Follow Him: A Come, Follow Me Podcast - We Are Responsible for Our Own Learning Part 2 • Dr. Steven C. Harper • Dec. 26 - Jan. 1

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

Dr. Steven C. Harper examines the importance of scripture study, pondering, acting in faith, recording spiritual experiences, asking questions, and seeking answers.Please rate and review the podcast!Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.coApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/follow-him-a-come-follow-me-podcast/id1545433056Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/15G9TTz8yLp0dQyEcBQ8BYThanks to the follow HIM team:Shannon Sorensen: Executive Producer, SponsorDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing, SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Editor, Show NotesJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignWill Stoughton: Video EditorKrystal Roberts: Translation Team, English & French Transcripts, WebsiteAriel Cuadra: Spanish TranscriptsIgor Willians: Portuguese Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com

Welcome to Part 2 with Dr. Stephen Harper. I remember when we had those presidents of the church manuals in a really sity and priesthood meeting, and I can't remember the exact words, but somebody I believe had asked President Gordon B. Hinckley if he had a favorite verse of scripture, and I think he said something like, I don't know if I'd say I have a favorite verse of scripture. And I think he said something like, I don't know if I'd say I have a favorite, but I've always loved this one. And just what you were saying, Steve, reminds me, I just, I love this section 50 of the Doctrine and Covenants, verse 24, that which is of God is light. And he that receives a light. And I've always felt like receiving is allowing it in

like a wedding reception or a receiving line. He that receives light and Continuous in God, just what you were talking about, continuing in God. He that receives light and Continuous in God receiveeth more light and that light grows with brighter and brighter until the perfect day. I say it that you may know the truth that you may chase darkness from among you. You are talking about if you're behaving badly or whatever that you may diminish your own previous experiences. And I'm reminded of Alma when he's in Zara Hemla and he says to those who are members of the church in Alma 5, he says, do you remember when you felt to sing the song of redeeming love when you heard the music of the gospel? Can you feel so now? It's like, what happened? What has happened that you're

diminishing those? And man, that Alma 5, that is an awesome, oh chapters chapters just this awesome reminder kind of a talk for how's your trend line? Are you trending upward? But and those ideas remind of me of that. I'm so glad you said that because it's so sad to hear people, well, I felt like at one point I had revelations, now I'm not so sure anymore. And who feel those have diminished or something. I love the way you put that, Steve. There's an old Socrates story that I don't even know if it's true or not, but it's a great story. It says- The attempted drowning. Yes.

It is said that a dispassionate young man approached the Greek philosopher and casually said, oh great Socrates, I come to you for knowledge. The philosopher took the young man down to the sea, waited in with him, and then dunked him under the water. When he let the young man up for air, Socrates asked him to repeat what he wanted. Knowledge, oh great one, he's buttered. So Socrates put him under the water again only a little longer.

After repeated dunkings and responses, the philosopher asked, what do you want? The young man finally gasped, I want air, air, good answered Socrates. Now when you want knowledge as much as you want air, you shall have it. And then I thought of a talk from President Uktorf who talks about if you seek God, will he answer you? And this is what he says, he says, the everlasting and almighty God, the creator of this vast universe will speak. Notice he doesn't say, might speak or I hope he'll speak, he will speak to those who approach him with his sincere heart and real intent.

He will speak to them in dreams, visions, thoughts and feelings. He will speak in a way that is unmistakable and that transcends human experience. He will give them divine direction and answer for their personal lives. Steve, since I have you here, I want to hear a little bit more about how the Smith family, Lucy Mack and Joseph Smith Sr., how they created a home for seekers. It says in the manual, President Nelson has invited us to transform our homes into a sanctuary of faith, to remodel our homes and to centers of gospel learning. And since we have an expert here, I want to know two things.

