“Satan doesn’t win when he can get us to cross the line but when he convinces us that there is no way back.”
| The Continuous Atonement
Repentance
LDS Quotes on Repentance
“When we pray, we are not conveying any information to God that he does not already have. Nor, when we confess our sins before him, is it news to him that we have misbehaved. More than we realize, being honest with God in our prayers helps us to be more honest with ourselves.”
“Do not throw away a man or a woman, old or young. If they commit an evil today and another tomorrow, but wish to be Saints and to be forgiven, do you forgive them, not only seven times, but seventy times seven in a day, if their hearts are fully set to do right. Let us make it a point to pass over their weaknesses and say, “God bless you in trying to be better in time to come,” and act as wise stewards in the kingdom of God.”
| Journal of Discourses, 8:368
“Closely related to our own obligation to repent is the generosity of letting others do the same. . . . In this we participate in the very essence of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. . . . We don’t want God to remember our sins, so there is something fundamentally wrong in our relentlessly trying to remember others’ sins. . . . It is one of those ironies of godhood that in order to find peace, the offended as well as the offender must engage the principle of forgiveness.”
| “The Peaceable Things of the Kingdom,” Ensign, Nov. 1996, p. 82
“You will listen best when you feel, “Father, thy will, not mine, be done.” You will have a feeling of “I want what you want.” Then, the still small voice will seem as if it pierces you…You will act after you have listened because when you hear his voice by the Spirit you will always feel that you are impelled to do something. You mustn’t be surprised if the instruction seems accompanied with what you feel as a rebuke.You might prefer that God simply tell you how well you are doing. But he loves you, wants you to be with him, and knows you must have a mighty change in your heart, through faith on the Lord Jesus Christ, humble repentance, and the making and keeping of sacred covenants.”
| “To Draw Closer to God,” Ensign, May 1991, 67.
Along the way you will most likely stumble and fall—perhaps many, many times. You are not perfect; falling is part of the qualifying process that allows you to refine your character and serve in a more compassionate way. If you fail, repent and learn from it…Practice so you will do better the next time. Ultimately, it’s up to you.
“Our task on earth is to resist the conforming of our spirit to our natural environment with its allures and distractions, and to shape our affections, inclinations, and desires in the mold shown us by the Savior. This is repentance: a conscious choice, born out of contraries, to be shaped and directed into a genuine spiritual begetting after the image of God, in accordance with the seed of divine potential in all of us.”
“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ.”
Jesus Christ Himself is the Lord of lost things. He cares for lost things. That is surely why He taught the three parables that we find in the 15th chapter of Luke: the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and, finally, the prodigal son. All these stories have a common denominator: It doesn’t matter why they were lost. It doesn’t matter even if they were aware they were lost. There reigns supreme a feeling of joy that exclaims, “Rejoice with me; for I have found [that] which was lost.” In the end, nothing is truly lost to Him.
| Found through the Power of the Book of Mormon
“God’s work is therefore first and foremost educative and constructive, not reparative. Life is pain, but it is not punishment.”