How precious a thing is a baby. How wonderful a thing is a child. What a marvelous thing is a family. Live worthy of becoming a father of whom your wife and children will be proud.
The Lord has ordained that we should marry, that we shall live together in love and peace and harmony, that we shall have children and rear them in His holy ways.
In conclusion, I speak briefly to those contemplating marriage. The best way to avoid divorce from an unfaithful, abusive, or unsupportive spouse is to avoid marriage to such a person. If you wish to marry well, inquire well. Associations through “hanging out” or exchanging information on the Internet are not a sufficient basis for marriage. There should be dating, followed by careful and thoughtful and thorough courtship. There should be ample opportunities to experience the prospective spouse’s behavior in a variety of circumstances. Fiancés should learn everything they can about the families with whom they will soon be joined in marriage. In all of this, we should realize that a good marriage does not require a perfect man or a perfect woman. It only requires a man and a woman committed to strive together toward perfection.
President Spencer W. Kimball taught: “Two individuals approaching the marriage altar must realize that to attain the happy marriage which they hope for they must know that marriage … means sacrifice, sharing, and even a reduction of some personal liberties. It means long, hard economizing. It means children who bring with them financial burdens, service burdens, care and worry burdens; but also it means the deepest and sweetest emotions of all.”
Dallin H. Oaks, Divorce, April 2007 General Conference
search words: perfect man, perfect woman committed to each other, marriage
We first learn the temple’s teachings about marriage in the story of Adam and Eve—the primal story of the temple. A friend once asked me, “If Christ is at the center of the gospel and the temple, why doesn’t the temple endowment teach the story of Christ’s life? What’s all this about Adam and Eve?”
As I have thought about his question, I have come to believe that the life of Christ is the story of giving the Atonement. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of receiving the Atonement—because they were the first people to receive it—amid the sometimes formidable oppositions of mortality.
.....
We find a second significant implication for marriage in a later scene from the Adam and Eve story. When they left the garden, the Lord directed them to build an altar and offer animal sacrifices. After many days an angel asked Adam why he offered sacrifices.
He said, “I know not, save the Lord commanded me.”
So the angel told him, “This thing is a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten.”34 The lambs they sacrificed symbolized and pointed them toward the Father’s future redemptive sacrifice of His Son. The angel then taught Adam and Eve that Christ’s sacrifice and the plan of redemption gave meaning and purpose to all of their opposition—from leaving Eden to Eve’s lamentation over her sons.
Many of us go to the temple today the way Adam and Eve did at first—simply because we are commanded, without knowing why. And simple obedience is certainly better than not performing the ordinances at all. But the Lord, who sent that angel, must have wanted them to know why—and I believe He wants us to know why.
Are today’s temple ordinances also “a similitude . . . of the Only Begotten”? Think of how the temple’s altars are, like the altar of Adam and Eve, altars of prayer, sacrifice, and covenants. Think of the dimensions of sacrifice in all the covenants of the endowment. Since Christ completed His atoning mission, we no longer offer animal sacrifices, but we do covenant to sacrifice. In what way? Christ taught the Nephites, “Ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit.”35
Animal sacrifices symbolized the Father’s sacrifice of the Son, but the sacrifice of a broken heart and a contrite spirit symbolizes the Son’s sacrifice of Himself. James E. Talmage wrote that Jesus “died of a broken heart.”36 In similitude, we now offer ourselves—our own broken hearts—as a personal sacrifice.37 As Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, “Real, personal sacrifice never was placing an animal on the altar. Instead, it is a willingness to put the animal in us upon the altar and letting it be consumed!”38
With these ideas on my mind, some months ago I was about to seal a young couple in the St. George Temple. As I invited them to the altar, he took her by the hand, and I realized that they were about to place upon that altar of sacrifice their own broken hearts and contrite spirits—a selfless offering of themselves to each other and to God in emulation of Christ’s sacrifice for them. And for what purpose? So that through a lifetime of sacrificing for each other—that is, living as He did—they might become ever more as He is. By trying to live that way every day, they would each come closer to God, which would also bring them closer to each other. Thus, living the covenants of the sealing ordinance would sanctify not only their marriage but also their hearts and their very lives.
But when we offer in our marriage a broken heart and a contrite spirit in similitude of the Good Shepherd, we will give our lives for the sheep of our covenant, a day or even an hour at a time. That process invites us to take selflessly upon ourselves both the afflictions and the joys of our companion, emulating in our own limited way how the Savior takes upon Himself our afflictions. “Be you afflicted in all his afflictions,”40 said the Lord to Peter Whitmer about his missionary companion Oliver Cowdery. Isaiah echoed that phrase in describing Christ and those He redeems: “In all their affliction he was afflicted, . . . and he . . . carried them all the days of old.”41
Not long ago I asked some temple workers what they thought it would mean to live the life of a broken heart and a contrite spirit in marriage, to treat one’s spouse as Christ Himself would treat us.
One of them said, “It means choosing to be kind—all the time.”
Another said, “It is placing our own broken hearts on the altar as we sacrifice enough so the Savior can heal us.”
Another, “Trying to care more about someone else’s needs than you do your own.”
