The LDS church teaches that Jesus offers you "Salvation", but that your works offer you something greater which is called: "Exaltation".
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Copy and paste from the Church website (you can skim)
Requirements for Exaltation
The time to fulfill the requirements for exaltation is now (see Alma 34:32–34).
President Joseph Fielding Smith said, “In order to obtain the exaltation we must accept the gospel and all its covenants; and take upon us the obligations which the Lord has offered; and walk in the light and the understanding of the truth; and ‘live by every word that proceedeth forth from the mouth of God’” (Doctrines of Salvation, 2:43).
To be exalted, we first must place our faith in Jesus Christ and then endure in that faith to the end of our lives. Our faith in Him must be such that we repent of our sins and obey His commandments.
He commands us all to receive certain ordinances:
We must be baptized.
We must receive the laying on of hands to be confirmed a member of the Church of Jesus Christ and to receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.
Brethren must receive the Melchizedek Priesthood and magnify their callings in the priesthood.
We must receive the temple endowment.
We must be married for eternity, either in this life or in the next.
In addition to receiving the required ordinances, the Lord commands all of us to:
Love God and our neighbors.
Keep the commandments.
Repent of our wrongdoings.
Search out our kindred dead and receive the saving ordinances of the gospel for them.
Attend our Church meetings as regularly as possible so we can renew our baptismal covenants by partaking of the sacrament. (this is a fallacy that gets perpetuated in the church that partaking of the sacrament renews your baptismal covenants. Even Elder Anderson slips it out in a training meeting at the 14:24 minute mark of this video)
Love our family members and strengthen them in the ways of the Lord.
Have family and individual prayers every day.
Teach the gospel to others by word and example.
Study the scriptures.
Listen to and obey the inspired words of the prophets of the Lord.
Finally, each of us needs to receive the Holy Ghost and learn to follow His direction in our individual lives.
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From the Church we learn that because of the sacrifice, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ - salvation is available to all who repent. Then the church also does this: "But wait! There's more!" and tells you that salvation is actually the lesser gift. The "more" is Exaltation which comes by your works.
Think of that.
To the Church - the suffering and death of Jesus Christ is a lesser gift.
This is what is known as "doctrines of devils" (1 Timothy 4:1)
To perpetually teach someone to devalue Jesus' sacrifice is cunning indeed. The church adds to Jesus' sacrifice (3 Nephi 11:39) a list of things you need to do in order to get to a higher heaven...they promote a lifetime hamster wheel of distraction. Jesus was clear:
21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ (Matthew 7)
Yes, there are differing Kingdoms in the afterlife (John 14: 2-6), but the requirements to live in each glory all have a law to be abided by (doing the Lord's will) not self-serving/self-manufactured deeds.
Jesus illustrates this in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25: 14-30). To one is given five, another two, another one. If you multiply what you have been given (to multiply is to seek and do the Father's will), then you will increase your gift. If you hide what you are given, or in other words - if you don't seek and do the Lord's will/are self-serving/self-manufacturing a sacrifice, then by the sheer mathematics of it - you don't have more (Matthew 16:24). Another parable that illustrates this example is the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20: 1-16) who each come at different times but all are given the agreed upon payment.
Those that live in a different glory will not do so because of the works they did. They will live there because they took what they had (the life they were given) and multiplied it (asked the Lord His will and did it). There are thrones, kingdoms, principalities, powers, dominions, and eternal lives. Jacob shows us that we live in eternal progression (Genesis 28: 11-19).
Then what is Salvation and Exaltation?
I frequently use this website to research scriptures and I highly recommend it. I did a word search in the standard works to see where Jesus uses the word 'Exaltation' and aside from D&C 124: 9 where it says, "...the Gentiles to the exaltation or lifting up of Zion" the word Exaltation is only used in ONE place in all recorded scripture. Where, you might ask?
D&C 132.
In case you weren't aware, D&C 132 was not given by the Lord but was deceitfully manufactured by Brigham Young and more can be learned about it in this video by Rob Fotheringham which can be found here.
Know this, dear reader: Exaltation is a doctrine of devils and was never taught by Jesus. We have been brainwashed into believing this is an eternal principle which will get us to the highest heavens.
