Answer

What Does "Power" From Temple Covenants Actually Look Like?

Prophets talk about receiving power through temple covenants, and it is easy to hear that as something you would notice happening. If you have been to the temple and felt mostly ordinary afterwards, you may have wondered whether you missed it.

It is less dramatic and more useful than the word suggests. What people who have it describe is quieter: seeing a situation more clearly than they otherwise would, recognising a temptation earlier, knowing what to do next when there was no obvious reason they should.

Eternal Truths

The power is Christ’s, and the covenant is the connection to it. The Lord said the temple was built so that His people could be endowed with power from on high (Doctrine and Covenants 109:22-23). President Russell M. Nelson taught that temple covenants give access to God’s power in ordinary daily life (“The Temple and Your Spiritual Foundation”). Keeping covenants is less like earning something and more like staying connected to it.

The covenant binds you by agreement rather than by feeling. That matters most on the days the feeling is absent. The Church describes the endowment as a gift, a series of instructions that includes covenants to live righteously (Temples). Living righteously is something you could attempt without a temple. Making it a covenant changes what is behind you while you do it.

Repentance is part of the mechanism, not evidence of failure. The Lord requires that a person enter the covenant and abide in it (Doctrine and Covenants 132:19). Abiding includes repenting. The covenant does not lapse when you fall short of it.

What Can Make This Confusing?

The word “power” suggests an event, so people go looking for a surge and conclude nothing happened. What is actually described is capacity: better decisions under pressure, revelation about ordinary things, a measurable increase in the ability to keep going. People usually notice it looking backwards rather than in the moment.

Questions to Think About

• What have I been expecting covenant power to feel like, and where did that expectation come from?
• Which of my covenants am I most afraid of not keeping?
• Looking back over the last year, where did I have more capacity than I could account for?

What You Can Do

Write down one decision you are facing this week and take it to the temple, or if you cannot attend, to the covenants you have already made. Then write down what came. If you are single, all of this is available to you now; the endowment is made by a person, not a couple. The essay behind this answer covers what each covenant asks and promises.

Jesus Christ is the source of every promise made in His house, and the power He offers is the kind that shows up on an ordinary Tuesday.