And another, “I will offer not only my heart but also my arms and my hands.”
And, “It’s the sacrifice of learning to give up the natural man within me.”
And finally, “It takes a broken heart and a contrite spirit for me to overcome my pride and forgive enough to receive the Atonement.”
Another temple worker lost his wife after she had suffered a debilitating illness for several years. After her funeral he told me, “I thought I knew what love was—we’d had over fifty blessed years together. But only in trying to care for her in these last few years did I discover what love is.” By going where he had to go, in being afflicted in her afflictions, this man discovered wellsprings of compassion deep in his own heart that a hireling will never know exist. The accumulation of such discoveries produces the sanctifying process of becoming like the Good Shepherd—by living and giving as He does. Not incidentally, that kind of living breathes irreplaceable strength into the social interests of our culture....
I bear witness that the order of marriage that God gave to Adam and Eve is worth whatever it takes—to find it, to build it, and to keep it in our lives. I also testify that husbands and wives who try to live like the Good Shepherd will discover and will give to each other the abundant life of authentic joy.
Marriage, Family Law, and the Temple, Bruce C. Hafen, Emeritus General Authority Seventy
Well, I hope this brief look at legal history might whet your appetite to think more deeply about such family-related questions. And for the sake of our families, our friends, and our own marriages, I also hope this historical context will help explain why today’s culture no longer understands marriage in the way God intended it. Building a good marriage isn’t easy. It isn’t supposed to be easy. But when a confused culture confuses us about what marriage means, we may give up on ourselves and on each other much too soon. Yet the gospel’s eternal perspective, as taught in the scriptures and in the temple, can help us transcend the modern chaos until our marriages become the most satisfying and sanctifying—even if also the most demanding—experiences of our lives.
....
Because of that Atonement we can learn from our experiences without being condemned by them. And receiving the Atonement, as Adam and Eve did, is not just a doctrine about erasing black marks; it is the core doctrine that allows human development. That is why Adam and Eve didn’t return to the Garden of Eden after they were forgiven. Rather, they held onto each other and moved forward, together, into the world in which we now live. And there they kept growing, together, as a couple. The temple’s primal story is quite consciously the story of a married couple who help one another face continuous mortal opposition. For only in that sometimes-miserable opposition could they learn to comprehend true joy.
Marriage, Family Law, and the Temple, Bruce C. Hafen, Emeritus General Authority Seventy
Without the sealings that create eternal families and link generations here and hereafter, we would be left in eternity with neither roots nor branches—that is, neither ancestry nor posterity. It is this free-floating, disconnected state of individuals, on the one hand, or connections that defy the marriage and family relations God has appointed, on the other hand, that would frustrate the very purpose of the earth’s creation. Were that to become the norm, it would be tantamount to the earth being smitten with a curse or “utterly wasted” at the Lord’s coming
In courtship and marriage, we don’t fall in love or fall out of love as though we are objects being moved on a chessboard. We choose to love and sustain one another. We do the same in other family relationships and with friends who are like family to us.
Let us consider two fundamental principles that strengthen the partnership between man and woman. The first principle is we are all alike unto God. According to gospel doctrine, the difference between woman and man does not override the eternal promises that God has for His sons and daughters. One has no greater possibilities for celestial glory than the other in the eternities. The Savior Himself invites all of us, God’s children, “to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him.” Therefore, in this context, we are all considered equal before Him.
When spouses understand and incorporate this principle, they do not position themselves as president or vice president of their family. There is no superiority or inferiority in the marriage relationship, and neither walks ahead of or behind the other. They walk side by side, as equals, the divine offspring of God. They become one in thought, desire, and purpose with our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, leading and guiding the family unit together.
In an equal partnership, “love is not possession, but participation, … part of that co-creation which is our human calling.” “With true participation, husband and wife merge into the synergistic oneness of an ‘everlasting dominion’ that ‘without compulsory means’ will flow with spiritual life to them and their posterity ‘forever and ever.’”
The second relevant principle is the Golden Rule, taught by the Savior in the Sermon on the Mount: “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” This principle indicates an attitude of mutuality, reciprocity, unity, and interdependence and is based on the second great commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” It merges with other Christian attributes such as long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, and kindness.
Fundamental to us is God’s revelation that exaltation can be attained only through faithfulness to the covenants of an eternal marriage between a man and a woman. That divine doctrine is why we teach that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.”
That is also why the Lord has required His restored Church to oppose social and legal pressures to retreat from His doctrine of marriage between a man and a woman, to oppose changes that homogenize the differences between men and women or confuse or alter gender....Satan....seeks to oppose progress toward exaltation by distorting marriage, discouraging childbearing, or confusing gender....we affirm that the family proclamation, founded on irrevocable doctrine, defines the kind of family relationships where they most important part of our eternal development can occur.
Korihor was an anti-Christ. Anti-Christ is antifamily. Any doctrine or principle our youth hear from the world that is antifamily is also anti-Christ. It’s that clear. If our youth cease to believe in the righteous traditions of their fathers as did the people described in Mosiah 26, if our youth don’t understand their part in the plan, they could be led away.
