Repentance: Grace--After All We Can Do

These posts on Repentance are intended to be read in order from the beginning: 

Repentance: Introduction

At the bottom of each post is a link to the next one. 

So what did Nephi mean when he said that we are saved by grace, after all we can do? Perhaps it is easier if we framed the question: What Can We Do? This is where religion and the Gospel of Jesus Christ collide. After teaching the Gospel of Grace and Repentance one Sunday in Gospel Doctrine, a friend said to me: “But we have to do something, don’t we?” He was asking because I had just taught that when we access the grace of Christ through faith and repentance, and not by our works, then it is He that begins to make the changes in us. The fruits of our repentance are a result of Him, the root making them, not us. We are, after all, the branches and cannot bring forth fruit of our own. 

Before we move on to what “after all we can do” means, remember that Nephi also said that “after (we) are reconciled unto God, that it is only in and through the grace of God that (we) are saved” (2 Nephi 10:24 emphasis added). Let’s talk about being “reconciled unto God.” 

Christ has already paid the demands of justice for all. We just have take advantage of the grace of God. How do we do that? First, we have to lose the life that we have. “If anyone wants to come with me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For if anyone wants to save his life, he will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25 emphasis added). Losing our life is hard for winners, those who, like the Pharisee, attempt to justify their life by their good works. And yet it is only in losing our life that we can find it. And it was none other than Jesus who insisted that the only way to win is to lose. Nothing is harder for those who are comfortably “living their religion” to accept.

In order to be reconciled to God, then, we must lose our life, or better yet, come to the realization that we are lost. We must become losers and not winners. We have to give Jesus someone he can work with, and He cannot work with winners because they insist that their works will save them. These are those who read Nephi’s “after all we can do” as just another call to be good and do good works and Christ will take care of the rest. These are the “ninety and nine” who need no repentance. These are the Pharisees in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, and the elder brothers in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Incidentally, the “ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance” whom Jesus introduced in the Parable of the Lost Sheep are strictly a rhetorical device: In fact, there are not and never have been any such people anywhere, only those who imagine that they need no repentance, or whose image is that of a winner.

Christ is going to present us all to the Father in the power of His atonement, death and resurrection, and not at all in the power of our own totally inadequate records, either good or bad. 

Ask yourself why is it that God cannot work with the Pharisee? Then ask yourself why is it that God can work with the Publican? But the most important question is: can He work with you? 

Let me share some thoughts from Robert Capon, an American Episcopal priest and author, whose studies and writings on the Parables are without equal. He is writing about the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Prodigal Son. These will help you start to get an idea of what Nephi meant by “after all we can do.” I quote his words to see if you can hear God's words in them. It is only God's words that matter and we should learn to hear His words no matter who speaks or writes them.

“But if the salt of the earth becomes insipid (loses its savor) --if a disciple of Jesus forgets that only losing wins, and a fortiori, if the church forgets it--where in the wide world of winners drowning in the syrup of their own success will either the disciple or the church be able to recapture the saltiness of victory out of loss? The answer is nowhere. And the sad fact is that the church both now and at far too many times in its history, has found it easier to act as if it were selling the sugar of moral and spiritual achievement rather than the salt of Jesus’s passion and death. It will preach salvation for the successfully well-behaved, redemption for the triumphantly correct in doctrine, and pie in the sky for all the winners who think they can walk into the final judgment and flash their passing report cards at Jesus.” (Pulpit Narrative)

“The church “preaches the nutra-sweet religion of test-passing, which is the only thing the world is ready to buy and which isn’t even the real sugar let alone salt. In spite of all our fakery, though, Jesus’ program remains firm. He saves losers and only losers. He raises the dead and only the dead. And rejoices more over the last, the least, and the little than over all the winners in the world. That alone is what this losing race of ours needs to hear, even though it can’t stand the thought of it. That alone is the salt that takes our perishing insipidity and gives it life and flavor. That alone….” (Scripture Narrative)

“He records that tax collectors and sinners were coming to Jesus to hear him, and that the Pharisees and scribes (winners all) grumbled extensively about such consorting with losers.”

“Give him a world with a hundred out of every hundred souls lost--give him, in other words, the worldful of losers that is the only real world we have--and it will do just fine: lostness is exactly his cup of tea.” (Christ is both the Shepherd in the Parable of the Lost Sheep, and the woman in the Parable of the Lost Coin. Note that the only criteria for being found was that each was lost.)

