followHIM - Matt. 8; Mark 2-4; Luke 7 Part 1 • Dr. Joshua M. Sears • Feb. 27 - Mar. 5

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

Why does Jesus heal and rescue some and not others? Dr. Joshua Sears examines the relationship between faith and rescue and Jesus healing Gentiles, controlling the weather, and healing people from a distance.00:00 Part 1–Dr. Joshua Sears00:50 Introduction of Dr. Joshua Sears02:18 Faith and healing overview05:37 Our relationship with God08:55 God does everything for our benefit09:45 Nephi considers destruction of Jerusalem13:27 Foundation of God’s love through tribulation15:35 Healing the Centurion’s servant19:33 Jesus can heal Gentiles and from a distance22:38 Parallel to Moroni and the Brother of Jared26:32 Roman Centurions27:50 Doublets in Luke31:22 Geography of Nain and Capernaum33:03 Dr. Sears shares a story from his mission37:06 Jesus calms a storm40:19 John shares a story where a farm worker can sleep through a storm42:26 End of Part 1–Dr. Joshua SearsShow Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.coFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FollowHimOfficialChannelThanks to the followHIM team:Shannon Sorensen: Executive Producer, SponsorDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing, SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Editor, Show NotesJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignWill Stoughton: Video EditorKrystal Roberts: Translation Team, English & French Transcripts, WebsiteAriel Cuadra: Spanish Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com/products/let-zion-in-her-beauty-rise-piano

Welcome to Follow Him, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me study. I'm Hank Smith. And I'm John, by the way. We love to learn. We love to laugh. We want to learn and laugh with you. As together, we follow Him. Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Follow Him. My name is Hank Smith. I'm your host. I'm here with my faithful co-host, John, by the way. Welcome, John, by the way, back to another episode of Follow Him. I'll try to live up to that adjective. That's a semper fidelis thing. John, you are as faithful as they come. You're as good as gold, in my opinion.

Right back at you. The name of the lesson is, Thy faith hath saved thee. Speaking of our lesson today, we brought on a Bible expert who's been with us before, John. Can you tell everybody who's with us? Yes, I was so happy to look at our little schedule and see that Joshua Sears is back with us again because we had such a wonderful time before. Dr. Sears grew up in Southern California, served in the Chile Osorno Mission. He received a bachelor's in ancient Near Eastern Studies from BYU, where he taught at the Missionary Training Center and volunteered as an EMT.

So he was an MTC EMT, I guess. He received a master's from Ohio State University and a PhD in the Hebrew Bible at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include Israelite Prophecy, Marriage and Families in the Ancient World, the publication History of Latter-day Saint Scripture. He is presented at regional and national meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, BYU Campus Education Week, the Sidney B. Sperry Symposium, and the Leonardo Museum Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls. His wife, Alice, is from Hong Kong, plays in the Bells at Temple Square. They live in Linden, Utah with their five children.

Josh, we're so glad to have you back with us again. Thank you. Yeah, Josh, it was with us three times last year for the Old Testament. If we have any listeners who are new to our program, go back and find those episodes with Josh from last year. You will love each of them. They each have their own unique flavor, but man, they were all just will touch your heart. They're so good. So we're excited to have Josh back.

Welcome, Josh. Thanks. Let's just kind of hand the reins over to you, Josh. We're in Matthew 8, Mark 2 and 4, and Luke 7 today. So the synoptic gospels, we're going to spend our time in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But where do you want to start when it comes to these three sections of scripture? Well, I liked how you pointed out that in the Come Follow Me manual, the title of this lesson is Thy Faith Hath Saved The thee. And then the first line in the Individuals and Families Manual says, One of the clearest messages in the New Testament is that Jesus Christ is a healer. Both that first line and the title are themes that you see running throughout these chapters.

