Understanding the Endowment

with Guest Cory Jensen

Meghan: Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of the Latter-day Disciples podcast. I am so excited and grateful to be joined today by Cory Jensen. Cory was born and raised in Utah. He is a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He served a mission in Rome, Italy and afterwards graduated with honors from BYU with a degree in European studies. And then also an MBA. As a successful entrepreneur, he has started and grown several businesses during his career. He’s also active in humanitarian work and spent four years on the board of directors for “The Moore Project”. His love for the temple began early in his life, and he’s been actively involved in temple and genealogical work for many years. He currently serves as an ordinance worker in the Mount Timpanogos Temple. He and his wife, Tracy are the parents of four wonderful children. He has three wonderful books known as the Temple Endowment Book series, that includes Preparing for your Endowment, Understanding your Endowment, and then Completing your Endowment. We will include links to those in the show notes. Cory, thank you so much for joining us today.

Cory: Well, thank you for having me. I’m happy to be there.

Meghan: Yes, my pleasure, absolutely. So, in terms of our conversation today, I love to share people stories and to kind of get a background on you and your experience and obviously centered on your experience with the temple and how your understanding with that came to be. We’ve mentioned it a lot in recent episodes. The temple has kind of been a theme of sorts, of things that we’ve been talking about. One of the things that a guest of mine mentioned is how we talk about the temple very little it seems. The reason that we tend to give for that is that it’s very sacred, which obviously it is, but it almost seems like perhaps that’s a little bit of a smokescreen for the fact that we don’t actually really understand the temple, and we don’t really know how to talk about it, or to what degree we should, and where the boundaries [in talking about it]. I know that Elder Bednar has spoken about that recently and kind of put a better perspective on things, but I’d love to hear your experience of going through the temple for the first time, and then what was it in your life that led you to a really deep and rich understanding of temple doctrine?

Cory: So good questions and I think you’re right. I think a lot of times it’s just safest to say nothing, and so that’s where we’re comfortable. I was endowed right before my mission in August of 1985 in the Logan Temple. And back then, there was no temple prep at all. I mean, we walked in cold, just off the street and the only temple prep I had was, as we were walking across the parking lot to go into the front door of the temple, my dad leaned over to me and he whispered. He said, “Just remember, all the bows go on the same side.” I was like what?

Meghan: Wait a minute, what?

