All the inhabitants of the earth are the spiritual offspring of their spiritual Father and Mother. When born into mortality, each of us receive a set of mortal parents. But the world, through the fall of Adam, has separated us from God. We have become, thereby, carnal, sensual, and devilish (Mosiah 16:3). Through our separation from God, we have, in effect, died a spiritual death (the first, spiritual death). In order to come alive to things of the Spirit, we must be born again, not according to the flesh as Nicodemus thought, but according to the Spirit.
This spiritual rebirth is not without parentage. The Lord, Jesus Christ, becomes the Father of our Spirits. Behold, I am Jesus Christ. I am the Father and the Son. In me shall all mankind have life, and that eternally, even they who shall believe on my name; and they shall become by sons and my daughters (Ether 3:14). When we receive Him as our Redeemer, He will receive us as a son or daughter of Christ, as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God (Jn 1:12). The people of Benjamin had, indeed, received the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior and Redeemer. Therefore, his atonement, which had not yet been accomplished, frees them from the captivity of sin—as Benjamin says, under this head ye are made free (v. 8).
Just as we have a father of our mortal bodies, we have a Father of our born-again spirits. Of this, the book of Hebrews makes reference:
'For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?
But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.
Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live? (Heb 12:6-9)
Joseph Fielding Smith
"The Son of God has a perfect right to call us his children, spiritually begotten, and we have a perfect right to look on him as our father who spiritually begot us.
"Now if these critics would read carefully the Book of Mormon, they would find that when the Savior came and visited the Nephites, he told them that he had been sent by his Father. He knelt before them, and he prayed to his Father. He taught them to pray to his Father, but that did not lessen in the least our duty and responsibility of looking upon the Son of God as a father to us because he spiritually begot us." (Conference Reports, Oct. 1962, p. 21)