Editor’s Note:  Richard Eyre’s 12-article series earlier this year gave added perspective to the Gospel and the Plan of Salvation by viewing both through a familycentric lens.  (to see those earlier articles click here.)

The insightful series was so well received that we were all sorry to see it end.  And it turns out that it didn’t end—Richard is adding five additional essays, one today and one each weekend for the next four weeks.  It will be a good way to begin the new year!

Author’s Note: Christmas is the perfect time to consider both the doctrinal gifts of the Restoration and their spectacular wrappings. As always, I would love your private feedback if you will email me at Dr*******@***il.com

Christmas Morning

All parents have experienced it at Christmastime:  We choose gifts for our children, wrap them beautifully and put them under the tree. But on Christmas morning, our smallest children often seem to find more interest in the bright foil wrapping and the fancy, colorful bows than they do in what is inside.

And that was the metaphor used in London many years ago by my friend the Hon. Rhodes Boyson.  Rhodes was both a Member of Parliament and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Minister of Education. Linda and I had become close to he and his wife Fleurette and loved them as friends.  We were there as the Mission Leaders, and so they had been well exposed to the Church—they had met many members and attended many meetings and were highly favorable to our faith.

But one day Rhodes asked me perhaps the best theological question I had ever heard. He said, “I know about the ‘wrappings and the bows’—the angels and the gold plates and the supernatural events, but what I really want to know is what is inside the box—what are the actual gifts of your Restoration?  What are the truths that went missing from Catholicism and that, even after the Reformation, still needed to be brought back?  Specifically, what was lost from the original Church of Jesus Christ of former days, and had to be restored in the Church of Jesus Christ of latter days?”

It wasn’t a question that could be answered quickly or casually, and Rhodes was not one who would accept a short or simple answer. So, I sat down and began to write out my response in a letter; and several days later that letter was 87 pages long. I am going to try here to summarize the 14 gifts that I wrote about to Rhodes, and talk about the glory of these gifts of the Restoration for which we should be so grateful, particularly now in the season of gifts, at Christmas.

The Gifts

Each of these 14 gifts was part of what Christ taught during his earthly ministry within His true and everlasting Gospel, and all were certainly embraced by His Apostles. But through their martyrdom and the dilution and compromise of the Apostacy, they were lost, and it would take a God-initiated restoration rather than a man-initiated reformation to bring them back.

Yes, these restored, doctrinal gifts came in the spectacular “wrappings” of golden plates, angelic visitations, and often startling revelation (how else could they have been delivered, given their power and sublime beauty.)

But it is the gifts themselves, and not the wrappings, that count most.

The letter to Rhodes was 87 pages long because I was trying to explain things to him that he had never heard before—with the goal of teaching and perhaps converting. It will take much less space to innumerate and review these gifts with you who have received them long ago and used them all of your life—the goal here is remembering and appreciating.

They are not listed here in any particular order or priority—simply expressed with a deep sense of wonder and awe.

For Church Members, these gifts feel so natural and so purely and intuitively true that we often take them for granted, and it is hard to imagine living or thinking or loving without them.  Let us remember how blessed we are to have each one, and how very different our lives would be without them.  Let us remember that only about one person out of every thousand persons on this earth has these insightful, illuminating gifts.  And as we consider them, let us express our gratitude in every way we can think of or conceive.

Gift One: The doctrine of eternal progression and family exaltation.  Most of the Restoration is about exaltation—which is basically “our” word—if you google it, it will refer you to LDS teachings. The word itself implies the ultimate goal of returning to live with our Heavenly Parents and to there be enough like them to have the type of eternal family relationships that They enjoy.

This whole insight of a parental God, including both Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother and our eternal past-life and post-life connection to Them and to our spiritual siblings who populate this earth with us is completely unique to the restored Gospel.

Without it, we can only imagine the disconnects and spiritual loneliness we might feel.

Gift Two: Knowledge of our Premortal Existence and of our position in our Heavenly Parents Spiritual Family. We know who we are only when we know where and who we came from, and among all of the things that were lost in the Apostacy, perhaps the most basic is the half of eternity that came before this mortal earth. Try to imagine the difference in spirit and mind of thinking that we each had our beginning at our mortal birth rather than having always existed and having been born spiritually to our Heavenly Parents.