Cory: What am I doing? What am I getting myself into? And I didn’t know we wore ceremonial clothing in the temple. I mean, I had no idea what was going to happen. And I remember that day leaving the temple 2 hours later and I had felt the spirit, probably to a greater degree than I had ever before felt, up to that point in my life, I mean as a 19-year-old. So I knew that it was something very significant and very sacred and special, but it also wasn’t anything like what I expected, and I left kind of feeling like, OK, what was that? So, as a missionary I tried to go as many times as I could before I left, which was a few times and then in the MTC a few times and then when I got home and got back to school, work and got married. Early in our marriage, we started going weekly to the temple. And I really wanted to start to understand a little bit, OK, what’s going on here? Why are we doing all of this? What’s the Lord trying to communicate to us? Are these ordinances salvific in and of themselves? Or are they instructional, is the Lord trying to teach us something here? And it took me a long, long time. A lot of years have just going repetitively and I felt maybe a little bit like Adam, you know when he’s commanded to offer sacrifice. I felt the need to go to the temple, but you do so for many years without really understanding what’s going on. What is this really all meaning? I read basically everything that I could find and eventually I came to see that the scriptures are probably the best commentary on the temple. I think the scriptures and the temple are kind of two halves of a whole. One without the other is incomplete. Without the ordinances we don’t really understand all the scriptures, and vice versa. So that really helped to open some things up for me. When my daughter turned 19, she was wanting to go on a mission and was preparing to go to the temple for her own endowment, and at that point I wanted her to have a better experience than I had had. Not that mine had been bad by any means, but I had just been really unprepared and didn’t really have any clue what was happening. So I sat down with her and I pulled together a bunch of scriptures and we just went through scripture after scripture after scripture and talked about them. We met on Sunday nights and we did this for about six or seven weeks before she went to the temple. And then she went and had her endowment experience and she came out of the temple 2 hours later and she was like, “Wow, Dad that was awesome! And I was so excited and I could understand, OK, why we were doing this and this and this and I could see what you had shown me in the scriptures and that it made sense.” It really clicked for her. And she had an amazing experience there. Shortly after that, I was called into a bishopric at BYU, in a student ward and right as we were starting our service was when President Monson announced in general conference the age change for the sister missionaries. And so in our little ward at BYU, we had about 53 sisters leave on missions in about a six month period, and the Bishop of the ward knew I had served in the temple. He knew I had been very active that way, and he asked me, “Would you help get these sister ready for their temple experience?” So I took the notes, the scriptures that I had used for my daughter, and I turned them into kind of a seven week course to get these sisters ready to go through the temple for their own endowment. We taught the church’s temple prep material as well, but we also went through scriptures so they had a background or a context, so that things would kind of make sense. Well, what we found was, within about two weeks of this class, we had to go get a bigger classroom because we couldn’t fit in the room we were meeting in, and about half the class ended up being returned missionaries. The returned missionaries were there, having been endowed, but they were there kind of like, hey, we heard about this and we want to know what is going on over there, at the temple anyway. At the end of that three years of service, I had a real strong prompting from the Lord, to take these materials and put them into a book. And I resisted that a little bit because it’s like, OK, wait, I’m nobody. Nobody’s heard of me. I don’t have any high church calling. I don’t matter. And I’ve never written a book. I have no idea how to even start. But I felt really strongly about this, and so I started and things kind of fell into place. So we published the first book, Understanding your Endowment. I think that came out in 2015. It was received really, really well. And I thought, OK, good, I’m all done. That’s all I need to do. Well, a couple of years later through a series of circumstances and events that came about, It became apparent that I needed to write a predecessor book, really for kids, for youth who are getting ready to go to the temple. And so that book became Preparing for your Endowment. Once again, I thought I was finished. And then the Lord let me know there needed to be one more. And so my final book that I wrote is Completing your Endowment. I published it in 2017, so a couple years later. So, Preparing for your Endowment is really meant for youth and their parents. If you want a good place to sit down with your kids and talk through things before they go to the temple, I think that may be a helpful resource for some people. Understand your Endowment is really meant for people who have been going to the temple long enough that they’re familiar with the ceremony and this book largely goes through scriptures. I think it’ll talk about the scriptures in a way that as you’re going through them and as you’re reading that you’ll be able to make connections. The lights will go on. I see the connection here. For example, the first chapter is just on covenants, but it talks about ancient covenant ceremonies and all the steps that were involved, and many of which we find repeated our own temple experience. And then the final book, Completing your Endowment, is really not for everyone. It’s written more for people who are very mature in the gospel, who are very seasoned, who have been going to temple for a long time but, perhaps they’re stuck on a plateau or something, and so it addresses things like calling and election, fullness of the priesthood, priesthood and temple keys, kind of the historical context, and some of the questions, some of the things like, that it digs a little deeper. So, and your audience, if they want that final book, I have the rights to it, and you can download a free copy. I’m not trying to sell anything to anyone. I’m just trying to help people in their journey to understanding. My website is https://www.templeendowment.com and you can download a free copy of it there.

Meghan: Thank you. We’ll include the link to that in the show notes as well. I was saying I have received great feedback on these books and it’s something that I’ve been grateful for and I’m sure our listeners will too because this podcast has been kind of unexpected and the direction that we’ve ended up going was not what I anticipated, but especially over the last couple of months our audience with us has been exploring some of the rich, deeper doctrines that there are in the church. And it kind of puts you in a challenging position at first, when you’re trying to understand the temple on a deeper level because there’s really not a lot of resources that talk about what some of the symbols actually represent, and what the patterns are that the temple is trying to teach you, and the fact that the temple endowment is not a one and done – you checked the box, now you’ll be exalted sort of experience – yet we sort of teach it that way. Why do you think it is that the way that we talk about the temple has been not as descriptive as perhaps it was like in Joseph Smith’s era?

