Why Try to Be Righteous?

Now that I've finished blogging about the last few General Conference talks, I'm free to go back to blogging about The Gift of Grace, or whatever else I want to blog about.

Toward the end of his talk, President Uchtdorf posed an important question. Since we can't earn salvation through our own righteousness, and God's grace can save sinners no matter how unrighteous they've been, why do we bother trying to keep the commandments? Or, to put the question in his own words:

If grace is a gift of God, why then is obedience to God’s commandments so important? Why bother with God’s commandments—or repentance, for that matter? Why not just admit we’re sinful and let God save us?

My answer is that it simply doesn't work like that. God's grace only saves us on the condition of repentance, and repentance is only genuine if includes a desire and at least an attempt to keep the commandment you're repenting of having broken.

But still, even if we have to repent to receive forgiveness, and even if we have to try to keep the commandments to make our repentance valid, couldn't we live in sin for as long as we want to, then "repent" just before we die? If we time it right, we wouldn't have to try to be righteous for long, and then we could go to the same heaven we would have gone to if we had been righteous all our lives.

Again, it doesn't work like that. Since none of us know exactly when we're going to die, planning to repent just before we die isn't a solid plan. Also, I'm not sure that such a plan, even if we managed to pull it off, would truly get us to the same heaven we'd have gone to if we had been righteous all our lives. I said recently that I believe that we're all going to end up with people who were about as righteous or as wicked as we were. Perhaps I should change that to "as we were, or as we were trying to be." I don't think that spending a lifetime being unrepentantly wicked, then "repenting" at the last second, will get us to the same place that those who spend their whole lives trying to be righteous will go.

No matter how clever we think we are, I don't think we're going to find a way to "cheat the system" that God has established. For one thing, He's smarter than we are. And for another thing, being forgiven and going back to heaven is only part of what we're trying to do here. Another objective we have, and a large part of the reason we were sent to Earth in the first place, is to gain some real character growth. We're here to develop Christlike attributes and grow to become like God. Even if we manage to "cheat the system" and get into heaven on a technicality, we won't have accomplished one of the chief purposes of coming to Earth in the first place. It would be like going to college and cheating on every test and exam. You might get the same degree as everyone else, but you won't have learned anything. Whether we're cheating to get into heaven or to get a degree, we're really only wasting our time.

So, part of the reason we try to live righteously is that it's an essential part of repentance, which is how we obtain forgiveness and salvation. Another part of the reason is that trying to be righteous is how we grow to become more like God and Jesus Christ. Of course, there are more good reasons, including the ones President Uchtdorf gave when he posed the questions that started this conversation, but these two reasons are enough for me for now. Essentially, we try to be righteous because God's plan for us won't work for us if we don't.