From you, Steve, one, how did the Smith do it, and two, how did the Harper's do it? Oh, boy. So our transitioning from the responsibility to seek and be responsible for our learning to, what could we do to foster seekers, to help seekers? It's a good question. So an answer to the Smith question might be a little surprising. A necessary component is conflict. That sounds strange. If Joseph Smith never has any trouble in his life, he does not go to the sacred

growth. Joseph Smith's home is loving, but it is also a place of conflict, and there's just no way around it. The country is in conflict. There's a market revolution happening, and the Smith family is feeling it. What that means is there's this optimism that they're going to make it go economically speaking. They're going to finally become in possession of the means of their own prosperity for the future. It's going to work out and then there's always the prospect that it'll tank.

And so living on the edge of that produces tension and conflict in a person. There's no way around it. You probably have some measure that in your family. I don't know any family that doesn't. That's not a bad thing necessarily. I mean, we can react to it badly. I could go home from work and take out my concerns about whether I'm going to have enough to retire on some day, you know, on the kids by being grout to you or something. That's what I mean by reacting badly to it. But the tension itself, it can be conducive. The economic tension in the Smith home is just one of many. The most important one to them by far, and the one that's proving most difficult to resolve is the spiritual tension. We've

summed this up sometimes in the past by saying, Joseph Sr. is the son of people who were committed congregationalists, but who have migrated almost quite radically in some ways to universalism. So they have changed. So think of the challenge that change presents. Think of changing the way you think about the nature of God and the nature of salvation quite completely. And for Joseph Smith's senior, this means that in his own religious quest, he has not found a spiritual home. He's the first person in his family history for several generations to not have a church. And he's also inherited a dose of skepticism from his culture, from his father. He's of the opinion that it would be better to have no church at all than one of these

wrong ones. He's quite disgusted with what they called formalism, which they take from the very passage of scripture that the Lord gives to Joseph Smith. It says people have a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof. So Joseph's senior felt that about the ministers. Yeah, they have a form of godliness, but nobody around is really exercising the power of God. So better to not, I can stay home and get more religion than that. So Lucy, though, as you know, Joseph's mother, she has a different set of life experiences. They're full of anxieties and tensions, and they incline her to be on a diligent quest for the true church. She has survived the burculosis when her

sisters did not, and she has promised God when her own daughter nearly dies from a typhoid infection that she will seek the true church if God will intervene. And so Lucy has been questing for the true church, almost her whole life, and to her some church is better than not going to church at all. So there's no way you can be Joseph Smith Jr. and not be caught up in that tension, in that conflict. All the children were, right? Yes, absolutely. It's productive tension because Joseph then is asking, well, Which of my parents is right? Not only which of all the churches is right, but which one of my parents is right? And how will I know it? Lucy is the one who

Tells us in her memoir that when she has a problem a dilemma Attention including a conflict with her husband over whether to go to the Methodist church or not, she goes to the woods and prays about it. And she has revelations when she does that. Our memoir just really beautifully tells about these kinds of experiences. So it seems very, very likely to me that Joseph Smith Jr. grows up knowing there are these conflicts. And when we have them, what we do is ask God. We seek and strive and quest for truth. We look everywhere for it.

We bring a dose of skepticism to it. We don't just go with the first person to give us a silver tongue speech. All these attributes of his parents, you can see buying for a competition, for a place in Joseph's attention and that inclines him to be a seeker. Now Steve, did they sit and read the text together? Is that something they did often? They read the Bible together, they prayed together. Lucy says in her memoir that Joseph has never read the Bible together, they prayed together. Lucy says in her

memoir that Joseph has never read the Bible through. Joseph is not a, when he's a teenager, he's not a particularly bookish person, but Lucy says he's much more inclined to meditation and deep study than my other kids. So there you go. There's a seeker for you. You guys know the term of thinking slowly. Do you know the work of the Israeli psychologist who spent their life studying human biases? This is a fantastic book, kind of a culmination of their life's work called thinking fast and slow. And thinking fast simply means the normal way we go about everyday life. You don't think about how to drive to work or how to groom yourself in the morning. These are just things you do, you think through these things. And there's lots of ways in which