“If we badger ourselves (and each other) with the dismal notion that sinners must first forsake their sins before God will forgive them, that the lost must somehow find itself before the finder will get off his backside and look for it--we carry ourselves straight away from the obvious sense of both stories.” (Lost Coin and Lost Sheep) “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8 emphasis added).

“They are emphatically not stories designed to convince us that if we will wind ourselves up to some acceptable level of moral and/or spiritual improvement, God will then forgive us; rather they are parables about God’s determination to move before we do--in short, to make lostness and death the only tickets we need to the Supper of the Lamb.” 

Now do you better comprehend the reason that in order to be reconciled to God we must experience Godly Sorrow--our nothingness, our lostness?

“Neither the lostness, nor the deadness, nor the repentance is in itself redemptive; God alone gives life, and he gives it freely and fully on no conditions whatsoever. These stories, therefore, are parables of grace and grace only. There is in them not one single note of earning or merit, not one breath about rewarding the rewardable, correcting the correctable, or improving the improvable. There is only the gracious saving determination of the shepherd, the woman, the king, and the father--all surrogates for God--to raise the dead.”

“Rather it is the admission that we are dead in our sins--that we have no power of ourselves either to save ourselves or to convince anyone else that we are worth saving.” (Godly Sorrow/we cannot merit anything of ourselves)

“It is the recognition that our whole life is finally and forever out of our hands and that if we ever live again, our life will be entirely the gift of some gracious other.” (Godly Sorrow)

“When God pardons, therefore, he does not say he understands our weakness or makes allowances for our errors; rather he disposes of, he finishes with, the whole of our dead life and raises us up with a new one.” (Become new creatures!)

“He finds us, in short, in the desert of death, not in the garden of improvement; and in the power of Jesus’ resurrection, he puts us on his shoulders rejoicing and brings us home” (Capon, The Parables of Grace, emphasis and comment added).

Christ did say after all: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight unto the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18 emphasis added). 

In addition to experiencing our nothingness, our deadness, our lost and fallen state, there are still other things that we can do to be saved by Grace. We can repent,  but then again repentance is the experiencing of our lost and fallen state, our nothingness and His goodness. But we can also forgive, and since all are lost, all are fallen, all have sinned, repenting, as the Lord defines repentance, and forgiving are the only things we can do.

Lamoni and his brother, sitting in council, after they had been reconciled to God, or as they described it “converted unto the Lord,” said “And I also thank my God, yea, my great God, that he hath granted unto us that we might repent of these things, and also that he hath forgiven us of those many sins and murders which we have committed, and taken away the guilt from our hearts, through the merits of his Son. And now behold, my brethren, since it has been all that we could do (as we were the most lost of all mankind) to repent…for it was all we could do to repent sufficiently before God that he would take away our stain…” (Alma 24:10-11 emphasis added).

It was all they could do to repent. By linking “all we could do” with Nephi’s “after all we could do,” we see that all we can do is repent. No winning. No justification by our works, regardless of how good they may be. Remember the Pharisee. His long list, which included fasting, tithing, praying, and attending meetings, did count for nothing. The scriptures have concluded that all are under sin, and that our sinfulness cannot be broken by good examples, even if we could follow them. Quite the contrary the Gospel of Jesus Christ teaches us that we can be saved only by the horrible example of a Savior who, in an excruciating death, lays down his life for us.

No human virtues, however revered or practiced, will be enough. Those who are found guiltless (3 Nephi 27:16) are only made up of forgiven sinners. They are no good guys, the successful types, who of their own integrity, have been accepted into God’s presence. There are only failures, only those who have accepted their deaths in their sins and have been saved from their sins.

The sole difference, therefore, between those who are found guiltless and those who are “hewn down and cast into the fire” is that the love of God is accepted and passed along by this group, while the others reject and block it. The spotless, because of the Grace of God, do not withhold their forgiveness from others, while those cast into the fire are living a life of keeping tabs on everyone else, unforgiving, judgmental and in hell. No mercy is found in them, and they have refused to receive mercy.

