John Bytheway: 00:00:02 Welcome to part two of Dr. Lili Anderson, the Book of Daniel. They were doing the right thing. Boy, it was a come what may. They were going to do the right thing. In verse 20, they bound them, threw them in.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:00:18 After heating it up to seven times its normal.

John Bytheway: 00:00:21 I don’t know what kind of thermometers they had back then, or if seven just means complete, like it sometimes does.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:00:28 It’s high enough that the guards that throw them in perish from the heat, which must not have been the normal occurrence.

John Bytheway: 00:00:36 Then let’s finish this amazing experience. In verse 25, “I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire.”

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:00:45 Didn’t we just throw in three?

John Bytheway: 00:00:47 Yeah. They have no hurt. This intrigues me. I can’t wait to ask both of you because we don’t see the phrase, “Son of God,” very often in the Old Testament. “The form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” I was expecting to see a footnote on that or something, but how often do we see that in the Old Testament?

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:01:08 Good point. It’s interesting that it’s coming from a pagan.

John Bytheway: 00:01:14 Yeah, that’s right. Nebuchadnezzar said that, right?

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:01:18 Yeah. He’s like, “Who is that in there? He looks like the Son of God.” Now, he believes in lots of different gods. He does know about the God of Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He has been acquainted with Him through their testimonies and their witnesses. It seems to be that’s coming from there. You’re right. That’s an unusual phrase and especially coming from a gentile in the Old Testament. Then of course, they call them out. These three men come out unscathed. They don’t even smell of smoke, it says.

  00:01:48 Then there’s this beautiful kind of witness given by Nebuchadnezzar in verse 28 and the next couple verses also, where he says, “He spake and said, ‘Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who hath sent his angel, and delivered his servants that trusted in him, and have changed the king’s word.'”

  00:02:06 Now that’s quite a statement coming from an absolute monarch. “And yielded their bodies.” Let’s say that. “Changed the king’s word and yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor worship any God except their own God.”

  00:02:17 That’s amazing to Nebuchadnezzar because there are all these different gods that he worships. “Therefore, I make a decree, that every people, nation, and language, which speak anything amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, shall be cut in pieces.” Now see, he still hasn’t lost that narcissistic, absolute power.

Hank Smith: 00:02:34 Yeah, he’s still… Come on.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:02:35 Off with their heads. He’s not really trying to please that God.

John Bytheway: 00:02:39 You’re the guy that threw him in, Nebuchadnezzar.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:02:40 That’s right.

John Bytheway: 00:02:41 Are you worried at all?

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:02:42 But if you speak against Him, you are going to be cut into pieces.

Hank Smith: 00:02:46 He’s just looking for reasons to kill people sometimes.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:02:48 To flex that muscle. That’s right.

Hank Smith: 00:02:50 Goodness.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:02:51 Because there is no other God that can deliver after this sort. The king promised Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego this thing. He still hasn’t really caught the vision of a covenant life, but he does acknowledge this power.

  00:03:04 He has so much power himself that it is still quite an acknowledgement to say, “Wow, there is something so much greater than anything I can do or any of the gods that I have seen. At least be respectful to this power.” He sends that decree out there. I don’t know how it was enforced, if at all. That is an interesting statement coming from a gentile absolute monarch. Then in Daniel 4, let’s just handle this one quickly. It’s a strange chapter that’s written mostly by Nebuchadnezzar. We have this gentile king who writes most of Daniel 4. What’s the purpose of this chapter? I mean, He has another dream. He calls for Daniel, and Daniel says, “Wow, I wish this dream had been given to your enemies,” which is kind of interesting.

  00:03:47 That’s over there toward the end of 19 where he says, “My Lord, the dream be to them that hate thee, and the interpretation thereof to thine enemies.” I kind of wish this hadn’t happened to you. “The tree thou sawest, which grew, and was strong,” and whatever. Anyway, it’s you, and you’re cut down to a stump. Out of the stump comes this beast. “Hew the tree down, and destroy it,” in verse 23, “yet leave the stump of the roots and let his portion… ” At the end of verse 23, “let his portion be with the beasts of the field, till seven times pass over him,” which turns out to be seven years.

  00:04:22 He says, “This is the doctrine that you’re going to be driven from men, and thy dwelling,” verse 25 here, “will be with the beast of the field. You’ll eat grass as oxen till thou know,” a few lines down, “that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men and giveth it to whomsoever he will.”

  00:04:41 Even though Nebuchadnezzar has acknowledged the power of Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego’s God, the God of Israel, he still is not humble. He’s built this statue to himself. He still doesn’t really bow down to God. He recognizes Him, but he doesn’t humble himself.

  00:04:58 Daniel says, “The Lord isn’t done with you. He wants you to know that God is the one who gave you this kingdom. You’re doing something that God wants. You didn’t take it of your own strength.” In other words, again, acknowledge and be humble.

Hank Smith: 00:05:11 He begs him to repent. Verse 27, “Let my counsel be acceptable to thee. Break off thy sins and show mercy to the poor.”

John Bytheway: 00:05:19 That’s guts to talk to a king that way. When I’m reading the end of chapter 3, I just wonder if Nebuchadnezzar is kind of looking up, like, “Okay. Anyone who hurts Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego’s God, I want you to hear this because I’m defending you now.”

Hank Smith: 00:05:34 Right, yeah.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:05:36 Is that enough? I still got to be a son of a gun sometimes because I’m kind of a death spot, and I just threatened to cut them in pieces.

John Bytheway: 00:05:45 I’m defending you now, God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Daniel’s got guts to say, “Oh yeah. Sorry about your dream, but that’s you. You’re going to be grazing like an animal pretty soon.”

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:05:58 This happens. I mean, there’s a 12-month kind of respite. Maybe Nebuchadnezzar tried to do some of those things. At the end of 12 months, verse 29, that’s what happens, and then he becomes like a beast. This is what happens. “The kingdom is departed from me,” the end of verse 31. “They shall drive thee from men. Thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field,” in verse 32. “All those things which were promised are fulfilled.” Verse 33, “The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar. His hairs,” at the end of that verse, “were grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.”

  00:06:30 He really was not living a human type existence. That lasts for seven years, which it says in the footnote there for verse 34. Finally, at the end of that time, Nebuchadnezzar lifts his eyes to heaven, and his understanding returned. He blessed the Most High.

  00:06:47 He finally gets the message. “I praised and honored him that liveth for ever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion.” His reason, in verse 36, returns to him. “I was established in my kingdom,” at the end of that verse, “and excellent majesty was added to me. Now I… ” Look at the change in language. “Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise, and extol, and honor the King of heaven.” Not Daniel’s God or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego’s God, but the king of heaven.

Hank Smith: 00:07:17 God of heaven.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:07:19 There’s a different level of acknowledgement here. “All whose works are truth, and his ways judgment, and those that walk in pride, like I have done, he is able to abase.” There’s a different level of understanding of God. That’s a pretty stringent message for seven years you’re like a beast.

John Bytheway: 00:07:39 It’s unique. Do you think this is maybe after the fact, “Hey, Nebuchadnezzar, you should write that down”?

Hank Smith: 00:07:45 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 00:07:46 Because it is odd that he is the one that’s written this.

Hank Smith: 00:07:49 Voice for this, yeah.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:07:53 It is. It’s very unusual. I think it probably is after that he’s like, “All right. I’m going to tell my own story here and how Daniel’s and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego’s God humbled me and got through to me, not just as their God but as the God.”

John Bytheway: 00:08:07 Something I’ve just felt this whole time is that this is a very involved God, isn’t it?

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:08:13 He is in the affairs of men.

John Bytheway: 00:08:15 Yeah. In these kingdoms, He’s very involved. He wants to be involved. Even though Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are in Babylon in captivity, He’s involved in their life. He’s watching over them and helping them. We can get the same kind of message for us, I hope.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:08:32 Well, it’s back to that… I don’t know if we said this. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s beautiful sonnet… It’s the Portuguese. At the end verse, she says, referring to Moses and the burning bush… You kind of have to know the backstory, that Moses comes off this path to see this marvel of this bush that’s aflame but not being consumed.

  00:08:51 Then the first thing he hears is, “Take off thy shoes from off thy feet. For the ground thou standest on is holy ground.” He does because this is temple area. The Lord Himself is visiting this area. It’s sacred ground.