we use heuristics. That's a fancy word for a sort of mental shortcuts, fast thinking. In other words, so an example they use in the book is if you ask 100 people, if they're an above average driver, guess how many of them are above average drivers? I don't know. 100 90% of people. Yeah. 90% of people believe they are above average drivers. And this is because when you ask that question,

people don't stop and think about it. They don't think, well, what would I need to know in order to determine if I'm an above average driver or not? It is default. You think fast. Thinking fast is a way to function through day-to-day life, but it's a terrible way to come to know ultimate day-to-day life, but it's a terrible way to come to know ultimate truths. Thinking fast is based on mental shortcuts that are informed by biases. And we want to do what Joseph Smith did. We want to be more inclined to deep study and to meditation. We want to think slowly. Thinking slowly simply means asking, what do we know and how do we know? What do I really know? If I googled something about first vision accounts and found out some facts, maybe mix with some nonsense, would I really know anything about it?

All I would know is that on this particular website it reports these things. But I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know anything really about the first vision unless I thought slow enough to find out well what are the sources of knowledge about the gospel of Matthew? What is the gospel of Matthew say? Until I digest it for myself and Joseph's, until I digest it for myself, and Joseph's words, until I have learned for myself, then we really don't know anything. Thinking slow means that we go about it so deliberately. We get on our quest for the knowledge of the restored gospel so deliberately.

We ask inspired questions. We identify assumptions that we might be making, and we start to interrogate them rather than just take them at face value. And we come to knowledge in the slow, painstaking, persistent process that is much, much better. When people think fast about it, what happens is at some point their conclusions get upset. They realize that because they come in contact with some new fact or something that they had been thinking badly about it before and many of them will then hopefully learn to

think better about it, but many will just trade one form of fast thinking for another. And that's not seeking either. Whether you're in favor of the restoration or against it, if you're not thinking about it, like the scriptures prescribe, you're not doing it in a way that's gonna sustain faith. Let's contrast Lucy and Joseph Smith, senior with the minister who shuts Joseph

Smith down. We don't know as much as we'd like to about this, but it's clear that Joseph and Lucy Smith are raising seekers. They cultivate inquiry and even debate discussion of these things in their home. Joseph's. doesn't shut Lucy down. The one time he tries to, and she says in her memoir, she gets pretty upset about that. And that's when she goes to the woods and prays. He says, Lucy, just please don't keep going, shopping for churches, all right?

He's just making my dad upset. And this really hurts Lucy. It's painful to her to have her husband pick his dad over her. It sounds like a typical sort of marriage kind of conflict. But for Joseph and Lucy, this sends her to the woods where she prays and the revelation she receives in answer is she sees this in answer is she sees this dream or vision of a beautiful meadow, a stream running through it, these two trees on either side of the stream and one of them just moves beautifully in the breeze and one of them just doesn't move no matter how stiff the breeze is and Lucy realizes that the client tree is her

husband and the other tree is her husband. And the other one is his more stubborn brother. What Lucy takes away from this is you can quit being so upset at your husband's insensitivity because the restored gospel is coming and he will receive it when it comes. He'll be flexible. Lucy is a seeker and Joseph's senior is a seeker and that means that they incline their children to be seekers. Their children, Joseph, Jr. most famously are open to what the

scriptures mean. They're open to asking questions, even tough questions, and seeking answers by study and by faith. Notice that Lucy is a Bible reader. She is a church visitor and she also goes to the woods to pray and seeks and receives revelations. So Joseph's junior learns how to do these things from his parents and even to love each other and support each other through disagreement and conflict. And he becomes, of course, maybe the world's greatest example of seeking truth from the scriptures and from God directly. And relying on any kind of good resources from scholars or extension tax, he learns how to read Hebrews best he can for that.