Jesus said that many will do works like prophesy and cast out devils (and more) - but it will fall short for one reason. He says clearly - you have to do the will of the Father (increase your talent) or it's all selfish (hiding your talent in the earth). If you prophesy, cast out devils, and do many wonderful works without it being the will of the Father - He will say that He actually never knew you. Another translation is - you never knew Him.
Here is what He asks for:
D&C 88:
67 And if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you; and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things.
68 Therefore, sanctify yourselves (seek and do His will) that your minds become single to God, and the days will come that you shall see him; for he will unveil his face unto you, and it shall be in his own time, and in his own way, and according to his own will.
David was special to God and the Lord tells us why that is: "I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after mine own heart, which shall fulfil all my will." (Acts 13:22)
Allow me to phrase that scripture differently:
"I have found David the son of Jesse, a man who chased after My own Heart...who wanted such intimacy with Me he pursued My Heart by seeking and doing My will."
Are you a man/woman who is chasing after God's own heart? The Lord called people Zion (Moses 7:18) because they were of one heart and one mind...His. That is Zion. That is the intimacy that God is after. We were made for intimacy with God. As Evelyn Underhill said, those that find God don't find Him because God loves them more...they find Him because those that earnestly seek Him, "loved and attended to Him more."
I don't know who coined the phrase "parable of the prodigal son" but my husband noted it should probably be called the Parable of the Father. It truly reveals His heart towards us.
Jesus repeatedly spells out His love for us in the Gospels but our religious brainwashing keeps us from seeing it - even when we have "woken up" to the corruption of the Church. Matthew 9:9-13 capatures a lovely glimpse of the gospel of Jesus:
As Jesus was walking on from there he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office, and said to him, "Follow me." And he got up and followed him. Now while he was at the table in the house it happened that a number of tax collectors and sinners came to sit at the table with Jesus and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, "Why does your master eat with tax collectors and sinners?" When he heard this he replied, "It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick. Go and learn the meaning of the words: Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice. And indeed I came to call not the upright, but sinners."
The next things I write are from a book by Brennan Manning (The Ragamuffin Gospel):
"Our resistance to the furious love of God may be traced to the church, our parents and pastors, and life itself. They have hidden the face of a compassionate God, we protest and favored a God of holiness, justice, and wrath. Yet if we were truly men and women of prayer, our faces set like flint and our hearts laid waste by passion, we would discard our excuses. We would be done with blaming others. We must go out into a desert of some kind (your backyard will do) and come into a personal experience of the awesome love of God."
This is the gospel of God. "A God who, out of love for us, sent the only Son He ever had wrapped in our skin. He learned how to walk, stumbled and fell, cried for His milk, sweated blood in the night, was lashed with a whip and showered with spit, was fixed to a cross, and died whispering forgiveness on us all."
Jesus spent a disproportionate amount of time with people described in the Gospels as the poor, the blind, the lame, the lepers, the hungry, sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, the persecuted, the downtrodden, the captives, those possessed by unclean spirits, all who labor and are heavy burdened, the rabble who know nothing of the law, the crowds, the little ones, the least, the last, and the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
"The saved sinner is prostrate in adoration, lost in wonder and praise. He knows repentance is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven. It serves as an expression of gratitude rather than an effort to earn forgiveness. Thus the sequence of forgiveness and then repentance, rather than repentance and then forgiveness, is crucial for understanding the gospel of grace."
Perhaps you've heard this story:
Years ago in a large city in the far West, rumors spread that a certain Catholic woman was having visions of Jesus. The reports reached the archbishop. He decided to check her out. There is always a fine line between the authentic mystic and the lunatic fringe.
“Is it true ma’am, that you have visions of Jesus?” asked the cleric.
“Yes,” the woman replied simply.
“Well, the next time you have a vision, I want you to ask Jesus to tell you the sins that I confessed in my last confession.”
The woman was stunned. “Did I hear you right, bishop? You actually want me to ask Jesus to tell me the sins of your past?”
“Exactly. Please call me if anything happens.”
Ten days later the woman notified her spiritual leader of a recent apparition. “Please come,” she said.