  00:09:03 Knowing that backstory, Elizabeth Barrett Browning penned these words. She said, “Earth is crammed with heaven, and every common bush is a fire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes.” In other words, do we have eyes to see the hand of God, or do we go around with our feet or with our shoes on, and we don’t acknowledge or notice that God is everywhere, and He is in everything?

  00:09:35 Sometimes we see Him as kind of hands off, and some people complain about that. “Why won’t God do this? Why won’t God do that?” It’s like His ways are higher. He’s playing the long game. He always plays the long game. It’s about eternity.

  00:09:49 Trust in Him. Even if you can’t see exactly what His purpose is right now, you know His purposes are good, and they are bringing to pass the immortality and the eternal life of men. That’s always the long game He’s playing. Then when we have eyes to see, we can see that even the times He’s hands off, it’s for our good. We see His hand even when it is restrained.

John Bytheway: 00:10:10 Oh, I love it. They had to trust Him to be able to say, “But if not.” Then I go to Abinadi who had to trust him and trusted him so much. At the moment of his death, he could say, “Oh God, receive my soul,” and was okay with that outcome.

  00:10:29 Oh. I love what you’ve said about trust here. This is an involved God. Trust means that you’ll accept His will when you don’t get it, when it doesn’t make sense. Can I trust Him when nothing’s making sense, like Job that we’ve talked about before?

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:10:47 Like the injury that is given to innocence. We can trust Him that it will all be right in the end. Again-

John Bytheway: 00:10:53 There’s an eventually coming.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:10:55 Yes. It’s our knowledge of God that can do that. In the third lecture on faith, that is one of those teachings, that knowing the character of God is essential for the exercise of true faith, His character, His perfections.

  00:11:10 Too often, a lot of the pain in our life is because we don’t know who He is. We have our doubts about how merciful, or how good, or how trustworthy, and that is our failing because He is forever the same, yesterday, today, and forever.

  00:11:24 All goodness, all love, perfect charity. We can trust it. Is it a leap of faith? Absolutely. Faith is believing what we can’t see. It’s a choice to believe that. It’s our choice in how we choose to see what happens in life.

  00:11:40 Do we take off our shoes because we see Him, and know who He is, and know His perfect character, or do we go around with that chip on our shoulder that gets knocked off all the time because life is hard for the unbeliever? It’s hard for everybody.

John Bytheway: 00:11:55 Our friend, Meg Johnson, who’s a quadriplegic… She accidentally jumped off of a cliff while hiking in southern Utah and prayed her heart out when she was going through this, “Will I be healed? Can I be healed?” Is a quadriplegic. She wasn’t healed, but one of the answers she got, which was so profound to me, is, “Don’t envy that which you don’t have because I have given you more,” God said to her.

  00:12:21 It’s one of those, you can either have what you want, or you can have something better, which sounds… It doesn’t make sense to us, but to her, that was an amazing, revelatory answer to her, “I’ve given you more somehow.” She has learned to trust His outcome.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:12:39 That’s beautiful, really putting it on the line in these moments. We all have that opportunity at some point, to put it on the line, because God does give each of us that opportunity if we are followers of Christ. Chapter 5.

Hank Smith: 00:12:54 Well, it sounds like the end of Babylon is right around the corner.

John Bytheway: 00:12:58 We might even say, “Oh Babylon, oh Babylon, we bid thee-

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:13:02 Farewell.

John Bytheway: 00:13:03 … farewell.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:13:04 That is right. What happens here is that after this humbling of Nebuchadnezzar, his sons don’t seem to get the message too well. As I mentioned, Nabonidus, who’s not mentioned here, specifically… He didn’t like the capital. He didn’t like ruling. He did have his son… The grandson of Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, is mostly in charge but doesn’t become emperor until his father dies. It lasts, basically, for one night because in that night, Belshazzar is celebrating with a thousand of his closest friends.

Hank Smith: 00:13:32 Drinking from the vessels of the temple.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:13:34 Yes, he sends for the sacred things from the temple of Solomon.

John Bytheway: 00:13:40 You still don’t get it, do you?

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:13:41 Yeah, you really don’t get it. That message was not transferred very well, generationally. He is blaspheming and being full of sacrilege here for these sacred items. Then this finger appears and draws on the wall.

  00:13:55 The writing on the wall is the phrase that we hear often. This was where it came from because then… Now Daniel was sort of into at least semi-retirement at this point. He hasn’t been counseling this man, but he remembers that Daniel can interpret things.

  00:14:08 He sends for Daniel, and Daniel comes in. Again, unafraid, he gives him some bad news again, which in 22, “And thou his son, O Belshazzar, hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this.” You heard about this stuff, even about your grandfather being like a beast of the fields, and you still weren’t humble. You didn’t learn from vicarious experience, and you’ve been a son of a gun yourself.

  00:14:33 Here we go, then the interpretation of the words in verse 25, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.” I’m not sure how to pronounce that. “This is the interpretation. God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.”

John Bytheway: 00:14:52 Ouch.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:14:52 “Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” You’re out of it now. “That night was Belshazzar,” in verse 30, “the king of the Chaldeans slain, and Darius the Median took the kingdom.” Now Darius was a general for Cyrus, so he’s working for Cyrus. He’s the one leading the charge against Babylon. Now Babylon, as we said, hugely protected by this enormous and powerful wall, but it had a vulnerability because the river, Euphrates, traveled through the city of Babylon coming under that wall.

  00:15:24 What Darius does is he stops the river. He dams the river, which leaves an opening under the wall for the troops to come in and overtake the city of Babylon in one night. Apparently, from history, it tells us that the people who killed Belshazzar were his own counselors, and generals, and so on, who saw that they had been taken over like that by the Medes and the Persians. They killed him themselves according to tradition.

  00:15:52 Darius is the one who conquered it, but Cyrus is the king for a while. This is a little obscure here because we read about Darius in chapter 6. There was a relationship between Daniel and Cyrus. It’s an interesting relationship. He, after one year, turns the kingdom over to Darius even though Cyrus is doing other things abroad.

  00:16:14 What Daniel does almost immediately is that he shows Cyrus a letter written to him by name by the prophet Isaiah, in the writings of Isaiah, well before this time. Kind of summarizing that, this is from Isaiah 44 and 45, he basically says to Cyrus, “You will say to my people, ‘Go rebuild my temple.'” Cyrus is the one who writes the decree that sends Jews back to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple of Solomon and, ultimately, the wall around the city.

Hank Smith: 00:16:50 We talked about that with Dr. Ludlow: Ezra, Nehemiah, and the rebuilding.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:16:56 That’s right. The order is a little bit confusing in the chronology of the Old Testament. The books aren’t always in chronological order. Cyrus is the one who gives that decree. Isaiah saw that and puts this basic letter from God to Cyrus, saying, “I am He who calls you by your name. It is I who have girded you for battle even though you do not know me.”

  00:17:16 Again, like you were saying, John, God is working through the affairs of men. He raises up people, and He lets them fall. “I will raise you up, Cyrus, to fulfill my righteousness, and I will guide you. You will restore my city and free my people without seeking any reward for doing so.”

  00:17:33 You remember when we did study Ezra and Nehemiah, it seemed kind of amazingly generous that he says, “Oh yeah. Go back and build your place. Here are all the fittings for the temple,” all that came out of the treasury that Belshazzar was being sacrilegious about. Babylon had taken them as spoils.

  00:17:51 Cyrus, without asking for any recompense, sends them back for the rebuilding and the rededication of the temple. Can you imagine how this pagan king, again, comes in? Daniel, this great counselor, comes and says, “The Lord knew of you. You didn’t know of Him, but He knew of you, and He raised you up for this. This is one of the reasons He raised you up to power, so that you would send this people back to rebuild that city and their temple.” Cyrus is like, “Wow. He called me by name. A prophet of Israel called me by name years and years before this happened, and I will do it.”

Hank Smith: 00:18:26 Over 150 years, previous.

John Bytheway: 00:18:28 One of the things that kind of surprised me in my master’s degree was that there are Bible scholars who are not Bible believers.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:18:35 That’s true.

John Bytheway: 00:18:36 I guess I figured if you’re going to study the Bible, you’re going to believe it. There’s a lot of people who think that the prophecy about Cyrus was not actually written by Isaiah because how could Isaiah know his name? Well, that’s why we call him a prophet, you see. That’s what that means. They call it Deutero-Isaiah or something. They give it another name. It’s impressive that, yeah, Isaiah knew Cyrus’s name before he was born, evidently.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:19:02 The last story, fascinating, concerns kind of a Daniel and the lions’ den, part one, which is not included in the King James Version. Because the people of Babylon were angry that Daniel is debunking their gods, they go to Cyrus and say, “He’s turning you into a Jew. You need to deliver him to us, and we’ll fix it. We’ll make this end.”

