Plan of Salvation
Bruce McConkie

God our Heavenly Father ordained and established the plan of salvation. Joseph Smith expressed it in these words. He said, “God himself, finding he was in the midst of spirits and glory, because he was more intelligent, saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 354). God is exalted and omnipotent and enthroned; he has all power, all might, and all dominion. He lives in the family unit, and the name of the kind of life that he lives is eternal life. And so if we advance and progress and go forward until we become like him, we then become, like Christ, inheritors of eternal life in the kingdom of God. That is our aim and our goal. Hence there is this thing which Paul calls “the gospel of God,” meaning that the Father ordained and established the plan of salvation. But then Paul says, “Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3), meaning that Christ adopted the Father’s plan. He made it his own. He espoused it. He became the advocate of salvation, the leader in the cause of salvation—all because he was chosen to be born into the world as God’s Son.

All of this was known and taught and understood in the great eternities that went before. We all heard the gospel preached. We knew its terms and conditions. We knew what would be involved in this mortal probation. We knew that it was necessary to come here and get a mortal body as a step toward gaining an immortal body, one of flesh and bones. We knew that when we came here we would need to be tried and examined and tested. We’d need to undergo probationary experiences when we were outside the presence of God, when we walked by faith rather than by sight, when the spirit was housed in a tabernacle of clay and subject to the lusts and appetites and passions of mortality. This we all knew. And then our Father sent forth the great decree through the councils of eternity, “Whom shall I send to be my son, to work out the infinite and eternal atoning sacrifice, to be born into mortality with the power of immortality, to inherit from me the power to work out the infinite and eternal atoning sacrifice?” He got two volunteers. Christ the Lord said, “Father, thy will be done” (see Moses 4:1–3). That is, “I will go down and do what thou hast ordained and sacrifice myself. I will be the lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” Lucifer wanted to modify the Father’s plan so radically that we could almost say he offered a new system of salvation. He wanted to deny all men their agency, to save all men and, in return, receive the power and dignity and glory of the Father. He wanted to take the place of the Father. The decision was then made: “I will send the first.”

The plan was put into operation. Part of it was the creation of this earth. Then came its peopling. We are all the sons and daughters of Father Adam; all of us are eternal beings, offspring of Deity. Our mortal bodies have been made from the dust of the earth. We’re here, having mortal bodies, being examined and tried and tested to see if we will walk uprightly and keep the commandments.

Now, our first obligation is to believe in Christ and accept him literally and completely and fully for what he is. We believe in Christ when we believe the doctrine he teaches, the words that he speaks, the message that he proclaims. When he came in the flesh as Mary’s son, the account says that he “went about . . . preaching the gospel of the kingdom” (Matthew 9:35), meaning that his message was a revelation to people in that day of the plan of salvation, of the things that they had to do to overcome the world, to perfect their lives, and to qualify to go back with him to the presence of the everlasting Father.

So, first of all, we believe in Christ. And the test as to whether we believe in him is whether we believe his words and whether we believe those whom he hath sent—the apostles and prophets of all the ages. And then, having believed, we have the obligation of conforming to the truths that we have thus learned. If we do conform we begin to grow in spiritual graces. We add to our faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance and patience and godliness and all of the other attributes and characteristics that are written in the revelations (see 2 Peter 1:5–7). So step by step and degree by degree we begin to become like God our Heavenly Father.

We do not work out our salvation in a moment; it doesn’t come to us in an instant, suddenly. Gaining salvation is a process. Paul says, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). To some members of the Church who had been baptized and who were on the course leading to eternal life, he said, “Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed” (Romans 13:11). That is, “We have made some progress along the straight and narrow path. We are going forward, and if we continue in that direction, eternal life will be our everlasting reward.”

We start out in the direction of eternal life when we join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We enter in at a gate, and the name of the gate is repentance and baptism. We thereby get on a path, and the name of the path is the straight and narrow path. And then if we endure to the end, meaning if we keep the commandments of God after baptism, we go up that straight and narrow path, and at its end is a reward that is named eternal life. All of this is available because of the atoning sacrifice of Christ. If he had not come, there would be no hope or no possibility under any circumstance for any man either to be resurrected or to have eternal life. Salvation comes by the mercy and the love and the condescension of God. In other words, it comes by the grace of God, meaning that our Lord made it available. But he has done his work, and we must now do ours; and we have the obligation to endure to the end, to keep the commandments, to work out our salvation, and that is what we are in the process of doing in the church and the kingdom of God on earth.

