LDS Quotes on Atonement
“The powers of the Atonement do not lie dormant until one sins and then suddenly spring forth to satisfy the needs of the repentant person. Rather, like the forces of gravity, they are everywhere present, exerting their unseen but powerful influence.”
| The Infinite Atonement
“God uses no magic wand to simply wave bad things into nonexistence. The sins that he remits, he remits by making them his own and suffering them. The pain and heartaches that he relieves, he relieves by suffering them himself. These things can be shared and absorbed, but they cannot be simply wished or waved away. They must be suffered.”
| Believing Christ: The Parable of the Bicycle and Other Good News
“We can change our behavior. Our very desires can change. How? There is only one way. True change—permanent change—can come only through the healing, cleansing, and enabling power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. He loves you—each of you! He allows you to access His power as you keep His commandments, eagerly, earnestly, and exactly. It is that simple and certain. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a gospel of change!”
| Decisions for Eternity
“Had agency come to man without the Atonement, it would have been a fatal gift.”
| "Atonement, Agency, Accountability," Conference April 1988
“May we take time this Christmas season to renew our covenants to follow the Savior and to do his will, just as he did the will of our Heavenly Father. As we do so, the words of King Benjamin’s people, recorded 125 years before the Savior’s birth, will be fulfilled for us today: ‘O have mercy, and apply the atoning blood of Christ that we may receive forgiveness of our sins, and our hearts may be purified; for we believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who created heaven and earth, and all things; who shall come down among the children of men’ (Mosiah 4:2).
“The Savior’s message was essential to our salvation, but his personal exposition of it was not. President J. Reuben Clark Jr. gave this caution: “Brethren, it is all right to speak of the Savior and the beauty of his doctrines, and the beauty of the truth. But remember, and this is the thing I wish you . . . [to] always carry with you, the Savior is to be looked at as the Messiah, the Redeemer of the world. His teachings were ancillary and auxiliary to that great fact.”
| The Infinite Atonement
“The Savior was no ivory-tower observer, no behind-the-lines captain… The Savior was a participant, a player, who not only understood our plight intellectually, but who felt our wounds because they became his wounds.”
| The Infinite Atonement
“There was something in the Savior’s descent that made possible man’s ascent.”
| The Infinite Atonement
“But how does the Atonement motivate, invite, and draw all men unto the Savior? What causes this gravitational pull– this spiritual tug? There is a certain compelling power that flows from righteous suffering– not indiscriminate suffering, not needless suffering, but righteous, voluntary suffering for another. Such suffering for another is the highest and purest form of motivation we can offer to those we love. Contemplate that for a moment: How does one change the attitude or the course of conduct of a loved one whose every step seems bent on destruction? If example fails to influence, words of kindness go unheeded, and the powers of logic are dismissed as chaff before the wind, then where does one turn…In the words of the missionary evangelist, E. Stanley Jones, suffering has “an intense moral appeal.” Jones once asked Mahatma Gandhi as he sat on a cot in an open courtyard of Yervavda jail, “‘Isn’t your fasting a species of coercion?’ ‘Yes,’ he said very slowly, ‘the same kind of coercion which Jesus exercises upon you from the cross.'” As Jones reflected upon that sobering rejoinder, he said: “I was silent. It was so obviously true that I am silent again every time I think of it. He was profoundly right. The years have clarified it. And I now see it for what it is: a very morally potent and redemptive power if used rightly. But it has to be used rightly.”
| The Infinite Atonement