On a recent pre-dedication public open house tour of a newly completed temple, a family was viewing the temple's ordinance rooms. The eldest son, on the verge of turning 12 and receiving the Aaronic priesthood, asked his father about the purpose of the rooms.

The father whispered a response in general terms: The rooms are where we go to receive the endowment, which provides us with knowledge we need to prepare us to live with Heavenly Father and Jesus.

"Then what is Primary for?" was the boy's follow-up question.

The father was momentarily stumped. His boy likely had been told – not incorrectly – that a purpose of Primary is to prepare us to live again with God. After all, isn't that the message contained in the beloved Primary song "I Am a Child of God"?

The father then gave the only concise answer he could think of that seemed appropriate and accurate: "Primary helps prepare us to enter the temple."

Indeed, not just Primary but all other organizations and occasions of teaching and learning in the Church have as a purpose to prepare the faithful eventually to receive ordinances and make the associated covenants in the temple.

In a 1990 Melchizedek Priesthood training video, Elder Boyd K. Packer of the Quorum of the Twelve said: "We would do well to see that in administering the organizations of the Church, all roads lead to the temple, for it is there that we are prepared in all things to qualify us to enter the presence of the Lord" (see Ensign, June 1990, p. 76).

Four years later, at a news conference on the occasion of his being called to preside over the Church, President Howard W. Hunter invited Church members "to establish the temple of the Lord as the great symbol of their membership and the supernal setting for their most sacred covenants."

Instruction and knowledge obtained in Church classes, meetings and conferences and in personal and family gospel study is necessary to righteous living and salvation. But it is in the making and keeping of temple covenants that such knowledge has its culminating implementation.

Very early in this gospel dispensation, the resurrected Nephite prophet Moroni in a visit to a youthful Joseph Smith expanded upon a key passage in the book of Malachi:

"Behold I will reveal unto you the Priesthood, by the hand of Elijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord,

"And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to the fathers.

"If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming" (Doctrine and Covenants 2:1-3; see also Malachi 4:5-6).

Here, Moroni quotes a scriptural passage alluding to the priesthood power by which God's children are sealed together as family units in ancestral lines that link them through the eternities in righteousness and glory and ultimately make them joint-heirs with Christ of all that the Father has (see Romans 8:16-17). If this were not to transpire, "the whole earth would be utterly wasted" at the coming of Christ, for the purpose of mortality would not have been fulfilled.

Quoting the above-referenced passage from Malachi, Joseph Smith offered this commentary, which itself became canonized scripture:

"The earth will be smitten with a curse [or utterly wasted] unless there is a welding link of some kind or other between the fathers and the children" (Doctrine and Covenants 128:18).

Further, he wrote: "For we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect."

As the above-mentioned family progressed on their temple open house tour they viewed a sealing room where opposing mirrors provide reflected images that seem to go on forever. This, of course, symbolizes the endless posterity and increase in store for those who enter into temple covenants and remain true to them.

It is to be hoped that the 11-year-old boy in this incident – and the rest of us – will understand better in the years to come the sublime and profound gospel precepts that begin with the simple instruction in settings such as Primary.