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.
True charity is the desire to be useful to others with no thought of recompense.
If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you won't be persuaded by me, taking it that I am ionizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions every day about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded.
The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.
Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace?
Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.
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