Aislin Dyer: 00:07 Let’s go to 1 John chapter two, verses 15 through 17 are such a good guideline. This is this light that we get from God. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passeth away and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God, abideth forever. It is so easy for us to follow our appetites, whether it’s the appetites of our body or our ego. There’s a saying, “Don’t tell me what you love. Show me where you put your time and your energy and resources and I will be able to tell you what you love.”

  00:52 And sometimes I think the things that we say are our priorities, if we actually were to say, “Well, okay, how much do you actually give to those things?” Maybe it wouldn’t look true. We can get really distracted by things that if you’ve ever heard the term urgent versus important. There are things that feel urgent that we have to do, but maybe they’re not actually important and this is tricky. It doesn’t mean that we say, “Let’s burn it all down. Let’s quit all our jobs. Let’s never do anything that’s going to pass away again.” Of course, it’s not that. When I think about housework, sometimes it’s nice to think these dishes are going to pass away one day.

Hank Smith: 01:29 Yeah, eventually.

Aislin Dyer: 01:30 You know that laundry, it will not be resurrected. I don’t know, sometimes that’s a nice thought to think it will pass away, but there can be eternal principles behind the things that we do, even in a temporal space that we can say, well, the service we’re giving in our families, a family culture of shared work and unified effort, a space we create where we can fellowship others, the self-discipline we cultivate when we’re good stewards of what we have. Those principles are very eternal and they can fulfill eternal purposes. So that’s why I love that President Nelson in General Conference just invited us to think celestial, what do you really want and how does everything you’re doing help or not help you along the path to that goal?

  02:14 It’s interesting for us to figure out how do we then discern these things? How do we figure out what is an earthly appetite and what’s an eternal something? So verse 20 is really interesting. It says, but ye have an unction from the holy one and you know all things. I’m sure both of you used the word unction like five times before breakfast, right? Yeah. Like top 10 most common words. An unction is an ointment. The Greek word is charisma, and that’s where we get the term chrism. If you’re not familiar with that, in many, many civilizations when somebody is crowned the king or the queen, they are anointed with a chrism, a special ointment, and a holy oil.

  02:57 So when Charles, the 3rd was crowned recently, that’s the most recent earthly monarch that was established, the Archbishop of Canterbury anointed him with a chrism, with an oil. The idea behind that was that now Charles is something more. Before, he was not king. Now, he’s king. He’s more than that regular person. However wealthy and privileged he may have been, he’s something different now.

Hank Smith: 03:22 This anointing has changed something.

Aislin Dyer: 03:25 Exactly, and we get an unction from the holy one. And through that unction, that anointing, we have the ability to know all things. So if we move on to verse 25, it says, and this is the promise that he hath promised us, even eternal life. Then in verse 27 and 28 it says, but the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you and ye need not that any man teach you, but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things and is truth and is no lie. And even as it have taught you, ye shall abide in him. Now little children abide in him that when he shall appear, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before him at his coming.

  04:08 That language just hollers covenant to me. That if we abide in him, we might also say, take his name upon us. If we are with him and we are disciples and we’re following him and doing what we can, what does he promise us? Eternal life. And he gives us gifts to help us with that, to teach us and to guide us. I mean, that’s our baptismal covenant in a nutshell. We’re going to follow him and take his name upon us. He’s going to give us something. He’s going to give us the gift of the Holy Ghost and we can learn all things. It can testify of all truth. One of the things we’re blessed with in the temple, we are symbolically anointed in the temple while we participate there, and that is one of my favorite things to go and do in the temple is the Initiatory, because it feels like just this outpouring of love and confidence and gifts. We get the gift of discernment. The Holy Ghost can help us know what’s right and wrong, how to make our choices, how to figure out what’s important versus urgent.

  05:07 And I truly believe that we can receive capacity through God’s grace, through the gift of his spirit, because of our anointing through our covenants that we can be enlarged and enabled to do whatever God asks of us.

Hank Smith: 05:21 Aislin, I love what you’ve said here. Help me understand when you talk about the temple anointing and how powerful I feel, how my enthusiasm for being a saint, it’s just at its peak and then I come back into parenting and to dealing with life and people. And I don’t want to listen to the message of 1 John and just feel lousy about myself. I don’t want to have any listeners at home thinking, “Well now I’ve just learned what a terrible parent I am. I’ve also learned that I’m not really in the light because I’m stumbling with a relationship.” How do we overcome that feeling of, “Okay, here’s the ideal, here’s what we’re after. And here’s where we are and it’s okay that those are two different things and we can stretch a little bit.” I just can think of a listener at home who’s thinking, “Man, if I would’ve known these things when I was parenting.” It almost can be shame that comes on a parent thinking, “I’m so lousy, I wish I would’ve known.”

Aislin Dyer: 06:26 I relate to that. Maybe my kids would disagree, but I think my biggest flaw as a parent is I’m somebody with a big temper that’s a part of my natural man that I have struggled with my entire life and we all know it. What is extraordinary though, that’s something that I have grappled with and I have known that that was a part of me that was potentially dangerous to the people I love most. I have done the self-flagellation. I have done the, “I’m so terrible, why do I do this? That’ll stop me.” No, it just gets me in a darker and darker place. What’s fascinating though, when the children and youth program was first introduced and they started encouraging us to scaffold our people in our stewardship to make goals, I realized that if I wanted to encourage my kids to make goals and make themselves available so that we could support them, that I should probably model that.

