Making it to the Celestial Kingdom

About a month ago, we had a combined Young Men/Young Women activity that was a large object lesson on the three kingdoms. After the fun was over, we gathered together and I summed up the experience with a short talk. Here are some of my notes from that night:

Kingdoms
Celestial Kingdom

• Dwell in presence of God and Christ
• Don’t receive it in one attempt. “It is the result of a lifetime of righteousness and constancy of purpose”
• Must exercise faith in Christ
• Must receive ordinances of salvation and keep associated covenants: Baptism, Gift of the Holy Ghost, Melchizedek Priesthood ordination for men, Temple endowment, Marriage sealing
• Must keep commandments
• Must repent
• Must Endure Faithfully
• Given to all who would have received it if they didn’t have the opportunity in this life
• Given to all children who die before age of accountability (eight)
• Comparable to Glory of the sun

Terrestial Kingdom

• Can have presence of Christ but not the Father
• Honorable people who were deceived by craftiness of men
• Members of the church who were not valiant
• Those who rejected the opportunity to receive the gospel in mortality but later received it in the postmortal spirit world
• Comparable to Glory of the moon

Telestial Kingdom

• Did not receive the gospel or a testimony of Jesus
• Redeemed from spirit prison (hell)
• Comparable to Glory of the stars
  

Utilize the atonement: You can do it! You can gain Eternal Life

• "...be assured that eternal life is within your reach. The Lord wants you to return to Him, and He will never require anything of you that you cannot fulfill. All His commandments are calculated to promote your happiness." (True to the Faith, page 53)
• The Atonement reconciles us to the Father, we are made perfect through Jesus (DC 76: 62 and 69)
• The Savior invites all of us to receive eternal life
• We ALL sin; we ALL need the Atonement
• Repent Now—for most of us that will mean daily
• Elder Eyring said in General Conference (Do Not Delay: http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=c63a6a4430c0c010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&hideNav=1 ): “All of us have faced deadlines. Fear can grip us when we realize that there may not be enough time left to finish what we promised we would do. The thought comes, “Why didn’t I start earlier?””
  
  "That temptation to delay comes from our enemy, Lucifer. He knows that we can never be truly happy unless we have hope in this life and then realization, in the next, of eternal life. It is the greatest of all the gifts of God. It is to live in families forever with our Heavenly Father and with Jesus Christ and to have eternal increase. Satan wants us to be miserable as he is. And he knows that we can only have that true happiness if we are washed clean through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, by deep and continuing repentance, and the making and keeping of sacred covenants offered only through God’s authorized servants."
  
  "And so Satan tempts with procrastination throughout our days of probation. Any choice to delay repentance gives him the chance to steal happiness from one of the spirit children of our Heavenly Father."
• President Kimball said:
  “One of the most serious human defects in all ages is procrastination,” and then he defined it: “an unwillingness to accept personal responsibility now”
• Elder Eyring also said:
  "...know that we are not the helpless victims of our circumstances. The world tries to tell us that the opposite is true: imperfections in our parents or our faulty genetic inheritance are presented to us as absolving us of personal responsibility. But difficult as circumstances may be, they do not relieve us of accountability for our actions or our inactions. Nephi was right. God gives no commandments to the children of men save He prepares a way for them to obey. However difficult our circumstances, we can repent."
  
  "Similarly, the world might be willing to excuse our bad behavior because those around us behave badly. It is not true that the behavior of others removes our responsibility for our own. God’s standards for our behavior are unchanged whether or not others choose to rise to them."
  
  "The truth is that today is always a better day to repent than any tomorrow. First, sin has its debilitating effects on us. The very faith we need to repent is weakened by delay. The choice to continue in sin diminishes our faith and lessens our right to claim the Holy Ghost as our companion and comforter."
  
  "...even should we be forgiven at some later time, the Lord cannot restore the good effects our repentance today might have had on those we love and are to serve."
• Alma 34: For behold, this life is the time for men to prepare to meet God; yea, behold the day of this life is the day for men to perform their labors…Ye cannot say, when ye are brought to that awful crisis, that I will repent, that I will return to my God. Nay, ye cannot say this; for that same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time that ye go out of this life, that same spirit will have power to possess your body in that eternal world
• Story from Elder Eyring:
  " I knew a man once who could have thought that and given up. When he was 12 he was ordained a deacon. Some of his friends tempted him to begin to smoke. He began to feel uncomfortable in church. He left his little town, not finishing high school, to begin a life following construction jobs across the United States. He was a heavy-equipment operator. He married. They had children. The marriage ended in a bitter divorce. He lost his children. He lost an eye in an accident. He lived alone in boardinghouses. He lost everything he owned except what he could carry in a trunk.
  
  One night, as he prepared to move yet again, he decided to lighten the load of that trunk. Beneath the junk of years, he found a book. He never knew how it got there. It was the Book of Mormon. He read it through, and the Spirit told him it was true. He knew then that all those years ago he had walked away from the true Church of Jesus Christ and from the happiness which could have been his.
  
  Later, he was my more-than-70-year-old district missionary companion. I asked the people we were teaching, as I testified of the power of the Savior’s Atonement, to look at him. He had been washed clean and given a new heart, and I knew they would see that in his face. I told the people that what they saw was evidence that the Atonement of Jesus Christ could wash away all the corrosive effects of sin.
  
  That was the only time he ever rebuked me. He told me in the darkness outside the trailer where we had been teaching that I should have told the people that while God was able to give him a new heart, He had not been able to give him back his wife and his children and what he might have done for them. But he had not looked back in sorrow and regret for what might have been. He moved forward, lifted by faith, to what yet might be."