Knowing that there was a “before” impacts our view of justice, of mutual respect, of purpose, and gives us a framework broad enough to more fully glimpse God’s power and our own endless journey of eternal progression. And our love and witness of a Parental God deepens as we understand the Fatherly wisdom that knows when children reach a stage where their growth requires agency and a degree of separation from their parents.

Gift Three: Insight into the purposes of Earth and Mortality. For those with no faith in God, life is random and arbitrary and often seems pointless.  For those who do believe, there is hope, but it may seem vague and undefined.  For Christians, that hope centers in the Savior, and for Latter Day Saint Christians the whole hope and purpose comes more sharply into focus with our knowledge of immortality and progression and covenants and the path to exaltation.

What greater gift could there be than knowing why we are here?

Gift Four:  Understanding of the Degrees and Dimensions of Life after Death. The troublesome paradigm of a binary heaven and hell with some barely making it to one and others just narrowly slipping into the other forever (and with the former being unattainable for those not knowing of or being baptized unto Christ during their lifetimes) has plagued traditional Christianity for centuries.

The Restoration’s gift of an expanded view of the hereafter where all reside and progress in places and on paths corresponding to their valiance and desire gives us a larger perspective of self-judgement and atonement and the brilliance of eternal progression rather than the boredom of eternal rest.

Gift Five:  Enhanced Faith in the Fairness and Justice of God.  Gifts 2, 3, and 4 combine to give us the important assurance that God is fair, and that He loves all of His children equally and totally.  Our revelation concerning a Spirit World, where opportunities not presented to one on this earth can emerge in an equalizing fashion, helps us to see a loving and benevolent God rather than an arbitrary or partial one.

Opportunities become equal for all of God’s children not through the Hinduist idea of living multiple lives as multiple creatures with varying possibilities, but through forever being one’s eternal self, passing through multiple phases of an existence without beginning or end where we were once intelligences before being organized into God’s spirit children and in which we have the potential of one day living with Him and being like Him.

Gift Six: A more complete comprehension of Christ, of His Roles within God’s Plan, and of His Relationship to us. Belief in and worship of Jesus Christ gives all true Christians something so magnificent in common that it should overwhelm all differences.  But knowing of Christ only within the confines of His thirty-three years here on earth limits the magnitude of His power as well as the margins of our perspective.

Adding the knowledge of Hi—as the Firstborn Spirit Son of God, as the presenter of His Father’s plan, as the Creator, as Jehova of the Old Testament, as the Minister to the “other sheep” of America and the Lost Tribes, as the Restorer of His Gospel, as our Judge, and ultimately as our Father—allows us to worship Him more fully and find faith in Him more completely.

Gift Seven:  The Gift of the Holy Ghost. All Christians and believers in the New Testament know of the Holy Spirit and the guidance and power that He can provide. But through the Restoration, we can also know Him as the third separate and distinct member of the Godhead, and we more fully understand the indispensable importance of His influence as the revealer of truth, the comforter, and the sealer of our covenants and God’s promises.

And we have the sublime opportunity of actually receiving this Great and Divine Influencer as a direct Priesthood-given gift via the laying on of hands after making the covenants of baptism.

Gift Eight:  The Gift of the Priesthood.  The power of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is available to all, but the actual, specific power to act in God’s name, and to bless and ordain and perform divine ordinances comes only through the Holy Priesthood which is given and administered by the Priesthood keys held only by a living Prophet.

And with the Priesthood comes instructions on how it can be effectively and righteously used, exercised, and magnified for the blessings of our families and the Church (D&C 121)

Gift Nine: Temples, Eternal Marriages and Ancestral Connection. The difference in scope and in effect between “Till death do you part” and “For time and all eternity” is hard to fathom. And the revealed Temple ordinances, covenants and sealings, along with our privilege of performing them vicariously for our ancestors and all who have died without those opportunities, creates the eternal order and government of God.

The mutual dependency and blessings converging backward and forward over generations connects us all within God’s family in ways that are perhaps beyond our understanding.  We owe all to our forbearers who made our lives possible, and they may owe much to our diligent remembrance of their lives and the vicarious spiritual work we are able to do for them.

