Hank Smith: 00:05 Hello, everyone. Welcome to FollowHIM Favorites. My name is Hank Smith. I’m here with the incredible John Bytheway. Hello, John.

John Bytheway: 00:11 Hi, Hank.

Hank Smith: 00:12 This is a good day. FollowHIM Favorites is where we take our lesson. We’re going to take one question from our lesson this week and 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 going to talk about this again. This is 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 going to 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?

John Bytheway: 01:04 Well, boy, so many places you could go with that. Hank, why is eating so repetitive? It feels like I have to eat every single day. If we think of it like spiritual food, that might be a way to look at it, but I’m intrigued with the things that the Lord has us repeat. The sacrament, for example. We could do that once a year. We could do it Christmas and Easter, but every week. I’m intrigued that he wants us to keep remembering. You do see that in the scriptures a lot.

John Bytheway: 01:35 Because we have a tendency to forget. It’s Home Alone 2, I think, where he says, “I won’t forget you,” to the woman that feeds pigeons. “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. I think when King Benjamin talked to the people, he said something about, “Have these commandments before your eyes.” All those things just help us remember. Going back to church is a chance to remember. It’s also a chance to repent and a church of second chances like Elder Holland might say.

John Bytheway: 02:16 But I don’t know, for me, I need that because it’s a reminder. Remembering and reminding. And you’ve heard me say this before Hank that 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 memories that forget stuff sometimes.

Hank Smith: 02:37 I mean the book we’re in this week is Deuteronomy, which really means repetition, right? Remember, repetition of the law.

John Bytheway: 02:45 Here it is again.

Hank Smith: 02:46 Moses is going to 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.” You talked about eating, I thought about brushing your teeth. We brush our teeth every day, multiple times a day because the plaque on your teeth will creep up. Every day, it creeps back up and that’s kind of how forgetting is isn’t it? It creeps back up into our mind. We forget our spiritual experiences. I remember President Eyring saying, “Faith has a short shelf life.” 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.

John Bytheway: 03:31 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. 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 the gospel, you got to keep coming back, and then it builds and your faith builds and your hope builds, and hopefully your charity builds, your ability to forgive builds.

Hank Smith: 04:05 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. That seems to be the way in the gospel, is that if we’re remembering and we keep pedaling, the light gets brighter.

Hank Smith: 04:25 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 lest you forget.” That’s Deuteronomy 6:12. It says it again in Deuteronomy 8, Verse 11, “Beware lest thou forget.” Even something like a wedding ring or garments or the sacrament, like you said is, remember, remember, remember. I know your tendency to forget, so you need to remember.

John Bytheway: 05:04 Do you remember Sister Julie B. Beck, the General Relief Society President 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. She said, one day she finally just said to her dad, she was a teenager, she says, “Why do we have to sing this one every single week?” Her dad said, “When you have learned lesson one, we’ll go on to lesson two.” So maybe that’s what the Lord is doing here. “Would you please get lesson one? Then we could go to lesson two.”

Hank Smith: 05:42 That’s funny. When I sing that song, I sing, “There’s beauty all around when there’s no one home.”

John Bytheway: 05:47 It’s really quiet then.

Hank Smith: 05:51 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. 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. You would think, “Well, just put one sign up. I’ll remember.” It’s good to have that constant repetition of the same idea to avoid those problems and issues or to stay on the right path.

John Bytheway: 06:22 Acknowledge that there’s opposition in 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 is never going to stop trying to distract us, decoy us, or stratagem us, to use a Book of Mormon word, to make us distracted and to forget.

Hank Smith: 06:42 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. Well, we hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called FollowHIM. And we hope you’ll join us next week for another FollowHIM Favorite.