  00:19:25 He is delivered to these Babylonians who are very angry at what Daniel has done, and he is thrown into a pit of lions. It says, specifically, seven lions. They don’t feed the lions what they normally feed them. At the end, Cyrus comes to mourn Daniel, to bewail his loss because he was liking him pretty well. Instead, he finds Daniel seated peacefully amongst the lions who are now starving but not eating Daniel.

  00:19:54 He delivers them out of the lions’ pit and, again, throws in the ones who wanted to get Daniel killed. The lions immediately eat them. Imagine Daniel’s life, how fascinating these events. I mean, he really was a player in these big ways throughout the system here, but he did upset people because he was unafraid to call out the truth, and to debunk these false idols, and to witness of his God, the true God.

  00:20:20 Then in chapter 6, we have the more familiar story of Daniel and the lions’ den. I think most people know this by now. When I was young, they often depicted him as a fairly young person being thrown in with the lions. This is toward the end of his ministry, so he was an older man. There are many pictures who do depict him that way.

  00:20:38 Here it’s possible that Darius then knew of the first round in the lions’ den where Daniel survives. That could be because in chapter 6… What does he say? This is verse 16 when Daniel is set up again by some of the enemies that are jealous of his influence in the court. They cast him into the den of lions. “Now the king spake and said unto Daniel.” This is chapter 6, verse 16, “Thy God whom thou servest continually, he will deliver thee.”

Hank Smith: 00:21:08 He’s a believer.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:21:09 He’s a believer. It may be that he knows from Cyrus that this has already happened once before, and he was delivered. He says, “Don’t worry, Daniel. Your God will do this again. You’re falsely accused again.” Of course, this time, as we see, that Darius is bound by his own decree.

  00:21:26 That didn’t happen with Nebuchadnezzar. Now there is a limitation on this silver kingdom. He had made this law not thinking about Daniel, of course, whom he cared for. He said that anybody who made a petition to God or any other man for 30 days, except of the king, would be cast into the den of lions. Then they know that Daniel will do that because he prays consistently, night and morning, every day.

  00:21:50 They then say, “Look, Darius. He’s breaking your decree.” Darius wasn’t thinking of that because he didn’t mean this to happen, but here he has to follow his own decree. He does put him in the pit of lions, but he kind of believes already that Daniel can be saved again. He is, as we know.

Hank Smith: 00:22:05 Yeah, the king’s right there on that day.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:22:08 He fasts for Daniel that night. He doesn’t have anybody bringing music to play to him or anything. He’s like, “No, I’m thinking of Daniel, and I want him to be saved.” He goes very early the next morning, “Oh Daniel, servant of the living God.” Again, here Darius believes at least in the power of Daniel’s God. “Is thy God, whom thou servest continually, able to deliver thee from the lions?” Daniel says, “Oh king, live forever. My God has sent His angel and shut the lions’ mouths.” He’s delivered. Of course, again, he throws in the guys who accused Daniel with their wives and children. Kind of gory.

John Bytheway: 00:22:43 Brutal.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:22:44 He’s mad, and he takes some vengeance there against the accusers. Then he makes a decree at the end of the chapter, verse 26, “In every dominion of my kingdom, men tremble and fear before the God of Daniel. For He is the living God and steadfast forever, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed, and His dominion shall be even unto the end.”

  00:23:07 Beautiful testimony here. “He delivereth and rescueth, and He worketh signs and wonders in heaven and earth, who hath delivered Daniel from the power of the lions. So this Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian.”

Hank Smith: 00:23:18 Yes, what a life.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:23:21 Then what happens in these next six chapters, which again… No, were not part of our curriculum reading, so this can be very brief. It’s kind of fascinating how so many scholars, particularly mathematicians, have studied these prophecies of Daniel because he did ask when these things would occur. When would the Messiah come?

  00:23:41 It says, specifically, that the angel, Gabriel, who, as we know, was on earth as the prophet, Noah, but comes again as an angel to Daniel to give him this information and gives him incredible prophecy. Now let’s talk practical applications here from another message of Daniel.

  00:23:59 I have to start with a disclaimer because some people don’t like to talk about parenting anymore because their kids are grown, and maybe some of them, even after all the valiant efforts of their parents to teach them the gospel and to be good examples, see them leave the church.

  00:24:12 I want to talk for a minute to those parents and say that I have material for you at the end of this discussion that is powerful, hope-instilling messaging from the prophets and from God Himself, that things will be okay. I hope that you’ll hang on to hear that because one of my daughters-in-law, when I was kind of talking about Daniel with her and thinking some early thoughts about it, wisely cautioned.

  00:24:36 She said, “If you’re talking about parenting, don’t forget that there are a lot of parents who feel bad about being told about good parenting practice because they tried their best to teach their children the gospel and have seen their children fall away.” I thought that was a really tender reminder.

  00:24:53 I am saying that there is a message coming that gives great comfort to parents in that situation. I am going to begin with a practical application idea of trying to raise Zion children in the midst of Babylon because Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were Zion youth, and they became Zion men. They lived in literal Babylon.

  00:25:19 We are also in the midst of Babylon, and it’s often referred to in that way by our prophets. Elder David Stoney gave a speech not long ago called Building Zion in the Midst of Babylon because that’s what’s happening here. We are admonished to try to build Zion because the Lord will not come until there’s a Zion people to receive him.

  00:25:38 We can be in that path right now and should be. If we are believers, we should be seeking that Zion life, not creating a Zion cult, not trying to organize before the prophets call it to happen because this will come in wisdom and in order through our leaders, through the prophet himself when the time is right.

  00:25:56 We need to be prepared by living that Zion life, which basically means being on the road to sanctification. That comes through consistent obedience. I’ve used the term before on this podcast, boring obedience, boringly consistent obedience, where we do not falter, as did these wonderful people that we read of in the scriptures. They stayed faithful no matter what.

Hank Smith: 00:26:19 Steady and deliberate.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:26:21 That is the road to living as a Zion person. That would qualify us when the time comes. We’re not going to become Zion people after Christ comes. We need to become Zion people now. Anyway, how do we help our children and give them the best possible opportunity to become Zion children in the midst of Babylon? Because they are growing up in Babylon.

Hank Smith: 00:26:41 Which is exactly what happened to these four boys.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:26:43 Literally happened to them. We don’t hear about their parents, but we could give a tribute for a moment.

Hank Smith: 00:26:51 There’s got to be something there.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:26:52 The teachings that came to these young men in their youth that helped instill in them through their own choices, their own acceptance of those messages, and their own acts of obedience. Instill that testimony. They learned this from somewhere. We could think for a moment of their parents that began that teaching.

  00:27:11 Then I want to start with kind of a sobering statement, another prophetic statement, by Neal Maxwell in a speech called Becometh As a Child from April 1996. We’re talking over two decades, almost two and a half decades, before now. Ever since I heard this in conference, it has been something on my mind.

  00:27:29 He said, “I have no hesitancy, brothers and sisters, in stating that unless checked, permissiveness, at the end of its journey, will cause humanity to stare in mute disbelief at its awful consequences.” He is specifically talking to parents about permissiveness, and he’s warning them that permissiveness brings awful consequences.

  00:27:58 Let’s talk about that. I’m going to repeat the statement one more time. “I have no hesitancy, brothers and sisters, in stating that unless checked, permissiveness, at the end of its journey, will cause humanity to stare in mute disbelief at its awful consequences.”

  00:28:15 Having that in my mind and working as I do with families, that has come to my remembrance many times as I’ve seen struggles that parents have with children in a world, that is, Babylon. We are not immune in the church as we all know.

  00:28:32 Some of these statements come from a man named Leonard Sax in a book that he wrote called The Collapse of Parenting. I think it kind of helps to set a little bit the stage for what Elder Maxwell was warning against. “Over the past four decades,” says Leonard Sax, “there has been a massive transfer of authority from parents to kids.”

  00:28:53 Now that’s one way of describing permissiveness, a transfer of authority from parents to kids. You remember… I’m not suggesting we go back to the harsh days where children had to be seen but not heard and could never budge. There was too much maybe roughness about that.

