Repentance
Only one perfect person has walked the Earth—this was Jesus Christ. The rest of us are bound to sin. We are, all of us, imperfect people, and you won’t stop sinning as you get older. What we can do is keep striving to be better.
And this means repentance. In Mormon doctrine, repentance is essential to our salvation and to our happiness. Without repentance, we carry around our guilt and sins on and on—repentance allows us to be forgiven of those sins. God won’t remember them any more against us, so we don’t need to carry them around. What repentance involves is more than just feeling bad, though. Recognizing that you’ve sinned is the first step—and a lot of people don’t ever reach that. Instead of recognizing their sins, they try to justify themselves out of guilt. It doesn’t ever quite work, but, well, if you at least try to feel justified, you can keep doing what you’re doing. |
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See, repentance is about change. The point of repentance is to be better than you were. It’s not enough to say a quick apology to God about the sin and then sin again and thoughtlessly. True repentance is more than that.
So, first, and again, recognize the sin. This does mean that we need to be aware of what’s a sin, of course. We should study the scriptures and the words of the prophets and make sure we’re in line. Are we spending too much time goofing off when we could be productive, even? That might not be a “ten commandment” style sin, but repentance can cover more than that. Again, we should always be trying to be better. Who wants to stay the same from day to day? We can always be better, in Mormon belief.
Then, we must have sorrow for our sins. This should be beyond guilt. There’s wallowing sorrow and there’s helpful sorrow. Helpful sorrow comes from a real desire to change—not self-disgust, not resentment, not “getting caught.” We are sorrowful because we haven’t been as righteous as the Lord would have us be. We are sorrowful for disappointing him.
And, because we don’t want to disappoint the Lord further, we then forsake our sins. We don’t sin every once in a while when we really feel like it or think we can get away with it. We have to honestly want to not do it any more—and then not do it. This might be just about the hardest part. The sins we’re prone to tend to be pretty attractive to us, or we wouldn’t do them. But it’s worth it to forsake them.
Then, we confess our sins. All sins need to be confessed to the Lord, but very serious sins need to be confessed to the bishop, in Mormonism. These serious sins are sins like adultery or other sexual sins—these take more effort to repent of, because of their seriousness, but the extra effort is necessary and you’ll feel all the better after for it. Even if confessing to the bishop isn’t ever easy.
Lastly, if our sin has hurt someone else, we need to make restitution—if we’ve stolen, we need to give back what we stole. If we lie, we need to tell the truth. If we’ve caused damage, we need to apologize. This cleans the sin and makes our relationship with the offended better.
Forgiveness is part of repentance, too. At the end of the process, we do need to forgive ourselves, but we also need to forgive everyone. It’s God’s place to judge, not ours. We can’t ever decide that we were offended too much, hurt too much, and we can’t forgive because of it. We can’t decide that someone’s sin was too great. The Lord commands us to forgive, Mormons believe, and so we should.