“We need to get the gospel from our heads into our hearts! It is possible for us to merely go through the motions of living the gospel because it is expected or because it is the culture in which we have grown up or because it is a habit. …
“We all need to seek to have our hearts and very natures changed so that we no longer have a desire to follow the ways of the world but to please God” (Bonnie L. Oscarson, “Do I Believe?” Ensign or Liahona,May 2016, 88).
“After all our obedience and good works, we cannot be saved from death or the effects of our individual sins without the grace extended by the atonement of Jesus Christ. The Book of Mormon makes this clear. It teaches that ‘salvation doth not come by the law alone’ (Mosiah 13:28). In other words, salvation does not come simply by keeping the commandments. … Man cannot earn his own salvation” (Dallin H. Oaks, “Another Testament of Jesus Christ,” Ensign, Mar. 1994, 67).
“The modern reader should not see the Mosaic code—anciently or in modern times—as simply a tedious set of religious rituals slavishly (and sometimes militantly) followed by a stiffnecked people who did not accept the Christ and his gospel. This historic covenant, given by the hand of God himself and second only to the fulness of the gospel as an avenue to righteousness, should be seen rather as the unparalleled collection of types, shadows, symbols, and prefigurations of Christ that it is. For that reason it was once (and still is, in its essence and purity) a guide to spirituality, a gateway to Christ, a path of strict commandment-keeping that would, through the laws of duty and decency, lead to higher laws of holiness on the way to immortality and eternal life. …
“… It is crucial to understand that the law of Moses was overlaid upon, and thereby included, many basic parts of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which had existed before it. It was never intended to be something apart or separated from, and certainly not something antagonistic to, the gospel of Jesus Christ” (Jeffrey R. Holland, Christ and the New Covenant: The Messianic Message of the Book of Mormon [1997], 136–37, 147; see also 2 Nephi 11:4; Mosiah 16:14–15).
“We claim scriptural authority for the assertion that Jesus Christ was and is God the Creator, the God who revealed Himself to Adam, Enoch, and all the antediluvial patriarchs and prophets down to Noah; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the God of Israel as a united people, and the God of Ephraim and Judah after the disruption of the Hebrew nation; the God who made Himself known to the prophets from Moses to Malachi; the God of the Old Testament record; and the God of the Nephites. We affirm that Jesus Christ was and is Jehovah, the Eternal One” (James E. Talmage, Jesus the Christ, 3rd ed. [1916], 32).