As I was getting ready for the day this morning, I listened to a General Conference talk. This one was from April 2006 by Jeffrey R. Holland. It was entitled Broken Things to Mend. I love this talk. The entire thing is so great.
One part of it struck me. Elder Holland said, "In short we must repent, perhaps the most hopeful and encouraging word in the Christian vocabulary." The most hopeful and encouraging word. How cool! And it is so true.
Repentance is amazing. I don't know where any of us would be without it. So many times I try and try, but I continuously fall short. Thankfully, our loving Heavenly Father understood that this would be the case.
Elder Holland continued by saying, "We thank our Father in Heaven we are allowed to change, we thank Jesus we can change, and ultimately we do so only with Their divine assistance. . . . In this way our access to the Savior’s Atonement becomes as unimpeded as we, with our imperfections, can make it. He will take it from there."
What a comforting promise!
"Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God." (Moroni 10:32)
If you want to read the talk, here is the link:
Broken Things to Mend
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
a happy thought
Posted by Erin Despain at 5:46 PM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
.jpg)
1 comments:
Good talk. I remember listening to it when I had been in Argentina for a little over a week.
I read something in Preach My Gospel which reminded me of this blog post. It's going over the principles of the gospel that missionaries should teach, and it defines repentance as something "hopeful" and "encouraging," like Elder Holland said.
"As you teach people to understand the Restoration of the fulness of the gospel, you 'declare repentance' (D&C 15:6). Repentance involves a change of heart and a desire to forsake sin and serve God. It involves humbly yielding to the Spirit and submitting to God's will...It is a positive experience that brings joy and peace" (PMG pg. 8).
As a missionary I learned to think of repentance as simply "change." Anytime we improve and do something better (which I needed to do a lot as a missionary!), that's repentance.
Anyway, just a thought.
Post a Comment