  07:17 So I made some goals of my own and I put them up in a public space in our home and that took some vulnerability for me to do that. But one of the things I put on there was, I need to learn about anger. And I did the baby step, right? I said, “I need to learn about this.” And what was fascinating was by me being open with the fact that I had a goal, I was actively working on something. It’s amazing how it made me more thoughtful and more aware. It gave me that half a second to actually make a choice and not just react with my instinctive natural man. But I had one instance where I had a child say, “Mom, remember your goal.” I just had to eat that one.

Hank Smith: 08:01 Oh man.

Aislin Dyer: 08:03 What was fascinating is I did learn more about it. I’ve always tried to be careful about apologizing to my kids, that’s actually really important to me. I have watched in our family as I apologized and as I sought to grow and to change. I have watched my children be more gentle with one another. I have watched them become more ready and willing to seek forgiveness. And looking back, it was a majorly gradual process and I have not fully arrived. We are not deceiving ourselves about that. I still have issues, but I see progress. I can actually see progress in myself where I go, “You know what? I don’t get mad as often as I used to or I don’t snap as quick.” I cannot even express the relief I feel that it was possible to make progress. Did I really believe that I could make progress?

  08:52 Maybe sometimes I didn’t. Maybe I thought, “This is just me. This is who I am and this is what we all get here in this fallen world. It’s going to take the Resurrection to fix this.” But I do see progress and that is something where I see the Atonement of Jesus Christ working in my life. This is that process of becoming that we love to talk about. And it is slow, it is a wrestling match sometimes, but we have a fellowship to help one another within our families, within our other church communities. And as we are vulnerable with one another, we give each other permission to also work and struggle and hold each other’s hands and bear one another’s burdens as we do so.

Dr. Justin Dyer: 09:34 We need to make sure we’re not shaming ourselves for shaming others. There’s a really vicious cycle that can come up. I love in 1 John one, he does talk about the reality of sin, but he also talks about the reality of salvation. Just what Aislin was saying there. 1 John one verse nine, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And then jumping over to chapter two, there verses one and two, my little children, these things I write unto you that ye sin not and if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father Jesus Christ, the righteous, and I love that. He’s like, “I’m going to write these things to you so you don’t sin, but that’s probably going to happen.” We have an advocate with the Father and he is in verse two there, the propitiation or sacrifice for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

  10:36 This isn’t one of those localized gods that some of the people were thinking of at the time. This is a God of the whole world. He is faithful. I love that pairing with John and it’s kind of like every other verse, like verse eight in verse one is about sin. Verse nine is about forgiveness. Verse 10 is about don’t sin. Verse one in the next chapter is, if you do sin, we have Jesus. And verse two, he is the sacrifice for our sins and of the whole world. He’s pairing these oh so tightly, he’s binding them together. And again, we have to teach the whole truth, which is both of these, and I just think John’s doing such a masterful job here of wrapping these two ideas together.

Hank Smith: 11:24 It’s like the Fall and the Atonement. The Fall and the Atonement over and over. The Fall is important.

Aislin Dyer: 11:31 Yep. Tell the whole story, not just half of it.

Hank Smith: 11:34 What we’re talking about here reminds me of an experience I had years ago. Sarah and I were walking out of the Jordan River temple and we’re just walking back to our car. She asked me just an odd question. She said, “Do you think that Adam and Eve felt a little dumb when they found out that they were naked?” And I said, “What?” And I was so confused. And she said, “Well, think about it. If you didn’t know you were naked and then you found out later. ‘Oh, by the way, that whole time you were naked.’ Don’t you feel like you’d just look back and go, ‘Oh my goodness. I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe that.'” I kind of laughed and I said, “Where are you going with this?” And she said, “I learned something today. It’s not fair to judge yesterday’s mistakes with today’s knowledge.”

  12:35 When we learn something new or we get a new truth from the scriptures, I think it’s dangerous for them to say, “Let’s look back and see what would’ve been different had I known that thing before. What relationship could have been saved? What child could have been helped? That can be a dangerous, hurtful place to go where if we learn something new, let’s look forward to what’s possible, what we can do now.” Because I worry about the moms and dads listening who are now maybe grandma and grandpa and who are thinking, “Oh, I could have been a better parent. I should have been a better parent. Why didn’t I know this before?” And I’m sure both of you have felt that way. I’ve felt that way. I feel bad for our oldest child. She has often said about our youngest child, our two youngest are twins, and she’d say “They have a completely different life than I did. How come you’re so nice and so sweet now?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m so sorry you were kind of a little experiment. We learned a lot.”

Aislin Dyer: 13:32 You can’t keep up the same level of intensity. You learn what’s actually important.

Hank Smith: 13:36 We’ve learned a lot since you were young.

Dr. Justin Dyer: 13:39 Whenever I meet a student and I find out that they were in a class that I taught for the first time, I tell him, “I think you can go get your money back for that one.” Because I’ve learned a lot. I don’t think our oldest daughter can go get her money back for the… But of course the Savior is the Savior. Jesus is the one that saves, we don’t do that. And he’s really good at that. He’s really good at saving, that was his job. We do the very best we can. We get wrapped up in the love of God and we move forward.

