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Therefore, I say, my brothers and sisters, the Lord has distinctly settled the question of our status, as established in our resurrection from the dead. If we have earned a celestial body, we may have celestial glory. Yet many of the Saints will wake up and find they sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. If I should come forth and find myself in the telestial world, or in the terrestrial world, and look up to this earth, when it shall attain its place as a celestial orb, shining like a sun, when this earth will no longer need the sun to shine upon it by day or the moon by night, when it shall become a sun I should be so unfortunate as to lose my chance of obtaining an inheritance in that place, and be compelled to dwell upon a telestial orb, I surely will feel the full force of the poet's statement, "Of all the sad words of the tongue and pen, the saddest of them all, it might have been." I might have been there. I was born there. It was my right and privilege to be there, but I lost it through my own blindness, through my own wickedness, I have lost it forever. While I may have joy here, and experience and growth here, yet I have lost eternal companionship with my Heavenly Father.
Source: Ballard, Melvin J. Three Degrees of Glory, Delivered in the Ogden Tabernacle September 22, 1922.