templestgm ( + )

Brother Truman G. Madsen, delivered at Brigham Young University on March 5, 1972, regarding our temples

Introduction — Many of you have been swept, at least slightly, by the wind that came with the dedication (referring to the recent dedication of the Provo Utah Temple).  We have consecrated the oil, so to speak.  It is time for us now to administer.  And I would like to talk in the spirit of testimony about some of the glorious promises that have been made and some of the essential needs which those promises are designed to answer in our souls.  Let me begin, if I may, with a story familiar to some of you.  It goes back to the dedication of another temple, the Salt Lake Temple, which you will recall took forty years to build.  President McKay tells of a man who didn’t have money enough even to buy shoes to attend a conference in the Tabernacle.  During that Conference, Brigham Young arose and pled with the brethren that there needed to be more granite brought from the quarry about fifteen miles to the south.  They hauled it mostly by oxen teams.  A man came out from this conference and saw the other brother without shoes on the street with his team of oxen.  “Why weren’t you at the conference, brother?”  “Uh, I didn’t feel right about going in without shoes.”  “Well, Brother Brigham pled for more people to haul granite for the temple.”  “Alright”, said the brother without shoes, “I will go”.  And with that, he started for the quarry with his oxen and without shoes.
Man Is A Temple — President McKay’s eyes filled with tears as he related that simple incident.  The reason his name and his image come to mind whenever I think of temple is that it was President McKay who performed my wedding ceremony; and that high privilege was possible in part because he had done the same for my wife’s parents.  He came in his white suit that morning very early on a June day, a white tie, and white hair; you know the majesty of his personality.  Somehow we knew then, had we ever doubted it, that no one could speak properly if he spoke evil of the Temple, for there before us stood its product!  John the Revelator who, I believe, was also John the Beloved, visioning the city Jerusalem in glorified state, says, “And there was no temple in it, for the Lamb was the temple of it.”  And then he adds that not only would the Lamb reign forever, as we sing, but we by then, having been glorified like unto Him, would reign forever and ever also.
The Temple and Power — The Salt Lake Temple was dedicated with a sense of sacrifice and gratitude that maybe we have not reached.  Forty years in the construction!  Over 20,000 people gathered just to see the laying of the capstone.  Lorenzo Snow, then of the Twelve Apostles, led them in the Hosanna Shout that is now familiar to you.  And then Wilford Woodruff, who had had a dream years before that he would somehow be involved in the dedication of the temple (and he was, as he was the President of the Church), promised that those who would come in the spirit of fasting and repentance would be strengthened, that the brethren would not impose a strict reading of the requirements of worthiness provided they come feasting and repenting (that was not a slip of the tongue, because the Lord defines fasting and prayer in modern revelation as rejoicing and prayer).  Fasting is feasting on the Spirit, and somehow not partaking of physical food isn’t quite enough.  Fasting is a kind of concentration, a kind of pulling ourselves together.  Some 80,000 people during a 23-day period of dedicatory services (averaging 3,500 persons per day) were regenerated.  President Woodruff’s entry in his journal at the end of that year (1893) is “The greatest event of 1893 was the dedication of the great Salt Lake Temple.  Great power was manifest on that occasion.”  The scriptural phrase that brings all that into a theme is that we are to receive in temples, through temples, from temples “power from on high.”  (See Doctrine and Covenants 95:8)  And Christ is the source of that power.  The temple is His, and every symbol in and out of that sacred structure points toward Him, and as a cup carries water, transmits the Spirit of jesus Christ.  Now to be specific in terms of needs that all of us feel strongly about in our time.  It is a characteristic fact that the Lord has commanded the sacrifice of temple-building in the times when apparently our people were least able to build them, and the sacrifice has been immense.  But sacrifice “brings forth blessings”.  You may recall that the Brethren kept inquiring about what it is that they were doing.  They didn’t have our heritage, they didn’t understand even what the word temple meant.  Well, we build a temple.  What for?  And Joseph Smith said on one occasion, “…nor could Gabriel explain it to your understanding now.  But prepare.  Great blessings will come.”  (TPJS, page 91)  In a preparatory revelation (Section 88), the purposes of the temple are outlined.  It is called a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of study, a house of learning, a house of glory, and a house of God.  “Prepare yourselves,”  it says, “sanctify yourselves and I will unveil my face unto you.”  (Doctrine and Covenants 88:68)  Let us talk about each of those words for a moment.