Aislin Dyer: 14:10 I think we need to talk about the central point of all of these topics that we’ve talked about, that God is love. That everything that we’ve been talking about is rooted in God’s love for us, what he wants for us, and when we don’t fully understand that love or when we need more of it in our lives. In 1 John chapter four verses seven through 10, it says, beloved, let us love one another for love is of God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God. For God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us because that God sent his only begotten son into the world that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

  15:03 The thing that Elder Jeffrey R. Holland said that the first great commandment of all eternity is to love God with all of our heart, might, mind, and strength. That’s the first great commandment. But the first great truth of all eternity is that God loves us with all of his heart, might, mind, and strength. That love is the foundation stone of eternity and it should be the foundation stone of our daily life. So as we have been talking about fellowship and about the reality of sin and the gift of a Savior, if we look at it with the assumption that God is loving us, it is really going to change how we see things. The big questions that I’ve struggled with in my life when they are seen through the lens of God’s love, I don’t understand everything, but I have a trust that is going to say, “You know what? It’s going to work out.”

  15:54 I remember when we had been married for about 10 years, I looked at Justin one day and I said, “I don’t get as mad at you anymore as I used to.” And we laughed about that, but I realized when you do something or say something that feels insensitive, my first reaction is not to say, “How dare he be so mean to me? Or he’s being a jerk or whatever.” Now my first assumption is, “Well, he must be really distracted or he’s probably pretty stressed right now, or maybe he’s hangry.” And I realized I now have a benign assumption of where he’s coming from, that if something happens, he’s not trying to hurt me. I know that because I know him. I’ve had enough history of our relationship where I know he’s not trying to be mean. He loves me. If something happens that feels bumpy or difficult, okay, what’s the situation that’s making it that way? But it’s not that our relationship is so bad.

  16:50 And of course we have fallen relationships, and we’ve all got a lot of relationship work to do. But when I think about our heavenly parents, when I think about our Savior Jesus Christ, if there is something out there that is really hard or they’ve asked me to do something difficult, if I look at it through the lens of, “Well, they love me. So either they’re going to help me with this or this is going to help me grow.” It’s kind of the spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down, but it’s the real medicine. Is it’s God’s love.

  17:20 I love what Elder Robert M. Daynes said in just this last general conference October of 2023. He said, “Jesus announced at the outset that he had come to heal the broken-hearted to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. It wasn’t just a to-do list or good PR, it is the shape of his love. And our covenants and commandments are not rules to earn his love, he already loves you perfectly, but our challenge is to understand and shape our life to that love.” And I love that idea of he loves us, so how do we shape our lives to his love?

Dr. Justin Dyer: 18:01 I love that. It makes me think, “Okay, I’m probably in some ways in my life constricting God’s love from getting to me. How do I remove the weeds and everything so that God’s love can more purely come into me?” And it seems like that’s what the commandments really are deep down is, “Hey, this is a way that you can experience God’s love.”

John Bytheway: 18:24 I think sometimes if we’re in error, we’re looking at God like a university professor. Let’s throw us all under the bus here.

  18:34 Who takes delight in making the class hard and flunking people instead of a God who wants to bless us, who loves us, who wants to save us, and even sends an advocate, I am your advocate. I love that verse incidentally, if any man, if any woman, if any teenager sin, we have an advocate. So when we use the wrong kind of paradigm of “You did that wrong, I’m going to flunk you.” Instead of someone who’s on our side that we can get into trouble. And everything John is telling us is what you were saying, Aislin, this is a God who loves us. What’s that song? Be still thy soul. The Lord is on thy side and we have sung that 100 times and sometimes we still don’t. “Oh really? You mean he loves me? He wants me to succeed?” Yeah. He’s not that professor that you had that takes pride in how many can’t make it through my classes because they’re so hard. That’s not him. But I like that message that you just articulated.

Hank Smith: 19:39 Aislin, I think this is absolutely critical. John, you might remember this way back in our Doctrine & Covenants year, we had Dr. Kate Holbrook talking to us about plural marriage. Kate incidentally has since passed away. She taught something so crucial as she started her lesson. She said, “The only way you can approach this topic is through God’s love. You have to put that lens on that God loves us and that the Savior loves us and wants the best for us.” Scott Woodward, our friend up at BYU Idaho who uses the term, “When you read scripture, you read church history, you read anything, you either come at it with a hermeneutic of trust or a hermeneutic of suspicion.” And that changes the way you read something. It changes the way you view something, and I think what you’re asking us to do here is to have a hermeneutic of trust when it comes to anything that God is teaching us or telling us, that it’s coming from a basis that he loves us and wants to help us.

  20:42 John, I think that’s what you’re saying as well, is that, “I’ve been hurt by a university professor or something or a teacher who really didn’t have my best interest in mind. I should have been suspicious. If I’d been more suspicious, I wouldn’t have gotten hurt.” But with the Lord, Aislin, are you saying I can come at this with full trust? That whatever he teaches me is in my best interest?

Aislin Dyer: 21:03 Exactly. I think that love is one of the foundational elements of the character of God and the nature of God. It is how and why he does everything. This is my work and my glory. This is what I do, because I love them. I’m going to help these children to become the greatest that they can be. Sometimes we don’t feel very loved and that’s a real experience in this fallen world, but it just reminds me about what President Nelson is teaching us about covenant that he says, “Our covenants help us feel God’s love and they put us into a position and a pattern of living where that love is less restricted.” As you put it, Justin.

John Bytheway: 21:45 Well, Justin, you mentioned a verse of scripture that when we are just so confused and can’t figure out anything, we can go back to the angel asking Nephi, “Knowest thou the condescension of God”, and you mentioned that. His answer, “Well, I know he loves his children, but I don’t know the meaning of all things.” And that is such a good starting point. I’ve never met Herman Newdik. I didn’t have a class with Herman Newdik.

Hank Smith: 22:14 You can thank Scott Woodward for that one.

