LDS Quotes on Repentance
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.
“A person may get converted in a moment, miraculously. But that is not the way it happens with most people. With most people, conversion [spiritual rebirth and the accompanying remission of sins] is a process; and it goes step by step, degree by degree, level by level, from a lower state to a higher, from grace to grace, until the time that the individual is wholly turned to the cause of righteousness. Now this means that an individual overcomes one sin today and another sin tomorrow. He perfects his life in one field now, and in another field later on. And the conversion process goes on until it is completed, until we become, literally, as the Book of Mormon says, saints of God instead of natural men.”
| “Be Ye Converted” (address given at the BYU First Stake Quarterly Conference, 11 February 1968), 12.
“If you are suffering the disheartening effects of transgression, please recognize that the only path to permanent relief from sadness is sincere repentance with a broken heart and a contrite spirit.”
| A Broken Heart and a Contrite Spirit
“The Atonement of Jesus Christ does not just provide a way to clean up messes; it provides the purpose and desire to avoid making more messes. The Atonement doesn’t allow us to ignore our appetites or pretend they don’t matter, but to educate and elevate them.”
| The Continuous Atonement
“Leo Tolstoy wrote once of a priest who was criticized by one of his congregants for not living as resolutely as he should, the critic concluding that the principles the erring preacher taught must therefore also be erroneous. In response to that criticism, the priest says: “Look at my life now and compare it to my former life. You will see that I am trying to live out the truth I proclaim.” Unable to live up to the high ideals he taught, the priest admits he has failed. But he cries: Attack me, [if you wish,] I do this myself, but [don’t] attack … the path I follow. … If I know the way home [but] am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way simply because I am staggering from side to side?… Do not gleefully shout, ‘Look at him! … There he is crawling into a bog!’ No, do not gloat, but give … your help [to anyone trying to walk the road back to God.”
| Be Ye Therefore Perfect — Eventually
“Those of us who have been baptized will review our lives to see what we have done or not done that determines whether the Lord can keep his promise to let the Spirit always be with us. Because we are human still, that reflection usually leads to a desire to repent of things both done and not done.”
| “Making Covenants with God,” fireside address, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, September 8, 1996
“If the time comes when you have done all that you can to repent of your sins, and have made amends and restitution to the best of your ability; if it be something that will affect your standing in the church and you have gone through the proper authorities, then you will want that confirming answer as to whether or not the Lord has accepted of you. In your soul searching, if you seek for and you find that peace of conscience, by that token you may know that the Lord has accepted your repentance.”
“‘Repentance will be possible even after death,’ wrote James E. Talmage. To some, he continued, ‘it may appear that to teach the possibility of repentance beyond the grave may tend to weaken belief in the absolute necessity of repentance and reformation in this life. There is no reason for such objection,’ he explains, when we consider that willful neglect here and now will render the process that much more lengthy and difficult in the future…Our error here, once again, may be in adopting a language of salvation as either/or, as an event that transpires rather than a process that unfolds.”
“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.”