You see a lot of people in desperate need of healing and rescue. And then it frequently brings up in these stories explicitly or implicitly the need for faith. And you see these two ideas interlocking and bouncing off each other constantly. So I think that's going to be an important dynamic to explore this week is the healing and faith. Beautiful. I think I could use more healing in my life. I bet there's many listeners who would probably agree with me and say, Hank, yeah, there's certain relationships that need healing. There's physical healing. There's perhaps emotional healing that needs to take place. So is this kind of the overview of what we're going to look at today? Yeah. So Josh, there's a number of stories I think we could cover in these chapters. Where do you want to start? Yeah. What you find in these stories is that this interplay between healing and rescue and faith is not simple. You see a lot of people struggling with this in these stories. And I think

there's a fundamental concept that many of them struggle to understand or fully exercise trust in, and that leads to some of the challenges that they face. Maybe to illustrate this, I'll tell a quick story, go back in time. I started serving my mission in the summer of 2004. In missionary history, the fall of 2004 was a pretty eventful time. That's when Preach My Gospel was first released. So I had just been out in the field three, four months. We all knew that something big was coming. We were all excited and looking forward to that. And I remember the zone conference

where we were all sitting in the audience and the mission president said something like, boy, have I got something for you. And then the doors burst open and the assistants wheeled in these dollies with cardboard boxes on them. And everyone in the room was going ballistic. We were just going nuts. We were so excited. And they pulled these books out of the boxes and we started passing them around and we couldn't get them fast enough. And we were looking at full color pictures, this exciting new take on missionary work. And it was just a very dramatic time. I remember one thing that struck us was that lesson one was now the message of the restoration. Before that in the discussions, you didn't bring up the apostasy or the restoration until the third discussion. So having that front and center first thing was something that was very

notable to us. But I also remember thinking that the first principle of lesson one looked oddly out of place to me, like it didn't match. That principle is titled, God is our loving heavenly father. And to me, that just didn't seem to mesh with the rest of the lesson, which is history and dispensations and prophets getting called and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and all sorts of other things. So I kind of struggled with how to link that principle to everything else. And eventually, I decided, well, it's just there so I can make sure that they believe in God, because maybe if they're an atheist, then you have to stop and talk about some basics some more. So usually in my lessons,

just make sure, hey, do you believe in God? And they'd say yes. And I go, great. And I kind of move on to the rest of the lesson. Now, looking back over the years since then, I'm thinking I didn't do that quite as well as I should have, because I've come to appreciate that that idea is maybe the most important thing in the lesson and nothing else makes sense unless it's in light of that principle that I was taking for granted. It doesn't just posit that God exists. That statement is a declaration that God is our father. We have that familial relationship and proclaims that he loves us, which I've come to understand is not something we should take for granted. That is something, both as a matter of formal theology, a lot of people have disagreed with or struggled to believe that God can love us, make himself vulnerable by that emotional attachment to us. And even if you do believe that in your head, a lot of people struggle to

really believe that when you're going through difficult, excruciating things. And we wonder, well, does he really love us? Does he really love me? Especially that's something that a lot of people struggle with. So I've come to re-appreciate the apostles placing that principle first thing in the lesson. And I re-appreciated this three years ago when the apostles in the first presidency re-issued, remember the Bicentennial Restoration Proclamation, April 2020. You know, it's titled the Restoration of the Fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And given the subject matter, I might've expected it to open with a line like, in the spring of 1820. It does use that line, but that's the

beginning of the second paragraph. The first line reads, we solemnly proclaim that God loves his children in every nation of the world. And to me, that was quite striking that they chose again to highlight in front of that as the very first thing. The second sentence is on the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The third sentence is the resurrection. So those are also very important things. But before even those, they highlight the love of God for all of us as his children. I think there's something profound about that because unless we fully appreciate that God truly, deeply cares for us and loves us, none of the rest of it is going to make sense. There's such power in truly understanding that our Heavenly Father really, truly loves us. And if we can lock this in our minds that God is our father, he's good, he loves us,

we therefore have the ability to understand that anything he does with us, including the painful experiences we go through, is ultimately for our good. It's for our progress. It's for our eternal benefit because a loving God would otherwise not subject us to those things. It helps us make sense of so much of what's going on. Wow. Well said, Josh. Thanks so much for that. What a great way to start this lesson. What that reminds me of is 2 Nephi 26, 24. He doeth not anything, save it be for the benefit of the world, for he loveth the world, even that he lay it down his own life, that he may draw all men unto him. Of course, that's the Savior, but it sounds so simple.