A House of Prayer — Prayer, a house of prayer.  “Make yourselves acquainted,” said the Prophet once, “with those men who, like Daniel, pray three times a day toward the House of the Lord.”  (DHC 3:391)  There is a true principle involved in literally facing the House of God as one prays and as one praises the Lord.  The Prophet, as he led a group of faithful Saints through the Nauvoo Temple, not yet finished, said to them, “You do not yet know how to pray, to have your prayers answered.”  But, as the sister who recorded that brief statement testifies, her husband and she received their temple blessings, and then came to understand what he meant.  A modern leader in our midst, Elder Melvin J. Ballard, said once to a group of young people about solving their problems: “Study it out in your own minds, reach a conclusion, and then go to the Lord with it and he will give you an answer by that inward burning, and if you don’t get your answer I will tell you where to go — go to the House of the Lord.  Go with your hearts full of desire to do your duty. When in the sacred walls of these buildings, where you are entitled to the Spirit of the Lord, and in the silent moments, the answers will come.”  (Utah Genealogical Magazine, Volume 23)  Studying his life to see if there are any clues to personal experience behind that statement, you will find that in his boyhood he often looked up at the Logan Temple and its spires, and he was inspired by the spires, and wanted to go, regardless of what sacrifices it might entail.  That meant for one thing that he never was even tempted to break the Word of Wisdom because he knew that might prevent his entering the building.  I know that his later experiences, many having to do with his ministry, were a derivative often of what he felt, experienced, tasted within the walls of our temple sanctuaries. If I may be personal, I myself, in a critical year away from home and at school, drove at times (this was in Los Angeles) to the place they told us there would one day be a temple (it wasn’t yet built) just with the feeling that the place might be an added strength to me in prayer.  And it proved to be so.
A House of Learning — “A house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of study, a house of learning.”  One of the men who has touched my life, and many of you know this, was the late Elder John A. Widtsoe, a man who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard after three instead of four years, who was given that year an award for the greatest depth specializing in his field (chemistry), but they also gave an award that year for the student who had shown the greatest breadth of interests, which he also received.  Brother Widtsoe has written perceptively about the temple and temple worship.  I heard him say in sacred circumstances that the promise was given him by a patriarch when he was a mere boy in Norway — “Thou shalt have great faith, in the ordinances of the Lord’s House.”  So he did.  I have heard him say that the temple is so freighted with depth understanding, so loaded with symbolic grasp of life and its eternal significance, that only a fool would attempt in mere prosaic restatement to attempt to comprehensively give it.  I have heard him say that the temple is a place of revelation.  And he did not divorce that concept from the recognition that the problems you and I have are often very practical, very realistic, down-to-earth problems.  He often said, “I would rather take my practical problems to the House of the Lord than anywhere else.”  And in his book, In A Sunlit Land, he describes a day when, having been frustrated for months, I assume, in trying to pull together a mass of data he had compiled to come up with a formula, he took his companion, his wife, to the Logan Temple to forget his failure.  And in one of the rooms of that structure, there came, in light, the very answer he had heretofore toiled to find.  Two books on agrarian chemistry grew out of the single insight – a revelation in the Temple of God.  The temple is not just a union of heaven and earth.  It is the key to our mastery of the earth.  It is the Lord’s graduate course in subduing the earth, which, as only we understand, ultimately will be heaven, this earth glorified.
.    A house of learning?  Yes, and we learn more than about the earth.  We learn ourselves.  We come to comprehend more deeply in an environment that surrounds one like a cloak, our own identity, something of the roots that we can’t quite reach through memory but which nevertheless are built cumulatively into our deepest selves — an infinite memory of conditions that pre-date memory.  The temple is the catalyst whereby the self is revealed to the self.  There was a period when I was required as an officer in the Ensign Stake to go every Friday to the temple.  It was not a burden; I thought it would be.  It became instead my joy.  Slowly, because of that regularity I was trusted with certain assignments in the temple.  And this meant that I could walk into the temple annex and they would all say, “Good morning, Brother Madsen”, and I wouldn’t even have to show my recommend.  Not only that, but I had the right to sit for hours in the chapel of the annex or elsewhere, contemplative, reading occasionally, but trying to absorb, trying to breathe the air that is heavier than air, in that place.  And my critical problems had to do with decisions about my life’s work, with decision about the girl, and other struggles in how to cope.  There were, I testify, times when I learned something about myself, and times when peace came in a decision, and I knew that peace was of God. “My glory shall be there and my presence shall be there.”  The temple is a house of learning.  And it is intended that therein we learn not simply of or about Christ, but that we come to know Him.  It has always impressed me that in the Inspired Version where the classic passage occurs about the hereafter and how many will say, “Lord, Lord, did we not do this and that” — the King James Version says that Christ will respond, “I never knew you”, but the Inspired Version says, “You never knew me.”  This is the Gospel of jesus Christ.  This is the Restored Church of Jesus Christ.  This is the Church that teaches us that we can have a direct and immediate living relationship with the Living Christ.  And we inscribe on temples “Holiness to the Lord”, “The House of the Lord”.  He told us, and it isn’t qualified, that as respects our preparton, “all the pure in heart that come into it shall see God.”  Orson Pratt points out that that promise specifically had to do with a temple not yet built, a temple to be erected in the center City, the New Jerusalem, wherein someday Christ actually will dwell, and wherein, therefore, any who enter will meet Him.  But again, Brother Widtsoe, Brother George F. Richards, President Joseph Fielding Smith, and others have borne witness that the promise is more extensive than that.  And that it applies now.  It is a promise that we may have a wonderful rich communion with Him.  Communion!  That is to say that we are not simply learning propositions about, but that we are in a participating awareness with.