  00:29:08 We’ve gone way too far to the other end of the spectrum here. The pendulum has swung all the way to now, where that doesn’t seem to be just diminished. It’s reversed, where kids have authority, and parents don’t.

  00:29:21 Now think of the TV shows that we see or the movies we see. There are studies that show that the 150 most popular shows in our media… Not one of them depicts a parent who acts responsibly or reliably.

  00:29:38 Men in particular, studies have shown, are often… Father figures particularly are characterized as buffoons. They cause trouble that the children have to solve. That’s when they’re not evil because sometimes fathers are depicted as evil.

  00:29:54 Now mothers don’t get a lot better treatment, but it’s not quite as bad as some of the depictions of fathers in this popular media. Those of you who are as old as I am or watched Nickelodeon when you were young, maybe you remember shows like The Andy Griffith Show. I mean, there were others like Father Knows Best.

Hank Smith: 00:30:10 Oh no. You mentioned The Andy Griffith Show. John, how do you feel about that show?

John Bytheway: 00:30:17 Me and Barney Fife had a good run.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:30:21 There’s some really good family principles taught in that. Andy Griffith is a widower, and he has this son, Opie, who grows up a lot during the show. He has a teacher, Miss Crump. If he was ever disrespectful for Miss Crump, and that became the episode, what happened? The whole town came down on Opie. Floyd the barber is snatching him off the sidewalk, “Opie, you don’t talk to your teacher like that.”

  00:30:42 Gomer Pyle and Barney, so beautifully depicted by John here… The whole town knew about it, and they all sent the same message, “You cannot disrespect adults. You have to be respectful.” Then here we read just a few weeks ago in Isaiah that in the last days, a child would vaunt itself against its parents, and little children would rule over them.

  00:31:04 That’s what Leonard Sax is talking about. He’s not the only author who does this, by the way. This is a pretty well-known phenomenon amongst those who are studying parenting and showing that we’ve got this reversal of things where children now are consulted about everything.”Along with that, in many families,” this is Leonard Sax again, “what kids think, and what kids like, and what kids want now matters as much or more than what the parents think, and like, and want. Let the kids decide, is often kind of the manner of traveling of families.”

  00:31:36 In one study… This is terrible. The attitude of American teenagers toward their parents was described as ingratitude, seasoned with contempt, ingratitude, seasoned with contempt. We’ve seen it. It might have happened in some of our homes.

  00:31:54 It’s not healthy. It’s not right. How much influence can you have over a child who sees you with ingratitude and contempt, and has basically abandoned any thought of parental authority?

  00:32:06 Billy Graham once said, “A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone.” We can see how that would include God because God is a parental figure. He is a father.

  00:32:24 How do kids learn to respect deity? Well, they start with the parent figures that they grow up with because a little child… That’s what they know. If they learn to treat that parent with respect, it is not difficult to transfer that respect to a heavenly parent. If they grow up without respect towards their earthly parents, why should they respect God who is just another parent after all?

  00:32:50 This is so dangerous because then, we do see how this can kind of set kids up for abandoning their faith because they weren’t able to develop that respect for parental authority and then transfer it. Many people have been in this situation.

  00:33:03 My own mother had an abusive father, and she had a hard time feeling God’s love for her because He was a father too. That’s when I first heard about this connection, was long before I was married. My mom would talk about how that had been a challenge for her.

  00:33:17 Since then, as a counselor, I’ve worked with many people who’ve had a painful relationship with a father. Sometimes it’s the mother too because she’s also a strong parenting figure. It can make it difficult for a person to feel loved by God and to feel trust and respect for God because He is a parent.

  00:33:34 My mother overcame that, and it is possible to heal from that. She was intentional about that and realized that she needed to come to know a different kind of father, one that she could trust and feel loved by, not overlooked by or disdained. She very successfully navigated that path. I’ve tried to help others along the way who’ve been injured in that way.

  00:33:54 You can see the connections. They’re so important. How a child has a relationship with their earthly parents very much impacts their openness and their approach to a relationship with a heavenly parent.

  00:34:07 This is not a small thing. That’s what Neal Maxwell is talking about. Permissiveness can cause us to stare in mute disbelief at its awful consequences at the end of the road. That has happened incrementally as the world has descended into more and more permissive attitudes where we have fewer and fewer children who are taught to be respectful. Parents don’t even know that they can demand it anymore.

  00:34:26 You didn’t have to demand it in Mayberry because everybody expected it, and everybody supported it. Now hardly anybody else is doing it. You have to swim upstream if you want your children to respect you. You have to teach them.

  00:34:39 I even remember, my husband’s always been wonderfully supportive, but he had to travel when we were in Chicago. We already had four little kids and had two more there. I remember those young women’s lessons that talked about how your husband should teach your children to respect you.

  00:34:55 I thought, “Well, that sounds like a great idea,” but sometimes dads aren’t around. They go to work every day, and if they have to travel, especially. I realized I couldn’t wait until Chris came home in order to teach my kids to respect me. I had to do that.

  00:35:10 Honestly, I was very prayerful about it because this was something I hadn’t learned early on. I prayed to learn how to help my children learn respect for their parents. Of course, to do that, if we’re going to have integrity, we have to behave in respectable ways, not perfect ways.

  00:35:26 There’s a lot of on-the-job training for parents. No matter how many manuals you read, it’s an on-the-job learning course. If we are diligent in trying to be good examples, not perfect but good examples, and trying to be respectful to our children, and when we make mistakes, we apologize, and repent, and show that we are willing to improve as parents, we can deserve their respect, but we kind of have to teach it.

  00:35:52 Otherwise, the world is teaching an entirely different message. Their friends are often not taught these things, even from good families. There are many good families who have kind of slumped into permissiveness. This is so incredibly important.

  00:36:06 I just want to hit a few points. There’s a great researcher, Diana Baumrind, from Berkeley who developed a Baumrind parenting model that’s used in research all the time. I’m very quickly going to describe it.

  00:36:17 It’s basically a graph, like the old geometry graphs with two axes. The horizontal axis represents warmth and responsiveness, the quality of the relationship between parents and children. Now that’s individual because with some kids, you might be very close, and other kids might be a little more defiant or less compliant. It’s a little bit of a harder relationship with them.

  00:36:36 We have to look at children, individually, not just as a group, and see, are they feeling my love? Do they feel safe with me? Because that is an essential component of healthy parenting. Even though we may love our children, it’s different maybe how they feel that and if they can feel safe, or that we’re trustworthy for them.

  00:36:54 The vertical axis is demand and regulation. It’s how well do we enforce the rules of the family and enforcing not in a brutal, harsh, demeaning way that’s never acceptable to God, but in a successful way that does demand respect and compliance, a measure of compliance for appropriate standards.

  00:37:14 Now we are so blessed to have the gospel of Jesus Christ because we can know what’s important and what’s not. If it matters to God, it should matter to us as parents. If it doesn’t matter to God, we should drop it.

  00:37:26 To fight over red socks or blue, that’s foolishness. That’s not going to make a difference as to whether or not they’re qualified for the kingdom. Telling lies, that’s different. That matters to God. He’s a God of truth. We can’t have a positive relationship with God if we’re liars, and we can’t really have a relationship with anybody else that has much quality if we lie.

  00:37:42 If it matters to God, if this is something that would help our children qualify for the kingdom someday or have an opportunity to do that, if they choose to pursue that path, then it should matter to us as parents. It’s worth enforcing. If it doesn’t matter, let it go.

Hank Smith: 00:37:56 Like verbal abuse.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:37:59 Verbal abuse matters. Being kind, being honest, being respectful, doing your work, learning to do work that is not comfortable, because that’s a big problem for permissive families, is that the kids might do the work that they like or that has an immediate reward.

  00:38:15 Maybe they’re good students. They do their homework because they get rewarded. Their teachers like them. They get high grades, other opportunities. They do that work, but they don’t want to clean the bathrooms because there’s no reward in that that’s immediate or all that pleasant. They just do the things that reward them.

  00:38:31 Maybe it’s athletics. Maybe it’s music. Maybe it’s art. They may have these areas where they feel rewarded on a fairly quick basis. They pursue those and maybe put a lot of effort into it. We think, “Oh, at least they’re learning some self-control and discipline,” but it’s not really self-control and discipline unless it’s tasks that do not provide an immediate reward.

  00:38:51 That’s where self-control and discipline are manifest, in conquering the natural man and doing the unpleasant tasks of life. Cleaning your bedroom, learning to do the wash, cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the bathrooms. What we find is that a lot of our kids are only doing the things that bring a pretty immediate reward, and then they go on a mission.

