Come Follow Me with Sam

Welcome to Come Follow Me with Sam! I have combined the last two weeks as they are some of the last words Alma gives, and some very fascinating scriptures! Alma is a man of many sides. He was a rebel, an apostate, a (re)convert, a chief judge, a high priest, a warrior, a missionary, a seeker of the greater things, and a poet, among other things. I have decided to go through these scriptures talking to some of these sides. Was Alma teaching a pattern with the order he put these teachings in? Alma is a sneaky guy. You think you have him figured out and bam! 150 years later we realize that he has perfect symmetrical pattern in his first chapter to his sons (36). Isaiah does a similar thing on a monstrously large scale. So here is a thought I am just throwing out there. Do you think that Alma 36 wasn't the only trick he through in the book? Do you think he followed a similar literary structure throughout the chapters? there's 7 of them, just sayin... 1. Alma 36 - Call to repentan...

Welcome to Come Follow Me with Sam! And welcome to the mission to the Zoramites! This section is so interesting because it actually started as a way to attenuate a more political/military movement by building people spiritually. It ended up instead bringing the downtrodden out of the culture. The Zoramites really twisted religion up, so this section is cool because it teaches some principles of the gospel very simply in a basics course correct. I would like to highlight 2 areas. The first is Alma's lecture on faith.. The second is his comments on prayer. Lets take a closer look at Alma 32 and faith This is where the famous scripture comes from - if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true. There are some important contexts to extract before we should say we get what Alma is saying. I may compare this to Moroni 7 later.  Alma first establishes that God wants to you believe. he desires that you should believe, and particularly on his word.  So how do w...

Welcome to Come Follow Me with Sam! We have two chapters this week. One is korihor the anti-Christ, one is the folly of the Zoramites and a prayer for them. We'll see how Korihor is a really sneaky man, like a nibbler trying to eat the foundation. Hopefully we can use this to see more clearly. Korihor the bore Korihor is an anti-Christ of the vanilla kind. People like him have been wandering the earth since the days of Adam with basically the same arguments. If you look at Korihor's arguments, they actually seem inconsequential and childish. I believe he is using a disorienting trick that I will get into later. For now, look at what he puts. He says the people are bound down under a foolish and vain hope, why do you yoke yourselves? Notice how he is basically making assertions and selling them as pre-built assumptions. Binding down under a foolish and vain hope isn't really the deal. It is not what we are going for. If you told that to Abinidai, he would say, wow, you don...

Welcome to Come Follow Me with Sam! Wow, there is so much that happens in these short chapters. It is really hard to keep up and understand. These chapters are like a secret window into understanding the psyche of the Anti-Nephi-Lehis, the sons of Ammon, and Alma! Really valuable stuff. Why did the Anti-Nephi-Lehis/Ammonites not fight? One thing we can see about the Anti-Nephi-Lehis - they knew the thanksgiving way. I can't think of anyone more truly converted than these people. There is a certain purity without complication or guile to the lives they decided to live. Remember that these people regularly killed Nephites and each other. King Lamoni was troubled because of all the Nephites and Lamanites he had killed and that was why he was afraid of Ammon at first. rebels in his kingdom were not afraid to kill either. This was not a nice place to live. Well, they rejected all of that once they converted to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Here's an interesting thing to think about th...