Lesson 23: The Blessings of the Holy Temple

One of the pioneers said of the trek west that they never could have made it without the blessings of the temple.  I used to reference that quote often, but I didn't understand it-- not really.  Then, a number of years ago, our family was living in northwestern Missouri and one of our children had a serious medical event.  For about six months, my wife and this child lived most of the time in Kansas City first in the hospital and then to be near doctors and therapists for daily treatments, while the rest of the kids and I stayed two hours away in our house.  Prior to this, my wife and I had been making the trek to the Winter Quarters temple once a month.  Obviously, we did not get to the temple during this time, but it was in a very real way that the power we had accumulated, if you will, by monthly temple attendance that saw us through.  I do not know in what condition we would have made it without the temple.  So, I am deeply thankful for the temple and one of my goals is to learn all I can about the temple and its blessings.  So, this lesson is a highlight for me.

Once again, I could not really settle on a single activity for this lesson.  Instead, I am presenting two activities.  Choose the one, if either, fits the needs of your class/quorum best, and use that one.

Activity A:

1. President Hinckley mentions several ways in which the temple blesses us, e.g. "the total fulfillment of the Savior's Atonement" (sect. 2, para. 1); "a school of instruction" (4,5); "a place of personal inspiration and revelation" (4, 6); "a fountain of eternal truth" (4, 7); "a house of covenants" (4, 8); "peace" (4, 9); "the sanctifying influence of the Spirit" (4, 11).  And there are more.
2. Choose those blessings that you feel prompted would be the most significant for your class/quorum.
3. Divide the class into small groups (or even partners) and assign each group one of these blessings mentioned.
4. Ask the groups to read the section from the manual and discuss how they have felt these blessings in their own lives or have heard about them in the lives of others. 
5. After a little time, bring the groups back together and ask the groups to share what they talked about.
6. In this activity please remember (and it may be worth reminding your class/quorum) that it is not always appropriate to talk about our sacred experiences.  It has been my experience that in these cases, testifying of what we have learned, without sharing details of the experience itself, is just as powerful, if not more so.

Activity B:

1. In this section, President Hinckley speaks to members at all different levels of temple involvement.  In each case, he gives counsel and promised blessings.  Roughly there are three groups-- 1) those who are unworthy to go to the temple (Sect. 4, Para. 1-3), 2) those who are worthy but are not attending the temple (4, 2 & 13), and 3) those who are going occasionally but not regularly (4, 9 & 11-12).
2. Write these three levels of involvement on the board and discuss how we are each at different stages (and that stages may shift and change over the course of our lives).  Be careful to not single anyone out or to speak disparagingly of any group on the board.
3. Read and discuss, as a class, the counsel given and blessing enumerated for each group.
4. Challenge each person in the class/quorum to write down a goal for their temple involvement.  You may even want to provide a note card for them to record their goals on.  The Elders Quorum I am part of passes around index card sized pieces of paper with our temple on them and lines to record a goal for each month.  Many of the quorum members find that very helpful.
5. Prior to this lesson: Set and work towards your own goal.  That way you can bear testimony of the blessings you have received as you pursued this goal.

Using these activities:

There are many variations on each of these activities that might work well.  I will mention only one variation for each activity.  For Activity A, you could hang up pieces of paper around the room with the blessings listed on them.  Then, class members could choose which blessings to talk about by going to that poster.  Similarly, you could provide them with markers and allow them to silently walk around the room and write on each poster experiences, ideas, or questions germane to each blessing listed.  The marker idea might be difficult because it might take a while to record an experience.  Activity B could easily be made into a sheet that class members wrote on.  Simply create a table in Word that had a row for each of the levels and a column for the counsel and a column for the blessings associated with each level. 

In both cases, though, these activities are designed to be high-involvement activities.  Also, I think these activities (especially the second one) are valuable because they ask our class members to consider the gospel in ways that they may not often think about it (in a more systematic, structured way).  That is not necessarily a better way of thinking, but my experience tends to suggest that when we think about something in a new way, we come to understand it in new, usually deeper ways.  I think this has more to do with pondering on a topic (which involves thinking about it in numerous ways and from different vantage points) and the blessings that come from pondering.

As always, I hope that these ideas are useful to your efforts.