Hank Smith: 00:02 Hello my friends. Welcome to another Follow Him Favorites. My name is Hank Smith. I’m here with the wonderful John Bytheway. Hi John.

John Bytheway: 00:09 Hi Hank.

Hank Smith: 00:09 John, you know the drill, Follow Him Favorites. We take a question from this week’s Come, Follow Me lesson and attempt to answer it. The question for this week, John, comes from the story of Peter in Acts chapter 10, where Peter changes what you would say a policy in the church, that you can’t teach Gentiles. And then he receives Revelation and he says, “We’re going to change that policy.” What do you think that means for our church for the idea of a prophet continuing revelation? Another way to ask this might be what does the Lord mean when he calls this church a living church?

John Bytheway: 00:46 Oh yeah. I like that question because the world changes dramatically. I like to show teenagers… I have a 1965 For the Strength of Youth, much shorter, lots of pictures. And then I have the latest one and it’s thick and it has lots of pictures, a lot thicker. And I say, “I thought standards don’t change.” Yeah. What changed? The world changed dramatically. A living church can adapt to those changes. The first one I have doesn’t even mention movies and television, because they were so clean back then. It wasn’t a thing, and so what changed? The world did, and we adjusted. The Lord adjusted it through his prophets.

Hank Smith: 01:24 Yeah. We’ve coined that phrase, “The church is true”, John. We have taken that and run with it and it’s ours, right? The church is true, but I think that comes from Doctrine and Covenants section 1, where the Lord says, “The church is true and living.”

John Bytheway: 01:36 And living.

Hank Smith: 01:37 I think we leave that part out maybe to our detriment. Article of Faith number 9 says, “We believe in all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal. We believe He will yet reveal many great and important things.” And as far as I know, that article of faith hasn’t been rescinded. Right? I haven’t heard any… President Nelson saying, “Well, it’s the great and important things are out, and it’s now going to be good and trivial.” It seems like we still have more to come.

John Bytheway: 02:03 And that phrase, “Continuous restoration”, is another evidence of that, yeah.

Hank Smith: 02:07 Yeah, absolutely. There’s a sense of excitement about that, that the Lord is going to continue to roll this out, this plan, this building of his Kingdom. He’s still continuing to roll this out and I can be open. I need to be open to that idea that living things adjust. They change, they evolve, they grow.

John Bytheway: 02:27 Yeah. The church is the same way. There’s more Spanish speakers in the church now than English speakers, I think. That requires some adjustment and who knows what else could happen. It’s fun. It’s exciting.

Hank Smith: 02:37 Yeah. It’s exciting to be part of this living thing that is growing and learning and changing. We hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called, Follow Him. You can get it wherever you get your podcast. Come join us over there. I think you’ll love the discussion this week. And then come back here next week for another Follow Him Favorites.