Cory: Good question and I can only speculate. I don’t know. My personal belief is that a lot of people don’t understand the temple. And I think a lot of people have the attitude, and I would even say many people who have attended for a while and maybe even some temple workers (do) and I think a lot of people understand and go thinking, we will get something out of it, whether it’s just even just feeling the spirit of being in that environment and the peace that we feel there. I find a lot of people that I talk to have the attitude of ‘well, I go and I’m faithful, and in the next life, someday I’ll understand’. I think that’s a mistake. I think the Lord gives us this [feeling about the temple]. And I think it’s very helpful, it can be very helpful. We may need some help to get started, I really dislike the reluctance that we have to talk about anything because, if you really pay attention, there’s a few things we’ve covenanted not to disclose. Very few key things. But there’s so much of the endowment that’s in the scriptures and there’s so much that we can talk about. And I do rejoice and applaud that more recently, even in the last five, ten years, the church has started to be more open about ‘OK, we do have ceremonial clothing’. You can see some of these resources. I’ll tell you a funny little story. When I published this first book, Understanding your Endowment, I had a friend who was in the temple presidency. He’d worked for the church, he’d been in the CES curriculum department and he knew all the people, and was very heavily involved in all those circles. And I asked him to read a manuscript copy of it and to give me any feedback and he came back, and he said, you know, he really liked it. In fact, I’ve had several temple presidents that have contacted me and said they were using this in training our workers. It’s gratifying to hear that it’s been helpful, but the concern that he had was, ‘you mentioned initiatory, and you mentioned this and that, I mean, and I don’t know if we can mention that there’s initiatory’? That was his concern, and I went and found a general conference talk where so and so talked about these different things, but particularly with the older generation, because it is sacred and probably out of an abundance of caution, and maybe sometimes out of a lack of real good understanding, there’s a very real reticence to talk about things. But there’s so much in the scriptures that we can talk about, and there are so many things we should talk about, and we probably should talk more about the covenants that we make and what do those covenants mean in our daily lives and how do we really keep them? For part of my class that I taught at BYU, I’d asked the returned missionaries, “We make 5 primary covenants in the endowment, can you name them even in your head?” And a lot of them couldn’t because we hadn’t talked about them. And yet the temple prep book that the church published at the time said you can list these covenants on the board, but nobody ever did and nobody ever talked about them. I think the world has changed too. I will share with you one experience I had while writing. I tried to be very, very careful and prayerful and tried to let the Lord really direct what he wanted me to include. One of the beautiful things about the temple endowment is it’s universal, it applies to all of us, all of God’s children, but it’s also very, very individual. I love that he uses symbolism there because you know, I can be at one level in my growth and Meghan you could be at a different level and you can see one symbol and it can mean something to you and it could mean a different thing to me. And they’re both right. And sometimes those change over time and throughout our lives. And so I think it’s really beautiful how individualized the Lord can make this. So, if you read something in one of my books or something, I suggest and it doesn’t sit right with you, that’s fine. Throw it out the window. Your answer is just as good or better than mine. I do remember on one occasion, I was very prayerful in approaching the Lord about what he wanted included and what he didn’t. At one point I had a question and I wish I could remember the question, I don’t even remember specifically what the question was, but it was something I was trying to decide, OK, should I talk about this or should I not talk about this? Should I leave it out? And I went to the temple one day, really seeking an answer. I went through a session and I was sitting in the Celestial Room and I was pondering this question, and the Lord answered me very distinctly and very clearly. And I was looking for a yes or no answer. Yes included, ‘No, leave it out.’ Just really simple, that’s all I needed. And what the Lord told me on that day is this. And these are his exact words. “I would not have my sons and daughters in ignorance any longer.” And I’ve thought about that answer a lot in the years since then. I took that as a yes, and whatever it was, it’s in the book. So I included it. But I believe the world has changed. You know, my parents and my grandparents, the world they lived in, maybe it was OK to not really understand things super, super well. You know, maybe going to the temple a few times throughout their lives or on special occasions or whatever, however they did, maybe that was enough. But I look at the youth growing up now and the challenges and how much the world has changed and I really believe that unless our youth are grounded in the Book of Mormon and unless they’re grounded in the temple, they’re just not going to make it. And I really think the Lord wants us to come to understand what he’s trying to give us there. Because it’s so much more than we can soak up in just a 2 hour session. It’s going to take a lifetime.

Meghan: Right, because it’s not just a performance, there’s a performance aspect to it, but it’s really about becoming a certain kind of person. I love that. Thank you for sharing that. There are a couple of things that you mentioned that I’d really love to dive a little bit deeper on if you wouldn’t mind just being an educator for a little bit. The first thing is the initiatory, which has some really profound and beautiful blessings but I certainly don’t feel like I completely understand the purpose of the initiatory. I feel like there’s a little bit of overlap with baptism in some ways with that particular experience. And then I’d love from there if we could talk about the ordinances of the temple and if you wouldn’t mind teaching what is the difference between an outward ordinance and an inward ordinance. And how did those apply?