The contrast point then is the minister, the Methodist minister that Joseph relies on, and this is nothing against Methodism. I studied Methodism and have great respect and admiration for what one scholar friend calls the unrestored gospel. I don't hate the unrestored gospel. I just find the restored gospel has in it the restored parts right the the things that are missing. It's compelling. I don't want here is to misunderstand that I'm trying to bash on Methodism far from it. But Joseph tells us that

in his quest is seeking to be responsible for his own learning, he tells the minister about his first vision. And this minister had been fostering Joseph as a seeker. He'd been encouraging him to seek and find answers to his hard questions. But when Joseph told what the answer was, this minister really landed on him, really shut him down in a harsh way. And that impacted Joseph very much. What I'm suggesting here is it would not be a good idea for any of us to react to our children or other students in the way that the minister did to Joseph Smith.

No matter what they say, no matter what they come home with, it's not good for relationships and therefore for fostering trust and good gospel conversations for us to say, shut up, that never happened to you, it never will. Those kind of experiences are over. We can learn what to do from Lucy and Joseph Smith's senior. We can learn what not to do from the Methodist minister. And I've done plenty of what not to do things myself. Me too. I want to ask both of you,

and now I realize that neither of you are perfect parents and that nobody listening is a perfect parent. We can foster what President Nelson called we can remodel our homes into centers of gospel learning. What advice would you give to parents on how to do that? Knowing full well that neither of you are perfect. I love the idea of being in a place where it's safe to ask questions and to own your questions. And I have a friend who was a mission president and he told his missionaries, if you have tough

questions, I want you not only to own those questions, I want you to begin your own search for those answers from trustworthy sources. Everything we've been talking about, it wasn't that you're wrong to have that question. It was like, wow, own that and go figure it out. And you know how to seek the light to figure that out. And I thought that was a really good safe Making them feel safe approach to if you have a question great. Where are you gonna go for that? How you get to figure that out? What would be the most trustworthy sources you could look to to find answers to that?

Excellent That seems inspired to me. That's our inheritance as Latter-day Saints That's how we got started, that's how we roll. That's what we do. Going back to that section 50 phrase, some people have a tough question, and instead of continuing in God, they discontinue God, which is so strange. You just unplugged from the source of the light. So instead of going to Google and leading TikTok influencers, we stay in the light,

continuing God and seek your answer in the light, and you'll get a better answer. You'll get an inspired answer. I just love that phrase, continuing God. That's very appropriate these days, I think. Yeah. One thing I'm learning from the Smith family is read together. Just sit and read the text together. This is an excellent chance this year with the New Testament to say, Hey, let's read the entire New Testament as a family together, especially the four Gospels. Just that simple act alone might transform your home into a sanctuary of faith, at least take a step towards that. Yeah, I believe that too. At my house, it always goes badly when I try to orchestrate it like every component. If I try to make it formal and official, and it just is a disaster, I feel like I've

got to control how this goes. And exactly when people will start weeping because they're overcome. They're overcome by your lecture that you've been giving. So what works though is lots of informality. And I'm not saying this one size fits all folks will be different. But in our family, it's when one of the kids will come in to the bedroom at night and say, Hey, I've been thinking about this. Or more often they'll come in and sort of linger and you'll think, Okay, something's on their mind. And you'll sort of try to prime that. And it might take 15 minutes or half an hour before they're willing to say,

well, what about this? At least for my family, it's so much more about having relationships where people feel safe. Like you said, John, owning their questions, I'm coming forward with them. Am I going to get hurt if I ask this question? Am I going to get yelled at? Am I going to get, yeah. Joseph had a vivid memory of what that minister said to him. Four things specifically that shut him down and that means that Joseph processed that deeply and with a lot of emotion. That hurt, that rejection hurt. And we will teach our children to never come to us with hard things if we respond to them like that. It will signal to them, we're not to be trusted, we can't be talked to.

