Sunday, March 15, 2009

A Temple-Building People

I love this thought from the Bible Dictionary:

"TEMPLE: A temple is literally a house of the Lord, a holy sanctuary in which sacred ceremonies and ordinances of the gospel are performed by and for the living and also in behalf of the dead. A place where the Lord may come, it is the most holy of any place of worship on earth. Only the home can compare with the temple in sacredness.

"Whenever the Lord has had a people on the earth who will obey his word, they have been commanded to build temples in which the ordinances of the gospel and other spiritual manifestations that pertain to exaltation and eternal life may be administered."

We had Elder John M. Madsen of the Seventy presiding at our stake conference this weekend. He spoke of the temple and suggested that it is a symbol of the great Atonement of Christ. If we make the temple the center of our lives, he said, we allow Christ to write His law in our hearts. Then we are becoming like Him.