Why Not Try Repentance! – Sunday, October 03, 1943
The characteristic technique of the sleight-of-hand performer is to divert attention from what he doesn’t want us to see and focus attention on what he does want us to see. He may employ a casual and disarming line of talk or a few false motions, or both—but all to one purpose: to take our minds off reality and to make unreality seem real. In some respects the illustration would seem to have pertinence to the pattern of our current living—a pattern so complicated, so crowded with immediate problems, so dominated by startling news, that we sometimes stand in danger of thinking too much about what is happening and not enough about why—too much about effects and not enough about causes—too much about symptoms and not enough about the disease. The doctor who goes about prescribing for symptoms only, may relieve the patient, but the chances for permanent cure are not so good unless he looks beyond symptoms to discover causes.
This figure also seems to have pertinence to the pattern of current living, because social and economic upheavals are symptoms of something deeper; and war is a symptom also—a symptom of some underlying cause in the lives of men—and, while we devoutly work and pray for an end to war, and while, as a nation, our immediate problem is unreservedly the winning of the war, if the coming of peace should find the basic cause untouched, a reasonable expectancy would be for the malady to recur. The winning of a war does not, for example, assure personal or national righteousness. It doesn’t outlaw greed or hate, or unchastity or incontinence, or deception or inordinate ambition. And yet such things, with their innumerable kindred brood, are the festering causes of war, because they drive peace from the hearts of men. Isaiah spoke the formula these many centuries since: “. . . the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.” (Isaiah 57:20, 21). And if there is no peace for the wicked, there can be no peace for anyone until the wicked have repented or been confined to their proper sphere.
But repentance must go beyond those who are known as “the wicked.” It must be a general repentance—repentance from unreality, from false thinking, from treating symptoms while ignoring causes. We must look beyond what is happening and give more attention to why. If we don’t, and if history may be trusted to repeat itself, peace will continue to be merely a breathing spell between periods of conflict. This will not be a popular conclusion. Such messages never have been popular. But the record will show that nearly everything else has been tried without permanent success. Now why not try repentance!
By Richard L. Evans, spoken from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, Oct. 3, 1943, over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright – 1943.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
October 03, 1943
Broadcast Number 0,737