.     Occasionally we struggle in amateur research in Church history to understand what kind of a portrait, in terms of sheer physical appearance, one could draw of Christ, if we simply utilized what modern witnesses have said about their glimpses of Him.  It is an impressive portrait.  But one thing perhaps we sometimes neglect in that curiosity is an awareness of, or a seeking for an awareness of, His personality, of those subtler realities that we already recognize in other persons in all variations, but which have been perfect in Him.  What would it be like to be in His presence — not simply in terms of what you would see, but what you would feel.  “Listen,” he said to give us one clue, and these passages were included by our prophet in a recent dedicatory prayer in Provo, “To him who is pleading your cause before him, saying, Father, behold the sufferings and death of Him who did not sin [that is to say, committed none, but He knows them, for He experience them all] in whom thou wast well pleased, behold the blood of thy Son which was shed…Wherefore, Father, spare these my brethren.”  (Doctrine and Covenants 45: 3,4)  That is a glimpse of the compassion that one comes to feel in communion, the feeling with, the feeling for us that He has.  He is the one Personality, if there are no others.  I dare predict that for many of us the time will come when we will feel there are no others, of whom it cannot truthfully be said, “You don’t know me.  You don’t understand me.  You don’t care about me.”  All three are eternally false because of what He went through.  And he has had us sacrifice to build houses where the lineage of his heart, His beliefs of compassion can merge with ours.  The temple is a place of learning to know Him.
A House of Glory — And now, as for the phrase “a house of glory, a house of God”.  One of the most tender moments of my spiritual life was the day a woman, Rose Wallace Bennett, authoress of the Gleaner Sheaf, told me that she as a little girl was present in the dedicatory services of the Salt Lake Temple.  She described also the day Wilford Woodruff had a birthday, his 90th, when it was a little girl’s privilege to take forward to him in the Tabernacle 90 roses in a setting of some 8,000 children between the ages of 8 and 12, all dressed in white.  They had gathered to honor him, and then as he had come into the building (under some prestense that there was need of an organ repair) they arose and sang, “We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet.”  She couldn’t talk about what it felt like to see his tears, or again, what it was like to be in the Temple, without herself weeping  But what she said to me was, “Young man, my father brought me to the edge of City Creek Canyon where we could look down on the Temple.  I testify to you”, she said, “that there was a light around the temple, and it was not due to electricity.”
.      Well, there are such phrases in all the authentic literature that has to do with temple dedications, light, glory, power.  Even non-members of the Church at Kirtland came running, wondering what had happened.  They wondered if the building was on fire.  It was, but with what the Prophet called “celestial burnings”.  It was the downflow of the power of the Living God, like encircling flame as on the day of Pentecost.  A prayer for that had been offered by the Prophet and by his father.  And those prayers were fulfilled.  What is glory?  Well, it is many things in the scriptures.  But let me mention one thing it is that is often neglected.  If we can trust one Hebrew student, the word equivalent to glory, “Kabod” in Hebrew, refers in some of it strands to physical presence.  Just as a person says in common parlance today, “he was there in all his glory”, so the Old Testament often uses this word for God.  In the verse that refers to the glory, there are two changes that are crucial.  King James reads, “He hath made man a little lower than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor.”  Likely, what that verse said originally was, “He hath made man a little lower than the Gods, and hath crowned him with a physical body and with honor.”  This is the truth, brothers and sisters.  The body is a step up in the scales of progress, not a step down.  God is God because He is gloriously embodied, and were He not so, He would be less than God.  The privilege of the House of God is in effect to have our physical beings brought into harmony with our spirit personalities.  And I have read the testimony of President Lorenzo Snow to the effect that this is the only way that the knowledge locked in our spirit can become part of this flesh, and thus occurs that inseparable union, that blending, which makes possible celestial resurrection.  It is as if we are given in the House of God a patriarchal blessing to every organ and attribute and power of our being, a blessing that is to be fulfilled in this world and the next, keys and insights that can enable us to live a godly life in a very worldly world, protected and insulated from the poisons and distortions that are everywhere.  That is the temple.  And the glory of God, His ultimate perfection is in His House duplicated in us provided we go susceptible.
