Follow Him: A Come, Follow Me Podcast - "Why is the gospel so repetitive?" : follow HIM Favorites

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

Hank Smith and John Bytheway answer a question from the Come, Follow Me study from Deuteronomy.Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.co/old-testament/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FollowHimOfficialChannelThanks to the followHIM team:Steve & Shannon Sorensen: Executive Producers/SponsorsDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: MarketingLisa Spice: Client Relations, Show Notes/TranscriptsJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignWill Stoughton: Rough Video EditorKrystal Roberts: Transcripts/Language Team/French TranscriptsAriel Cuadra: Spanish TranscriptsIgor Willians: Portuguese Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com/products/let-zion-in-her-beauty-rise-pianoPlease rate and review the podcast.

Hello everyone, welcome to Follow Him Favorites. My name is Hank Smith. I'm here with the incredible John, by the way. Hello, John. I think this is a good day. Follow Him Favorites is where we take our lesson. We're going to take one question from our lesson this week and kind of just focus in on that for a few minutes. The question, John, and I see this in the eyes of my students, sometimes in the eyes of my children is, we're gonna talk about this again, and this is this kind of the same thing we talk about over and over and over.

So the question is, why is the gospel so repetitive? I can already tell you probably what most of general conference is going to be about, right? I can probably tell you what I'm gonna talk about at church or at family night or in seminary or in my patriarchal blessing or in the scriptures. I get the same message over and over and over and maybe it gets a little repetitive.

How would you answer that question? Well, boy, so many places you could go with that. Hank, why is eating so repetitive? I just seem like, if he's like, I have to eat like every single day, you know? If we think of it like spiritual food, that might be a way to look at it. But I'm kind of intrigued with the things

that the Lord has us repeat. Like the sacrament, for example, we could do that once a year. We could do it Christmas and Easter, but every week, and I'm intrigued that he wants us to keep remembering, you do see that in the scriptures. So, that we, because we have a tendency to forget.

And it's home alone too, I think, where she says, oh, she says, I won't forget you to the woman that feeds pigeons, right? Oh, don't make promises you can't keep. He said, I don't think people forget. I just think they forget to remember or something like that. There's a nice little line. They forget to remember. And I think when King Benjamin talked to the people, he said, something about, have these commandments before your eyes. And all those things just help us remember. And going back to church is a chance to remember.

And it's also a chance to repent. And a church of second chance, as like Elder Holland might say. But I don't know. For me, I kind of need that because it's a reminder that remembering and reminding, and you've heard me say this before, Hank, but President Kimball said the most important word in the dictionary could be remember. And all of this stuff is to help us remember

because we have natural man memories that forget stuff sometimes. Yeah. I mean, the book we're in this week is Deuteronomy, which really means repetition, right? Remember repetition of the law. Yeah, Moses is gonna give three last messages in the book of Deuteronomy,

and they're pretty much all the same thing. Beware, less thou forget. Beware, less thou forget. Yeah. And it's, I think if you talked about eating, I thought about brushing your teeth, right? We brush our teeth every day, multiple times a day, because the plaque on your teeth will creep up every day.

Creeps back up, and that's kind of how forgetting is. It creeps back up into our mind. We forget our spiritual experiences. I remember President Eiring saying, faith has a short shelf life, right? You just can't live off one spiritual experience a long time ago. You've got to keep coming back over and over and over.

Yeah, I think there's some things in life that are like riding a bike. Once you know how to do it, you always know how to do that. And there are other things that just aren't that way. And it's like weeding a garden to use the parable of the sower or something. To use Alma 32, 33. You got to keep going back and getting out the weeds and nurturing the good stuff.

There's not that many things like riding a bike where once you know how to do it, you just know, but with with the gospel, you got to keep coming back and then it builds in your faith builds and your hope builds and hopefully your charity builds, your ability to forgive builds. I remember Elder Hales, I don't know if anybody listening would remember Elder Hales, but he said he had a light on the front of his bicycle, but it would only work if he was pedaling. So he said, the faster I pedaled, the brighter the light got, right? And that seems to be the way in the gospel is that if we're remembering and we keep pedaling, the light gets brighter. I'm interested in Deuteronomy where the Lord says, I won't forget you. That's not the problem.

The problem is you forget me. You are going to forget me. So Moses over and over and over says, beware less you forget. That's Deuteronomy 612. Says it again in Deuteronomy 8 verse 11 beware less thou forget and you know even Something like a wedding ring or garments or you know The sacrament like you said is is is Remember remember remember I know your tendency to forget So you need to remember remember sister sister Julie B. Beck, the generally sighted Prince of years ago, there was one of those worldwide broadcast or something and she was saying that

when she was a teenager, every single week for home evening, they sang, love at home. Right. And she said, one day she finally just said, do it out of why do we have she was a teenager. She says, why do we have to sing this one every single week? And her dad said, when you have learned lesson one, we'll go on to lesson two. So maybe that's kind of what the Lord is doing here. Would you please get lesson one that we could go to lesson two? That's funny.

When I sing that song, I sing, there's beauty all around. When there's no one home. Yeah, that's really quiet then. Yeah. So, when the gospel gets repetitive, just remember, it's not that we can't come up with new material. It's that this is designed into the program. You know, if you see a real electric fence, the kind that can really hurt you, there's

a sign about every 10 feet. Don't touch this fence. And you would think, well, just put one sign up. I'll remember it's good to have that constant repetition of the same idea, right, to avoid those problems and issues or to stay on the right path. Acknowledge that there's opposition and all things. Somebody will be trying to get you to forget

or to distract you from what's good constantly. So it's good to have reminders constantly because the adversary's never gonna stop trying to distract us, decoy us or stratagem us to use a book more in my word, to make us distracted and to forget. And so the Lord has given us a multitude of ways to remember. I mean, it's all over the place if we'll look, right? Well, we hope you'll join us on our full podcast.

It's called Follow Him. And we hope you'll join us next week for another Follow Him favorite. Thank you.