  00:39:09 The mission doesn’t have an immediate reward attached. A lot of grueling days on a mission. You’re just one of a whole hoard of missionaries. You’re no longer special. You might have a companion you don’t particularly care for, right?

Hank Smith: 00:39:23 Right.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:39:23 You might be in an area that they don’t have a lot of people who are interested in the gospel. These are real trials to your faith. If all you can do are things that are comfortable or bring a reward, it’s pretty hard to be successful in a setting that’s very different, and yet that’s the kind of steadfast obedience we’ve been talking about, doing it no matter what.

Hank Smith: 00:39:41 It’s important to God.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:39:43 It is so important to God that we be able to do the right thing without reward and even in the face of an immediate consequence that’s negative. We’re really robbing our children if we only let them do the things that they enjoy, and that they’re naturally good at, or that they find a reward in pretty quickly.

  00:40:00 Anyway, I’m just going to say that in this Baumrind model, the upper right-hand quadrant is the good one. It’s high in both dimensions. It’s high in warmth and responsiveness, and it’s high in demand and regulation.

  00:40:13 Now, as members of the church, we’re not perfect. We certainly can have parents with real problems, but it’s not hard to love your children. It’s not hard to provide that warmth and responsiveness if we were fairly decent and not too messed up by our own past. Loving our kids is not typically the hard part. We do need to check it and make sure that our kids feel it well, and they’re receiving that well, and so on.

  00:40:37 The hard one is usually the vertical axis, which is demand and regulation. Both of them need to be high in order for us to be the kind of parent God is. This is called authoritative parenting. That’s the kind of parent God is. He’s authoritative. The love is undeniable.

  00:40:54 Then he says things like, “I’m bound when you do what I say. When you do not what I say, you have no promise.” There are conditions. There’s a high demand, and it’s enforced with consequences.

John Bytheway: 00:41:04 There’s boundaries.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:41:05 Limits. Yes, limits. There are boundaries. There are standards. There are commandments.

John Bytheway: 00:41:09 Expectations.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:41:10 Blessings are contingent on our compliance. Not everybody can get a temple recommend, but those who comply with those requirements to a certain extent. Not everybody will enter the celestial kingdom but those who comply. God is clear about that. He is definitely in that upper right quadrant, the authoritative parent. That’s where we should try to be. That is not permissive. Permissiveness is the lower right quadrant where we’re high in love. Like I said, this is pretty easy for Latter-day Saint parents. It’s low in demand and regulation.

Hank Smith: 00:41:44 I love you, so you can do whatever you want.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:41:46 Yes, that’s right. I don’t want to fight. That’s what moves a lot of permissive parenting, is I don’t want to fight with my kid because I don’t want to lose the warmth and positive nature of our relationship. Instead, I’ll just say, “Okay, I’ll let it go,” or sometimes we slip into the authoritarian quadrant where we say, “Because I said so.”

Hank Smith: 00:42:06 My house, my rules.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:42:08 Yes, that’s the upper left quadrant. It’s at the cost of the relationship because if we become frustrated and then we just lay down the law, we tend to get a little too harsh or too authoritarian. We impose some pretty severe consequences, or at least it varies in degree. That’s not good for the relationship. That becomes more fear-based. Do it or else. That’s at the cost of the relationship.

  00:42:28 There are some authoritarian parents still on the planet, and sometimes we swing into that quadrant. We move around a little bit. I would say most good parents, I mean, most decent human beings actually want to be authoritative parents in that upper right quadrant, high in both dimensions, whether they know the model or not because they want their children to feel loved. They want them to grow into useful citizens and maybe even citizens of the kingdom someday.

  00:42:50 We have that desire. The problem with staying in the authoritative quadrant is that kids push back. When they say, “I don’t want to,” or, “I’m not going to,” parents don’t know what to do, so they tend to drop into the permissive quadrant. Okay, let’s not fight, and we let them get away with it, or we jump into the authoritarian quadrant and say, “Because I said so,” but that doesn’t work either because it becomes fear-based. As soon as they’re old enough, they’re going to shake the dust off their feet and get out of town. They’re not going to look back or maintain the values we’ve tried to teach.

  00:43:19 The authoritative quadrant is the one where we’re able to transfer values and help our children become more acceptable to God, to harness their natural man, to see the blessings of the gospel as well as, because they are harnessing their natural man, they become eligible for the visitation of the spirit because when we don’t do what’s right, we chase the spirit away from us.

  00:43:41 When we are rebellious, or obnoxious, or disrespectful, we chase the spirit away from us. Then what are we, going to launch these kids into Babylon without the spirit? That’s an abnegation of our responsibility as parents. If we can help our kids learn to harness that natural man by authoritative parenting, our children harness their natural man because they do have to comply with expectations and standards that are not conducive to the natural man getting what he wants or what she wants.

  00:44:10 They have to overcome that in order to qualify for approval or the rewards that are established, the positive consequences. Then they are fit to take the spirit with them when they leave our homes. This is such an important gift to give our children.

  00:44:23 Neal Maxwell saw all of this, obviously, when he and many other prophets have warned us about teaching our children when they’re young. The earlier we start, the better. Now, can you do this with a 16-year-old? Yes, you can. It’s harder if you haven’t done it before, but don’t give up. You can still teach good principles.

  00:44:41 Some parents say, “Well, I’ve never done this before. If I do it now, my kids are going to complain and say, ‘You never did this before. You didn’t do this for the older kids,'” or whatever. My answer is always, “Yeah, but you upgrade your software, don’t you?” What does that mean, you never did it before?

John Bytheway: 00:44:56 It’s a good way to put it. Well, I’ve upgraded since last time.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:44:59 That’s right. I’ve upgraded. Aren’t you lucky because you’re going to benefit from my upgrade.

John Bytheway: 00:45:08 You’re going to get parent 4.0.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:45:08 That’s exactly right. It’s going to keep growing. The Collapse of Parenting by Leonard Sax. It’s a little bit older book now. I mean, it’s been around for a while, but it’s still very relevant. We could update some of the data that he includes there, but it’s going to be along the same trend that he has identified. There are many good voices out there about this, but I do particularly like this book.

  00:45:28 The Baumrind model is different, but it’s used in a lot of research. You actually hear about it sometimes even in kind of just news reports or magazines and things like that because it’s been such an effective model in research. People don’t talk about it from a religious point of view, but it fits so well with gospel principles that it’s a very useful model, simple to describe, and incredibly useful.

  00:45:48 Now let me explain a little bit how to stay in the authoritative quadrant because it’s not hard to want to be there, but to stay there when the kids push back is difficult. To avoid permissive parenting, which is what Elder Maxwell is warning so stringently about, is to be able to maintain the rule when the kids push back without becoming brutal, without resorting to my way or the highway, or becoming harsh, or angry, or punitive.

Hank Smith: 00:46:20 You’re creating resentment, creating the rebellion.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:46:24 They very well might throw the baby out with the bathwater and leave the gospel behind too, if that’s what the gospel seems to produce in their parents. In order to maintain structure and compliance with rules, we need to consider… This whole phrase matters, “A structure of consequences consistently enforced that yields the desired behavioral outcomes in our children.”

Hank Smith: 00:46:48 I can’t make up new rules on the spot?

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:46:52 No, but I must say some trial and error may be involved because-

Hank Smith: 00:46:56 Okay.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:46:56 … children are different in how they perceive consequences. Some kids love to be sent to their room, and some kids hate it. We have to be a little bit idiosyncratic about how to motivate our children with that structure of consequences.

  00:47:09 The truth is that every human behavior is motivated. This is really pretty basic. God knows us so well. What it comes down to is that every behavior has within it costs and payoffs.

  00:47:22 There are certain costs to the behavior, and there are certain payoffs. If the payoffs exceed the costs, the behavior will continue. It’s more worth it than not. If the costs exceed the payoffs, the behavior will stop.

  00:47:40 This is true of every human being. Now some are more stubborn than others. That difference might have to be greater, but it is true of every human being. Now where we really differ is in our perception of costs and payoffs. People look at us as members of the church and say, “You guys are fools. You’re missing all the good parties and all the good fun.”

