“Ye shall offer up unto me no more the shedding of blood; yea, your sacrifices and your burnt offerings shall be done away… .
“And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit”
(3 Nephi 9:19–20).
In place of the law of blood sacrifice, the Savior instituted the ordinance of the sacrament. This ordinance serves as a reminder of that “great and last sacrifice” (Alma 34:10). President J. Reuben Clark, Jr., explained:
“Under the new covenant that came in with Christ, the sinner must offer the sacrifice out of his own life, not by offering the blood of some other creature; he must give up his sins, he must repent, he himself must make the sacrifice and that sacrifice was calculated to reach out into the life of the sinner in the future so that he would become a better and changed man… .
“… Every sinner so repenting, every sinner so sorrowing for the past by an abandonment of the practices of the past, moves into a new world where, with proper covenants, he thrusts away out of his life the wrongs of the past”
(“Meaning of the Peace of Which the Angels Spoke,” Church News, 24 Dec. 1960, p. 15).