Cory: I think that those are both great questions. Let’s start with the initiatory and then remind me to circle back to your other one. So if you look at a new child, a child that is just born, part of the physical birth into this world, that child as it comes forth out of the womb, they’re a brand-new life and to kind of complete that process, that child is washed and cleaned up, they’re clothed, their named, and in our faith, they’re giving a blessing. So, it shouldn’t surprise us too much that following our baptism and becoming a new creature in Christ or a new part of the Lord’s Kingdom, that as part of that rebirth process, we’re going to find the same exact elements; we’re going to be clothed, we’re going to be washed, we’re going to be blessed as part of that rebirth. Part of that is to prepare you for your journey, for what’s ahead, and part of that is preparing you to enter a more sacred space. In Leviticus it talks about how Moses brings Aaron to the door of the Tabernacle of the Congregation, and he anoints him, and he takes this blood and he smears it on his ear and on different parts of his body, on his toe and on his hand. You might think, OK, well that’s kind of odd, why are they doing that? But then you think about what that represents, what that blood represents or what the water or the olive oil represents in terms of the Atonement and in terms of our Savior and in terms of the Holy Ghost; how our ears should be a attuned to everything we hear, our ears being symbolic of what we give heed to and what we pay attention to; our eyes being symbolic of what we’re looking at, what direction we’re headed; and our feet, our path through life; our hands, meaning the actions that we’re taking. And so all of this should be covered through and by the Atonement. In Hebrews 10:20 Paul compares the veil of the temple with the flesh of Christ. And then you consider what’s very closely tied with the veil of the temple is our personal garment. And so to me, when I get up in the morning, and I get dressed and I put on my garments it’s reminding me that I’m taking upon me Christ for that day, and he’s with me. It has deep meaning in that sense, and there’s a whole bunch more we could talk about. We could talk about the initiatory for an hour. I have a chapter or two on that specific topic, if you want to look at more on it. So, there’s little clues like that in the scriptures that help you make connections and put things together and what symbols can mean too. As far as your other question on ordinances, I believe all ordinances have a physical component and a spiritual component. The physical part is something we do externally, to signify our acceptance of the covenant that’s attached with the ordinance. It’s our acceptance of the ordinance, whether it be, baptism by getting immersed, or in the sacrament, where we’re partaking of the bread and the water. That’s the physical part. That’s our indication to God that we accept it. But there’s also, if you think about it, there’s a spiritual component to each of those covenants and each of those ordinances. So, with baptism, it’s actually receiving the Holy Ghost. In the sacrament it is receiving Christ’s spirit to be with us. And one without the other is incomplete; if we just receive the physical portion and we don’t receive the spiritual component, then we haven’t received the full ordinance, if that makes sense. And the temple ordinances are no different. We are there, we are entering into covenants, we use physical actions to accept and ratify those covenants and those ordinances that we are participating in, but then we’re receiving a token back from the Lord in return. And in the temple, that’s a physical thing that we receive as well, but recognize there’s a spiritual component to that. I do like and I don’t like Brigham Young’s definition of the endowment. Years ago, the introduction was, ‘Your endowment is preparing you for exhalation in the Celestial Kingdom’ that was it. Later it was changed or modified and now we have Brigham Young’s definition we’re all familiar with, ‘Your endowment is to receive all the ordinances in The House of Lord that are necessary for you to walk back into the presence of the Father, etcetera, etcetera.’ I think sometimes we feel like, OK, I’m going to need some physical token. To walk back to the presence of the Father, I used to believe that myself. I don’t believe that any longer. I believe those physical tokens are merely symbols. And we need to possess not just the physical symbol, we need this spiritual gift or the spiritual endowment that that token represents. And if we have received those? Yes, we will be able to return back to the Father. Just think about it from a practical standpoint. Somebody walks in, they qualify, they go to the temple, they learn the ceremony or worse yet nowadays they just Google it, OK? And they memorize it, and they will live a wicked, horrible life. They don’t keep any of their covenants, but they can walk back to the presence of the Father because they learn a few things? No. That’s not right. Those are symbols. Those are meant to teach us, and they can be very instructive and when we recognize what those things are symbolizing, then the endowment can function as a map or a guide or a Liahona in our lives. The Lord can actually tell you, OK, this is where you are at in the journey in the path and you can see OK, I can recognize where I am and what I still lack or what I still need and press forward until you receive those things. If you receive the spiritual endowments that the physical temple endowment is trying to prepare you for and trying to help you obtain and trying to teach you about, then yes, you will be able to walk back to the Father. But just going through one time for two hours or Googling it isn’t going to do you a lot of good.

Meghan: Yeah, lately it’s been impressed upon me, just the checklist nature of a lot of things that we approach in the gospel. And this is just further evidence that God is not a checklist God. He is not interested in you having just gone through the motions of a temple endowment. He’s interested in you then taking that information, asking for the guidance of the Holy Ghost, delving into the scriptures, and really seeking to understand what the pattern is and then living by that pattern to return back to him, which is the essence of mortality, really.