John Bytheway: 22:16 Of a way of looking at things. If we start with that, we know God loves us and then what’s that one in second Nephi 26, “he doeth not anything, save it be for the benefit of the world.”

Hank Smith: 22:27 The benefit.

John Bytheway: 22:28 Taking it from that angle. That’s a great insight, Hank. Kate Holbrook talked about that topic. Well start here and that helps everything else.

Dr. Justin Dyer: 22:39 Going back to the idea of just knowing who God is. When we’re in fellowship with God, we know who he is, we know his character and so much just flows from that.

Hank Smith: 22:50 As Aislin said, it doesn’t make it easy, but it does mitigate some of the difficulty of and the confusion.

Aislin Dyer: 22:57 And that love can help squeeze out our fears that are going to get in our way.

John Bytheway: 23:02 I have a daughter who when she was three years old, had an unusual fascination with the dishwasher and whenever the lid was open it was free dishes and she’d grab them and start running around the house. Now, if I love my daughter and she picks up a knife and starts running around with it, if I love her, what’s my job?

Hank Smith: 23:26 Stop. Teach.

John Bytheway: 23:28 A God who loves me is going to tell me when I’m messing up. I appreciate that. God gives us a conscience, a light of Christ because he loves us so that I know I probably shouldn’t do that again. I don’t want it to sound like he loves us so much that he doesn’t care what we do. Actually he cares what we do because he loves us so much.

Dr. Justin Dyer: 23:53 Something about our understanding of the premortal life is so important here to understand that this is what we wanted. I mean, we were in the premortal life. We saw our heavenly parents and we’re like, “You are literally the two most awesome people in the universe and we want to be like you. Please, can we be like you?” And they said, “Absolutely. Here’s the plan. You’re going to go down there.” Sometimes we’re in the middle of things. We lose the perspective that this is really what we wanted and they’re just helping us to accomplish what we said that we wanted in the first place. For some of my university students, they decided, “Yes, I want that diploma.” And they get in, they’re like, “Well, I didn’t know I was going to have to do all this work.” And this assignment or that assignment, and then you get in the weeds and they can forget that, “Well, this is what I wanted. This is what I chose.”

  24:50 Sometimes we need that reminder as university students, as children of God, this really is what we wanted that we asked for. All our heavenly parents are trying to do is give us exactly what we, I’m sure, begged for and rejoiced for. At the thought that we could have all of this. I think that knowledge of the premortal life really helps at least me, open my eyes to say, “Oh, I wanted this.” Their whole job, you think about really kind nice parents, okay, let’s help you get there. All of their love is going towards helping us to achieve what we told them we wanted.

Hank Smith: 25:26 Yeah, that’s fantastic.

John Bytheway: 25:29 There’s a phrase I heard, I can’t remember who said it, that God is more interested in our growth than he is in our comfort. What would it be if your life were always comfortable? You might not grow very much. You’re in a tough calling right now, Justin. I’ll bet there’s a lot of growth there and a lot of feeling God’s love for people there. I love what Brad Wilcox said once, “a God who is asking nothing of us is making nothing of us.” So a God who loves us is going to ask things of us as well, and maybe he’s more interested in our growth. And sometimes we don’t see that in the middle of something, but we see it afterwards and we could say, “I’m glad that God helped me through that thing.”

Dr. Justin Dyer: 26:14 We’ve been talking about God’s love for us and the question is how do we love God? 1 John five, two through three, it seems like John’s trying to help us know how do we love him? He says, by this, we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep His commandments for this is the love of God that we keep his commandments, and his commandments are not grievous. And then if you go to 2 John 1:6, he says, and this is love that we walk after his commandments. This is the commandment that as ye have heard from the beginning, ye should walk in it. And this goes right back to when Christ said, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” How is it that we love God and what is it that we do? Well, he’s giving it to us right here. We love God by keeping his commandments.

  27:13 And I love how he says, “Guess what? These aren’t grievous.” Now I will not say that they’re always the most comfortable and they can be very difficult and sometimes just absolutely heart-wrenching for us. But he says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Picking up Christ’s burden. That’s the footnote to the word grievous there. Really, when we follow the Savior, that is the light burden. We all have to carry some kind of burden in our lives. Every choice comes with some kind of burden and you’re saying, “You know what? If you pick up the commandments that’s loving God, you are experiencing the light burden.” And I really love that we’re defining love as an action, like something that we do. Hank, I’ve listened to some of the things that you’ve talked about running marathons.

  28:05 When you say you run marathons, I don’t think about you sitting on your couch having thoughts about marathons, good or bad. I imagine you actually out there running the marathon, and that’s the same with our love for God, loving God isn’t just sitting on our couch having nice thoughts about God. It’s “Oh, I’m loving him by doing. I’m loving him by keeping his commandments.” And that’s really where we see a lot of the definition of God’s love. In 1 John 4:9, it says, in this was manifest the love of God towards us because that God sent his only begotten son into the world, that we might be alive through him and herein his love. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.

  28:56 So it wasn’t that God just sits somewhere in heaven and feels really nice feelings about us that wouldn’t do us much good. It’s that he’s doing that. He’s acting for us. When Aislin and I were married, there’s a phrase that I’ll never forget because Aislin’s grandma cross stitched it and put it on our wall. “You cannot love without giving.”

John Bytheway: 29:20 “You cannot love without giving,” sounds like from my notes here I’ve taken today. That you contribute more than you consume. It sounds like the same thing. See how much I’m learning today? This is awesome.

Hank Smith: 29:33 Justin, I love that you said commandments are a way to experience God’s love. It’s a completely different paradigm to, “Oh, commandments are difficult.”