  00:47:59 What are we saying? We’re saying that I perceive that the reward to come in the hereafter is such a huge payoff that I am willing to make whatever you think is a sacrifice now because there’s no contest to me in terms of the cost and the payoff. Others are like, “Yeah, I don’t know if it’s worth it. I’m having a lot of fun now. I don’t really believe in what’s to come or whatever,” or they think that God will beat them with a few stripes, and they’ll be at last saved in the kingdom of God.

  00:48:26 Anyway, we perceive things differently. We do need to kind of know our children and know ourselves to recognize what’s going on there. In parenting, it’s good to look at our children and say, “What does constitute a cost that will help to help change their behavior?”

  00:48:39 A couple of examples. When I was an early morning seminary teacher, and I may have mentioned this in a previous episode, but I taught the juniors. They were mostly driving. Almost every semester, somebody would come in and say, “My parents took my car keys.” I’d say… Oh, I never said, “That’s too bad,” by the way, because I was delighted that the parents were trying to parent.

  00:48:57 Instead, I would ask, “Oh, what happened?” It was usually grades. Report cards had come out, and they had not been too diligent. The parents were like, “You can’t drive the car.” Again, I wouldn’t say, “That’s too bad.”

  00:49:07 I would ask, “How long do you have to get your grades up? Do you have to wait for another report card?” Or, these days it’s all online and stuff. “How many weeks do you have to get your grades up to get your keys back?”

  00:49:17 Every single time… I taught for five years, so this happened a lot over those years. They would say, “Oh, I don’t have to do that. After two or three days of getting up to bring me to early morning seminary, they’d give me the keys back.”

  00:49:33 I wish your parents could hear you now. You totally have their number. You hold your breath for a few days, and they back off on the consequence. You get your way, and you don’t have to change. That happens all the time.

  00:49:46 We really need to look at ourselves and say, “What am I doing? Am I really getting the desired outcome?” If not, I need to go back to the drawing board and make sure the costs are high enough. Again, not brutal, not demeaning, never abusive. There are plenty of costs. They owe everything to us in the tangible sense.

  00:50:04 They live in our houses. They use our media. They use our internet. They’re usually paying for their devices. They’re driving cars. People will say, “I can’t get my kids to do anything.” Then I’m like, “Well, you’re not trying very hard because you actually have a lot of things that you can impose as consequences.”

  00:50:18 Some of them can be incentives. If you do this, then we can do this. Some of them are costs. You lose this privilege for a while. Parents just don’t want to do it. Why? Because of what those parents were saying about early morning seminary.

  00:50:28 When we impose a cost on our children, we impose a cost on ourselves, by definition. Sometimes parents are too soft on themselves because it’s hard to impose that consequence in a consistent, long-lasting way that is sufficient to change their attitudes or change their behavior. We give up long before the kid does.

  00:50:48 Once, one of my daughters-in-law came to me. Her oldest was probably about three at the time. She’s now over 16. She’s a wonderful kid. I mean, nobody would believe this because she’s like an angel child. When she was a little girl, she was pretty stubborn.

  00:51:01 My daughter-in-law called and said, “She won’t pick up her toys. I just can’t get her to pick up her toys.” I told her the basics of this model. I said, “Okay. When are you asking her to pick up her toys? Is it at bedtime?” She said, “Yeah.”

  00:51:12 I said, “Well, that’s a lousy time because the payoff of not picking up her toys is that she gets to stay up later, and she doesn’t want to go to bed.” Three- year-olds usually don’t want to go to bed. They want to stay up.

  00:51:21 I said, “That’s a bad time to do it. Do it before lunch. Now I know you really want it picked up at night, but you can change the time later. Let’s just get compliance first. Let’s get her used to doing what she’s asked to do. Do it before lunch because you have a built-in, cost-payoff thing.”

  00:51:37 She doesn’t get lunch until she picks up the toys. It’s a simple task. I mean, it was like a basket, and she had to put some things in there. I mean, it wasn’t some grueling task that wasn’t age-appropriate. It was totally age-appropriate, and it was a good way to start her complying with a job, a chore that she needed to be responsible for that didn’t have a built-in reward by itself, but that she was being obedient to her mother.

  00:51:59 My daughter-in-law said, “Okay, I’m going to try that.” Then she called me back the next day, and it was like 1:30 or something. She said, “She won’t pick up her toys, but she’s crying because she says she’s hungry.”

  00:52:11 I said, “Okay. Make her favorite sandwich. I mean, it’s peanut butter and jelly dripping with jelly, really good and juicy. Then kind of wave it under her nose, like, ‘Boy, I sure hope you pick up those toys because as soon as you pick up those toys, you can have the sandwich. If you don’t pick up the toys, you don’t get the sandwich.'”

  00:52:30 She told me that at some point, her daughter’s holding her stomach and saying, “I’m so hungry. I need to eat.” I said, “That girl is not going to starve to death today. Let her be really hungry. If she’s really stubborn, take a bite of that sandwich.”

  00:52:44 Say, “Wow, it’s sure a good sandwich. I sure hope you pick up your toys and have this.” See, you can then even be an advocate for your child. Even though you’re imposing the consequence, you can encourage them.

Hank Smith: 00:52:56 You can cheer them on.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 00:52:57 Yes, you can cheer them on instead of having it just be about a temper battle between the two of you. “Yes, you will.” “No, I won’t.” No, we want to avoid that. We want to just say, “No, here’s the structure. Even though I’m the one who created, I mean, enforcing the structure or both, but I sure hope you’ll get the prize. I sure hope you’ll get back this privilege because as soon as you do, it’s going to be a lot nicer, and I know you’re capable.”

  00:53:18 She called me later, and she said, “She picked up her toys.” She had to do that a few days to kind of get that principle lodged in her stubborn little girl’s heart and mind. Then there was no problem.

  00:53:29 Like I said, if you start when they’re young, there’s a really great spillover effect. If they learn to be obedient in their early years, they tend not to be inclined so much to be rebellious. The sooner they find out they can get away with it, the harder it is to turn that course.

  00:53:46 Don’t give up. You can do this with a 16-year-old. It’s a little trickier. If they have their own money by then, that’s harder because they can just go buy what you’re taking away, or if their friends have money or transfers… Anyway, it’s a little harder as they get older. Don’t give up. Be prayerful because God wants us to get this right.

  00:54:02 Why is this so important? Well, because being authoritative parents rather than permissive blesses our children in millions of ways and ways I’m sure that we can’t even measure at this point, but we’ll see it someday very clearly.

  00:54:16 Children who are raised permissively tend to have poor levels of self-worth. Now this makes perfect sense if you understand where self-worth comes from. Self-worth comes from self-mastery. It doesn’t come from somebody telling you you’re good. Now we tried that in the ’80s. They used to send magnets home or lists home for the parents, 100 ways to praise your children.

  00:54:40 You know what? They don’t believe you if they’re not doing good things. They know that they’re not doing what’s right, and you can’t… Was this Ezra Taft Benson who said, “You can’t do wrong and feel right”? That’s what happens to our children. We can say, “You’re wonderful,” and somebody else can tell them they’re wonderful, but if they’re not doing the things that they know are right, they’re not going to feel like good people. They have this kind of shaky or worse self-image because it comes from appropriately mastering ourselves and the appropriate parts of our environment.

  00:55:09 Think of a little kid who learns to tie his shoe. He is so pumped. He feels so good about himself because he conquered that fine motor coordination, which is tricky for little kids. He conquered something in himself and an appropriate part of his environment. You can’t take that feeling away from him or her.

  00:55:26 We take that away from our children as they grow because we don’t ask hard things. We don’t want to fight. We don’t want to have to come up with a consequence. We let them slide. They grow up not feeling good about themselves. This has been born out in lots of research because this model is used all over the place as if we needed it. That’s the problem.

  00:55:43 That’s one of the problems that Neal Maxwell saw, prophetically. What happens if they don’t have a good self-image? They are much more vulnerable to depression and anxiety. Shocker.

  00:55:56 We have increasing levels of depressed and anxious kids at younger and younger ages and, of course, suicide accompanies that. Since our lockdowns and whatever, that has really been aggravated and exacerbated at scary levels. These kids are not flourishing.

  00:56:13 We have some great kids that still learn things in a good way. I don’t mean that this is every child. I’m saying there is a tendency here that is easily seen if we look. It is not going the right direction. That’s why our prophets warn us against it.

  00:56:28 I remember when I saw those stats start to rise meteorically on anxiety and depression at younger and younger years along with suicide. I remembered Neal Maxwell’s statement, which was well before those numbers went up. This is one of the things he saw, that there are awful consequences to our children that happen when we don’t teach them authoritatively to harness the natural man and to develop, thereby, strong self-worth, that we have too much permissive parenting.

