Richard L. Evans from his book “Thoughts for one hundred days” taught:
Repentance is a subject that is sometimes shunned. But repentance is a very practical principle and plays a very important part in human progress. This is so because, in a sense, no one moves forward in any way without repentance. Increasing individual or industrial efficiency is a kind of repentance—by abandoning wasteful ways and following better ways. Applying improved processes in any undertaking is a form of repentance.
The process of growing up and leaving behind childish ways, as increasing wisdom comes, is a kind of repentance. But when an adult reverts to childish ways or persists in unenlightened practices, or when one conducts their self in conflict with conscience or in conduct with the commandments of God, to that extent he/she proves to be unrepentant—and therefore unprogressive. The unrepentant person turns their face to the darkness instead of the light. They follow ways they know to be evil and error—evil if only in the sense that their conduct doesn’t conform to their best knowledge. In other words when a person knows better than they do, and persists in acting in error, they are unrepentant, and are, therefore, also unprogressive.
They who don’t repent of breaking the laws of health will pay the price of ill health. The person or the institution that doesn’t repent of spending beyond their means will pay the price of prodigality. Any individual or organization, any nation or people must pay a price for unrepentance—even if it is only the price of holding themselves back from what they might have been. A successful life is a life of constant improvement, a life that seeks earnestly to abandon old errors. In short, repentance is the very essence of progress, and an unrepentant person is an unprogressive person. Even from a purely practical point of view no person can afford to be unrepentant. ~Richard L. Evans, Thoughts for one hundred days (Salt Lake City: Publishers Press, 1966). 164-5 (language modernized)