About Preparation — Let me turn to just a few remarks about the how of susceptibility and be through.  I listened once in Los Angeles to the plea of President McKay, stake president after stake president pledge contributions to make possible the building of the Los Angeles Temple.  They committed, and then he arose and delivered a masterful discourse, maybe the greatest I have ever heard on the subject of temples.  I jotted down one paragraph which I am going to quote, but before I do so, this explanation.  He told of a girl, a girl, I found out later, who was his niece and therefore felt confident in confiding, who had earlier that year been initiated in a sorority and then, not long thereafter, had gone through the temple, as we say. ( I wish we would say ‘the temple going through us, rather than us going through the temple’.  I also wish that we would say temple worship rather than temple work.)  President McKay stopped everyone by saying, “This young lady came to me.  She had had both experiences, but said she had been for more impressed with her sorority experience than her temple experience.”  We gasped as you did.  President McKay was a master of the pause.  He let that wait a minute and then said, “Brother and sisters, she was disappointed in the temple.  Brothers and sisters, I was disappointed in the Temple.”  But then he finished his sentence, “And so were you.”  Then no one gasped.  He had us. “Why were we disappointed?” he asked.  And then he named some of the reasons.  “We were not prepared.  How could we be fully prepared?  We had stereotypes in our minds, faulty expectations.  We were unable to distinguish the symbol from the symbolized.  We were not worthy enough.  We were too inclined to quickly respond negatively, critically.  And we had not yet seasoned spiritually.”  Now those are my words, but those cover about what he said.  Then the quotation I will give you verbatim.  He said, “Brothers and sisters, I believe there are few” — and I remind you this was a man at that time 80 years old who had been in the temple every week for over 50 years, which gave him some right to speak — “I believe there are few, even temple workers, who comprehend the full meaning and power of the temple endowment.  Seen for what it is, it is the step-by-step ascent –”  (I pause to remind you of both strands of meaning of that word: 1) assent, agreement, consent, covenant  2) ascent, rise)  “It is the step-by-step ascent into the eternal Presence.  If our young people could but glimpse it, it would be the most powerful spiritual motivation of their lives.”  I heard him say that, and felt it.  I had myself been a critic, had made up my mind that some things were trivial, offensive.  But that day the Lord touched me, and I decided that would not speak again against the House of the Lord.  I would not jest, I  would not assume I knew better than the prophets.  I would listen.  And I would repent.  And I would hope that someday I could testify as did that noble prophet.  I found in time that there was far more than I had ever dreamed in the temple ceremonies.  But there continued to be three things amiss in me, and I dare to suppose these may apply to some of your.  FIrst, I had not even read the scriptures carefully about the temple.  It had not occurred to me that there are over three hundred verses, by my count, in the Doctrine and Covenants alone that talk about the temple and the “how’s”, if you will, of preparations.  I had not read what the brethren had said to help us.  I was unaware that there were such materials as The House of the Lord by Elder Talmage (a very difficult book, but focus on the parts having to do with today and you, and it can help); that remarkable compilation of Brother Widtsoe, a book called A Rational Theology, but with it his great essay “Temple Worship”, which some stake presidents here at BYU still distribute upon request as preparation;  Brother Lee’s Youth and the Church, with three chapters dealing with the temple, Archibald F. Bennett’s great manual Saviors on Mount Zion, rich with nuggets.  Well, I hadn’t even looked.  Second:  I was, I am afraid, afflicted with various kinds of unworthiness and not too anxious to change all that.  We talk of it and we aspire.  We want it, but we don’t want it enough.  We are (and I don’t laugh at poor Saint Augustine for saying it), we are like Saint Augustine who said in a prayer, “Oh, God, make me clean, but not quite yet.”  We talk of sacrifice.  The one the Lord asks of you, now is the sacrifice for your sins, the hardest thing in the world to give up.  There is still a certain bittersweet enjoyment.  But his promise is crystal clear.  “If you will purify yourselves and sanctify yourselves, I will bless you.”  And I am afraid the postscript is, “And if you don’t, I can’t!”  The third point is that I had a built-in hostility to ritual and to symbolism.  