  00:56:59 Those parents are loving parents. It’s not that they want bad outcomes for their children. I know that’s true. I’ve talked to so many. They don’t know how to expect enough of their children, and the neighbors aren’t doing it. The kids get used to going with that natural man impulse. They do a work if they feel rewarded. If they don’t, they don’t. They don’t develop that strong sense of worth.

  00:57:22 Their identity… What did President Nelson tell us just recently at that Worldwide Youth Fireside where he talked about identity? We need to know. Our children need to know we are a child of God, a child of the covenant, and a disciple of Christ. How can they know that if they don’t feel good about themselves, or how can they know what that means and how it can protect them if they don’t really know who they are?

  00:57:43 They don’t feel solid and good because they have not been asked to do things that are uncomfortable, and to get good at those things, and to be rewarded from that capacity growing in them, not because there’s an instant reward attached but because it’s the right thing to do. We are robbing our children of that strength, and then they are gathered by every wind and tossed.

  00:58:06 We can do better. The gospel of Jesus Christ teaches us how to do better. Before I saw the Baumrind parenting model… Because my mother, as wonderful as she was, was not a disciplinarian. Probably because her dad was so authoritarian, and nasty, and abusive, she didn’t want to be like that. She kind of over-corrected, and she was a little bit more permissive but at a less dangerous time, I will say.

  00:58:30 The world wasn’t quite marshaled against kids at that point as it is now and will be in the years to come. I didn’t learn this from my mother. I learned lots of wonderful things from her, but I didn’t learn this. Then we started having all these kids. I hadn’t anticipated having so many kids so close together, but it was the right thing.

  00:58:48 We felt guided, and blessed, and were healthy. It was a huge blessing in my life. I hadn’t even babysat when I was a teenager because I felt overwhelmed by trying to get kids to do stuff.

  00:58:59 I didn’t know how to be a disciplinarian or even have any authority. I prayed my guts out as a young mother, “Lord, teach me how to teach discipline to my children, self-control and delayed gratification. I don’t know how.” He taught me through the Spirit. There were experiences that I had that I could see He was guiding me and molding me.

  00:59:19 I learned to do this as a young parent because God loves us, and He loved my kids. He loved me, and He wanted me to learn what I was asking to learn. Line upon line, precept upon precept, I learned these principles. They work. I can testify they work. Now I know that there are exceptions. There are kids who are particularly defiant and stubborn. We are not blaming the parents for that.

  00:59:42 Remember we’ve said this before, that the product of parenting is not the child. Ultimately, the product of parenting is the parent. It’s what we learn to do that makes us more like God because He is an authoritative parent. Our children will exercise their agency to comply or to not comply.

  00:59:58 Nevertheless, we have been told that there is more likelihood that children will comply when parents know how to teach. This helps us to grow in our roles as parents and to become more like God Himself. It gives our children the best possible chance.

  01:00:15 Then they make their own choices, and we don’t blame the parents for that. That’s too spurious a correlation. It’s not consistent, and it’s not founded in truth. Look at God Himself. He would be condemned with all His rebellious children. We don’t measure God by His rebellious children. We measure Him for who He is and how He is, and that’s how God will measure us.

  01:00:37 These things are so valuable. When I saw the Baumrind model in my PhD program, many years later, my kids were all grown, I recognized it for truth because that was what God had taught me in the trenches. I was so grateful that God will speak to us. We can learn this. We can bless our children with a positive self-worth, positive, strong sense of identity that can help them to withstand all these philosophies of men.

  01:01:06 The benefits of parental authority are substantial when parents matter more than peers. How often does that happen in our families these days? It should, and it can. They can teach right and wrong in meaningful ways. That is the intergenerational transfer of values because, ultimately, we don’t want to just corral our children’s behavior in the process of not being permissive and having consequences, incentives and disincentives.

  01:01:33 We need to be teaching them and answering the question, why. That’s where we really, again, transfer values and help to convert them to the principles of the gospel. We don’t want them to behave like this when we’re watching. We want them to behave like this on a desert island, alone, because it’s the right way to behave. They trust in what the Lord is asking them to do.

  01:01:52 That transfer of values happens with parental authority. Otherwise, we try to teach our lessons, and they just blow us off because we don’t have any real authority or power in their lives or respect. They don’t seem to think that we are deserving of respect. We can then help our children develop more robust and more authentic sense of self. That’s what we’ve been talking about.

  01:02:14 Then we can teach our children, as parents with authority, to educate their desires. That’s about harnessing the natural man. This is a non-LDS author, but he has the principles down. We can help to educate their desires, which is to help them harness the natural man which qualifies them for the attendance of the spirit so that when they launch, they take the spirit with them instead of offending the spirit because they still serve the natural man too much.

  01:02:38 This instills in them a longing for higher and better things: in music, in the arts, in their own character, spirituality, and in their worship of God. There is good evidence that you can boost a child’s conscientiousness including his or her honesty and self-control in a matter of weeks without spending any money. We do still need to learn how to be the kind of parent God is, which is good for us. Do not allow yourself to be paralyzed by your own inadequacies.

  01:03:11 I think that’s great counsel for parents. Of course, we’re not going to be 100% consistent, but if we keep trying, and praying, and seeking revelation and guidance from the Spirit, and we are earnest in our endeavors to become a better version of ourselves as a parent, to learn more about God-like parenting, God will bless us. He will bless and consecrate that experience for our good, and our children will be recipients of that better parenting, whatever they choose to do with it.

  01:03:39 Raising your child to know and care about virtue and character is not a special, extra-credit assignment reserved for the superior parent. It is mandatory for all parents. When you are given a mandatory assignment, you must do your best, regardless of your own shortcomings, regardless of whether your peers, other parents are paying attention to the assignment or not.

  01:04:05 I am telling you, you’re going to be swimming upstream because when you’re asking your kids to do things that the neighbors aren’t… Most of the neighbors aren’t asking that of their kids. There is no greater responsibility given to a parent during that season of life.

  01:04:18 I do want to say, let’s go back now to what I promised in the beginning of this section, which is comfort for parents whose children have gone astray or have rejected their teachings. I will add this too. I’ve probably said this before.

  01:04:33 Chris worked with missionaries for a long time at the MTC as a counselor. I mean, for years. He would find that some of these missionaries would come in and kind of be beating themselves up because they just had heard a fireside or a devotional on being the best missionary you can be, and they didn’t feel like they were being the best. What does that even mean?

  01:04:49 Chris was great. He said, “Well, let’s just make a search of it.” I said, “You know that the word, best, does not appear in scripture?” God doesn’t really ask us to be our best. I mean, that’s sort of a weird target. Some days, people can lift cars off children. If I’m not doing that every day, am I doing my best?

  01:05:06 That’s not really what God asks. What God asks repeatedly in scripture is that we be diligent. Diligence is the way to go forward. Not worrying about perfection but being diligent. I can apologize to my children, which really increases my moral authority because I’m holding myself to the same standards that I’m asking them to comply with.

  01:05:25 I’m leading out. I’m not pushing from behind. I’m trying to lead out in becoming a better version of myself and being a better parent. Now to those parents whose children have already fallen away, I remember a woman that came into my office probably almost 20 years ago now. This was the first time I had heard it, but since then, I’ve heard it many times, that a woman is only as happy as her least happy child.

  01:05:48 She had a daughter who was already into the drug scene, an older teenager. Then as a young adult, it continued. She was miserable because she saw this as a real failure, personally. She loved her daughter, but she took a lot of ownership over that and thought, “I’m a terrible parent.”

  01:06:05 Part of the problem with that is that she had other children. I’m like, “What kind of advertisement is this for living the gospel of Jesus Christ? That if your child goes astray, you are miserable. The gospel can’t do any better than that in your life? That you have to be culpable, and then you have to be miserable. Your children see that? Why should they be drawn to a gospel that leads to that kind of misery and depression despondency?”

  01:06:30 I thought about that all that evening. After I’d seen all my clients, that thought came back. I was like, “Okay, is that a good thought? I’m a mom too.” Even men say that that kind of resonates, that you’re only as happy as your least happy child. I thought, “Is that how we’re supposed to feel?” I thought, “No, that can’t be right.”