Cory: I agree, 100% correct. You know, the other reason I don’t like Brigham Young’s definition is, and again, it’s OK and if you like it, great, I don’t have any beef at all. This is just me personally. I think as Members we tend to view the endowment in terms of the next life too much. And I think that can be a mistake. I think we should really view it a lot in terms of this life. If I were to choose one scripture that to me best summarizes the entire temple endowment. It’s D&C 93:1, which says, “Verily, thus sayeth the Lord, it shall come to pass that every soul who forsaketh his sins (or her sins), and cometh unto me, and calleth on my name, and obeyeth my voice, and keepeth with my commandments, shall see my face, and know that I am.” Our endowment is a journey, it’s a step by step ascent back into the divine presence but there is no mention of death. It’s the journey that Joseph Smith took. If you want to take Joseph Smith’s first vision experience: it encapsulates the gospel. It’s God reaching down to man and man reaching up to God. And it’s the Atonement. It’s the reunification. And I think, if you back up, if you look at what Joseph Smith was trying to do over and over and over again, it was the same thing Moses was trying to do. Moses had stood in the Lord’s presence. And he spent the rest of his life trying to get those miserable Israelites to rise up and receive the same blessing. And they refused over and over and over again. And finally the Lord got frustrated with them and just said, ‘OK, yeah, yeah, forget it.’ Joseph Smith, same thing. He had been in the Lord’s presence, and he spent a tremendous amount of effort in Kirtland and in Nauvoo, trying to get the Saints to receive the same blessing. To a great extent most of them failed. So what did Joseph leave us behind? Well, it’s the same thing as Moses, Moses was taken, the greater priesthood was taken, but he left behind ordinances that could prepare them and help them. Joseph Smith was taken out of our midst, but he left behind this temple ceremony. To me the greatest thing he could have left because it enables us to rise up and receive the blessings for ourselves that he wanted us to obtain. It’s the same thing the Book of Mormon testifies to over and over and over again. And so we have all these witnesses. And yet, we have a hard time believing that. And we put it into, oh, this is for the next life and we talk right over our heads too often.

Meghan: I remember thinking that when I was younger and less decided about the world than you get when you grow up, you get older, you get opinions and things. And I remember thinking, why is it that we don’t see Christ like they did in the scriptures? Or why is it that we don’t experience the miracles of the priesthood the way that they did? If I got an answer from someone, I don’t remember who it was, and I don’t remember the answer being very substantial other than well, times are different now. And I think that that’s true, except the times are different in such a way that we should be experiencing all of those blessings and more. These are the latter days! These are the fullness of times! So, why is it then that we aren’t seeing those things? I love how the temple endowment fits the pattern of the Lord, which is to teach in parables. And exactly what you were saying is that if you are ready for a lesser law in the lower doctrine, you’ll go to the temple and you’ll get that. Then if you’re ready for something more; in the same pattern, in the same endowment ceremony, you’ll receive more. It’s gratifying to me to see the patterns of the Lord because it testifies of the truthfulness of things. Again, as you were saying that Joseph Smith was a prophet and that his legacy is in establishing the temple endowment, it really was. It was in the pattern of the Lord. It was inspired, and it shows us exactly what you said, what he experienced, and what we can experience, in our lifetimes, if we submit to learning how.

Cory: So, I agree, and you raise a really good question. OK, why don’t we talk about this? Why don’t we emphasize it? If anything, the times have changed, yes, but it makes it more relevant, more pertinent today maybe than ever before. The Book of Mormon was kind of an unkind answer for us. You know, it condemns us, it says, well, it’s because of your lack of faith. And over and over and over and over again, what is the Book of Mormon’s message to us? It’s rise up and receive these blessings. It’s Lehi in the first chapter and then Nephi and then Jacob and then it just goes on and on and on through. In fact, you know, you come to Ether and you read this experience of the brother of Jared. There is a real endowment. That’s the spiritual endowment that the Lord wants us to have. And if you look at his life, if you go through those scriptures carefully, you can see every aspect of our temple endowment played out in his life. He’s living it. He’s not just going through a ceremonial reenactment. The ceremony that’s designed to teach us. He’s living it and he’s receiving a real endowment. And at the end of that whole thing, what does Moroni tell us? He sums it up for us and he says, ‘Come unto me ye Gentiles.’ In the Book of Mormon language, we are the gentiles. We think of ourselves as the House of Israel, and I understand all that but if you read the Book of Mormon, it’s written to the Israelites. Well, it’s written to the Lamanites, to the Jews and to the Gentiles. In those three groups we (the members of the church) are gentiles. D&C 109 makes that clear as well. And so here he is speaking to us, “Come unto me, O ye Gentiles, and I will show you the greater things, the knowledge which is hid up because of unbelief.” This is Ether 4:13 and then 15. “When ye shall rend that veil of unbelief which doth cause you to remain in your awful state of wickedness and hardness of heart, and blindness of mind, then shall these great marvelous things which have been hid up be made manifest unto you.” And it’s really self-regulating. In Alma chapter 12:9-13 Alma tells us, “It is given unto many to know the mysteries of God; nevertheless they are laid under a strict command that they shall not impart only according to the portion of his word which he doth grant unto the children of men, according to the heed and diligence which they give unto him. And therefore, he that will harden his heart, the same receiveth the lesser portion of the word; and he that will not harden his heart, to him is given the greater portion of the word, until it is given unto him to know the mysteries of God until he know them in full. And they that will harden their hearts, to them is given the lesser portion of the word until they know nothing concerning his mysteries;” And so it’s really self-regulating. We’re either progressing or not and we’re either moving forward, we’re either gaining greater and greater light and knowledge, or we’re not. I think the Lord sits up there and waits and waits and waits and waits patiently. And how many times? I mean even in my own life, I look at many of the experiences I’ve had, and it’s been after I’ve sought or I’ve finally been ready – You know, when the student’s ready – The teacher’s been waiting for a long time. So we do ourselves a disservice when we just assume, Oh, I’ll understand this in the next life, or I’m too busy right now to try to figure this out, or to spend much time there, or to put some effort in. But I think it can yield great rewards.

