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

John Bytheway: 00:09 Hi Hank.

Hank Smith: 00:10 John, we’re doing another followHIM Favorites, where we take one question from this week’s Come, Follow Me lesson. The question this week comes from Galatians, it comes right out of the manual. It says, how have Christ and his gospel made you free? So how can that happen? I might think the gospel is just rules and commandments that bind me up. Freedom is no commandments. How does the gospel with all of its rules and commandments make us free?

John Bytheway: 00:38 That’s such a great question because I love the way you said it because it sounds like we have all these rules and restrictions and boundaries, but one way at least I can think of is we are free from so many bad consequences. I like to say, and sometimes I get pushback, but I like to say the Gospel’s the easiest way to live and people, “Wait a minute, it’s not easy,” and I didn’t say it was easy. I said it’s the easiest. It’s the easiest way available because life is just hard, but it’s easier because you avoid so many bad consequences. So maybe that’s one way you are free from a lot of some really bad consequences. You’re free from those because these rules are guidelines to happiness.

Hank Smith: 01:20 Living being persistent in the gospel can free you from addiction or help you avoid addiction entirely, and someone addicted to a substance or to a practice, that’s not freedom. Addiction is the opposite of freedom, and the gospel does provide that. A great evangelical preacher once said, “Real Christians do not carry their religion, their religion carries them. It is not weight, it is wings. It sets them free from fear, discouragement and sin, the great enslavers of souls.” And then I’m reminded of John, you probably remember this, way back in the book of Moses, John, you probably remember this, the story of Cain and Abel way back in Moses chapter five. Remember we did this last year during the Old Testament, Cain kills his brother Abel, and the oddest statement, he makes that verse later, this Moses five, verse 33, “Cain gloried in that which he had done, saying, ‘I am free’.” I remember you and I talking about this, saying, no, you’re not.

John Bytheway: 02:24 No.

Hank Smith: 02:25 You are more bonded than you’ve ever been.

John Bytheway: 02:27 Yeah. Satan is so good at what he does that he can send the Korihors out to say, “You guys are bound, you’re yoked. You have no freedom. You can’t do anything.” And it’s exactly the opposite. And in the war chapters, when Moroni and Pahoran are sending letters back and forth and Pahoran says, “Conduct a war in that part of land,” I think he says, “According to the spirit of God, which is the spirit of freedom.” I was like, whoa, look at that. The spirit of God is the spirit of freedom. And knowledge helps us, the gospel helps us be free.

Hank Smith: 03:00 I once read a letter from someone who was in prison for a bunch of serious drug offenses and other things that came along with that, and they’ll be in prison for quite a few years. But in prison, this man found the gospel and began to repent and really come to the Savior. And then he said this towards the end of his article, he said, “Though I’m confined by fences, I feel free again, thanks to the gospel of Jesus Christ and his miraculous atonement.” Interesting that this man in prison even now feels free because of what he’s found the Lord has done and will do for him.

John Bytheway: 03:41 Yeah. Because of some more knowledge of the gospel that he got. Yeah, it’s great.

Hank Smith: 03:45 Yeah. We hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcast. We’re with Dr. Jared Ludlow in the full book of Galatians this week, and he is a brilliant Bible scholar. We think you’ll love what he does with this epistle. And then come back next week and join us for another followHIM Favorites.