  01:06:45 Of course, it was easy to think that because I thought of God who has a lot of wayward children, and yet is full of joy. Why would we have wanted to be like Him if He were only as happy as His least happy child? He has some pretty miserable contenders for that least happy position, and a lot of them, right? He is full of joy, or we would’ve had no desire to be like Him, or to receive what He offers.

  01:07:10 Obviously, He’s full of joy. I thought, “Well, how does He do that?” Well, He knows the end from the beginning, and He knows it’s a happy ending. The plan is more generous than we sometimes remember or think about. God is so merciful. He is so generous, so munificent in His character.

  01:07:33 Again, we’ve talked about knowing the character and attributes of God. We need to remind ourselves of how incredibly kind and generous the Father is. Everybody gets a happy ending, other than those who basically could have that, and then spit in God’s eye, and reject it. Those are the sons of perdition. There are so few. We don’t need to worry about them, but they do it with full knowledge and awareness, so you can’t feel sorry for them.

  01:08:00 All receive more than we deserve. For those who want it, we can have all that the Father offers us. We can be co-heirs with Christ. That blows my mind. I don’t know how to contain that idea, that He can raise us to the stature of Christ Himself, our Savior and Redeemer, the Lamb of God. I mean, it’s amazing how generous this plan is.

  01:08:21 We suffer so much because we don’t think of how merciful it is. We think that our kids will be eternally unhappy. No, they will not. Even the most rebellious of them will not be eternally unhappy.

  01:08:34 Now it’s not over till it’s over. Boyd K. Packer gave a great speech many years ago called the Play and the Plan. It was back in 1995 at a CES Fireside. He talked about the plan being a three-act play, the pre-earth life, the first estate, the second estate being mortality, which continues until the end of the spirit world and the end of the millennium.

  01:08:56 Again, Boyd K. Packer said, “Nobody walks out of a play at the end of the second act and thinks they know how it ends. Why are we trying to judge the final outcome of our children by the end of the second act, which doesn’t even end until the end of the spirit world and the millennium?”

  01:09:14 He’s telling us, “Don’t think you can second-guess exactly how things work out. You don’t know yet. Trust in God’s kindness and mercy.” Then we have all these amazing statements. Boyd K. Packer does mention, “Remember, the line, ‘And they all lived happily ever after,’ is never written into the second act.”

  01:09:35 That’s true, right? This line belongs in the third act where the mysteries are solved, and everything is put right. Let’s not be precipitous and think that we know exactly how judgment is going to occur by the end of mortality.

  01:09:51 These wonderful quotes from prophets that I want to share… Many people have heard this. “The prophet, Joseph Smith, declared, and he never taught a more comforting doctrine, that the eternal sealings of faithful parents and the divine promises made to them for valiant service in the cause of truth would save not only themselves, but likewise their posterity. Though some of the sheep may wander, the eye of the shepherd is upon them. Sooner or later, they will feel the tentacles of divine providence reaching out after them and drawing them back to the fold. Either in this life or the life to come, they will return. They will have to pay their debt to justice. They will suffer for their sins and may tread a thorny path. If it leads them at last, like the penitent prodigal, to a loving and forgiving father’s heart and home, the painful experience will not have been in vain. Pray for your careless and disobedient children. Hold onto them with your faith. Hope on, trust on, till you see the salvation of God.” That’s an Orson F. Whitney quote.

  01:10:49 Brigham Young, “Let the father and mother who are members of this church and kingdom take a righteous course and strive with all their might never to do a wrong but to do good all their lives. If they have 1 child or 100 children, if they conduct themselves toward them as they should, binding them to the Lord by their faith and prayers, I care not where those children go. They are bound up to their parents by an everlasting tie. No power of earth or hell can separate them from their parents in eternity. They will return again to the fountain from whence they sprang.”

  01:11:20 Lorenzo Snow says something very similarly. “If you succeed in passing through these trials and afflictions and receive a resurrection, you will, by the power of the priesthood, work in labor as the Son of God has, until you get all your sons and daughters in the path of exaltation and glory. This is just as sure as that the sun rose this morning over yonder mountains. Therefore, mourn not because all your sons and daughters do not follow in the path that you have marked out to them or give heed to your counsels. Inasmuch as we succeed in securing eternal glory and stand as saviors and as kings and priests to our God, we will save our posterity.”

  01:11:55 Boyd K. Packer, “The measure of our success as parents will not rest solely on how our children turn out. That judgment would be just only if we could raise our families in a perfectly moral environment, and that is not now possible. It is not uncommon for responsible parents to lose one of their children, for a time, to influences over which they have no control. They agonize over rebellious sons or daughters. They are puzzled over why they are so helpless when they have tried so hard to do what they should. It is my conviction that those wicked influences one day will be overruled. We cannot overemphasize the value of temple marriage, the binding ties of the sealing ordinance, and the standards of worthiness required of them. When parents keep the covenants they have made at the altar of the temple, their children will be forever bound to them.”

  01:12:43 We have the endorsement of our prophet, Ezra Taft Benson, of this Nibley statement. “There comes a time when the general defilement of a society becomes so great that the rising generation is put under undue pressure and cannot be said to have a fair choice between the way of light and the way of darkness.”

  01:13:04 I remember hearing that years ago, but I’ve remembered that. It makes so much sense that in Babylon, sometimes some children will be blinded and will not have a complete opportunity to exercise their agency with their eyes open. If we as parents are worthy and keep our covenants, there is a blessing and a power that comes to our posterity that we know very little of. We don’t know the mechanics of it, but why would we bet against God?

  01:13:31 That has been so motivating to me as a parent. In fact, when I went through the temple before I was married, those words stood out to me even then, before I had any children. I knew that that would commit me to even more motivation to live my covenants because it could bless my children. I am not going to limit God. He does honor agency.

  01:13:52 Again, God doesn’t give us all the answers yet, but He asks us to believe Him and that there will be joy. That’s what Henry Eyring said in that great talk. This is April 2019, A Home Where the Spirit of the Lord Dwells. “Some have tried with full heart to establish a home and family in righteousness, yet it has not been granted. My promise to you is one that a member of the Quorum of 12 Apostles once made to me. I had said to him that because of choices some in our extended family had made, I doubted that we could be together in the world to come.

  01:14:32 He said, As well as I can remember, you are worrying about the wrong problem. You just live worthy of the celestial kingdom, and the family arrangements will be more wonderful than you can imagine.”

  01:14:50 I believe that with all my heart, and I have believed that for a long time, which is why I noticed when Henry Eyring said that, and thought, “That is what I have been trying to testify of to parents that I work with who are in pain because of the rebellion of some of their children.”

  01:15:07 Trust God. We’ve been talking about that throughout this wonderful time with Daniel. We can as parents trust God when He says that our keeping of our covenants will be an outcome that is more wonderful than we can possibly imagine with our finite, limited, mortal brains. We can trust Him.

  01:15:30 We cannot become bitter. We cannot fail in our faith because God is good. He is loving and merciful. It never faileth. His goodness never faileth. He wants us to be full of joy as He is, and we can start that right now if we trust in Him.

Hank Smith: 01:15:52 Wow. Lili, thank you. Oh my word. That was just absolutely wonderful.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 01:15:58 It’s lots of fun to talk about these things.

Hank Smith: 01:16:01 Yeah, thank you for your passion, and your excitement, and your inspiration. It really is inspiring. I’m going to be a better parent.

Dr. Lili Anderson: 01:16:08 May we all keep climbing that mountain, little by little, line on line, precept on precept. God is patient. We can be patient too.

John Bytheway: 01:16:15 I think sometimes as parents, we recite Moses 1:39 to ourselves like this, “This is your job and your glory to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of your children.” That’s not what He said. He said, “This is my work and my glory.” As we learned today from Daniel, “I am able to do my work.”

Dr. Lili Anderson: 01:16:34 Is my arm shortened at all that it cannot redeem, or have I no power to deliver?

John Bytheway: 01:16:39 That’s kind of a, phew, you got to help me with this one, and He will.

Hank Smith: 01:16:42 Mighty to save. We want to thank Dr. Lili Anderson for being with us today. What a joy. We’ll have her back. We want to thank our executive producers, Steve and Shannon Sorensen, and our sponsors, David and Verla Sorensen. We hope all of you will join us next week. We’ve got another episode of followHIM.

  01:17:04 We have an amazing production crew we want you to know about: David Perry, Lisa Spice, Jamie Nielsen, Will Stoughton, Krystal Roberts, and Ariel Cuadra. Thank you, to our amazing production team.