Aislin Dyer: 29:44 If we look at it through God’s love though, isn’t it beautiful to say, “God wants me to be safe, so God’s asked me to do this. God wants me to have good relationships. God wants me to avoid the pain that’s not absolutely necessary. That’s the why behind it. Wow, that sure helps.”

Hank Smith: 30:02 Yeah. I remember being young and thinking the first commandment is thou shalt not have fun because everything that seemed fun was out of the limit. I don’t remember when that changed, but it was a profound moment for me going, “Wait, the Lord has given me these… John, they’re not fences, they’re guardrails.”

John Bytheway: 30:19 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 30:19 Didn’t you give that talk years ago?

John Bytheway: 30:21 No, I didn’t. But Boyd K. Packer did. I used it as a book title. President Packer said, “How unfortunate is the youth who feels like the standards and commandments are a fence around love that says keep out.” He said, “Actually, they are the guardrails on the highway to love and happiness with guideposts along the way.” That’s a hermeneutic right there. But a different way of looking at it is that these commandments will keep you safe. As you said, Aislin.

Hank Smith: 30:56 Now, Elder Christofferson 2021, “his commandments are not grievous, just the opposite. They mark the path of healing, happiness, peace, and joy. Our father and our Redeemer have blessed us with commandments. And in obeying their commandments, we feel their perfect love more fully and more profoundly.” An American pastor, I wish I could remember his name, said, “Real Christians do not carry their religion. Their religion carries them. It is not weight, it is wings.” The commandments are wings. They’re not weights, they’re wings, they can take you places. Help you see and feel God’s love.

Dr. Justin Dyer: 31:36 Maybe just a quick thing. When we’re looking at love, there’s all kinds of definitions. There’s the story of a young man who has caught some fish and he’s there by the river and he’s cooking the fish and eating the fish, and an older man comes by and says, “Young man, why are you eating that fish?” And the man says, “Because I love fish.” And the old man says, “Oh, you love the fish? That’s why you took it out of the water and killed it and cooked it. Don’t tell me you love the fish, you love yourself and because the fish tastes good to you, you took out of the water and killed it and cooked it.” So we have this word love that means all kinds of things. And when we really show our love for God, is when we do those kinds of things that are more uncomfortable for us.

  32:20 Think about what the Lord said, the Lord gave his only begotten son. It’s sacrifice. Our level of love for God can really be determined by the level that we’re willing to sacrifice, that Abrahamic sacrifice. There’s these moments you see in the scriptures and you see them reflected in our own lives where we say, “Me following the commandments there. Me following what God wanted me to do. That truly helped me to dig down and see, and develop the love for God in that really meaningful way.” That sacrifice being that revelation to us and to God that this is how much we truly love God.

Hank Smith: 33:06 Justin, Aislin, this has been fantastic. What else do we need to see in these three epistles and Jude?

Dr. Justin Dyer: 33:13 One of the things that comes up is, all right, we have these people who are leaving the church, well, what do we do about that? How do we connect with them and how do we think about that? I think it’s interesting the language, it’s language we really don’t use anymore. John first tries to identify, “Okay, what is it that they’re teaching that’s wrong and that’s important to realize?” In 1 John 2: 22, it says he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ, he is antichrist and denieth the Father and the Son. Whosoever denieth the son the same hath not the Father, but he that acknowledges the son hath the father also. This term antichrist comes up several times and it’s not really one that we use very much. We don’t refer to my neighbor Bob, you know, the antichrist? I mean, it’s just not the language that we should be using here.

  33:59 What do we do with this? I love in 1 John chapter four, where if we have these teachings, what do we do with the teachings? And we’re not quite sure. And he says to try the spirits. I thought that’s really interesting. He says, there’s some false prophets out there. Try the spirits and see if they’re in alignment. And John’s day it was about Jesus coming in the flesh and suffering for their sins. For us today, I think one of the most useful things we can do to try the spirits is look at the documents, the Living Christ, the Family: a Proclamation to the World and the Restoration document. And those documents are just so wonderful to help us to say, “Okay, I’m hearing these things from people. Maybe they’ve left the church. What’s true? What’s not true?” Taking those documents to try that really, really is helpful.

Aislin Dyer: 34:46 Those are from our special witnesses. That they have a unified voice in those things where they’ve said, “This is where we’re all solid.” And man, we already talked about how important it’s for us to have their witness.

Dr. Justin Dyer: 34:56 And with that, then, okay, so how do we work with individuals? Well, I love President Nelson’s talk, peacemakers needed. In there, he talks so much about how there’s all these different voices and sometimes they’re pretty harsh and we shouldn’t be contributing to that. How can we continue to make sure that we’re loving? And that’s what this is all about. And John’s central message is to love. How can we make sure that we’re still loving individuals while recognizing we don’t agree on certain things, but it’s so important for us to remember that a person is so much more than certain beliefs that they may have. If we have our maybe dear friend who’s left the church, sometimes it’s all that we can see, but you know what? We still enjoyed going fishing with them or we still enjoyed doing… Let’s just build our relationships in all these other ways and not let this thing come between us, but just still continue to love and appreciate.

  35:55 Now, I will say sometimes we do need to probably be careful about a lot of negativity about the gospel we take into our lives. I had a friend who, he had adult children. One of his adult children had left the church and every time this adult child came over, the child would just rip on the church, couldn’t say anything good about the church. And one day my friend said to his son, he said, “I know that if you went into a Buddhist’s home, that you would not criticize the Buddhist’s beliefs the whole time. When you come in my home, I would really appreciate it if you wouldn’t tear down my faith.” My friend said it was from that moment that their relationship got better. Where he was able to say, “You know what? Let’s maybe put some boundaries here. I love you. You’re so wonderful. Thank you, but maybe there’s certain topics here that we’re not perhaps ready to discuss.”