It's not safe. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Whatever we can do to let them come forward, when they're ready, part of what I meant by overformality is, you know, a schedule half an hour on Monday night, or maybe 15 minutes during the half time of the football game when we're gonna squeeze this, come follow me in,

that's not conducive to letting the kids seek on their own terms when they're ready to articulate a question or a come forth with their own terms when they are ready to articulate a question or come forth with their own insight. One of the best things I've learned as my kids have grown up now is that I have a lot to learn from them, a lot to learn from them. I thought I was the professor who they would take their lectures from and it's turned out that I've learned a lot more about the gospel and how to apply the gospel from my children and from my wife. I'll give you an

example of this. My patriarchal blessing says, it's very important for you to teach your children to pray and the purpose of prayer. And I've been reflecting on that, wondering if I've done that or how I could do that. Certainly, we taught our kids that you kneel down and pray together twice a day, at least as a family. And we taught them how to pray. And so, in other words, okay, I've checked that box, but I've sort of got this regret that I'm not sure I taught them what the Bible dictionary says about the purpose of prayer and you guys might remember that it says you don't try to convince God to see things from your point of view and give you what you want you try to become one with God you try to do what Christ did in the garden. A line wills, right? That's right. So I've been thinking back on my life,

and I learned that lesson unexpectedly and somewhat painfully in my first months of being married. Because I started to notice that when my wife and I prayed together, my prayers sounded like a sales pitch. Like I was trying to talk God in. If he just could see things from my point of view, he would give me the job I was looking for and really wanted. And I didn't realize how it sounded until I listened to her pray. And her prayers were way more like the Savior's in the garden. Help us be what you want us to be, do what you need us to do, teach us what you want,

help us do your will. And I thought, oh, I've got a long way to go here and learning to pray and the purpose of prayer. I've learned that from my family. So in other words, one thing we can do to help our families and our homes become centers of gospel learning is be a little less, let's be primarily to fathers here, be a little less inclined to think of ourselves as the know-it-alls and the bosses of this process and think of ourselves as just fellow participants

with our family members in this process. We can learn a lot from our families no matter how young they are and how old they are. We can learn a lot. I'll tell you another example about my dear mother is 89 years old and it's the privilege for me to live close to her and be able to visit her regularly and I've looked in our the other night, a founder in her bed, she can't kneel down anymore, a founder in her bed praying, asking blessings on her family, on her nurse. It was one of the tenderest, most beautiful things I've ever seen. So we can learn a lot about gospel centers by listening to our family members and not presuming we know it all.

That's excellent, Steve. I think too. I've said this before on the podcast, but I sometimes have to repent to my children before the prayer. Sorry, I did this today, you guys, and I find that brings a better spirit if they can know I'm trying to do all this too and I'm failing sometimes. You're right on time, John, and the appendix to this lesson, one of the things it says is teach your children the joy of repentance and help them to understand and associate repentance with joy. And it says one of the ways to do that is to repent, to show them the joy that comes from repenting.

And I think our children need to see us repent authentically, not some sort of pretentious or fained experience, but if they watch us really repent, then they'll understand what that's all about. So see it with the joy that comes from true repentance. Elder David A. Bednar gave a talk called act in faith years ago. I just thought, wow, that's really true. Speaking of Joseph Smith as a seeker, he said, Joseph's question was not which church is right. His question was which church should I join? And there was an implied action there.

Which church do I join? He went to ask in faith, Elder Bednar said, intending to act. And I think that when we quoted Elder Bednar about what he'd say, no, live and become. The action implied there was not just, I need to know this, but then what am I going to do with what I know. And I love that the outcome is what are we becoming? Not just what we know, but what kind of people are we becoming. And I think today we've talked about becoming seekers and to continue to learn,

because I think we'll all go to our death with unanswered questions. But we can become hopefully more what the Lord wants us to become by keep seeking. Like that, we're all mindful of, and maybe we have been at times in our lives, the person who says, or feels, look, I've tried this. Everything you guys are saying

sounds lovely, but it doesn't work for me. I've read the book of Mormon and I've prayed about it, and I haven't got an answer. And I don't know the answer for everyone in that boat. I don't doubt their sincerity. I don't have any reason to think there's some sort of defect in them. And I hope they won't think that there's some defect in them, something wrong. But what we could do, all of us, is check before following the recipe. We can't expect, like we said, about the experiment on the word of God in Alma 32. We can't expect to get a souffle if we make a can of Campbell soup. It just won't work. Let's speak in there for my own culinary expertise. No way I could make a souffle. I can execute a grilled cheese sandwich on a

