Sins and Mistakes | Dallin H. Oaks, Aug 1994

Sins and mistakes can both hurt us, but are not the same thing. Understanding the difference between the two is necessary to learn how to deal with them.

This devotional was given on August 16, 1994.

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My dear brothers and sisters, I am glad to participate in this BYU Campus Education Week.

This year’s theme, “Education: Refined by Reason and Revelation,” is both appropriate and challenging. The idea that education should be based on both reason and revelation is a true gospel principle. It is rooted in the divine direction that we “seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). It is an immensely important principle that some good persons do not understand and apply. Some who have refined their application of reason reject revelation, and some who understand revelation seem to misunderstand its relationship with reason.

We can be edified by the example of great Latter-day Saints who honor and apply both reason and revelation. Arthur Henry King, a distinguished British civil servant who became a professor at BYU and then president of the London Temple, is such an individual. I quote from his book The Abundance of the Heart (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1986):

Conversion is not a matter of choosing what we like and ignoring the rest, but of whole-minded acceptance. . . . When we have performed this act of faith, . . . all the difficulties are resolved by it. When we have laid down at Christ’s feet all our scholarship, all our learning, all the tools of our trades, we discover that we may pick them all up again, clean them, adjust them, and use them for the Church in the name of Christ and in the light of his countenance. We do not need to discard them. All we need to do is to use them from the faith which now possesses us. And we find that we can. [p. 30]

Those words are both a challenge for all of us and an appropriate introduction for my subject today.

I

In this devotional message I wish to reason about a basic principle given in modern revelation but not as well understood or applied as it should be. This principle was given to guide us in our relationships with one another. It is especially important for parents with teenage children.

Three verses of the Doctrine and Covenants identify an important contrast between sins and mistakes. I had never noticed these verses until about one year ago, when I was reading the Doctrine and Covenants for the fifteenth or twentieth time. Their direction came to my mind with such freshness and impact that I thought they might have been newly inserted in my book. That is the way with prayerful study of the scriptures. The scriptures do not change, but we do, and so the old scriptures can give us new insights every time we read them.

The twentieth section of the Doctrine and Covenants, given the same month the Church was organized, is the basic revelation on Church government. It contains one verse giving this important direction: “Any member of the church of Christ transgressing, or being overtaken in a fault, shall be dealt with as the scriptures direct” (D&C 20:80). The clear implication of this verse is that transgressing is different from being overtaken in a fault, but that either type of action is to be dealt with as the scriptures direct.

The scriptures contain various directions for dealing with members, but the key direction for present purposes is contained in two verses in the November 1831 revelation given as the preface to the book that is now the Doctrine and Covenants. These verses follow the Lord’s explanation that he has given his servants the commandments in that book “after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding” (D&C 1:24). Succeeding verses clarify the difference between error and sin, and give distinctly different directions for the correction of each. I quote verses 25 and 27:

And inasmuch as they erred it might be made known. . . .

And inasmuch as they sinned they might be chastened, that they might repent. [D&C 1:25, 27]

Under these verses transgressing is different from being at fault, and to err is different than to sin. Here I need to define some terms. I believe that in these scriptures sin and transgression mean the same thing. Similarly, to err or to be at fault are also equivalent. In referring to this second category, I will use the more familiar description: “to make a mistake.”

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