Meghan: It’s a really damning approach to take. Because this life is the time to prepare to meet God, literally. If you can meet God before the end of your life, that’s where it’s at. That’s the ideal way to go about it. In the next life, I think we will find that it’s much more challenging. I love what you were teaching about the mysteries of God. It was really insightful for me when I learned through the scriptures that mysteries, oftentimes when that’s referred to, is designating an ordinance or the ordinances of the Lord. That made a lot of sense to me because they do feel quite mysterious, when you only have the token and the knowledge that there is something that this is representing. You’re not really sure where to go from there without the context of the ordinances, mysteries just seem so vast. It’s like, how do I begin asking about that? Are we talking about mysteries of creation? Are we talking about mysteries of how all knowing you are and everything that you know about us and about everyone? What exactly does it mean? So that context was really helpful. I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind sharing what some of the symbolism is behind the four main endowment ordinances. Is that something you feel comfortable teaching about?

Cory: Yes. In fact, let me look at it again. OK, these are my personal interpretations. If you want to disagree with it or if you want to throw it out, that’s totally, totally fine. But I’m going to point you to two places where you can read about it in more detail. I talked briefly in Understanding your Endowment about the tokens and what they represent to me and why they’re tied where they are. The first one to me is the light of Christ. We all were given that gift at birth, right? And there’s a progression in these too, if we give heed to that, that is going to lead us eventually to a point where we can receive the Holy Ghost and the baptism of fire. And so that is in my view token number two. Number three is, your calling and election made sure, the next major milestone in that journey. Then number four would be the Second Comforter. So, I touch upon that briefly in Understanding your Endowment. I expounded on that quite a bit in Completing your Endowment. There’s a couple of chapters. There’s one chapter, chapter 6, the Endowments Testimony of Christ. I talk about how those tokens and signs and things actually teach us about Christ as well. But then I also expanded upon the ordinance and the covenant, the blessing that, the token, everything, how they all are combined together. So rather than really delve into that here, I’d refer you to that resource because in it, I kind of flush it out and talk about it with scripture backing and things like that. I think it’ll make a little more sense than I can do on a podcast.

Meghan: Thank you I think, for me in my scripture study even having a keyword that I can search out for myself and study from is really helpful. I think it’s hard because even the inward ordinances that are associated with those tokens, we don’t often know the words for those. I think most people are like my mom, I know that I have talked to her about it and she’s heard the phrase ‘calling and election made sure’, but that’s not something that she understands. And because it’s not talked about more broadly, it’s easy to think, well, maybe this isn’t relevant and that’s not true.

Cory: So again, calling and election is something we could talk about, maybe I will circle back to that. I do have an entire chapter on that in the third book that I think would be helpful to her. It’s mostly based on Joseph Smith’s teachings. Joseph Smith and Peter in the scriptures and other places encourage us very strongly to receive that blessing in our life and it is very possible.

Meghan: Can we linger on that for a minute? I think that’s another thing that might be hard for some people. I’ve experienced that too. It’s because these things are so unfamiliar in our everyday orthodoxy, it seems really intimidating to think that these blessings are still being administered in our day. So you feel confident in saying that these things are things that you can reasonably receive as a faithful and God fearing person if you submit to the pattern. We don’t have to if you don’t want to. If the Spirit guides only.