good day. And I can't expect to end up with an exquisite recipe. If I don't put in the right ingredients and the right proportions and cook it for the right amount of time in the right way. So what we want to draw attention to here then is to notice that the scriptures prescribe quite specific recipes for coming to know. And we can't shortchange those recipes or cheat them and expect

to get the product that we want. So let's review the recipes. We've talked about one of them that is seek diligently. The adverb is vital. Imagine seek half-heartedly. Not the same recipe. And then we've also noticed the recipe is the right sources. Seek out of the best books. And today that is perfectly fine to add websites into that, but not all websites are created equal. Yeah. We're podcasts. Yeah, podcasts. If you're seeking out of the worst sources, or even just less than the best sources, well, then you can't expect the best knowledge. So seek diligently.

By study and by faith, notice the end is very important. It's got to be both at the same time. It's not one or the other. It's both. They're both God-given gifts and capacities, and they've got to be cultivated together simultaneously in harmony with each other if we expect to get the recipe right. And when we do those things, see diligently, study and faith out of the best books, then we can come to know things we can get the recipe right. Another one, as you know, is in Maroni 10. And here, the intellectual components are read, remember, ponder. It's a lot of brain work involved here. It indicates that we need to remember a lot. We need to remember back to Adam and everything God has done

all the way forward. At least for me, this recipe has worked without me knowing every single fact about every person who's ever lived since Adam. I don't think that's what it means. But it does mean to have a mindset that is remembering how merciful God has been from the beginning until now. To remember that the nature of God is to be merciful. Okay, I've got to bring that to the recipe or the recipe will not turn out.

So if I remember that, I read diligently and I ponder what I've read, these are hard things to do. They're not cheap, hard work. I bring those intellectual components, but at the very same time, I've got to add a sincere heart, real intent, and faith in Christ. And I'm not even positive. I know what all those things mean. But if we have any listeners who are thinking, well, this recipe has never worked for me, what they might do is go back and check all those ingredients and say, well, this recipe has never worked for me. What they might do is go back and check all those ingredients and say, well, maybe what I thought was a sincere

heart isn't yet. Maybe what I thought was faith in Christ is undeveloped or lacking in some way. Maybe what I thought was real intent is actually sort of not as real as I thought, not as authentic as I thought. There are all kinds of reasons, psychological reasons or whatever else, where we might be hedging. There might be some part of us that doesn't want to know these things are true. When we know they're true, then our life is obligated. There are ways to live and things to do and consecrated futures for people who know.

So there might be all kinds of reasons that we're not even conscious of, that we might be sort of sabotaging our own recipe. And if we can work on that, patiently and persistently and diligently with asking for God's help, I think there's nobody who can't execute this recipe if that's what they really, really want. And I believe the Lord will help them to do so. That's awesome. I love the Maron I-10-3. The read, remember, Ponder, how merciful the Lord has been,

since Adam, I've always kind of felt like One of the fruits of that is gratitude and maybe gratitude is one of the gateways to revelation, but It's excellent that idea of Check the recipe and then check each ingredient For the very first time this recipe worked for me. I was just a young teenager, a ninth grader. My dad used to have this funny way of, I've, I'd call him for a ride. He always used to say, we'll start walking. I don't know, maybe he wanted to save on gas. I don't know, the quarter mile I could walk, but one time I asked him for a ride, I was over to friends and I said, can you come get

me, said, sure, start walking. So I started walking. It was a 20 minute drive. I was going to have 20 minutes to walk by myself. And that was one of the times where all the recipe, I can look back now, not at the time. I wouldn't have said I have every piece in place, but I can look back and go, I was sincere because I wasn't just curious. I was really pondering some things really wanted to know. My intentions were correct.