But no, that's a very important idea. He's not a detached God that just created things and is just set it in motion and unattached from what's going to happen next. But so I feel like, uh, our whole study of the old Testament last year, I can't get that impression over and over again, how involved God wanted to be with his people and kept coming after them, even when they, they left him.

And I think in the scriptures, the prophets understood this and really understanding this fundamental concept helps us appreciate a little better what they were saying. Well, if we can use another book of Mormon example, I'll just go to first Nephi chapter one. Remember that Lehi in that opening book of Mormon chapter, he swept up into this vision. He goes to heaven, right? Sees God and all the angels and everything. And in verse 12 in heaven, he's handed a book to read. And this is what he reads in the book in verse 13. Woe, woe unto Jerusalem, for I have seen thine abominations. Yea, and many things did my father read concerning Jerusalem, that it should be destroyed,

and the inhabitants thereof, many should perish by the sword and many should be carried away captive into Babylon. And that is a really, we got to stop and think about what impact this probably would have had on Lehi. This is where all his friends and family live. This is where the temple is. This is the city of God where he's manifested so many miracles. So the idea that it's going to be destroyed and people either killed or carried off into captivity, This had to have been such a devastating tragedy. And that makes what he responds in verse 14, almost completely baffling at first. Verse 14, when my father had read and seen many great and marvelous things, he did exclaim many things unto the Lord, such as, and you might expect him to say, come on now, no, please, anything but this, or some kind of complaining. But him to say, come on now, no, please, anything but this,

or some kind of complaining. But he says, great and marvelous are they works, O Lord God Almighty. Thy throne is high in the heavens, and thy power and goodness and mercy over all the inhabitants of the earth. And because thou art merciful, thou will not suffer those who come unto thee, that they shall perish. And after this manner was the language of my father in the praising of his God, for his soul did rejoice and his whole heart was filled. It doesn't look like verses 13 and 14 go together. They don't look like they match. And I think the only way to make sense of this is if we assume that Lehi understood some fundamentals in a bigger picture than just

the immediate tragedy of the destruction of Jerusalem. He had to have understood that God is our father, that God cares for us and he loves us. And therefore, whatever he does, even the painful things is for our good and is going to lead to good. And when we know, like we learned the Old Testament last year, we know the rest of the story that this ultimately was a positive thing in the history of the people of Judah here. It was a tragedy that Jerusalem was destroyed. It was hard. We're not trying to make this rainbows and bunny rabbits here, but through that experience, they did repent. They recognize the error of their ways. They did come back into the covenant path. They did return to Jerusalem. They rebuilt the city and it prospered again. And in that big picture sense,

you can see the Lord trying to work with these people to help them even through the hard things, the hard consequences that they themselves get them into through their poor choices. But yeah, unless you understand those fundamentals, which I think Lehi understood, we're not going to understand his reaction. And this is the power of understanding those fundamentals that when we go through our terrible tragedies, we can respond like Lehi, recognizing the big picture and the purposes here and recognizing the mercy that's behind all the hard times and not just be devastated and blown over by the terrible things we go through. He doesn't do anything, save it's for the benefit of the world. And Lehi must have known somehow this is what's going to happen. A loving God is going to use this somehow.

That's interesting. Yeah. And maybe he didn't know all the details of how that's going to work, but he knew that that's where it's going to end up. There's a loving reason behind all of this, or God can use it for a loving outcome. What is the verse in the Doctrine and Covenants, John, when they first get to, when the saints first got to Missouri, the Lord told them, this is not going to be easy. I think the idea was, oh, we're going to get to Zion and everything's going to be great. The Lord says, you cannot behold with your natural eyes.

This is section 58 verse three for the present time, the design of your God concerning the things which shall come hereafter and the glory, which shall follow after much tribulation for after much tribulation come the blessings. It's that same principle here, Josh, is that I love you.

I love you. No matter what you're going through, you have to set it on a foundation of God's love. Yeah. And this is crucial. The restoration for 200 years has been trying to rehabilitate the image of God to teach us that he loves us. And when we suffer, it's not punishment. So much of history, people have just been so quick to interpret every bad thing we go through as God's wrath and God trying to punish us. And the revelations of the restoration have been, have given us this ability to see, know that God loves us. And yes, sometimes he allows us to suffer the consequences of our foolish choices, but ultimately anything he allows and anything he does is meant for our immortality and eternal life. What you've been saying reminds me of a quote from Elder Orson F. Whitney.

