Hank Smith: 00:04 Hello, my friends. Welcome to followHIM Favorites. My name is Hank Smith. I’m here with the wonderful, amazing closest friend, John Bytheway. If you’ve been following followHIM Favorites this year, you know that we take a single question from this week’s lesson.

Hank Smith: 00:20 Well, John, I wanted to ask you a question. The title of this week’s lesson is, Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord. It’s all about the Book of Psalms. My question for you which I’ve received before from students is, “Why does God need to be praised so much? Is there something about Him where He says, ‘If you have breath, you should be praising me.'” Wow.

Hank Smith: 00:47 John, what do you say to someone who says, “Why does God need to be praised so much?” Or even that, “Why does He need to be prayed too so much? Why does He need to be glorified so much?” What do you say to that?

John Bytheway: 00:59 Boy, that’s such a good question. I think when we think of why we might want to hear someone praise us is a different reason. I think for God and boy, you can help me with your thoughts, Hank, but it tells us where our hearts and where our minds are. If our hearts are on gratitude, on devotion, on our covenants, I think that our praise is not helping Him as much as it’s helping us. It reveals what’s going on with us and what’s going on in our hearts.

John Bytheway: 01:29 Some of these Psalms are like that. They’re so different that way, because it’s not God’s words through a prophet, but it’s our words about God and, “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He leads me besides still waters.” It’s not like God’s going, “Okay, I need more of that.” But look how it changed the writer of that, to be thinking and pondering, and how it filled him with gratitude, and can fill us with gratitude. That’s where I would go with that. What do you think?

Hank Smith: 01:58 Yeah, I think when we say, “Let everything have breath praise the Lord.” I think the Lord knows that the praising changes the praiser not the praisee, all right. Where you and I, we love to be praised because people say, “Oh John and Hank, you’re so great. Thanks for doing this.” We think, “Oh, thank you. Please don’t stop.” Like yeah.

John Bytheway: 02:21 It doesn’t stop.

Hank Smith: 02:21 They don’t stop. But for the Lord, He realizes that when we praise Him, we change. It’s a lot like I think in prayer, I read this in the Bible dictionary when it comes to prayer. It says, “Prayer or praising in this case, is the act by which the will of the Father and the will of the child are brought into a correspondence, alignment with each other. The object of prayer or praise is not to change the will of God, but to secure for ourselves and for others blessings that God is already willing to grant, but have been made conditional on our asking for them or praising for them. Blessings require some work and effort on our part. Before we can obtain them, prayer is a form of work.” I like the idea of God saying, “If you will spend your time in praising me, you are spending your time aligning with me.”

John Bytheway: 03:21 Yeah. It reminds me of Joseph Smith’s prayer in Liberty Jail. That was so powerful and beautiful, “How long?” The answer that he got, he didn’t suddenly pop out outside of the jail.

Hank Smith: 03:33 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 03:34 His perspective changed, “Thy suffering and thine afflictions will be but a small moment.” He learned like you just said, the will of the Lord. The circumstances didn’t change much but the perspective changed dramatically when he, what was the word you used? He started to align his will with God’s or at least learn what it was.

Hank Smith: 03:54 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 03:55 That helps me a little bit.

Hank Smith: 03:56 I think we see that same thing, don’t you? In 2 Nephi 4, where Nephi is in a really bad place. He starts to praise the Lord. He first starts out talking about how terrible he is.

John Bytheway: 04:09 “Wretched man that I am.” I would love to be as wretched as Nephi.

Hank Smith: 04:14 Yeah. That’s the first word I think of with Nephi. Oh, wretched. Right. But that’s what he thinks of. And then he starts to align his will. If you read 2 Nephi 4:19, he says, “I groan because of my sins. Nevertheless, I know in whom I have trusted.” So in his act of writing, and praying, and praising, you can feel his alignment changing. “My God has been my support. He has led me through my afflictions in the wilderness. He’s confounded my enemies.” He talks about, “I’ve been carried away in vision. If this is the case, why should my heart weep and my soul linger in the valley of sorrow?”

Hank Smith: 04:59 Towards the very end, he starts to praise the Lord. “Oh Lord, I have trusted in thee, and I will trust in thee forever.” I think this is a good example. 2 Nephi 4 is a good example of the praising changing the praiser.

John Bytheway: 05:14 Right.

Hank Smith: 05:15 Does that make sense? And not really, it didn’t change the Lord at all. But wow, it brought Nephi in alignment with the spirit he needed, to have that enthusiasm to continue forward.

John Bytheway: 05:26 Look at what he started to do. It’s like the counsel we get in that hymn, Count your blessings and name them one by one. He started counting all the things the Lord had done for him and that changed him. The Lord knew that he had done those things, but when he started reflecting on it, I think he got out of that place where he was. I don’t think anyone would say to Nephi, when he said, “Oh, wretched man that I am.” I don’t think any of us would say, “Come on Nephi, I don’t have low self-esteem.”

John Bytheway: 05:55 This was one of his greatest moments when he recognized his dependence on God. We both joked, “I’d love to be as wretched as Nephi.” Maybe he was sad that he was going-

Hank Smith: 06:07 He is struggling.

John Bytheway: 06:07 … to keep his family together, whatever. “I was angry with my brothers, whatever.” But as he put his reliance on God, God didn’t need the praise. But look what it did for Nephi by the end, that’s a perfect example to use, Hank I think.

Hank Smith: 06:20 Yeah, so at night when you kneel down to pray and you might think, “Well, God already knows what I need. God already knows what I’ve done. Why do I have to pray?” It’s for you. It’s not for Him. It’s for you to find out some things about you. Not for God to find out some things about you or for God to find out some things about God. It’s for you. And when you sing the hymns in church, we’ve been talking about Psalms so much. Singing, taking part in these Psalms, with the song of the saints can actually change you. It can change your heart. It can soften your heart.

Hank Smith: 06:56 I know that by the time I’m done singing a sacrament hymn, my heart is a little bit different. Isn’t it? It’s a little bit different. It’s a little bit softer. It’s a little bit more repentant. That act of praising God in that hymn changed me, not Him. But man, it changed me. I think when the Lord says, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” He means, “I want you in alignment with me.”

John Bytheway: 07:19 Yeah. I remember in the MTC having, I don’t know, a thousand, couple of thousand of us singing, Called to Serve, together. That changed me. That was an amazing experience to feel like looking left and right and seeing all of these elders and sisters, and feeling part of this. I bet you had the same type of experience. The Lord knew why we were there but it changed me.

John Bytheway: 07:48 When I was on my mission and having a moment where I felt pretty isolated alone, me and my companion, but I could remember, “No, I’ve locked elbows with thousands of us in the MTC and we’re doing this. We’re going to go gather Israel together.” It changed me. I don’t know about you, but you’re nodding. I think you remember those times singing with an army of missionaries, how fun that is.

Hank Smith: 08:12 Well, you can feel it. It literally changes your soul every time you do it. So go to church this weekend and sing the songs. Praise the Lord in your songs or on your own. On your own, sing, turn on some of that wonderful Gospel music and sing, and see if that act of praising God doesn’t change you as the praiser.

Hank Smith: 08:36 Thanks for joining us on followHIM Favorites. We hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcast. Come back next week, we’ll do another followHIM Favorites.