People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
I have the feeling … that those who give themselves with all their might and main to this work receive help from the other side, and not merely in gathering genealogies. Whoever seeks to help those on the other side receives help in return in all the affairs of life...
The greatest responsibility in this world that God has laid upon us is to seek after our dead. The apostle says, “They without us cannot be made perfect”; 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.
Heaven and earth are partners in the cosmic work of salvation. Neither can we be made perfect without our fathers (we need their help) nor can they be made perfect without us (we provide them the saving ordinances). When we bless them with saving ordinances, they are suddenly endowed with power to help save our/their children. Elder Boyd K. Packer wrote, “Brother Widtsoe reaffirmed that ‘those who give themselves with all their might and main to this work [genealogical and temple work] receive help from the other side. Whoever seeks to help those on the other side receives help in return in all the affairs of life.’”
Sister Susa Young Gates…once asked her father [Brigham Young] how it would ever be possible to accomplish the great amount of temple work that must be done, if all are given a full opportunity for exaltation. He told her there would be many inventors of labor-saving devices, so that our daily duties could be performed in a short time, leaving us more and more time for temple work. The inventions have come, and are still coming, but many simply divert the time gained to other channels, and not for the purpose intended by the Lord.
Often Church members suffer from a lack of perspective, perhaps understandably, as to the vastness and intensity of the Lord's work in the spirit world. The scope is enormous! Demographers estimate that some sixty to seventy billion people have lived on this planet thus far. Without diminishing in any way the importance of the absolutely vital and tandem work on this side of the veil, we do need a better grasp of ‘things as they really will be’ (Jacob 4:13). Otherwise, we can so easily come to regard family history as a quaint hobby and its resulting temple work as something we will get around to later. Not only does the word vastness characterize the work there but so does intensity.