Sacrament Mistake, Exact Obedience and Atonement

Today during our sacrament meeting the young priest who was saying the blessing over the bread before it was passed to the congregation made a very small one-word mistake on the prayer. This happens from time to time and what happened today which was typical of other times a mistake is made on the sacrament prayer. The young priest simply repeated the prayer a second time, but without the mistake.

Until today, I am not sure I really realized the significance of that. I'm not sure I really thought about why we expect priests to say the prayer over the Lord's Supper word-for-word and mistake-free other than its important to obey with exactness. But, today I realized the significance of this expectation for exact obedience is more than the LDS church was just being strict.

Some Christians may feel that making the young priest repeat the prayer after he has done his best is being abusive. Why don't we just accept best first effort. And I realized that the reason really illustrates the power of the atonement of Jesus Christ and what the atonement is all about. The truth is that God really does not look upon sin with the least degree of allowance. And the atonement of Christ is not just about overlooking our sins and imperfections and letting us into heaven anyways despite all our sins. What the atonement of Christ is about is allowing us a do-over, and then empowering us the second or third or seventieth time to do it right. And while none of us do everything with exact obedience all the time, we do know that by the end of the Millennium, Christ have completed the work of sanctification in us and that eventually we will be empowered to obey with exactness all the time.