Temples are more than stone and mortar. They are filled with faith and fasting. They are built of trials and testimonies. They are sanctified by sacrifice and service.
Interpretation
Temples symbolize more than their physical structure, embodying faith and the experiences of those who build them.
Thomas S. Monson highlights that the essence of temples lies not solely in their architectural form but in the profound spiritual and communal experiences of those who create and maintain them. The quote emphasizes that faith, personal struggles, and acts of service contribute to their sanctity, illustrating the idea that spiritual places are reflections of the inner journeys and sacrifices of individuals.
In practice
In a sermon about building faith within a community, this quote can illustrate the importance of shared experiences.
Mortality is a period of testing, a time to prove ourselves worthy to return to the presence of our Heavenly Father. In order for us to be tested, we must face challenges and difficulties. These can break us, and the surface of our souls may crack and crumble-that is, if our foundations of faith, our testimonies of truth are not deeply embedded within us.
We are never alone when we stand with our Father in Heaven.
Things which provide deep and lasting happiness and gratitude are the things which money cannot buy: our families, the gospel, good friends, our health, our abilities, the love we receive from those around us.
The face of sin today often wears the mask of tolerance. Do not be deceived; behind that facade is heartache, unhappiness and pain. .. YOU be the one to make a stand for right, even if you stand alone. Have the moral courage to be a light for others to follow.
Gracias, danke, merci - whatever language is spoken, "thank you" frequently expressed will cheer your spirit, broaden your friendships, and lift your lives to a higher pathway as you journey toward perfection. There is a simplicity - even a sincerity - when "thank you" is spoken.
No member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has canned peas, topped beets, hauled hay, shoveled coal, or helped in any way to serve others ever forgets or regrets the experience of helping provide for those in need.
If we truly worship God, acknowledging and adoring his infinite worth, we find ourselves impelled to make him known to others, in order that they may worship him too. Thus worship leads to witness, and witness in its turn to worship, in a perpetual circle.
He feared his maturity as it grew upon him with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.
I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure, unless built upon truth and justice, therefore, I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects.
Sometimes we exclude things in ourselves in order to be like everybody else around us-our ethnicity, our social backgrounds, our ideas. What kind of world is it that will not allow me to be myself, and is it really good for me to be there? What part of me will die a slow death if I stay?
Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate Semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parable therein.
The thing to do is to concentrate on the seer and not on the seen, not on the objects, but on the Light which reveals them.
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