This is Come Follow Me for Us, Hybrid. A little bit of old, a little bit of new because yeah, I said it and it was good.

And as always, I'm your host Melanie Stroud. This is season 5, episode 19, Matthew 21 through 23, Mark 11, Luke 19 through 20, John 12, behold the king cometh.

And as I was listening to this old one, I thought, this is all really good. There isn't a lot to add. I did ask you all to ask a question like I said, we're four months in. How do you think we're doing with this new Come Follow Me?

And I think it's an appropriate question to ask for years later. How are we doing? Are we as diligent about doing it with our family or are we like, yeah, been there done that? Do we still listen to podcast?

Do we have Sunday night discussions about it? I know we aren't as diligent as we have been the last four years. And I'm not pouring through it like I used to. So I'm just curious. When I ask that question, I think you should do a little introspection on yourself and your family and see, are we able to carry this momentum?

Because hopefully, hopefully we can all like redirect our energies and say, this is just as important now four years later as it was back then.

There's one story in this lesson about hypocrisy and it's talking about the fair season scribes and how they were hypocrites. And there's a lot of people in the world that look at Christians and say that Christians in general are hypocrites.

And I got to thinking about that this week as I was preparing this lesson and thinking about the things that were said and thinking about a dumb mistake, I made this week. And I had taken some information and read into it more than there was there and kind of blew it up.

Someone else took that information and told people in, you know, rumor, we eat blah blah blah, it spread around. And when I realized what had happened and how I had been the start of it, I felt terrible. And I tried to clear it up with people involved until the whole story and take the blame and all the things. And I just had a really heavy heart about it. And I started reading about this hypocrisy and about these scribes and these people that, you know, professed to be so good.

But yet they weren't. And as I started reading through the scriptures and feeling like these people, like, here I am telling everybody to be so good and follow Jesus on the podcast and then look at what I did.

I, of course, going through the book of Mormon, clicked on some stuff and ended up on just the word sincerity. And I felt like the Lord said, you know, you messed up, you made a dumb mistake. And you're trying to make it better.

And you're sincere. You're sincere in the things that you say, you're sincere. When you make the podcast, you're sincere in your testimony. It doesn't mean you're perfect. And I think that was the difference between the scribes and the Pharisees and us as Christians.

We say, yes, we believe in Jesus. We want to keep the commandments. We want to do the things. But we mess up. And I think when we mess up, we own up to it. And we apologize. And we try to do what we can to make it right.

And then we go on and we understand the principle of forgiveness. And we understand that we're not out to deceived people because we're not perfect. It doesn't mean we're pretending to be perfect. And then we're rotten.

Unless we're pretending to be perfect and we're having extra marital affairs and we're doing all sorts of stuff that we know is wrong. And yet we're pretending to be something else because that's what the scribes and Pharisees did. And that's who they were.

And in the first section, it talks about that they tried to appear righteous in order to win praise, influence, and wealth of the world.

All the while, oppressing the people, they should have been blessing. So they were purposely not doing what was right and pretending that they were.

So maybe just something to keep this week in your mind is that of course we're not perfect. And of course we make mistakes. And of course we apologize. And of course we try to make it better.

But it doesn't make us a hypocrite when we fall short of perfection. What makes us a hypocrite is if we don't try to fix it. And if we don't try to be better and if we don't try to be more like Christ the next day.

And I think that's all that he expects of us. I mean the parable last week about the people that only worked the last hour. Remember and they got the same pay.

Christ doesn't care when we get there. He just cares that we get there and that we keep trying. And I showed this little video on Instagram about this girl that was five. And she's an incredible snowboarder. And she was going down the hill.

And they had put a mic in her little snow suit. And as she was going down the hill, she was saying, I'm awesome. I'm such a good snowboarder. Look at how good I can do. And she's like sometimes that fall down.

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