Fifty was my favorite age. It takes about that long to learn to quit competing—to be yourself and settle down to living.
-Marjorie Pay Hinckley
The older I get the more I am convinced that obedience and repentance are equivalent principles. Well, I at least cannot refute the statement. Hear me out and see if you agree.
My reasoning is this: No one perfectly obeys any commandment. We can always work to improve each and every area of our lives. The important thing is to remain willing to improve–the essence of repentance.
Therefore, the best principle to obey is that of repentance. And the repentant heart chooses to forsake sin which is obedience. So we have “obedience = repentance.”
This becomes an important equivalence to consider when combined with the scriptural inequality from Samuel that “obedience > sacrifice.”
In 1 Samuel 15, Samuel chastizes Saul for not following the Lord’s directions completely. Saul had disobeyed the Lord in his attempt to make a sacrifice. From verse 22, “And Samuel said, Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.”
Listening to the Lord is better than hopelessly trying to improve His word. We improve our obedience by listening to the Holy Ghost’s promptings to repent.
In returning to church, I have discovered an error in my original scriptural math. I had equated sacrifice with repentance producing the substitute equation “obedience > repentance.” This erroneous inequality can lead one to think that people who do not make mistakes are somehow more worthy or chosen than those who do. That is plainly wrong and actually constitutes a quite prideful stance.
The correction substitution is “repentance > sacrifice.” This inequality correctly encapsulates the truth that we are not the Lamb of God. Christ is the Only Begotten Son and on Him, we entirely rely. Therefore, our sacrifice is less than holding repentant hearts. Correct self-esteem is built by installing processes of repentant growth in our lives, not through prideful completion of any particular sacrifice.
CS Lewis said, “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.” As my Twitter friend Carrie said, “Feeling superior requires an inferior.”
As I read my scriptures lately, I substitute the words obedience and repentance interchangeably and windows of understanding are opening for me.
I realize now that my post last week is essentially the same as this one. We should build for being repentant, not for obedient doneness. We should build for being obedient, not for repentant doneness.
What do you think? What perspectives do you have on the potential equivalence of obedience and repentance?
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