Repentance and Grace
When God sent His children to earth, He gave them instructions on proper behavior. These instructions were also given to prophets and recorded in the Bible. However, God, knowing His children well, knew they wouldn’t always live the way He taught them to live. Because of this He sent His only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to live on earth, take on the sins of the world, and die on the cross, to be resurrected three days later. Mormons teach that through grace, we can repent of our sins. Do Mormons believe in grace? They do. Grace is an essential part of our eternal progression, and is important to our understanding of repentance.
Repentance is more than mindlessly-and even worse-faithlessly-going through a series of steps. For repentance to work, the person repenting must be sincere in his desire to live according to God’s teachings. The first step is recognition of the sin. One must understand exactly what he did wrong and why it is wrong. This often involves receiving counsel or studying on one’s own.
The second step is to experience true sorrow for having fallen away from the teachings of a loving Father in Heaven. Jesus was very clear that one must follow the commandments. “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” He taught those who came to learn from Him. The greater our love for the Savior is, the greater our sadness will be when we fall away from what He’s asked us to do.
With this sorrow in our heart, we can begin to work our way through the remaining steps of the process. First, we are required to make restitution for what we’ve done, as far as possible. If we’ve hurt someone’s feelings, we must apologize and strengthen our relationship with that person. If we’ve broken laws, we need to handle the legalities involved and also repay those we’ve harmed. While every wrong can’t be completely recompensed, we have to do the best we can do to feel the situation has been properly resolved, and the person compensated for the wrongs that were done.
Next, we must completely forsake the sin. If the sin involves addiction, this may take some time to resolve, and to feel certain it’s properly under control. If we fall again, we start the process over, and continue working towards completely changing the way we live.
When the Savior protected the woman being stoned, He reminded her not to sin further. Forsaking the sin is a critical part of the repentance process. The level of change helps to demonstrate how real our sorrow was for the sin, and how committed we are to putting God first in our lives.
This repentance process is made possible through grace. Without the sacrifices the Savior made, we could never have been forgiven for anything we did, and would have had to live a sinless life in order to return to God. Since this isn’t possible, and atonement can only be made by one who is sinless, everyone receives this free gift from the Savior. Through grace, which was given when the sinless Savior freely offered Himself for us, we are able to repent of our sins as far as we’re able to do so, and the Savior makes up the difference.
