Repentance means to turn toward God. To turn toward God obviously includes more than simply feeling sorry for being turned away from him in the past. The Hebrew and Greek words related to repentance are not limited to regret, emphasizing the need to change one’s desires1 and actions2 toward God.3 To turn toward God is to learn more about and adopt his purpose, qualities, thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Repentance is not a limited or partial action, but corresponds to an active and total adoption of his character, as far as you understand it, at all times and in all places. It is to share his motive, value what he values, desire what he desires, and use your attention and other resources as he would. You can’t “face” God while “facing” anything else.4 You must either serve God or someone else, but you can’t serve both.5
The opposite of repentance is rebellion, which is turning your face away from God. You might believe that rebellion against God requires an active choice. This is not so. Our nature is so inclined against God that we rebel against him by default.6 The very absence of active turning toward God is rebellion against him. Any rebellion against God increases your distance from him, dimming his light within you, making it more difficult to see what is best and easier to turn further away from it.
God’s will is that you remove the differences between you and him. Jesus has already provided everything necessary for you to have the power and reasons to reconcile your known differences with him.1292 He will continue to provide everything necessary for you to continue to align with him as you learn more about him. The steps towards becoming more like God consist of iteratively perceiving more differences between how you are and how God is and reconciling yourself to how you now perceive him to be.1293 The bridge from where you are to where God is necessarily begins where you are.
The more you repent of the differences you know of between you and God, the more additional differences will be revealed to you.1294 The more you approach the light of God’s presence, the more of your remaining faults will be exposed. The fire of his presence will both illuminate ways you can improve and assist you in removing what cannot endure a greater relationship with him. Repentance is a dawning of a new approach to God that includes adding what is required for a closer relationship with him and clearing away anything that prevents it, preparing you to continue this process as you learn more about him.
Footnotes
- 1. And I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes: (Daniel 9:3) ↩
- 2. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed. (James 1:23-25) ↩
- 3. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else. (Isaiah 45:22) ↩
- 4. No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew 6:24) ↩
- 5. Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter. (Isaiah 56:11) ↩
- 6. For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father. (Mosiah 3:19) ↩