day as a minimum. That is what I am passing along to you, because it is the same counsel he gave the Church in 1986 and it is as true now as it was then. Fifteen minutes is not a burden. Most of us spend more than that looking at our phones before we get out of bed. What the daily reading signals to God — and to yourself — is that you want to draw closer and you want to hear what He has to say to you. That posture, practiced every day over years, changes a person in ways that are genuinely hard to describe.

I will also tell you this: do not expect every day to be a spiritual experience. There are stretches where I have read and felt nothing at all. Days that felt dry and mechanical and like I was just checking a box. If you are waiting for every session to be transcendent you will quit inside a month. You read because it is right to read, because you made a commitment, because the accumulation matters even when the individual day does not feel significant. And then one morning you open to a verse you have read fifty times and it speaks to you like you have never heard it before. That is how this works.

Satan Has Never Given Up Trying to Stop Me

You would think that after forty years of this, the opposition would ease up. It has not. Not for a single day. Every conceivable form of distraction, interruption, busyness, and discouragement has come at me over these four decades. Today, as I write this, I am so deep in the work of writing and promoting this book that my own scripture study has been shallower than I would like to admit. That is not a minor irony — it is the adversary's favorite trick, getting you so busy with good things that the most important thing gets squeezed out.

If you commit to reading the Book of Mormon every day, expect opposition. Expect mornings when you cannot find the book, when someone calls right when you sit down, when you feel too tired to concentrate, when something urgent materializes from nowhere. This is not coincidence. But I can tell you from forty years of experience that pushing through it anyway is worth every bit of the effort.

A Testimony, Not a Rant

I started writing this as a rant about gospel skimmers and it turned into something else. Maybe that is the Spirit having the last word, which would be entirely appropriate. The rant is real — I do wish more people would go deep instead of skimming. But the more important thing I want to say is this: the Book of Mormon is the most correct book on earth. It is the most powerful book on earth. If you want to get close to God, it will get you there faster than anything else I know.

I know there are people reading this who have been told the book is dangerous or false or written by the devil. I understand that. I have written about how what we believe filters everything we are willing to see, and that article might be worth reading first if that is where you are. But I will say this plainly: if anyone tells you not to read the Book of Mormon, that person is not in tune with the Spirit of God. It is as simple as that.

Fifteen minutes a day. Start tonight. Not with a chapter summary, not with a study guide, not with an AI overview. Open the book and read it. Let the words sit. See what happens.

And please — do not be a gospel skimmer. The depth is where God lives.

Kelly Smith is the author of The First Horseman: Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy. He is a lifelong student of biblical prophecy and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.