  36:53 And that way the love and the relationship can grow in so many other really important ways that we’re not just stuck on this, which is very important. But boy, loving and growing our relationship in so many other ways is just so critical.

Aislin Dyer: 37:08 President Nelson taught us to prioritize our testimony, put in the work for your own testimony. Sometimes I’ll tell my kids when they’re on each other, I’d be like, “You just need to be the boss of you right now.” And sometimes we just need to be the boss of us. Sometimes that’s where we need to put our energy. In the book of Jude, they have some really interesting insights about how we recognize that in this life, we are often living alongside people who may or may not be unified with us in every single thing. Unity is the long-term celestial goal and it’s a bumpy path and we’re working on it. But in our discipleship, when we don’t feel unified, he says in verse three of Jude, you should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered to the saints. And when I hear the word contend, sometimes I think have a fight for. But the more I’ve pondered this verse, that idea of earnestly contend, I need to make sure that I’m doing my work and I’m putting in my effort.

  38:05 President Nelson, he said this in a social media post last August. “I plead with you to take charge of your testimony of Jesus Christ, work for it, own it, care for it, nurture it so that it will grow. And he cautions us also to be careful about what you’re putting in. Don’t only be feeding it junk. Make sure you give God a chance. Give him a fair amount of your time.” And then he says, “Watch for miracles to happen. If we don’t work for that testimony and if our testimony is not rooted in our relationship with God. We’ve been talking about God is love, God is light. If we are not connected to him, then it’s going to be really hard and all of our other appetites that we discussed, those can gain the upper hand.” So Jude gives us a list of examples of people who separated themselves is the phrase he uses, that they separated themselves from the covenant path because they were unwilling to follow the pattern that God had given them because it conflicted with other things they wanted.

  39:02 And I want to make note and realize that if people choose to step away from the church, there’s a lot of different reasons for that. And I am not judging all those reasons. Sometimes it happens because you have a disagreement with doctrine. Sometimes it happens because there have been painful relationships or things that have happened. We are imperfect people all in the same place. I’m not trying to say, “Oh, they just didn’t want it hard enough.” I’m not saying that. In the Book of Jude, he gives us a list of examples of people and where they got off. He talks about the Israelites after leaving Egypt. That was not like this point A to point B kind of thing. They struggled with leaving things behind and things that maybe felt more comfortable. And this new normal was sometimes not what they wanted.

  39:46 He talks about the fallen angels. We know that a third of the host of heaven became convinced that Heavenly Father’s plan was too risky or wasn’t worth the difficulty. We don’t know all of their reasons, but some did not choose this. The residents of Sodom and Gomorrah prioritize their physical lust over the safety and dignity of other human beings. Verse nine is really interesting because it refers to something that I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this. I had never heard of this. It’s this little snippet of a story that kind of just floats by you and you go, “Wait, what?” The Bible scholar NT Wright says what this is from is the testament of Moses. Is a largely lost work. It only exists in fragmentary Latin now, but apparently Jude would’ve been very familiar with this story and he expected his readers to be. In the testimony of Moses, there’s an episode where Michael, the archangel and Satan get into an argument about what gets to happen to Moses’ body when he’s done with his life.

  40:43 And that is totally added to my reading list for after this life. There’s so many stories that I want to learn more about. But what’s interesting about this is Michael appeals to God to make the decision essentially. And Satan, as per his very typical MO, is not thrilled with recognizing the authority of God in decision making. It’s just another example of that who’s in alignment with God and seeking his guidance. They talk about Balaam. The prophet with the talking donkey is wanting to find a loophole to get around what he knew what he was supposed to do, but how could he satisfy what he wanted to? We have verse 11, it talks about Cora, it’s spelled Core in the King James version.

  41:26 This is an interesting story from number 16, where Cora was the ringleader of rebellion against Moses. And basically they came to Moses, Cora said, “Ye take too much upon you. Seeing all that the congregation are holy, every one of them. And the Lord is among them. Wherefore then lift ye up yourself above the congregation of the Lord.” He didn’t like the pattern of authority that God had established. He does not want to get told what to do. He’s chafing against that. And then we have the example of Cain who’s kind of this ultimate example of siding with Satan versus the Lord. And there’s a lot of reasons why people choose to leave. We’ve talked about reflecting on ourselves and making sure we’re not deceiving ourselves. This list is kind of a suggestion to say, where are you in alignment? What’s hard for you? Where does your natural man get in the way?

  42:14 When we have a loved one who chooses to step away from the church, we can have a lot of really big feelings about that. Sometimes it can feel insulting or hurtful, so we might feel like lashing out. We might be angry, we might be offended. We can have grief because maybe we’re losing what we thought something would look like in our families or our community and we should grieve I think when we lose someone. We want everybody, and if people choose to step away, we’re losing out on what they could bring in that particular sphere. Now hopefully though, with the love of Christ, we’re able to move through those feelings and still maintain the relationship. When I was in high school, I had a good friend who was investigating the church and wanted to learn and we would read the Book of Mormon together.

