The Unity of the Temple Experience

Elder Cook said this about his experiences in the temple: “When I would leave my workaday world in San Francisco and arrive at the Oakland Temple, I would experience an overwhelming feeling of love and peace….  A significant part of those beautiful feelings was the equality and unity that permeate the temple. Everyone is dressed in white clothing. There is no evidence of wealth, rank, or educational attainment; we are all brothers and sisters humbling ourselves before God.”  He continued, “I love the fact that the couple from the humblest background and the couple from the wealthiest background have exactly the same experience. They wear the same type of robes and make the same covenants across the same altar. They also receive the same eternal priesthood blessings.”  In the temple we seek to follow this commandment from the Lord: “I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine” (D&C 38:27).  With all dressed in similar white clothing, with each receiving the same treatment and given the same opportunities to make covenants, there no one is given preferential treatment over another.  Unlike the airlines, you don’t get a better seat in the temple because you paid more for your seat or because you have earned a special status by attending often.  No, in the temple, “the Lord esteemeth all flesh in one; he that is righteous is favored of God” (1 Nephi 17:35).  And who are those righteous who are favored of God?  They are everyone there—for all passed by the same standards worship in the house of the Lord. 

               The physical equality of the temple experience should remind us of the actual commitments we make there to serve God and all of His children.  In the temple as we participate we are taught of our need to live the law of consecration, which, as Elder McConkie described, “is that we consecrate our time, our talents, and our money and property to the cause of the Church: such are to be available to the extent they are needed to further the Lord’s interests on earth.”  In other words, we have to be willing to give whatever the Lord requires to His purposes, which of course are focused on providing temporal and spiritual blessings to all of His children.  To do this, we must live as the Lord commanded in the Book of Mormon: “Ye shall not esteem one flesh above another, or one man shall not think himself above another,” which the clothing and atmosphere in the temple already teach us (Mosiah 23:7).  This unity and humility was also described in the Nephite society this way: “For the preacher was no better than the hearer, neither was the teacher any better than the learner; and thus they were all equal, and they did all labor, every man according to his strength” (Alma 1:26).  As soon as we see ourselves as better than our neighbor, though, we start to lose the unity that the Lord requires for His people.  This is what happened to the Nephites after their miraculous deliverance from the Gadianton robbers that had brought them all so close together: “And the people began to be distinguished by ranks, according to their riches and their chances for learning” (3 Nephi 6:12).  Because some of them started to see themselves as being a higher “rank” than other, as having more worth because they had more education or money, their unity disintegrated and eventually the government and church were broken up completely.  Our participation in the temple and its ordinances is a reminder to us of the unity the Lord requires and how He sees His children: “the one being is as precious in his sight as the other” (Jacob 2:21).