The Broken Heart

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• For example, the person most in need of understanding the Savior’s mercy is probably one who has worked himself to exhaustion in a sincere effort to repent, but who still believes his estrangement from God is permanent and hopeless. By contrast, some people come before a bishop feeling that the repentance process requires them to do little more than casually acknowledge the truth of an accusation. An increasing number of younger Church members even seem to believe they are entitled to “a few free ones” as they sow their wild oats and walk constantly along the edge of transgression. Constant emphasis on the availability of forgiveness can be counterproductive for those in these latter categories, suggesting—wrongly—to them that they can “live it up” now and repent easily later without harmful consequences.
• Our understanding of the Atonement is hardly a shield against sorrow; rather, it is a rich source of strength to deal productively with the disappointments and heartbreaks that form the deliberate fabric of mortal life. The gospel was given us to heal our pain, not to prevent it.
• When we habitually understate the meaning of the Atonement, we take more serious risks than simply leaving one another without comforting reassurances—for some may simply drop out of the race, worn out and beaten down with the harsh and untrue belief that they are just not celestial material.
• His words do not describe an event or even simply an attitude, but a process; not the answer to a yes or no question, but an essay, written in the winding trail of our experience. Along that trail, he is not only aware of our limitations, he will also in due course compensate for them, “after all we can do.”
• The eternal law of mercy allowed the Savior to make that compensation fully through the great “at-one-ment,” 8 relieving Adam and his children of their unbearable burdens.
• The unconditional parts of the Atonement, those that assure our resurrection from physical death and that pay for Adam’s transgression, require no further action on our part. They are the free gifts of unmerited divine grace. The conditional part, however, requires our repentance—part of “all we can do”—as the condition of applying mercy to our personal sins. We have been told that if we do not repent, we must suffer even as the Savior did to satisfy the demands of justice.
• paying for our sins will not bear the same fruit as repenting of our sins. Justice is a law of balance and order and it must be satisfied, either through our payment or his. But if we decline the Savior’s invitation to let him carry our sins, and then satisfy justice by ourselves, we will not yet have experienced the complete rehabilitation that can occur through a combination of divine assistance and genuine repentance. Working together, those forces have the power permanently to change our hearts and our lives, preparing us for celestial life.
• The doctrines of mercy and repentance are rehabilitative, not retributive, in nature. The Savior asks for our repentance not merely to compensate him for paying our debt to justice, but also as a way of inducing us to undergo the process of development that will make our nature divine, giving us the capacity to live the celestial law. The “natural man” will remain an enemy to God forever—even after paying for his own sins—unless he also “becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child.”
• But Job’s own true perspective introduced a new thought to the Hebrew mind: We can experience trouble not only because of transgression but because it is a natural, even essential, part of life.