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

John Bytheway: 00:11 Hi, Hank.

Hank Smith: 00:12 It is FollowHIM Favorites time. This week, the lesson is in the Book of Numbers. You might not think, John, that you can get a lot out of the Book of Numbers, but you’d be surprised.

John Bytheway: 00:23 The original math book, the Book of Numbers.

Hank Smith: 00:25 The original-

John Bytheway: 00:25 Right.

Hank Smith: 00:26 Don’t say that, John. People are not going to …

John Bytheway: 00:27 Nobody will listen.

Hank Smith: 00:29 Yeah. So in the Book of Numbers, I wanted to focus in on one question. It comes from a verse, Numbers 13:33. Israelites are supposed to go in and take the Promised Land. And so, Moses sends 12 spies in there and 10 of them come back, and they’re scared to death. They don’t think they can do it. So I want to show you what they say about how they see themselves, because our question is going to be how do I see myself the way the Lord sees me? How do I see the value that he sees?

Hank Smith: 00:57 They come back and they say to Moses, “Moses, we can’t do it. The people over there are giants.” Then they say in verse 33, “And we were in our own sight grasshoppers.” Now that’s an interesting thing to see yourself as, that you look in the mirror and you see a grasshopper.

Hank Smith: 01:13 But I wrote down in my scriptures, how do you see yourself? That can be different oftentimes than what the Lord sees. If you were talking to a young adult, a teenager, John, and they said, “I don’t see what the Lord sees,” what advice would you offer them?

John Bytheway: 01:27 Oh, do you know what? I’m so glad you asked that question. I remember something that Stephen Covey did once with a group of young adults or teenagers that … I’ve never met Stephen Covey. I wish I would’ve.

John Bytheway: 01:38 But he had people take a piece of paper, fold it in half. That was just to make it into columns. Then in column one, write at the top, “How I see myself,” write, “How others see me.” He said he was a little surprised at how negative kids could be about themselves. “I’m this, I’m that. I’m weird. I’m strange. I’m not attractive. I’m whatever.” They would put all these things in there.

John Bytheway: 02:04 Then he said, “On the other side, I want you to write down how God sees me,” and started to go through scriptural references. What is the worth of the soul? What has he done for you? What has he said about you in your patriarchal blessing, which is amazing, your talents, your gifts, your capacities. They wrote all those things down on the right-hand column, how does God see you? Then he just asked the best question, Hank. He just said, “Who are you going to believe?”

Hank Smith: 02:32 That’s great. Who are you going to believe?

John Bytheway: 02:34 Who are you going to believe? Look at that on the right side. I think God sees us better than we see ourselves, which is one of the reasons we love Him is because He sees the best in us and He lets us repent. So that has helped me a lot. Who are you going to believe?

John Bytheway: 02:50 I love that the gospel that we love and embrace is always saying the most wonderful things about our capacity and our potential. No matter how we see ourself, it’s always telling us you’re of great worth and you have great capacity.

Hank Smith: 03:04 Yeah. This is a conscious choice that you have to make. There are so many subtle messages out there on social media and television everywhere. The social media is you’re not enough. You’re not pretty enough. You’re not attractive enough. You’re not smart enough. You’ll never be happy because you don’t look this way or have this much money or live in this house or drive this car.

Hank Smith: 03:22 They’re very subtle messages. They’re just underneath the surface picking at you. But, man, after a while that can create quite a canyon in your mind about the way you feel. It can hurt your self-image and your self-esteem so much that pretty soon all you see in the mirror are faults and flaws.

Hank Smith: 03:38 But I like what you said, who are you going to believe? Because in Numbers 14, the Lord asks that exact question. He says, “Moses, how long until the people believe me? I see something in them and they don’t believe me.” Now notice He doesn’t say, “They don’t believe in me.” They believe in Him. They just don’t believe Him. “I know that you’ve said all these wonderful things about me, but I just don’t know if I believe you.”

Hank Smith: 04:02 The more we can distance ourself from those messages, the more we’ll be able to hear what the Lord has to say about us. I go back to my patriarchal blessing. I can go to those in my family who I trust and love, those who are my friends who I trust and love, and I can start to pick up on what they see. I think it was Elder Wirthlin who once said the Lord doesn’t see you just you. He sees the glorious being you’re going to become. That’s who He sees.

Hank Smith: 04:27 There’s a self-confidence that comes when you tap into that that will come in no other way. The world can’t take away God-given self-confidence. He gave it to you. The world can’t take away what it didn’t give.