With God gives you this answer, what do you intend to do with it? What is the word Murni uses in tension? You're real intent. Real intent. Yeah, what are your intentions? If you get this answer and my intentions were right on, I intend to do everything that comes with my answer. Because oftentimes we want the answer without the responsibility that comes with the answer. I still remember that day. I've had thousands of experiences like it since then, but that was like a lightning out of a summer storm. It came from heaven and

really jolted my soul in a way that was powerful and beautiful and electrifying and something I did not create on my own. Because I remember going home that night saying, let's do that again. I really like that experience. Let's do that again. It didn't happen again. I couldn't force it.

I couldn't make it happen. But there was a time where it almost like the stars aligned, planets aligned, the recipe was there. And the recipe works. The recipe works. I just really like what Steve has said here. There's maybe so many out there that are expecting a testimony in a way. And I just think we don't know how the Lord's going to tell us.

I feel like I've expected feelings sometimes, and instead I've had experiences that took months, and then I could look back and say, wow, I was being guided back then and I didn't even know it at the time. And I wanted the feeling, but I got an experience or maybe I wanted an experience and I got a feeling responsible for printing in our place where we can learn and then sometimes we leave it to the Lord, how he's going to answer us, I think. It may be kind of a fourth watch type of thing, which I'm sure will cover. It won't come when we expect, or maybe even in the way we expect, but if we follow the recipe, we put ourself in a place that he can talk to us however he's going to do that.

And I just hope people will be patient in putting themselves in that good place and continuing God. And when you do have experiences, write them down. I have found that the Lord seems much more willing to grant me these experiences if I write them down and share them at appropriate times. Joseph seemed to do that too, right Steve? He wrote them down. Yeah, and he felt the same, LeMand, he had a dilemma. He knew these things need to be recorded but he felt like he was terrible at doing it, not adequate to it. But like, Merron, I felt and others, but he did get them recorded thankfully. We'll have them today. There are some folks who are listening to us who are struggling with

depression or something and they would give anything to feel the Holy Spirit of God. And for whatever reason, it's just not happening. And I hope they'll hear you, John, and that they'll continue in God. That's a willful, intentional, faithful thing to do to battle through that and say, I don't feel anything right now, but I'm going to keep on continuing in God even so. And I trust that he will compensate that and the day will come when they will feel everything they've longed for and good measure running over. Yeah. Joseph said the darkness that surrounded him, it seemed to him for a time that he was doomed. You get that feeling,

I think, from those who struggle with not feeling like, am I ever going to get out of this darkness? And what did he do? He continued to call upon God. I just continued to call upon God to deliver me eventually. The light came. That's a good example. Hank, it was an actual enemy from the unseen world.

And for a lot of people in our families, the people we love, sometimes ourselves, this is a real enemy. It's not imaginary. It really exists unseen as it is. The Lord will see us through that too. If we'll keep at it. Hold on, hold on. Steve, I love what you said at the beginning that the Scriptures never command us to assume. Love what you said at the beginning that the scriptures never command us to assume. Yeah. But to keep seeking and wow, what a great insight. We can fill in the gaps with so many things

of what we think it might be or what others have said it might be, but how important it is to seek for ourselves. I'm gonna make a slide out of that for some way. The scriptures never tell us to assume. Well, just figure, just put your own answers in there. No. A little bit of, we all don't line up exactly. It's okay. Well, makes you ask the question, no, should I do then? Perfect. Sometimes I worry if my wife and I are not perfectly aligned on everything,

but now I'm like, that's probably okay for our kids to see that we're not as long as we don't behave badly, as you said, because of it. And you still have a cat, right? Thank you. Yeah, we still have cats, even though, oh, goodness, don't start. Wow, what a great day we have had our first lesson from the new Testament year. Thank you, Dr. Harper, for being with us. It's just been a treat. Thank you, gentlemen. It's going to be with you again.

We want to thank Dr. Steve Harper, as I said, for being with us. We want to thank our executive producer, Shannon Sorenson. We want to thank our sponsors, David and Verla Sorenson, and of course, recognize our founder, the late Steve Sonson. We hope all of you will join us next week as we jump into the new testament on Follow Him. Today's transcripts, show notes and additional references are available on our website followhim.co Followhim.co And you can watch the podcast on YouTube with additional videos on Facebook and Instagram.

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