  43:04 I was able to be with her while the missionaries taught her, and it was a really special experience for me sharing something that I loved with my friend. She was not able to get baptized until she was 18 and her 18th birthday came and she was so excited, I mean, to me it seemed to be. And she was baptized. At that time, we would wait a week before a new convert was confirmed. And the next Sunday, she didn’t show up to be confirmed and receive the gift of the Holy Ghost and she never came back. I was so sad because my understanding had been that she loved this and was excited and I was giving her this very precious gift, something that was so important to me. And then the fact that she just didn’t follow through and just kind of disappeared. I kind of felt like something very important to me had just been treated not very important.

  43:55 It kind of felt like, that was personally a hard thing for me. But through the love of Christ, we can maintain relationships. We can find ways. Like Justin said, a person is a lot more than whether or not they have a membership in the church.

  44:11 In Jude, he talks about what we do. He says, beloved in verse 20, building up yourself on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost. Keep yourself in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. You’ve got to have your foundation. That makes me think about Helaman 5:12, remember that it’s upon the rock of our Redeemer that we’re built. Then whatever else happens, we’re solid. And then when we have that solid footing in verse 22 of Jude, he says, then of some we have compassion and that will make a difference.

  44:47 We’re going to be able to feel this out. And then in verse 23 he says, and then we might be in a position to save with fear and pull them out of the fire. We need to just be ready for those opportunities when they come. And if we don’t have a relationship, we might not be close enough to be there to snatch someone out of the fire or to be any sort of positive, compassionate influence in our loved ones. And I really feel like these things can be super complicated and it’s the Holy Ghost. It’s that light of God through our anointing that we can rely on to guide us through what can be really complicated things and the Lord knows how to do it because every single one of us does things that take us out of alignment with God. We all at times separate ourselves from him and he loves us through it. And so he will help us do the same thing.

Hank Smith: 45:36 Wonderful. Thank you, both of you, for talking about this. It’s interesting that it was happening during the time of John, isn’t it? You would think, “Oh, people leaving the faith is something in the last 20 years that we’ve experienced.” When really it’s been something that’s been around the entire time. Even if you look at the history of the Latter-day Church with Kirtland apostasy, this has been around for a long time. I want to share an experience like you said, Aislin, these are complex. You can’t generalize someone. “Oh, they’re going to step away from the church.” Here’s why, because every situation is different. I have a close friend who very good latter-day saint, wonderful family, and she for multiple reasons decided that they were going to step away for a while and maybe go join a different congregation, a different church.

  46:26 As we were talking, something fascinating happened. Again, I’m not quite sure what should happen, but this didn’t seem the right thing. She said the ward family that they had been a part of for so long kind of disappeared really quickly. She said, “It got very awkward with me and these are friends I’ve had for 15 years. These are my friends we’ve gone to dinner with and these are friends that we’ve helped each other raise our kids together, soccer games, and neighborhood parties and everything. And all of a sudden it went quiet.” She said, “All I really got was some cookies on my doorstep and texts to say the opening prayer in Sacrament meeting.” And it just went so silent and you could tell it just broke her heart because she was struggling with her faith. She really was in faith crisis mode. And I don’t think there’s anyone who could have stepped in and saved the day. That’s not what I don’t think she was expecting nor anybody else. But the radio silence was just devastating to her.

  47:31 And Justin, it’s like you said, we can create some limits and say, “Well, I know that you feel differently about the church now than I do. Let’s create some limits, but let’s maintain our friendship. Let’s continue in what we’ve always had.” She said, “We’re not completely different people now. We’re not all of a sudden strangers, we’re still the same people because I’m so far removed from the situation. It was easy for me to say, ‘Well, they shouldn’t have done this. They should have done this. They shouldn’t have done that.’ But it helps me understand when people around me decide to step away, that I don’t want to be just silent about it.” So maybe Justin and Aislin, what you’re saying is let love guide you. There’s not exactly the right way to do this, but step forward in love with faith that the Lord can work this out.

Dr. Justin Dyer: 48:20 Hank, you’d asked earlier from research, what does love look like? When we’re talking about research and parenting and what’s best for kids, a few things come to mind. One is what’s called responsiveness. And that simply means that the parent is dialed into that particular child and to what they need. And what it is that that child needs to progress. So often we get in a hurry and we just kind of have knee-jerk reactions and don’t really sit down and say, “What is it that that child needs? What is it that they’re thinking about? What is it that they’re feeling and how do we respond? Responsiveness to what they need?” And I think in the example of your friend there, the question we should ask ourselves is, “What is it that they need? What is it that they need to feel loved, and connected?” And really trying to understand those individuals.

  49:22 Brigham Young said that we should study our children’s temperaments and parent them accordingly. He had a lot of children to study, so I don’t know. But this idea that we actually look at each child, we treat them as an individual and we give them exactly what they need. And I really do think that’s what the Lord gives to us. He’s not parenting en masse. It’s the one by one. It’s the give the attention that that particular child needs, understanding who they are. And unfortunately it’s kind of a moving target. It’s a moving target for a couple.

  50:00 We were married pretty young, and in the last 20 years, we’ve changed, we’ve grown up a lot. What is needed at one time is probably not what’s needed at another time. And for our kids, it’s the exact same thing. It’s always constantly figuring out what is it that this person needs? I can’t think of hardly anything but better in terms of a definition of love than, “Who is this person? What’s going on with them in their life? Let me understand them and then let me give them what it is that they need right now.”

Hank Smith: 50:32 Do my best to assess, really listen, assess and then move forward with something. Parenting is so much trial and error, isn’t it?

