Believing Christ: A Practical Approach to the Atonement | Stephen E. Robinson | 1990

Believing in Christ and believing Christ are two entirely different things. Taking a practical approach to the Atonement can help us grow our faith.

This speech was given on May 29, 1990.

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"The greatest dichotomy, the greatest problem in the entire universe, consists of two facts. The first we can read in Doctrine and Covenants 1:31: “For I the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance.” That means he can’t stand it, he can’t tolerate it, he can’t blink, or look the other way, or sweep it under the rug. He can’t tolerate sin in the least degree. The other side of the dichotomy is very simply put: I sin, and so do you. If that were all there were to the equation, the conclusion would be inescapable that we, as sinful beings, cannot be tolerated in the presence of God.

But that is not all there is to the equation. This morning I would like to talk to you about the Atonement of Christ, that glorious plan by which this dichotomy can be resolved. I would like to share with you incidents from my own life that illustrate how the Atonement works in a practical, everyday setting.

Believing Christ

First is a story about my son, Michael, who did something wrong when he was six or seven years old. He’s my only son, and I’m hard on him. I want him to be better than his dad was, even as a boy, and so I lean on him and expect a great deal. Well, he had done something I thought was incredibly vile, and I let him know how terrible it was. I sent him to his room with the instructions, “Don’t you dare come out until I come and get you.”

And then I forgot. It was some hours later, as I was watching television, that I heard his door open and heard the tentative footsteps coming down the hall. I said, “Oh, my gosh,” and ran to my end of the hall to see him standing with swollen eyes and tears on his cheeks at the other end. He looked up at me—he wasn’t quite sure he should have come out—and said, “Dad, can’t we ever be friends again?” Well, I melted, ran to him, and hugged him. He’s my boy, and I love him.

Like Michael, we all do things that disappoint our Father, that separate us from his presence and spirit. There are times when we get sent to our rooms spiritually. There are sins that maim; there are sins that wound our spirits. Some of you know what it is like to do something that makes you feel as if you just drank raw sewage. You can wash, but you can never get clean. When that happens, sometimes we ask the Lord as we lift up our eyes, “O Father, can’t we ever be friends again?”

The answer that can be found in all the scriptures is a resounding “Yes, through the Atonement of Christ.” I particularly like the way it is put in Isaiah 1:18.

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

I like to paraphrase that for my students. What the Lord is saying is “I don’t care what you did. It doesn’t matter what you did. I can erase it. I can make you pure and worthy and innocent and celestial.”

Brothers and sisters, to have faith in Jesus Christ is not merely to believe that he is who he says he is, to believe in Christ. Sometimes, to have faith in Christ is also to believe Christ. Both as a bishop and as a teacher in the Church, I have learned there are many that believe Jesus is the Son of God and that he is the Savior of the World, but that he cannot save them. They believe in his identity, but not in his power to cleanse and to purify and to save. To have faith in his identity is only half the process. To have faith in his ability, in his power to cleanse and to save, that is the other half. We must not only believe in Christ, we must believe Christ when he says, “I can cleanse you and make you celestial.”

When I was a bishop, I used to hear several variations on a theme. Sometimes it was, “Bishop, I’ve punched my ticket wrong. I’ve just made mistakes that have gotten me off on the wrong track, and you can’t get there from here.” I’ve heard those who say, “Bishop, I’ve sinned too horribly. I can’t have the full blessings of the gospel because I did this, or I did that. I’ll come to Church, and I’ll be active, and I’m hoping for a pretty good reward,..."

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