The Doctrine of Christ, Part 2: Repentance

One of the great things about the gospel is that it is simple enough for a spiritual infant to grasp, yet complex enough to keep the worlds best scholars busy for their whole lives. Books upon books have been written about some of the simplest truths that we know. It is the same with any aspect of the gospel, including the Doctrine of Christ. I love the simplicity of how each part builds on itself and starts over and keeps building. The first building block is faith. Next comes repentance. We can't skip over steps in our progression. We see quite often people who want to be baptized without true repentance, thinking that the baptism itself will satisfy that requirement. This doesn't quite work. Just as we can't truly repent until we have faith, we shouldn't be baptized before we are prepared. But there is so much more to repentance than getting us to baptism. All of us have "sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23) and we therefore have great need of the Atonement of Christ, that makes repentance possible for us. Since our Heavenly Father is a God of both justice and mercy, His plan included a way for both to be satisfied. With The Savior's selfless sacrifice for us satisfied the demand for justice while mercifully allowing us a way to overcome our sin. (More in 2 Nephi 2:6-8) Without The Atonement, all of us would inevitably face justice for all our sins. Through Christ we have a way to escape our own transgressions and guilt and become pure again. Many of us see repentance as a difficult process that  we would rather avoid. It is difficult, but the alternative is so much worse. In the First Epistle of John it says, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." The gift of the Atonement and the Sacrifice of His Son is the greatest gift that Heavenly Father could have given us. If we delude ourselves into thinking that we don't need to repent, we are saying that we don't want that gift. At this point I'm afraid that the tone of this post is a little too negative for my liking, but the overall message I want to convey is one of hope. Without Christ we would have none, but thankfully that is not the case. That is the message that we want to bring to the world, that a loving Father has provided a way for all of us to return to Him, and that way is trough His Son. We can all find happiness through faith and repentance on the name of Christ.