Welcome back. Today we get to study Mosiah Chapter 1, 2, and 3 and I hope you're

as excited about this as I am. King Benjamin's address is one of my all-time

favorite passages in the Book of Mormon.

In fact, I had an amazing experience about a year ago

in these exact chapters,

discussing them over lunch with an evangelical minister friend of mine.

I do a lot of interfaith work that started when I was in Tennessee and it's continued here in Utah.

And this particular friend is a pastor from Alabama that comes out to do some interfaith work with me about every year and one time he was coming out and I said hey can we get together for lunch I want to talk to you about King Benjamin's address.

He's familiar enough with the Book of Mormon to know who I was talking about.

And I said, I think you'll really like what he has to say.

King Benjamin is about as close to an evangelical

Nephite as I think you could want to meet. That intrigued him. So we went to a

Mexican restaurant in downtown Salt Lake City and just ate and talked Book of Mormon, me and this wonderful

evangelical friend of mine. By the end of the conversation he was like, wow, yes,

King Benjamin would make a good evangelical Nephite.

He agreed with a doctrine that we taught and from an interfaith perspective, any time that

Latter-day Saints and evangelicals start discussing things, the conversation tends to go towards grace and wondering

how are we saved, what role do works and grace play in that salvation, what expectation

does God have of us if any and honestly I think these

these passages and King Benjamin are some of the best places for we Latter-day

Saints to understand our faith and to be able to explain it better to those that we sometimes speak past.

So that's the eventual destination today.

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