“They Can’t Be Saved Without Us”

Elder Alan Cheung

Of the Seventy

In the Gospel of John, the Savior taught, “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”¹ When I was 19, I met two missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on my way home one evening. After three months of meeting with them, they invited me to enter the waters of baptism. Since then, my life has changed forever! Today, we have more than 67,000 full-time missionaries around the world working day in and day out to invite people to come unto Christ by accepting the baptismal covenant. Though there were over 230,000 convert baptisms in 2018,² compared to the world population, this is a very small flock!³

Not everyone has an opportunity to be taught the restored gospel and to be baptized by proper authority during his or her mortal journey. Indeed, billions of people have lived and died without the knowledge of Jesus Christ. What would happen to these good men and women? God is just and merciful. In His grand plan, He has provided a way for all worthy deceased to receive baptism vicariously.⁴ In fact, this doctrine is not new. It was recorded in the New Testament during the time of the Apostle Paul. As Paul said, “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead?”⁵ This ordinance was resumed when Heavenly Father, through Joseph Smith, restored His true Church on this earth in this dispensation. Since then, many who have gone before us without the knowledge of Jesus Christ have been able to receive this sacred ordinance vicariously in temples throughout the world.

I am forever grateful for this sacred ordinance. My parents died when I was relatively young. My father was a construction worker, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. They endured many hardships, and both had lived a good life, but they never had a chance to be taught the restored gospel during their mortal life. Just before I left for my mission, I managed to complete my four-generation family history and brought their names with me to the missionary training center. On a crisp fall morning in October 1989, I was baptized for my parents and ancestors at the Provo Utah Temple. My heart was full on that beautiful morning. I felt the tender mercy of our Heavenly Father who, in His grand plan of salvation, provided us a way to redeem our deceased ancestors. As President Wilford Woodruff stated: “There is hardly any principle the Lord has revealed that I have rejoiced more in than in the redemption of our dead; that we will have our fathers, our mothers, our wives and our children with us in the family organization, in the morning of the first resurrection and in the Celestial Kingdom. These are grand principles. They are worth every sacrifice.”⁶ What a glorious doctrine!

As a member of His restored Church, we have a “divinely appointed responsibility”⁷ to search out our kindred dead and to help them receive all saving ordinances for their exaltation. “they without us cannot be made perfect—neither can we without our dead be made perfect.”⁸ Joseph Smith taught, “The greatest responsibility in this world that God has laid upon us is to seek after our dead. . . . For it is necessary that the sealing power should be in our hands to seal our children and our dead for the fulness of the dispensation of times—a dispensation to meet the promises made by Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world for the salvation of man.”⁹ May we all be touched by the spirit of Elijah and continue to find joy as we carry out this sacred work.