“The temple is also a model home that the Lord wants us to experience and use as a model for our own homes. In it, virtually every principle of the gospel is magnificently taught, either implicitly or explicitly.
The Lord’s home is purposeful, orderly, and reverent in every facet. Everyone knows exactly what he is doing and where he is going. If someone is temporarily confused or uncertain, he receives help and direction at once. Everything is done in proper sequence. No one can shortcut the processes. Regardless of their time pressures and personal deadlines, all accommodate the timetable and sequence of the Lord. No one yells at or belittles or condemns someone else. Cheerfulness and kindliness permeate the atmosphere, and any exception to this is exactly that—an exception, and offensive to the Spirit. The temple conforms to the Lord’s expression in the dedicatory prayer for the first temple of this dispensation, the Kirtland Temple—“ a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God” (D& C 109: 8).
We all need models, and in the temple we have a model home. But we must return frequently and refresh ourselves deeply, through meditation and concentration and true temple worship and service, in order to centralize these significant eternal truths and their author and source, our Heavenly Father.
There are four stages to the temple endowment: the preparatory ordinances, the visual lecture presentations, the covenants, and the tests of knowledge. The instruction given in the preparatory work prepares the participant for further light and knowledge regarding the creation of the world, the creation and nature of man, the Fall, the Atonement, and the divine process of receiving the Atonement in order to be redeemed from the Fall. The person accepts the light and knowledge communicated to him by binding himself in covenants. Then, through faithfulness to these covenants, he receives still more light and knowledge. (See “Temple Worship,” lecture delivered by Elder John A. Widtsoe in the Assembly Hall, Temple Square in Salt Lake City, October 12, 1920.)
The divine mirror of the temple endowment gives an accurate map of man’s true nature, and through his faithfulness it can subordinate, eclipse, or completely erase the distorted maps coming from the social mirror. These celestial principles and goals are as different from the best principles and goals which modern philosophy or psychology can suggest to man as the sun is from the moon. Any effort to use a secular frame of reference or map to evaluate the eternal/ celestial one would be comparable to holding a flashlight up to get a better view of the sun.”
The Divine Center, pg 175, 176
