“I will repent… . I will return to my God.” The Hebrew verb lashuv, translated “to repent,” means “to return.” The two words are appropriately used together here. They are used together in other passages also: Helaman 13:11; 3 Nephi 9:13; 10:6; 18:32; Doctrine and Covenants 109:21.
When we depart this mortal sphere, we will be taking with us into the spirit world our same attitudes, our same cravings, our same prejudices toward people, and our same inclinations toward sins. We will remain the same basic person. Taking bad habits and dispositions into the spirit world to work on them is like trying to learn to play the violin without a violin. Professor Rodney Turner wrote: “‘That same spirit’ is one’s distilled, fundamental self, stripped of all the transitory, superficial baggage acquired in mortality. It is what the soul really is in its fixed, resurrected state, rather than what it appeared to be at any given moment in its fluid, probationary state. What it really is determines what it really desires. These desires, free of all mitigating entanglements, constitute the soul’s own self-judgment.”15