I know that all of this requires a new mindset, a new paradigm because we have all been raised in religious families, where being good was prized. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ (3 Nephi 27:13-21) is not the same gospel most of us were taught. It may have been called the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and we did pride ourselves in living it, but it was not the Gospel of Repentance, Mercy and Grace. Unless we are willing to see our own death as necessary to salvation, and give up on trying to justify our lives through living them the way we have been taught, we will never be able to enjoy the Atonement, even though it is handed to us on a silver platter.

So far we have defined repentance, learned why all need to repent, defined Godly Sorry, caught a glimpse of why we should say nothing but repentance unto this generation, learned that it is by Grace that we are saved, and that we must lose our life in order to find it. But if we leave it at just learning about repentance, we will be as those who know, but don’t know. Why? Because we have not experienced our own lost and fallen state, have not been harrowed up in our sins, have not experienced our nothingness in comparison to His goodness, and have refused to do it His way--lose our life, the one we have made for ourselves, the more comfortable the better. 

“Therefore, blessed are they who will repent, and hearken unto the voice of the Lord; for these are they that shall be saved. And may God grant, in his great fulness, that men might be brought unto repentance and good works (works meet for repentance, the fruits of His repentance; His works done by the power and gifts of God), that they might be restored unto grace for grace. And I would that all men might be saved” (Helaman 12:23-24 emphasis added),

“Follow me,” He says. All the other ways--all the moral, philosophical and religious works on which humanity has always counted--have been canceled. Nothing counts now except being one of the lost and dead with Him. Follow Him into the waters of baptism, into His death and be raised with Him in His life. Anything else will leave you subject to His justice. But keep in mind that we are not saved by what Christ taught, and we are certainly not saved by what we understand Jesus to have taught. We are not saved by repentance. We are saved by Christ. We just have to believe Him.

I want to end with an example of where the Pulpit Narrative is the Scripture Narrative. Elder Jeffrey Holland, in the October 2017 General Conference said concerning the Parable of the Unjust or Unforgiving Servant.

“Our only hope for true perfection is in receiving it as a gift from heaven—we can’t ‘earn’ it.

Let me use one of the Savior’s parables to say this in a little different way. A servant was in debt to his king for the amount of 10,000 talents. Hearing the servant’s plea for patience and mercy, ‘the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and … forgave … the debt.’ But then that same servant would not forgive a fellow servant who owed him 100 pence. On hearing this, the king lamented to the one he had forgiven, ‘Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?’

There is some difference of opinion among scholars regarding the monetary values mentioned here—and forgive the U.S. monetary reference—but to make the math easy, if the smaller, unforgiven 100-pence debt were, say, $100 in current times, then the 10,000-talent debt so freely forgiven would have approached $1 billion—or more! As a personal debt, that is an astronomical number—totally beyond our comprehension. (Nobody can shop that much!) Well, for the purposes of this parable, it is supposed to be incomprehensible; it is supposed to be beyond our ability to grasp, to say nothing of beyond our ability to repay. That is because this isn’t a story about two servants arguing in the New Testament. It is a story about us, the fallen human family—mortal debtors, transgressors, and prisoners all. Every one of us is a debtor, and the verdict was imprisonment for every one of us. And there we would all have remained were it not for the grace of a King who sets us free because He loves us and is ‘moved with compassion toward us.’ Jesus uses an unfathomable measurement here because His Atonement is an unfathomable gift given at an incomprehensible cost” (Holland, Be Ye Therefore Perfect--Eventually October 2017 General Conference emphasis added). 

And then he quoted from Tolstoy a truth which, when I heard it, caused me to shout for joy!

“In that regard, Leo Tolstoy wrote once of a priest who was criticized by one of his congregants (an unforgiving servant perhaps) for not living as resolutely as he should, the critic concluding that the principles the erring preacher taught must therefore also be erroneous. In response to that criticism, the priest says: ‘Look at my life now and compare it to my former life. You will see that I am trying to live out the truth I proclaim.’ Unable to live up to the high ideals he taught, the priest admits he has failed (‘O wretched man that I am’). But he cries: ‘Attack me, [if you wish,] I do this myself, but [don’t] attack … the path I follow. … If I know the way home [but] am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way simply because I am staggering from side to side?’” Holland, Be Ye Therefore Perfect--Eventually October 2017 General Conference emphasis and comments added).

Again, what do you hear in the Gospel you have received?

Next: Repentance: By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them