John Bytheway: 04:39 I like to draw a graph with different words: self-worth and self-esteem. Esteem sounds like estimation. It’s how I estimate my worth. It can be up and down on life circumstances, or I didn’t get asked to prom or I did get asked to prom I’m on cloud nine, whatever. We hand the remote control to our feelings over to somebody else and let them decide. That esteem is estimated up and down. But our self-worth, here’s the problem. How can you put on a graph something that is infinite? You can’t put it there.

John Bytheway: 05:15 One of the really wonderful examples of this idea of esteeming things and how much in error we can be is the Messianic chapter of Isaiah, is Isaiah 53. So you all know who Abinadi is. Abinadi goes in, the wicked priest, “What are you teaching?” “We teach the law of Moses.” He’s like, “The law of Moses doesn’t save. Jesus saves.”

John Bytheway: 05:36 Then he reads Isaiah 53, which is Mosiah 14. Listen to this. Here’s how people esteemed Jesus. Imagine how wrong you could be. “He is despised, rejected, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. We hid as it were our faces from Him. He was despised and we esteemed Him not.” Verse four, “Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.”

John Bytheway: 06:04 That’s how wrong other people’s estimations can be, even of Jesus. Who am I going to believe? I’m going to go to God. I’m going to go to His gospel. That’s a foundation on which you can build your life. You’ll have ups and downs. Everybody does. But when you come back to the gospel, you’re building on a firm rock.

Hank Smith: 06:26 I love it. I love it. I remember one time you told me, you said, “My wife wanted to marry someone tall, dark, and handsome, and she didn’t get any of those.” Kim said to you, “Oh, come on. You’re not short.” I laughed and you laughed because we don’t get our self-esteem from the way we look. We don’t get our self-esteem from any of those things. We get our confidence from the Lord.

Hank Smith: 06:51 And Joshua and Caleb do. In this next chapter, in Numbers 14, they say, “We can do this. Let’s not rebel against the Lord. Let’s not fear. The Lord is with us.”

John Bytheway: 07:00 That’s the song, (singing). That’s the song. It’s where this comes from. We don’t love our grandmas because they’re supermodels. Why do we love our grandmas?

Hank Smith: 07:10 Yeah, because of our relationship.

John Bytheway: 07:11 There’s such goodness and such faith and devotion, and we love them. What a gift to be able to see ourselves the way the Lord sees us. We have evidence of how He feels about us in the scriptures, in our patriarchal blessings.

Hank Smith: 07:24 Yeah. We want our listeners to be Joshuas and Calebs in this world of grasshoppers. In a world of grasshopper, be a Joshua and a Caleb and say, “No, I know who I am. I know the Lord sees greatness in me. So I’m going to live up to that. I want to be that being that He sees.”

John Bytheway: 07:41 Who are you going to believe?

Hank Smith: 07:43 So take a look in the mirror, distance yourself from those subtle messages, and go back to your patriarchal blessing. When you start to get a taste of it, I think you’re going to like it. When you start to see what the Lord sees in you, and you’re going to feel that confidence coming, you’re going to act differently. You’re going to make different choices. You’re going to have different boundaries for yourself and others, just because of the way you see yourself. It’s going to be beautiful, because you are. You’re beautiful inside and out, completely.

Hank Smith: 08:09 When the Lord sees you, I can’t imagine the feelings that well up in His heart, how He feels about you. It’d be like asking John to describe one of his daughters, one of his children. He overflows with love. He doesn’t look at them and go, “Wow, she’s a little tall,” and, “Oh, she’s got big feet.” All he sees is pretty much perfection, right, John?

John Bytheway: 08:28 Thank you for pointing that out, Hank. We saw ourselves as grasshoppers. Okay, fine. How does God see you? What a wonderful way to look at it, and then to have the Lord tell Him, “I got you. I’m going to be with you.”

Hank Smith: 08:39 We can trust Him. I believe in me because He believes in me. Thanks, John. Thanks for helping me boost my self-confidence today. I’m not short either. That’s the only thing I …

John Bytheway: 08:52 There will be a resurrection.

Hank Smith: 08:55 I’m going to have that hair in the resurrection. Well, we hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called FollowHIM. Join us this week. We’re in the book of Numbers with Dr. Kerry Muhlestein, a modern-day Indiana Jones. You want to come over and visit us. Join us next week for another FollowHIM Favorites.