“While ‘just men made perfect’ (Hebrews 12:23) have achieved perfection on a celestial level (Doctrine & Covenants 76:69), they haven’t yet attained the perfection of Jesus Christ. To become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1:4), they too must go from grace to grace as Jesus did: ‘I, John, saw that he received not of the fulness at the first, but received grace for grace; And he received not of the fulness at first, but continued from grace to grace, until he received a fulness; And thus he was called the Son of God, because he received not of the fulness at the first’ (Doctrine & Covenants 93:12–14).
“That mortals may become ‘gods, and all of you sons of the Most High’ (Psalms 82:6), therefore, forms a foreordained part of the Father’s plan. His sending Jesus as ‘the Savior of the world’ (Doctrine & Covenants 43:34) became the signal event toward fulfilling his goal for this world’s inhabitants. Because, as Jesus declared, ‘No man comes to the Father but by me’ (John 14:6), our first step is to ‘come unto Christ, and partake of the goodness of God’ (Jacob 1:7); to ‘come unto Christ, and lay hold upon every good gift’—in effect, to ‘come unto Christ, and be perfected in him’ (Moroni 10:30, 32).
“To be perfect ‘even as’ Christ is perfect, on the other hand, or ‘even as’ our Father in Heaven is perfect, means nothing less than that those who attain that degree of perfection become Christs and Fathers in Heaven themselves. Anything less would invalidate God’s word. Because our attaining perfection is achieved experientially in our journeys through mortality, so was theirs. By doing the things we have seen Jesus do—even as Jesus did only those things he saw the Father do—we too may attain their glory: ‘For the Father loves the Son and shows him all things that he himself does’ (John 5:20).”
—From Becoming Kings and Queens of the Gentiles, Chapter 3, by Avraham Gileadi Ph.D.
