“Our Heavenly Father is more liberal in His views, and boundless in His mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive.”
| History, 1838–1856, volume D-1
Mercy
LDS Quotes About Mercy
“Healing seldom comes in an instant, with one decisive choice or one divine ministration. That is a function of our mortal limitations, not the Healer’s. Divine mercy, like the Sun, ‘must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.’
“The novelist Marilynne Robinson also saw judgment in more compassionate terms. She wrote: ‘The reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental.’ God wants us to live beautiful lives.”
“. . . there surely must be someone who yet needs your forgiveness. And please don’t ask if that’s fair – that the injured should have to bear the burden of forgiveness for the offender. Don’t ask if “justice” doesn’t demand that it be the other way around. No, whatever you do, don’t ask for justice. You and I know that what we plead for is mercy – and that is what we must be willing to give.”
| “I Stand All Amazed,” Ensign, August 1986, p. 72
“‘Hearken unto my voice. Listen to him who is the advocate with the Father, who is pleading your cause before him…that [you] may come unto me and have everlasting life.’
“What, exactly, is meant by this verse? We are happy to know we have an advocate, but we would hope our Father is not in need of heart softening. It may be that we misunderstand the term advocate the way it is being used here…We see that Christ as the atoning one — the mediator — is not our defender from God’s justice, but the collaborator in and minister of our Heavenly Father’s plan.”
God doesn’t care nearly as much about where you have been as He does about where you are and, with His help, where you are willing to go.
“There are many people who seem to rely solely on the Lord’s mercy rather than on accomplishing their own repentance. … The Lord may temper justice with mercy, but he will never supplant it. Mercy can never replace justice. God is merciful, but he is also just.”
| The Miracle of Forgiveness, Bookcraft, 1969, p. 358.
“Be merciful and you shall find mercy. Seek to help save souls, not to destroy them: for verily you know, that ‘there is more joy in heaven, over one sinner that repents, than there is over ninety and nine just persons [who] need no repentance.’”
| Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 77.
“Never must we allow supposed mercy to the unrepentant sinner to rob the justice by which the true repentance from sinful practices is predicated.”
| Strengthening the Home, 1973, p. 5.
“Jacob, in 2 Nephi 9:41, in speaking of the straight and narrow, reminds us that ‘the keeper of the gate is the Holy One of Israel’ and that Jesus ‘employeth no servant there.’ The emphasis rightly is on the fact that Jesus ‘cannot be deceived.’ There is another dimension of reassurance, too: not only will the ultimate judgment not be delegated in order to serve the purposes of divine justice, but also divine mercy can best be applied by him who knows these things what only he can know.”
| For the Power Is in Them (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1970), 37.
“God wants to give us a gift, and we want to buy it. We continually want to earn salvation and meaning through work and achievement, but salvation and meaning are actually one in this way of living, when you raise the white flag of surrender and allow grace to flood your soul.”
| Putting on Virtue