The Process of Achieving Eternal Life

We say that a man has to be born again, meaning that he has to die as pertaining to the unrighteous things in the world. Paul said, “Crucify the old man of sin and come forth in a newness of life” (see Romans 6:6). We are born again when we die as pertaining to unrighteousness and when we live as pertaining to the things of the Spirit. But that doesn’t happen in an instant, suddenly. That also is a process. Being born again is a gradual thing, except in a few isolated instances that are so miraculous they get written up in the scriptures. As far as the generality of the members of the Church are concerned, we are born again by degrees, and we are born again to added light and added knowledge and added desires for righteousness as we keep the commandments.

The same thing is true of being sanctified. Those who go to the celestial kingdom of heaven have to be sanctified, meaning that they become clean and pure and spotless. They’ve had evil and sin and iniquity burned out of their souls as though by fire, and the figurative expression there is “the baptism of fire.” Here again it is a process. Nobody is sanctified in an instant, suddenly. But if we keep the commandments and press forward with steadfastness after baptism, then degree by degree and step by step we sanctify our souls until that glorious day when we’re qualified to go where God and angels are.

So it is with the plan of salvation. We have to become perfect to be saved in the celestial kingdom. But nobody becomes perfect in this life. Only the Lord Jesus attained that state, and he had an advantage that none of us has. He was the Son of God, and he came into this life with a spiritual capacity and a talent and an inheritance that exceeded beyond all comprehension what any of the rest of us was born with. Our revelations say that he was like unto God in the premortal life and he was, under the Father, the creator of worlds without number. That Holy Being was the Holy One of Israel anciently and he was the Sinless One in mortality. He lived a perfect life, and he set an ideal example. This shows that we can strive and go forward toward that goal, but no other mortal—not the greatest, prophets nor the mightiest apostles nor any of the righteous saints of any of the ages—has ever been perfect, but we must become perfect to gain a celestial inheritance. As it is with being born again, and as it is with sanctifying our souls, so becoming perfect in Christ is a process.

We begin to keep the commandments today, and we keep more of them tomorrow, and we go from grace to grace, up the steps of the ladder, and we thus improve and perfect our souls. We can become perfect in some minor things. We can be perfect in the payment of tithing. If we pay one-tenth of our interest annually into the tithing funds of the Church, if we do it year in and year out, and desire to do it, and have no intent to withhold, and if we would do it regardless of what arose in our lives, then in that thing we are perfect. And in that thing and to that extent we are living the law as well as Moroni or the angels from heaven could live it. And so degree by degree and step by step we start out on the course to perfection with the objective of becoming perfect as God our Heavenly Father is perfect, in which eventuality we become inheritors of eternal life in his kingdom.

As members of the Church, if we chart a course leading to eternal life; if we begin the processes of spiritual rebirth, and are going in the right direction; if we chart a course of sanctifying our souls, and degree by degree are going in that direction; and if we chart a course of becoming perfect, and, step by step and phase by phase, are perfecting our souls by overcoming the world, then it is absolutely guaranteed—there is no question whatever about it—we shall gain eternal life. Even though we have spiritual rebirth ahead of us, perfection ahead of us, the full degree of sanctification ahead of us, if we chart a course and follow it to the best of our ability in this life, then when we go out of this life we’ll continue in exactly that same course. We’ll no longer be subject to the passions and the appetites of the flesh. We will have passed successfully the tests of this mortal probation and in due course we’ll get the fulness of our Father’s kingdom—and that means eternal life in his everlasting presence.

The Prophet told us that there are many things that people have to do, even after the grave, to work out their salvation. We’re not going to be perfect the minute we die. But if we’ve charted a course, if our desires are right, if our appetites are curtailed and bridled, and if we believe in the Lord and are doing to the very best of our abilities what we ought to do, we’ll go on to everlasting salvation, which is the fulness of eternal reward in our Father’s kingdom.