Within the hour the archbishop arrived. He trusted eye-to-eye contact. “You just told me on the phone that you actually had a vision of Jesus. Did you do what I asked?”
“Yes, bishop, I asked Jesus to tell me the sins you confessed in your last confession.”
The bishop leaned forward with anticipation. His eyes narrowed. “What did Jesus say?”
She took his hand and gazed deep into his eyes. “Bishop,” she said, “these are his exact words: ‘I CAN'T REMEMBER.’”
The prophetic word spoken by Jesus to a thirty-four-year-old widow, Marjory Kempe, in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1667 remains ever ancient, ever new: "More pleasing to Me than all your prayers, works, and penances is that you would believe I love you."
Mark 14:3-9 (NCV)
Jesus was in Bethany at the house of Simon, who had a skin disease. While Jesus was eating there, a woman approached him with an alabaster jar filled with very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She opened the jar and poured the perfume on Jesus’ head. Some who were there became upset and said to each other, “Why waste that perfume? It was worth a full year’s work. It could have been sold and the money given to the poor.” And they got very angry with the woman. Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why are you troubling her? She did an excellent thing for me. You will always have the poor with you, and you can help them anytime you want. But you will not always have me. This woman did the only thing she could do for me; she poured perfume on my body to prepare me for burial. I tell you the truth, wherever the Good News is preached in all the world, what this woman has done will be told, and people will remember her.”
What an impulsive, lovely gesture of gratitude! By human reckoning it was a foolish and wasteful thing to do. Yet Jesus was so deeply moved He wanted the tale of this woman's recklessness told and retold across the generations until the end of time!
How long will it be before we discover we cannot dazzle God with our accomplishments?
When will we acknowledge that we need not and cannot buy God's favor?
In Dostoyevsky's incomparable novel The Brothers Karamazov, the charge flung by the Church - embodied in the Grand Inquisitor - against Jeuss who has returned to earth is, "Why have you come to disturb us?"
After fifteen hundred years the institutional Church, instead of proclaiming Jesus, had supplanted Him. Ecclesiastical traditions and man-made laws had ursurped Jesus, and the Church was living off the success of its ingenuity.
There was too much light and truth in Jesus. His word, "You will know the truth and the truth will make you free," was intolerable. The elders decided that men and women simply were not capable of being free; so the Church ascribed to itself the protection of souls entrusted to it, only to dispense it when absolutely necessary. Ordinary people could not endure the burden of freedom, so the Church took it away from them for their own good. They would only abuse and misuse it anyway. Delivered from the anxiety and torment of personal decision and responsibility, people would feel safe and happy in the obedience to authority.
"They will be amazed at us," says the Grand Inquisitor to Jesus, "and will think of us as gods, because we, who set ourselves at their head, are ready to endure freedom, this freedom from which they shrink in horror; and because we are ready to rule over them - so terrible will it seem to them, in the end, to be free. But we shall say that we are obeying you and tuling only in your name. Again we shall be betraying them, for we shall not let you have anything to do with us anymore." Indeed, "Why have you come to disturb us?" The Grand Inquisitor means to take this Jesus who has come again, bringing freedom once again, and burn him at the stake in the name of the Church."
The question had become not "What does Jesus say?" but "What does the Church say?" This question is still being asked today.
Jesus wants intimacy with us. A lasting, intimate, daily relationship with Him where you commune with Him right here, right now. I thought to experience Jesus meant that I needed to attempt to get to some distant throne in the heavens where I would need to desperately claw my way to get there. What I learned was that He is here...right here by me, in me, around me...and always has been. That He could be so close, so near was the unbelief I needed to get rid of.
The best way that I have experienced Jesus is through the Wild at Heart ministry. They experience Jesus and want others to experience Him too. They are releasing a book on March 4th called, "Experience Jesus. Really." The audio book is designed to walk you through experiencing Jesus and I recommend getting their book. Here is a podcast they recently did where they show sections of what the book is about.
That's my wish, if I had one wish. That all would desire Him, seek Him, and find Him! There is no greater relationship and is the pearl of great price worthy of sacrificing everything for.
The Name Lives On
by
David Phelps