Aislin Dyer: 50:43 Isn’t it amazing that we believe in a plan that is us learning through trial and error? As much as we learned as a child, our parents were having trials and errors and sometimes we were the trials and sometimes we made the errors. And sometimes they were a trial to us. I’ve been thinking, there is a beach in Northern California called Glass Beach and it used to be a landfill and it was full of broken bottles and it was a garbage dump and it was horrible. And then over time, if you think of the waves just pulling that material in and out, rolling it back and forth, it is an entire beach made of pebbles of different colored glass and there is not a sharp side among them. They are beautiful and they glow and it is an amazing thing to go to that beach and just walk on all of these beautiful green and blue and brown and clear pebble and to realize that what used to be garbage, dangerous garbage, is now beautiful and smoothed.

  51:52 And I love the fact that the love of God can be that water for us in our relationships. We are sharp-edged, broken individuals. And I don’t mean unredeemably shameful broken. I mean we are inherently fallen. That’s part of our experience here. But we do have this think celestial long-term perspective available to us if we choose to lay hold of that, that the love of God is just going to rub us back and forth. That happens so much in our families and our ward communities in these places of by trial and error fellowship. Through the light of God, we better learn how to do these things and all these rough edges are going to get worn off and we will be transformed. In 1 John chapter three verse two, it says, beloved, now we are the sons of God. And I love that now because to me it indicates that maybe not before, we’ve been reborn. We didn’t use to have that same status with him, but now we’re children of his salvation. Now we are the sons and daughters of God.

  52:59 And it does not yet appear what we shall be. We’re not quite there yet. We don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like or what it’s going to take, but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him or we shall see him as he is. We will know him. We will then each be the epitome of a special witness of Christ and we will be able to see and recognize him. I don’t think we have the capacity to appreciate everything the Savior is to us. I don’t think our brains can hold it, but we will recognize everything that has happened and we will be big enough to hold that love, and that gratitude, and that knowledge that has come. We will have become as he is.

Hank Smith: 53:49 Absolutely wonderful. Man, so good. Justin, Aislin, we have been just so blessed by your time and your insights today. Let’s say I’m a listener at home. What do you hope changes for me? What do you hope I get out of this as I’m walking away going, “That was good.” What should be the sticking points that I keep in my mind?

Dr. Justin Dyer: 54:09 For me, having been able to delve into this, I realized, boy, John had some problems in his day. They were really thorny, difficult issues. And his answer, God his love. God loves you. There is a reality of sin, but there’s a reality of salvation. Jesus is real, he came in the flesh. Just this message that these thorny issues we will experience in our lives. Probably what we need to be thinking is how does God feel about me? How can I experience more of God’s love for myself? And then how can I experience that for other individuals? Almost any problem that you face, those questions are going to help to guide you through that.

Aislin Dyer: 54:58 And I just have that sense of this is a long game that we are playing. President Nelson has just invited us to think, “Where are we going? What’s the goal? What was in Jesus’ intercessory prayer that we may be one with them.” Across time, across generations and experiences, he didn’t say “Only the rich people.” He didn’t say, “Only the people who live over here.” His goal was that everyone that was willing to be united to him would be and would be empowered and protected and guided. And through God’s light and through God’s love, we can have the trust. We have Christ’s prayers for us that one day we can be united with them and be like them. And that’s what’s going to grease all of the tough, rough stuff that are inevitably part of a fallen world. And I have a testimony that that is true, that his light and his love make all the difference.

Hank Smith: 55:53 Fantastic. John, what a great day.

John Bytheway: 55:59 Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got lots of notes and I’ve got work to do. I’ve got a checklist. Apologize to my kids tonight.

Hank Smith: 56:08 To contribute more than you consume.

John Bytheway: 56:10 Than I consume. That’s the sign for the fridge. That’s some really great and beautiful teachings. And looking at Jude that way, as why people even, what do we do? Wow. That’s brilliant. Thank you for that.

Hank Smith: 56:22 Wonderful. Thank you both for being here.

Aislin Dyer: 56:24 Thank you so much for inviting us.

Dr. Justin Dyer: 56:25 It’s wonderful.

Aislin Dyer: 56:26 It’s been a pleasure, a joy.

Hank Smith: 56:28 Been a lot of fun. I feel like something settling in my soul. Be still and know that I am God. I can know that I’ve had a great time with you because I feel more love and I feel more light. As we walk away from our discussion, if we feel more love and light, I think we’ve been in the right place at the right time.

Aislin Dyer: 56:48 Yeah.

Dr. Justin Dyer: 56:48 We feel the same.

Aislin Dyer: 56:49 About that. Yes.

Hank Smith: 56:51 We want to thank Dr. Justin and Sister Aislin Dyer for being with us today. We want to thank our executive producer Shannon Sorensen. We want to thank our sponsors, David and Verla Sorensen, and we always, every episode we remember our founder, Steve Sorensen.

  57:06 We hope you’ll join us next week. We’re going to talk more about the New Testament on followHIM.

  57:11 Today’s transcripts, show notes, and additional references are available on our website. Followhim.co. That’s followhim.co. You can watch the podcast on YouTube with additional videos on our Facebook and Instagram accounts. All of this is absolutely free and we’d love for you to share it with your family and friends. We’d like to reach more of those who are searching for help with their Come, Follow Me study. If you could subscribe to rate, review, and comment on the podcast, that will make us easier to find. Of course, none of this could happen without our incredible production crew. David Perry, Lisa Spice, Jamie Neilson, Will Stoughton, Krystal Roberts, Ariel Cuadra, and Annabelle Sorenson.

President Russell M. Nelson: 57:50 Whatever questions or problems you have, the answer is always found in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Turn to him. Follow him.