(June 6, 2014)
It is not uncommon to see individuals who take the position that the Lord is not keeping tabs on sin like a heavenly scoreboard. They take this position as a preliminary position for their ultimate position that sin is not as big of a deal because the Lord cares who we are and not so much what we do.
While I agree with that, in general, here is where I think that people go horribly wrong. We are, to a large extent, what we do. I for years deceived myself that I could do wrong and still believe myself to be righteous and good. That ultimately hit the brick wall of (spiritual) reality when I discovered that despite my scripture-reading habits, and prayers, and my desire to do good, I was a genuinely bad person. My sins, which I allowed to persist, had consumed me to the point where I had become evil. I never wanted to be evil, and I never considered myself evil, but I became the accumulation of my bad actions.
Fortunately we are able to repent, and the Atonement allows us to escape not only the “scoreboard” aspect of our sins, but also the “accumulation” aspect of our sins. But the Atonement, for me at least, didn’t kick in until I was ready and willing and able to abandon my prior bad acts and hold myself to a different standard.
This ties back to the Lord’s words through Malachi – calling the proud happy and those who work wickedness set up. The truth is, they who are wicked are not happy because by definition they cannot be happy. I thought I was happy in spite of (or because of) my sins, but the comparison is really no comparison. I was miserable, and had only managed to fool myself. So too is the case with each of us, to the extent our behavior is evil. Wickedness really never was happiness.
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