Answer

What Actually Happens in the Temple?

Nobody will tell you the details, and that silence can make the temple sound like a test you might fail or a secret you have to earn. If you are preparing to go, some nervousness is normal and almost universal.

You make covenants with God, and you receive blessings that Christ’s Atonement makes possible. That is the whole of it. The ordinances are sacred acts performed under priesthood authority in which you promise God specific things and He promises you specific things in return.

Eternal Truths

Christ gave His Church authority to bind on earth and in heaven. He gave Peter the keys and said that what is bound on earth can be bound in heaven (Matthew 16:18-19). If relationships are going to survive death, something has to bind them, and the ordinances are what He established to do it.

Temple ordinances are the way covenant blessings are received, not the way God’s love is earned. The Church teaches that the endowment is a series of instructions that includes covenants to live righteously, and that a temple marriage continues forever if husband and wife are faithful to the covenants they make (Temples). President Russell M. Nelson taught that these covenants give access to God’s power in daily life (“The Temple and Your Spiritual Foundation”). You do not become worthier by attending. You receive access to power already offered.

A covenant has to be lived after it is made. The Lord said that a husband and wife must enter the covenant by proper authority and then abide in it (Doctrine and Covenants 132:19). Sincerity is necessary and it is not the same as authorisation, and authorisation is not the same as a finished work.

What Can Make This Confusing?

The reverence around temple ordinances is easy to mistake for secrecy, and secrecy suggests information you are being kept from. What is actually withheld is a small amount of wording, held sacred rather than hidden. Nearly everything about what covenants are and what they promise is published and can be studied before you go.

What Research Shows

David Dollahite and Loren Marks studied 28 Latter-day Saint families and the practices that shaped them. Belief in eternal family relationships was the central theme, and participants tied it to hope, purpose, forgiveness and patience. The study cannot measure sealing power. It does show how an eternal view changes how a family actually behaves.

Questions to Think About

• Am I preparing to receive something, or bracing to pass something?
• Which covenant am I least sure I could keep, and why?
• Who could I ask the questions I have been embarrassed to ask?

What You Can Do

Read the temple preparation material with your bishop this week and write down the questions you have been too self-conscious to ask. Most of them have straightforward answers, and asking beforehand is far better than working it out during. The essay behind this answer covers what the ordinances mean in more depth.

Jesus Christ is the one making every temple promise, and everything that happens there is His work being extended to you.