LDS Quotes on Repentance
It is hard to understand all the reasons why some people take another path. The best we can do in these circumstances is just to love and embrace them, pray for their well-being, and seek for the Lord’s help to know what to do and say. Sincerely rejoice with them in their successes; be their friends and look for the good in them. We should never give up on them but preserve our relationships. Never reject or misjudge them. Just love them!
“‘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.”
“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.”
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“Christianity alone teaches that the past can be wiped out; it knows the mystery of forgetting and cancelling the past. This is the mystery of redemption. The endless threads stretching from the past into the future are cut. Therein lies the mystery of penitence and the remission of sins. It is only in and through Christ that the past can be forgiven and forgotten.”
“The repenting sinner must suffer for his sins, but this suffering has a different purpose than punishment or payment. Its purpose is to change.”
The magnificent, peace-giving promise of the Book of Mormon and the restored gospel is that the Savior will mend all that we have broken. And He will also mend us if we turn to Him in faith and repent of the harm we have caused.
| Ensuring a Righteous Judgment - General Conference 2020
“If any of us are imperfect, it is our duty to pray for the gift that will make us perfect. . . . No man ought to say, “Oh, I cannot help this; it is my nature.” He is not justified in it, for the reason that God has promised to give strength to correct these things, and to give gifts that will eradicate them. . . . He wants His Saints to be perfected in the truth. For this purpose He gives these gifts, and bestows them upon those who seek after them, in order that they may be a perfect people upon the face of the earth, notwithstanding their many weaknesses, because God has promised to give the gifts that are necessary for their perfection.”
| Millennial Star, April 23, 1894, 260–61
“Humility is the essence of repentance. Humility is selfless, not selfish. It doesn’t demand its own way or speak with moral superiority. Instead, humility answers softly and listens kindly for understanding, not vindication. Humility recognizes that no one can change someone else, but with faith, effort, and the help of God, we can undergo our own mighty change of heart. (See Alma 5:11-12, 26-31.) Experiencing the mighty change of heart causes us to treat others, especially our spouses, with meekness. (See Moroni 7:43-48; 8:25-26.) Humility means that both husbands and wives seek to bless, help, and lift each other, putting the other first in every decision. Watch and learn: repentance and humility build happy marriages.”
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.
“Perhaps we feel we have stepped beyond that reach of the Atonement by knowingly repeating a previously forsaken sin. We understand that God and Jesus were willing to forgive the first time, but we wonder how many more times they will be willing to watch us bumble along before finally roll their eyes and declare, ‘Enough already!’ We struggle so much to forgive ourselves that we wrongly assume God must be having the same struggle.”
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