What we love determines what we seek. What we seek determines what we think and do. What we think and do determines who we are — and who we will become.
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Change
LDS Quotes on Change
“When we’re tempted to give up, we must remember God is long-suffering, change is a process, and repentance is a pattern in our lives.”
| The Continuous Atonement
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The miracle of the Atonement is not just that we can go home but that—miraculously—we can feel at home there. If Heavenly Father and His Son did not require faith and repentance, then there would be no desire to change.
Think of your friends and family members who have chosen to live without faith and without repentance. They don’t want to change. They are not trying to abandon sin and become comfortable with God. Rather, they are trying to abandon God and become comfortable with sin.
If the Father and the Son did not require covenants and bestow the gift of the Holy Ghost, then there would be no way to change. We would be left forever with only willpower, with no access to His power. If Heavenly Father and His Son did not require endurance to the end, then there would be no internalization of those changes over time. They would forever be surface and cosmetic rather than sinking inside us and becoming part of us—part of who we are. Put simply, if Jesus didn’t require practice, then we would never become Saints.
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“Without the Redeemer, … repentance becomes simply miserable behavior modification.”
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“Repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before he will take you back and which he could let you off if he chose. It is simply a description of what going back to him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking him to let you back without going back.”
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“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples.”
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We are always progressing as long as we are striving to follow the Lord.
| An Especially Noble Calling - General Conference 2020
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“Our enmity toward God takes on many labels, such as rebellion, hard-heartedness, stiff-neckedness, unrepentant, puffed up, easily offended, and sign seekers. The proud wish God would agree with them. They aren’t interested in changing their opinions to agree with God’s.”
| “Beware of Pride,” Ensign, May 1989
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“The vocabulary of sin and guilt and damnation has too often overwhelmed the restored gospel’s message of absolute love and powerfully grounded hopefulness. As Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, summarizing the almost universal misapprehension of overanxious Saints among us, we must learn to ‘distinguish more clearly between divine discontent and the devil’s dissonance, between dissatisfaction with self and disdain for self. We need the first and must shun the second. When conscience calls to us from the next ridge,’ he wrote, her purpose is to beckon not to scold.
“Rather than continuing to frame our lives in terms of deficiency and inadequacy, we would benefit from the perspective of Irenaeus, who emphasized the forward-looking process in which we should be engaged: becoming ‘perfected after the image and likeness of God.'”
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“Holiness is the strength of the soul. It comes by faith and through obedience to God’s laws and ordinances. God then purifies the heart by faith, and the heart becomes purged from that which is profane and unworthy. When holiness is achieved by conforming to God’s will, one knows intuitively that which is wrong and that which is right before the Lord. Holiness speaks when there is silence, encouraging that which is good or reproving that which is wrong.”
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