Repentance is the key with which we can unlock the prison from inside. We hold that key within our hands, and agency is ours to use it.
Interpretation
Repentance empowers individuals to overcome their inner struggles and take control of their lives.
In this quote, Boyd K. Packer emphasizes the importance of repentance as a transformative tool that can liberate individuals from their self-imposed confines. He suggests that each person possesses the ability and agency to utilize repentance to change their lives and rectify their mistakes, highlighting personal responsibility and empowerment in the journey towards self-improvement.
In practice
During a discussion on personal growth at a seminar.
Faith, to be faith, must center around something that is not known. Faith, to be faith, must go beyond that for which there is confirming evidence. Faith, to be faith, must go into the unknown. Faith, to be faith, must walk to the edge of the light, and then a few steps into the darkness. If everything has to be known, if everything has to be explained, if everything has to be certified, then there is no need for faith. Indeed, there is no room for it.
Every soul confined in a prison of sin, guilt, or perversion has a key to the gate. The key is labeled “repentance.” If you know how to use this key, the adversary cannot hold you.
Learn to pray. Pray often. Pray in your mind, in your heart. Pray on your knees. Prayer is your personal key to heaven. The lock is on your side of the veil. And I have learned to conclude all my prayers with ‘Thy will be done’ (Matthew 6:10; see also Luke 11:2; 3 Nephi 13:10).
Latter-day Saints are not obedient because they are compelled to be obedient. They are obedient because they know certain spiritual truths and have decided, as an expression of their own individual agency, to obey the commandments of God. . . . We are not obedient because we are blind, we are obedient because we can see
Thoughts, like water, will stay on course if we make a place for them to go. As you learn to control your thoughts, you can gain courage, conquer fear and have a happy life.
Addiction has the capacity to disconnect the human will and nullify moral agency. It can rob one of the power to decide.
There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.
Feel the delight of walking in the noisy street and being the noise.
For as the interposition of a rivulet, however small, will occasion the line of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any trifling disagreement will be the cause of seditions; but they will not so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue and vice, and next to that between poverty and riches.
Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.
Little more can reasonably be aimed at with respect to the people at large than to have them properly armed.
Know what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of Baptism; it is to believe in belief; it is to be so little that elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child had its fairy godmother in its soul.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.