I was taught, with good intention, by people both in and out of the Church that we don’t believe in pagan ceremony; we don’t believe in all these procedures and routines; that’s what they did in the ancient apostate church; we have outgrown all that.  Well, we are in effect throwing out the baby with the bath.  We are not against ordinances.  God has revealed them anew.  And I suspect they are as eternal as are what we often call eternal laws.  There are certain patterns or programs, certain chains if you will, of transmission which are eternal.  Ordinances tie in with those, if they are not identical with them.  God has so decreed, but his decree is based upon the very ultimate nature of reality.  “You cannot receive the powers of godliness,” says Doctrine and Covenants 84:20, “except through mine ordinances.”  That had not entered my mind. I thought our sacraments were a bit of an embarrassment and that one day we could do away with them until that day when it suddenly became clear to me — This is the Lord’s pattern of our nourishment, we need spiritual transformation.  We can eat, if you will, receive, drink the Living Fountain through ordinances.  Well, I pray that you will reach out for what is written, reach out for repentance, and reach out in the recognition that the ordinances are channels of power.
Asking and receiving in Spirit — Now in closing, some of your were quite conscious of the dedicatory prayer, and perhaps you sensed the power that was poured out as it was uttered.  Those prayers from the beginning have been given by revelation, and that was puzzling to some.  How can the Lord reveal a prayer to offer to Him Who has revealed it?  Well, there is nothing contradictory in that.  One cannot know fully what to pray until he receive guidance from the Lord.  “He that asketh in the spirit of God asketh according to the will of God.”  (Doctrine and Covenants 46:30)  You must listen in order to know what to say.  And prayers that are all ask and no listen are not very effective.  The temple is the place where you can come to understand what the Lord would have you ask.  And then the place where you can ask, in silence, in joy, in earnestness.  Years ago, if my wife will forgive this, I was involved in the Ensign Stake genealogical committee.  We held a series of firesides.  The climactic of six firesides was given by President Joseph Fielding Smith.  This last lecture was given on temple marriage.  But the week before that I had been asked to speak on vital temple purposes.  And I struggled with that.  And I was talking to young people, some of them quite a bit younger than you are.  What was most remarkable is that toward the end of what I said, I wanted somehow to let them know that my own assurance about marriage had come within the walls of the temple.  That, in effect, my wife and I had had a temple courtship as well as a temple marriage.  It was in the temple that I later gave her a ring.  But I didn’t want to acknowledge publicly that I was going to marry this girl.  That had not yet been said in private, and I didn’t think it therefore should be said in public.  But there came down on me that night, and I have a tape recording that tells the story, such a witness that I announced over the pulpit, “The Lord has made known to me that I am to be married, and to whom.”  She was on the front row.  She was sitting next to my father.  It came as a bit of a surprise to him, too.  There was much salt-water, in the form of tears.  I wept and I gasped, though, at what I had said and wanted somehow to alter, qualify, call back, change.  That is shown in several seconds of silence.  You just hear me saying “Uh — ” and then “In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen”.  And I then sat down.  He had me.  Now, what has that got to do with anything?  This — I testify that the Lord’s Spirit has prompted you individually, most of you here tonight, that that city set on a hill, that temple is yours — that something about it can change your lives, that you need to reach for it, to honor it, if need be, to sacrifice for it, even your sins.  And some of you have fought against that, as I fought against it, because it means change, maybe some painful change.  But I witness to you that it is the Spirit of God.  This valley will never be the same now that that temple stands there day and night as a witness. And you will be changed if you will honor the promptings and let the Lord have you.  I bear testimony that He lives, and I bear testimony that He is in His temples, that He ministers personally, manifests Himself unto the faithful therein, and that entering the House of God, whatever else may happen, is equivalent to being in the locks of the Panama Canal.  And while stopped from the rush of the earlier voyage, water comes up and surrounds and then the ship leaves eastward on a new ocean.  I testify that the power of Christ is in His Sanctuary and that it is intended that all of you drink deeply, receive powerfully, and then testify worthily of that glorious truth.  In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.