Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Question

 

Gramps,

Who do Mormons worship, God the Father or His Son, Jesus Christ? Who answers prayers?

Paul

 

Answer

 

Paul,

The mode of worship in our faith is to worship them all together.  While we do seek to differentiate ourselves from Trinitarians by the fact that we believe them to be three distinct beings, the mode of worship is quite similar to that of Trinitarians in that we worship them as One God.

Short answer:  We worship God.

More definitively, we worship the Godhead.  While many outsiders may try to categorize us as either polytheists or henotheists or some other type of theists, none of them are truly very accurate.  There are nuances and connotations that simply aren’t correct when attributing them to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  We don’t worship any one of them alone, but the Godhead as a whole.  We don’t simply seek answers to prayers from any one of them, but from the Godhead as a whole.

First, be it remembered that most scriptures that speak of God or of the Lord do not even bother to distinguish the Father from the Son, simply because it doesn’t make any difference which God is involved. They are one. The words or deeds of either of them would be the words and deeds of the other in the same circumstance.  – Bruce R. McConkie, Our Relationship With The Lord

Furthermore, Elder McConkie went on to state that our relationship of the worshiper and the worshiped does not depend on the individual, but the Three as One.

Now I know that some may be offended at the counsel that they should not strive for a special and personal relationship with Christ. It will seem to them as though I am speaking out against mother love, or Americanism, or the little red schoolhouse. But I am not. There is a fine line here over which true worshipers will not step.

 

It is true that there may, with propriety, be a special relationship with a wife, with children, with friends, with teachers, with the beasts of the field and the fowls of the sky and the lilies of the valley. But the very moment anyone singles out one member of the Godhead as the almost sole recipient of his devotion, to the exclusion of the others, that is the moment when spiritual instability begins to replace sense and reason.

Do you begin to see that there really is no word in common English that is truly accurate to describe our “God” other than “The Godhead”?

 

Gramps

 

 

 

Copyright © 2024 Ask Gramps - Q and A about Mormon Doctrine. All Rights Reserved.
This website is not owned by or affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes called the Mormon or LDS Church). The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the position of the Church. The views expressed by individual users are the responsibility of those users and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church. For the official Church websites, please visit churchofjesuschrist.org or comeuntochrist.org.

Pin It on Pinterest