Wants and Needs.

Other scriptures use words with identical or very close meaning.

Examples include “mighty and powerful” (Doctrine and Covenants 65:1), “by my wrath, and by my anger” (Doctrine and Covenants 19:15), and “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end” (Doctrine and Covenants 35:1). 

 Contemporaneous scriptures use “want” to mean something that is needed or lacking.

Another verse in the Doctrine and Covenants speaks of consecrated funds used “to administer to those who have not, from time to time, that every man who has need may be amply supplied and receive according to his wants” (Doctrine and Covenants 42:33). In the Book of Mormon, robbers became weak because of a “want of food” (3 Nephi 4:3). Helaman’s soldiers (Alma 58:7) and Lehi’s family (1 Nephi 16:19) also suffered from “the want of food.” Priests and teachers worked to support themselves except in cases of sickness or “much want” (Mosiah 27:5). Joseph Smith brought a letter to an end “for the want of time” (Doctrine and Covenants 127:11). In each instance, a “want” was something that was lacking, not something that was merely desired.

 Other contemporaneous writings distinguish wants from desires.

A few examples:

• “Not what we wish, but what we want, let mercy still supply.”*
• “The great ground of discontent, is not our wants, but our desires. There is scarce any condition in the world so low, but may satisfy our wants; and there is no condition so high, as can satisfy our desires.’”**
• “With corporeal enjoyments and mental gratifications like these he ought to be content; whatever more he desires is above his wants, and inconsistent with the distributions of Nature.”***
• “Our real wants, of course, must be supplied. But what are our real wants—our wants, not our desires—our real wants, not those that are artificial and imaginary?”†

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* The hymn “Author of Good, To Thee We Turn” appears in many collections, including Hymn Book of the Methodist Protestant Church, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Book Committee of the Methodist Protestant Church, 1838), no. 350.
** Bishop Hopkins, “On the Vanity of the World,” in Scarce Sermons (London: Gale and Curtis, 1812), 284-85.
*** Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, St. Pierre’s Studies of Nature (Philadelphia: Joseph J. Woodward, 1835), 140.
† Sheldon Dibble, Voice From Abroad or Thoughts on Missions (Lahainaluna, 1844), 18.