Gift Ten:  The Gift of Potential, Promises, Purpose, Priorities, Programs and Practical Guidelines.  Because of the Restoration, we know our potential and purpose which helps us prioritize our lives.  The restored Church itself extends the programs and practical physical and emotional assistance we need.  It is indeed “the scaffolding” within which wecan build Eternal Families.

A famous and time-tested essay by Eugene England is titled “Why the Church is as true as the Gospel” and indeed the organized and structured Church with its wards and stakes and auxiliaries and ministering and mentorship and service gives us the community and the brotherhood and sisterhood that can rescue us from the world’s chaos.

Gift Eleven: The Gift of Continuity and Consistency.  A God who changes is harder to believe in than One who is the same yesterday, today and forever.  What a gift to be able to believe in a Heavenly Father who still speaks to man, who still does miracles, who still calls Prophets, who still answers prayers, and who still loves all of His children.

We may move away from God, but He will never move away from us.  What a gift to know that all of His Spiritual Gifts still exist and can still be received and accessed by those who seek them.

Gift Twelve:  The Gift of Living Prophets and an ongoing Restoration.  The core and the extension of Gift 11 is the presence of Prophets and the reality of current and continuous communication from God to man of revealed truth as we are ready to receive and benefit from it.

The great Canadian barrister and member of the First Presidency Hugh B. Brown loved to say that the only three possible reasons why God would cease to call and speak through Prophets would be 1. If He no longer had the ability or the capacity to speak to man, 2. If He lost His interest in or His love for His children, or 3. If we no longer needed Him—if we had become so advanced and so competent in taking care of ourselves and the world that we were self-sufficient without Him. The complete un-truth of all three testifies of the truth of the modern-day revelation that is the overarching gift of the Restoration.

Gift Thirteen: The True Nature of God v. the compromised concept of Trinity. Understanding the oneness yet separateness of God and Christ is taught in the Seventeenth Chapter of John and elsewhere in the Bible, but the confusing and apostacy-arising concept of a three-in-one Trinity can undermine our personal relationship.  In his third lecture on Faith, the Prophet Joseph counts the revelation of the true nature of the Godhead as perhaps the most undergirding gift.

It is Heavenly Father who we pray to, Jesus who lived among us and saved us, and the Holy Ghost who guides us and striving to know each is the privilege of eternity.

Gift Fourteen: The correct concept of Original Sin and the Fall. The general Christian concept of fallen man and of Adam and Eve’s culpability in that “mistake” sends people in the direction of a self-image of defensive depravity; while the Restoration’s vision of Adam’s identity as Michael, and Eve’s clear-eyed choice of mortality as part of God’s plan, elevates them and all of mankind to the level of God’s children engaging in what this earth was created to teach us.

It changes the very nature of who we perceive ourselves to be.

Caution at Conclusion

As we work to fully accept the Gifts of the Restoration…to more completely appreciate them…to never take them for granted…to both receive and embrace them, let us do so with a caution in mind.

If we have a Rameumptom paradigm—being thankful that we have more than anyone else and exalting ourselves in that privilege, then the gifts of the Restoration can bend us toward pride, lessening our influence with others and separating us from 99% of our spiritual siblings.

But if we adopt the perspective of the unprofitable servant—knowing that we do not and cannot ever deserve what we have been given, then the gifts of the Restoration can bend us toward humility, increasing our desire to serve and to share, and making us each into a little flame that can both warm and enlighten those around us

And please consider, as we conclude, one other application of the metaphor of wrappings and gifts:  In the biggest and most eternal sense, it is we who are inside—wrapped in the covenants of God’s loving kindness forever.  As we are taught by Lehi in 2 Nephi 1:15,

“But behold, the Lord hath redeemed my soul from hell: I have beheld His glory, and I am encircled about eternally in the arms of His love. “

Our own becoming, our progress, our growing in grace and oneness with God is the very center of this gift of restoration. As we come to feel and connect with God in this fashion, it is knowingly undeserved yet received with hearts so full of gratitude that we cannot help but glow and overflow with the pure love of Christ.

To end on a lighter tone, I remember our Apostle LeGrand Richards quoting a friend who felt we didn’t fully appreciate the profundity and importance of what was restored through the Prophet Joseph. He said, “You Mormons are ignoramuses—you don’t know what you have!”

May we strive to know and remember always, particularly now at Christmas.