Cory: We’ll go here for a few minutes. We will take a brief detour and then I want to circle back some more practical day-to-day stuff. Let’s talk about that really quick. There is a second set of, you know, sometimes called the second endowment, the second anointing. There is an ordinance associated with calling and election. There’s a couple of papers actually that trace the history of that. That’s pretty interesting. My understanding is that was administered very commonly in, fairly commonly in Joseph Smith’s day. That practice continued down until the late 1800s, early 1900s. Then it was severely restricted because of some problems that came up since that time. It is still administered, to my understanding, from what I am told. I don’t have any first hand experience with this. I think that it is still administered to General Authorities and maybe temple Presidents. I think it’s probably pretty rarely administered to anybody in lower echelons of church hierarchy like me. I’m serving as a counselor in the bishopric. There are some problems. There’s a well known case of a general authority who received this ordinance, later lost his testimony, apostatized and talked about it openly online. It caused quite some embarrassment. I think there’s a number of very good reasons why that ordinance is very restricted. However, that being said, and I want to be very clear, I have not received any such ordinance and I don’t expect I will ever receive any such ordinance from the Church. But there’s another way. And again, this gets back to the spiritual component. The scriptures show there’s another way to have your calling and election made sure. And that is the pattern we find in the Book of Mormon. In Mosiah 26 you find Alma as he is quietly going about serving the Lord and he goes to the Lord in prayer and he’s asking about the situation that’s come up and what he should do. The Lord says to him (in Mosiah 26;20), or says to Alma, and this is Alma the elder, this is wicked Alma that was one of the wicked priests that’s turned his life around. I mean he’s made mistakes and he’s not lived an error free life, but the Lord says to him in verse 20. “Thou are my servant and I covenant with thee that thou shalt have eternal life.” Now let me ask you a question, Meghan. Would you rather have an ordinance administered to you by a man that doesn’t know your heart perfectly and could be prone to making a mistake if he’s not completely in tune with the spirit? Or would you rather have the Lord tell you directly, “Meghan, you’re my servant and I am covenanting with you. You have eternal life.” What is there to prevent the Lord from doing that to anyone in our day? Our own unbelief and our own lack of seeking for it. I do know people in the Church who have received that blessing from the Lord. I’m one of them. And I share that very reluctantly, and only for one reason. If you want to read about it, I talk about it in the third book. The only reason I share it is because I believe people need to know that an ordinary person like Meghan, like Cory Jensen, like anybody who has made mistakes; who has not lived a perfect life, but who has sought the Lord with their whole heart, can reach a point where the Lord extends that blessing. And if we seek it, it is available. And we need more people. I think we need more testimonies to say that that is the case so that others have hope. And this is the only reason I share that. I do not want to draw any attention to myself. I’m nothing special. But I believe the process that Joseph Smith outlined, I followed it and it works. And if it could work for me, it could work for you in your life. And that’s the only reason I share.

Meghan: Now I want to thank you for sharing that. I hope it was not me pulling that out of you.

