If a child born in the covenant is baptized into another denomination will she be sealed to her parents in the eternities?

Question

Dear Gramps,

Our daughter, who was born in the covenant, has recently been baptized into another denomination. What effect will that have as far as her sealing to us? She is an adult and has never received her own endowments in the temple. Will we still be together in the hereafter?

Bill

Answer

Dear Bill,

The promises of the Lord are sure and unequivocal. If the parents who have children sealed to them in the holy temple live in accordance with the covenant they make therein, their children will be theirs in eternity. Here is what Joseph Smith and Joseph Fielding Smith had to say on the subject.

The Prophet Joseph Smith declared–and he never taught a more comforting doctrine–that the eternal sealings of faithful parents and the divine promises made to them for valiant service in the Cause of Truth, would save not only themselves, but likewise their posterity. Though some of the sheep may wander, the eye of the Shepherd is upon them, and sooner or later they will feel the tentacles of Divine Providence reaching out after them and drawing them back to the fold. Either in this life or the life to come, they will return. They will have to pay their debt to justice; they will suffer for their sins; and may tread a thorny path; but if it leads them at last, like the penitent Prodigal, to a loving and forgiving father’s heart and home, the painful experience will not have been in vain. Pray for your careless and disobedient children; hold on to them with your faith. Hope on, trust on, till you see the salvation of God. Orson F. Whitney, Conference Report, April 1929, p. 110

Let the father and mother, who are members of this Church and Kingdom, take a righteous course, and strive with all their might never to do a wrong, but to do good all their lives; if they have one child or one hundred children, if they conduct themselves towards them as they should, binding them to the Lord by their faith and prayers, I care not where those children go, they are bound up to their parents by an everlasting tie, and no power of earth or hell can separate them from their parents in eternity; they will return again to the fountain from whence they sprang. Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation

Gramps