Saved From Our Sins

"...and thou shalt call his name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their sins" (Matt 1:21).

The greatest part of our energy in this world's life is spent in the endeavour to rid ourselves of discomfort. We spend vast amounts of time and resources trying to avoid discomfort or to make ourselves more comfortable. Some do it through attempting to escape the discomfort, others with strong and continuous effort to keep moving up into bigger and better and more, only to discover that with each new escape or new ascent, new discomfort. The truth is that we bring our troubles with us. We bring ourselves with us. In our haste to be rich or to escape, we are slow to find the poverty of our souls and no amount of effort at escaping or improving our circumstances can rid ourselves of this poverty.

For the cause of every person's discomfort is evil, or as Alma says 'our awful, sinful and polluted state,' or the evil in ourselves, our own corrupted state, our own unrighteousness, and our flawed goodness. In addition we also have and experience the evil of those we love. And the only way to rid ourselves of this evil is to get rid of our own sin--our sinful and polluted state. And I don't mean the deeds that we do, but the evil that we are. Make note of the irony--it is very uncomfortable to admit that we are evil. Only those bad people who have committed atrocious sins are evil, we tell ourselves. For this reason we cling to the deeds that we do, calling them good, because we are afraid to see the evil in ourselves.

What needs to be changed is us, not our actions or our behaviors. We can, for example, quit doing a particular sinful deed, but what is not changed is our capacity to continue to commit that sinful deed. Foolish is the person who would rid himself and others of discomfort by waging war on the evils around him, while that person neglects his own character and capacity for sin. We, nor others, can be righted from the outside. Wrong is always generated and done by an individual because the wrongness exists in that individual! 

Too often our efforts are directed at treating the symptoms rather than the cause. I call it chopping at the leaves as opposed to going to the root of the problem. Almost all of our efforts are thus directed as if a change in our behavior or the behavior of others is the cure to the sickness. We are only right when there is no wrong in us, not when we have quit doing wrong. We must be set free from the evil within us, not set free from the sins or evil we are doing, nor set free from the sins we have committed. I mean the sins we are capable of doing, the sins or evil which spoil our nature--the wrongness in us--the evil we consent to, the evil we are, the evil which makes us do the sins that we do.

Let's pause here and answer the question you may have--is it really evil that is within us? Is it not just the result of the fall? Isn't it better, or doesn't it make us feel better, to say that nobody is perfect and not that we are evil? We could if that were the case, but it isn't. One of the results of the fall of Adam was that Satan came "among the children of men, and tempteth them to worship him; and men have become carnal, sensual, and devilish..." (Moses 6:49 emphasis added). The Lord also told Adam that "inasmuch as thy children are conceived in sin, even so when they begin to grow up, sin conceiveth in their hearts, and they taste the bitter, that they may know to prize the good" (Moses 6:55 emphasis added). 

"For they are carnal and devilish, 

and the devil has power over them; 

yea, even that old serpent 

that did beguile our first parents, 

which was the cause of their fall; 

which was the cause of all mankind becoming carnal, sensual, devilish, 

knowing evil from good, subjecting themselves to the devil.

Thus all mankind were lost; 

and behold, they would 

have been endlessly lost 

were it not that God redeemed his people from their lost and fallen state.

But remember that he 

that persists in his own carnal nature, 

and goes on in the ways of sin 

and rebellion against God, 

remaineth in his fallen state 

and the devil hath all power over him. Therefore he is as though 

there was no redemption made, 

being an enemy to God; 

and also is the devil an enemy to God."

(Mosiah 16:3-5). 

Further, if the definition of Good is the righteousness of God and evil is everything else (Moroni 7 et al), then our capacity or desire to choose anything other than the righteousness of God is evil.

 

To save a man from his sins, or from his awful, sinful and polluted state is the reason Christ was sent by His Father, sent to do the will of the Father. Christ did not come to just deliver us from the consequences of our sinful deeds, while yet our sinful nature remained. But men, loving their sins, pervert the word of God by saying that He came to save us from the punishment of our sins. This teaching has perverted and corrupted the teaching of His gospel. He did not come to just pay the price of our sinful deeds, but to pay the price of our awful, sinful and polluted state--to save us from our sins, from ourselves.

As we learn to acknowledge the evil within us and the evil around us, we realize that we are helpless to make any changes in ourselves that will make our evil nature go away. What we can do is look for the light shining in the darkness. But Oh how we hate the light and prefer the darkness! For the light shining upon us will cause that we see the evil within us, and this we cannot stand. So we prefer the darkness. "This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."

It is the badness within us, ready to produce bad actions, that we need to be delivered from. As long as this badness remains we are left to be evil, commit evil and suffer the consequences. But to be delivered only from these consequences would be no deliverance from ourselves, but would be damnation. Add to the evil in our being the fact that we do not care and will not obey--we will not repent and turn to Him, because we love the comfort of the darkness rather than the discomfort of the light shining upon us.