Cory: No, I’m by nature a very private person, that’s very uncomfortable for me. I don’t like sharing spiritual things. I hold those very sacred to myself and I think people can misconstrue stuff a lot. When I asked the Lord about it, he gave me discretion as to when and who and where and what I would share. And so, I’ve shared just enough. No details, but just enough because I think it’s important to let everyone know hey, that is obtainable. And it’s obtainable for just a normal, ordinary, everyday member of the Church who’s really trying. This is the path that Joseph Smith outlined. This is in The Teachings of Prophet Joseph Smith, he said, “After a person has faith in Christ, repents of his sins, and is baptized for the remission of sins, and receives the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands, which is the first comforter, then let him or her continue to humble himself before God, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, and living by every word of God and the Lord will soon say, unto him son (or daughter), thou shalt be exalted. When the Lord has thoroughly proved him or her, and finds that the man or woman is determined to serve him at all hazards then that man or woman will find his or her calling and election made sure. Then it will be his privilege to receive the other comforter.” That’s the process, and that process works. And there’s no way to deceive, he’s the keeper of the gate, he can’t be deceived. The scriptures talk about a more sure hope, right? Hope that is fixed and permanent. Hope, like faith, like charity, is one of those things that I believe could start small, that it can grow but when you arrive at the day the Lord tells you that he has sealed you to himself, that becomes an anchor to your soul. Nothing else really matters or can be taken away. Now I want to circle back to a couple of very practical things, from kind of theoretical to more day-to-day. I want to also clarify something. One of the mistakes that I made in approaching the temple for many years, was what I was looking for, with respect to symbolism, I was looking for X = Y. So, I have X symbol here at the temple, it must mean Y thing? What is that thing? And I was way way narrow sighted in that. The Lord can use X symbol to be ABC, ZDQ and R things. It’s very limiting to think so, even with the tokens, there’s several ways to interpret those. But if you look at those in the way that I outlined in terms of certain gifts or certain milestones in our journey back to God and if you go to the temple and you ask him to show you where you are, what is my standing before the Lord? Where am I at in my journey? If you have that kind of framework in mind as you go through the ceremony, the Lord can whisper to you, OK, you’re here, you’re at this point. It’s very helpful because you can recognize OK, this is where I’m at. And maybe it can help you see the things you need to work towards as well. Two of the most helpful things in my own spiritual journey have been two practices. Well, I guess three things. I started in 2000 going to the temple weekly. I was at a point in my life where with work and my children, my family and all the other obligations, I could set aside one morning and I could go early. When I had really young kids at home, I wasn’t able to do that, but going to temple weekly changed me as a person and blessed my life in ways that I had no idea when I started. I did that for about 14 years. That’s going to change anybody that will put forth the effort. The second thing, though, was I started going to the Lord in prayer and I would ask, OK, what’s the next step for me? And I would wait and get an answer to that prayer. And I found the Lord was very willing to answer. When you go and ask him, OK, what’s my next step? He’s probably been waiting for a while to say OK, here it is. I would be careful to say, look, just give me one thing. I know there’s probably a whole list of 5000 things OK, just give me one. And so I would get one thing and I would go out and I would work on that one thing until it was done. And sometimes it’s very simple, sometimes it’s a day or two or three, sometimes it’s several months. Then I would come back, return back and report OK, I’ve finished that. And I found that oftentimes there was something I needed to learn or something I needed to clean up or do in my life or correct. But little by little by little, that process really helped me put my life in better order, helped me draw a lot closer to the Lord, and helped me learn to learn the whole process of personal revelation better. I got better at speaking the language of the spirit. It’s a little bit of a foreign language for us. If you’re struggling a little bit in knowing how to proceed, that would be my suggestion, start to implement that. The second thing that I did that was very helpful to me was I started keeping a separate virtual journal. And this is just a little journal, it’s not for anybody to ever read. In fact, I’m going to delete it, burn it, destroy it, whatever when I am older. I don’t ever want anybody to read it. But it would be a place where I would write; lots of times I would write questions; I would write insights that I’ve gained, something that had come to me that I wanted to record. But a lot of times I’d record the content of a prayer, essentially a prayer that anything that I felt like I received from the Lord in terms of an answer. Or anything like that I would record. And I did this for many years. I hate to say that for the last two or three years I’ve kind of neglected it. I actually need to get started back up again. But that was a very, very useful tool for me because I could look back over time (and I did this over a 10 to 15 year period), I could look back and I could start to see how many things the Lord had promised and had been fulfilled. Or ways that he had blessed me. It also helped me to see some places where I had certain insecurities that would pop up over and over and over and maybe they manifest themselves a little bit differently. But over time I could look back and go, OK, you know what? I really need to trust you in this area and quit worrying about it so much. Or I really need to work on this, because here’s an area where I’m consistently kind of stumbling. So that became a very useful tool. It also was helpful to me in recognizing the voice of the Spirit and in recognizing the Lord’s hand in my life. And sometimes, you know, I don’t know why, sometimes he speaks loud and clear, but in my experience, a lot of times he likes to whisper. And if we’re not listening we miss it. And so, I would try to record all those whispers and then look for how things in my life played out. So anyway, those two, those two practices have really helped in my walk with the Lord. At this point in my life I don’t really care about a whole lot other than I really want to do His will. And so I get up each day and I usually start the day with asking, is there anything I can do for you today? And sometimes it’ll be something that pops in the mind that OK, I’ll go take care of that today or I’ll help that person or I’ll seek that out. But other times it’s just as I go through the day, then, He’ll bring somebody in my path or whatever. And some days there’s not anything, but I find joy in just walking with the Lord on a daily basis. If there’s anything that I feel like I owe him at this point in my life, it’s just my complete trust. Because how many times has He showed me over and over and over again that He takes care of us? And even in the middle of really hard, difficult situations, we should put our total trust in him. And if I could go back 15-20 years ago and talk to myself back then? My advice for me personally, I probably would tell myself, you know what, relax and don’t worry quite so much, because the Lord has you covered.

Meghan: Thank you so much! You have shared so much vitally important information and I appreciate you sharing your experience and your practices and what’s helped you on this journey of learning and submission and obedience. I think you gave us some really beautiful patterns. I know I feel personally really grateful for what you shared as I’m progressing and as we all are striving to progress on this spiritual path. So, Cory, thank you so much.

Cory: You’re welcome. Thank you for the opportunity and I hope it is something that is helpful to your listeners as well. Again, I appreciate the opportunity.

Want to listen to the episode? Listen here or watch on YouTube. You can find Cory’s books at www.templeendowment.com

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