Repentance and Progress – Sunday, April 23, 1944
In considering great moral and religious principles, we are sometimes inclined to assume that they are idealistic rather than practical—that the benefits and penalties associated with them are virtually devoid of application so far as our commonplace daily affairs are concerned. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Consider, for example, the principle of repentance, which many of us do not take very seriously, but which has an extremely practical significance in every phase of life. In a sense, no man moves forward in any particular without repentance, neither in the realm of material things nor in the realm of the spiritual. Changing from an old way of doing things to a new and better way is repentance. Increasing industrial efficiency is a kind of repentance—by the abandoning of wasteful methods and the following of better ways. Applying the newer discoveries of science in the treatment of human ills and in the creation of all desirable and useful things is a form of repentance. The growing up of a child is a kind of repentance as he modifies his conduct in accordance with increasing wisdom. And when an adult behaves in childish ways, to that extent he has failed to be governed by the principle of repentance—when he reverts to unenlightened practices, when he refuses to abandon old errors for new-found truth, when he persists in ways that have been condemned by the experience of society and by the laws of God.
The unrepentant man turns his face to the darkness instead of to the light. He follows ways he knows to be evil—evil if only in the sense that his practice does not conform to the best available knowledge. In other words, when a man knows better than he does, to that extent he is unrepentant, and is, therefore, also unprogressive. He who doesn’t repent of breaking the laws of health will pay the price of ill health. The institution or the man who doesn’t repent of spending beyond his means, invites financial disaster. He who doesn’t repent of wrong thinking and wrongdoing will pay in personal unhappiness. To be unrepentant is to be foolish, unwise, and stupid, because it leads to failure.
A successful life is a life of constant repentance, a life of striving toward perfection, a life that seeks earnestly to abandon errors of thought, of conduct, errors of habit and of attitude, and to return no more to false ways. In short, repentance is the very essence of progress, in material as well as in spiritual things, in practical affairs as well as in the realm of idealism, and no man can afford to be unrepentant.
By Richard L. Evans, spoken from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, April 23, 1944, over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright – 1944.
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April 23, 1944
Broadcast Number 0,766