Consider that the evil that lives in each of us, our evil judgments, our evil desires, our hate and pride and envy and greed and self satisfaction--these are the souls of our sins, the cause of our sins, and are more terrible than the deeds that we do. They make us as loathsome as the loathsome things that we do.

Christ came to deliver us from the bondage of not just our deeds, but from our awful, sinful and polluted state, and not just from the punishment of any of them. When all our sins are gone and we are changed by Him, the punishment will have departed also. He came to make us good.

One master sin is at the root of all the rest. It is the non-recognition by us, and the consequent inactivity in us. It is the absence of our being in harmony with our Father and His Son. It is the fact that He has given us the choice between Him and His righteousness, and everything else, or evil. Being enticed by one or the other, we choose one or the other. Can you imagine that you can come to align your will with His? Not in the sense that we are better behaved or improved, but in the sense that we become like Him because we have come to recognize the evil within us and turned to Him to change us. It is the will of God that we become like Him. When that becomes our will as well, then we are one with God. The Lord knows what we need; we know only what we want. We want ease and comfort. He wants purity. 

We can begin by acknowledging the evil within us and compare ourselves to His goodness and bring about the godly sorrow that comes as a result of this comparison of His goodness and our nothingness. It is only through seeing the evil within us that we can exercise the faith to see the Good in Him.

As we move about in the shadows of our own darkness and the darkness of those around us we may create fictions of our own goodness by comparing ourselves to others. It is true that we can always find someone worse than we are, or so it seems, because all we measure is the outward manifestations of a people going about to establish their own righteousness. The true God gets distorted, while we assume the authenticities and endorsements that belong only to God. We maintain appearances of true worship and lay stress on outward observances and the need to preserve the exterior of true worship. All of this is caused by avoiding the light and being comfortable in the darkness and avoiding the righteousness of God.

Instead of the righteousness of God we create a fiction that feeds the many as we worship the God of our making, but are now allowed to worship the false gods (our gods) alongside the true God.  

In order to awaken to a sense of our own lost and fallen state, our evil and sinful state, we have a remedy. And that remedy is the "light of the everlasting word." The only problem with this remedy, is that the light of the everlasting word will awaken us to a sense of our awful guilt and the fact that we are encircled about by the bands of death and the chains of hell. Not a very comforting remedy to say the least for those who desire comfort. Nor is it comforting  to be shown our weakness as soon as we come unto Him, or be told that we must lose our life to find it. But it is the only way we can come out of the darkness and into the light. Measuring ourselves by what we do with what others may or may not do may be comforting, but it is not redeeming. 

While it is frightening and certainly not pleasant to see the evil within us, the alternative is much worse and will cause us to wish that we could command the rocks and the mountains to fall upon us to hide us from His presence. Adam and Eve certainly recognized this as they contemplated partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The attached poem that I wrote illustrates our dilemma.

The Lord cannot save us from our sins while we hold on to them.  We must send them away or forsake them. We must begin to cast them out, if we would be delivered from the evil within us. But alone we might labor for all eternity and not succeed. We cannot set ourselves right. Only Christ can do that. He does not even require that we be sorry for our sins, because, until His love is developed in us by Him, we cannot be truly sorry.

As soon as we just desire to forsake or to send our sins away, He will cause that desire to work in us, and immediately we will begin to see some of the fruits of our repentance, fruits which come from Him, such as curing our tendency to turn away from Him and taking away our disposition to do evil. But don't expect all the evil in us to be taken away in this lifetime. Hence the need for continual repentance, for validating our repentance by enduring to the end, with the hope, no the knowledge, that we can be perfected in Him.

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The Net

Something there is that doesn't love safety,

That wants the net removed from under us,

And forces all our timid ones to flee;

And awakens all our senses to the light.

The work of the lifeless is another thing:

I have seen them, cautious and secure,

Staying still, never moving;

Lifeless, helpless, never understanding why.

Never seeing, never feeling. Life I ask:

Is it more than dying? Isn't life for living?

Every year they seek to find their life

On things which have no life and give no life;

Things which give them comfort, make them safe,

And all the while entomb their souls for life.

"Be careful," they're told, "You might get hurt;"

And so they stay away from all that might give life;

As if getting hurt would harm them some.

"You can't get hurt if you are dead," I say.

Why is it that they are afraid to live, afraid to dance?

Wall flowers all, hiding from the real world, turning away;

Behaving themselves, deluding themselves;

Free from the pain of embarrassing failure.

Adam and Eve rejected the set, the garden in which they lived;

Both wanted more than comfort and ease, wanted to be like God.

And yet reseeking Eden, the Garden of Eden, is the work of the day;

"If only life were this or that, wouldn't we be happy?"

"Never suffering is never living," I say, as I remove the net

And see the danger from above, and feel the life within me.