Josh, no pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude, and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our character, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God. And it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our father and mother in heaven. Josh, that seems to just kind of dovetail perfectly with the way you've started us today.

Yeah. So why don't we dive in, look at these New Testament stories? We're not going to cover nearly everything that's in the assignment this week because you never can. It's just so full and rich, but we'll look at a few things and watch these people as they exercise faith, as they struggle with understanding the love of God, and as they seek the healing and rescue that they're looking for. So maybe one place we can start is Matthew chapter eight. I've noticed as we turn to Matthew, that Matthew seems to chunk a

lot of the miracles together in Matthew eight and nine. Do you think he did that on purpose? Yeah. One thing about the gospels is they don't present the life of Jesus in chronological order all the time. You know, most of them will start with his earlier life, earliest, and will end with the crucifixion. So you got a broad sense of chronology there. But in the middle, they'll present things not necessarily in chronological order. And one way you can tell that is by the fact that different Gospels show things in a different order. So somebody is not in order order if any of them are. But another thing is that often certain kinds of stories will come together. Like in Mark chapter four, with the equivalent in Matthew 13,

there's a whole bunch of parables. And maybe he did spend a whole afternoon just doing parable after parable. But it's also possible that for Mark, he simply thought, I'm going to make a section and pull together some parables. Or I'm going to make a section and pull together some parables. Or I'm going to have a section on healing stories. I'll have a section on confrontations with Pharisees. You get these clusters of similar stories, which suggests that some of this is arranged thematically. I was wondering if you were reading Matthew and you think, oh, we just went from the Sermon on the Mount straight to. And all he does is miracle, miracle, miracle after one after another.

Instead, maybe Matthew put them all together to kind of make a case of Jesus being a healer. So Matthew, beginning of chapter eight, actually we'll start in verse five. This is the story of the centurion. And there's an equivalent story in Luke chapter seven at the beginning of Luke there. So we'll keep an eye on that, but we'll read from Matthew. We got to pick one. Verse five. And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion beseeching him. So first thing we've got to note is the centurion is a leader in the Roman army. That's related to the word for century or sent because got a hundred people that he's over. So this is a Roman and decidedly not an Israelite.

That's going to be important in this story. So not an Israelite and someone who's got a fair level of authority as the Roman army is occupying Jewish lands here. So this guy comes in and verse six says, Lord, my servant lieth at home, sick of the palsy, grievously tormented. And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him. The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my servant shall be healed. For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me, and say unto this man, go, and he goeth, and to another, come, and he cometh, and to my servant, do this, and he doeth it. He's recognizing who Jesus is. He recognizes Jesus's power and authority. Now, why is he saying you can't come under my roof and citing all this authority stuff? You get a

sense here that he's aware that it puts Jesus potentially in an awkward situation because Jews traditionally were not going into the home of a Gentile. And that could cause Jesus some trouble with Jews who were sensitive to that kind of a thing. And when he says that I'm both under authority, I've got people over me and I'm in authority. I've got people below me. He recognizes how a chain of command works, how authority works. And it seems to be a recognition that he here, incoming to Jesus, recognize who has the real authority. He's saying here, I know that you can do this. I don't want to put you in the awkward position of coming into my home. I know I'm a Gentile. I know there's some issues there, but I know that even at your word, you don't even have to be present on site. You could heal my servant that I love.

When he calls Jesus Lord, do we know from the Greek, I mean, is he acknowledging his title? And that tells us something about him too. What is the word Lord in Greek that he's using? The word he uses there in Greek is kurios, which means Lord, and it can have a range of meanings. It can refer to a mortal human leader or Lord, like we would use that just like in English, we can talk about the Lord of the manor, the Lord of England. And it can also be used in this Jewish context to refer to the Lord, meaning Jehovah, the God of Israel. So depending on the gospel and where you're reading, it can have some nuances of that higher meaning here. It's hard to know what exactly the centurion

understood at this point, but clearly he knows enough about Jesus to recognize enough about him. So it's possible that he recognizes that he's more than just a mortal teacher here. He's coming to him clearly in faith saying, not only do I trust that you can heal my serving, you can do it from a distance. So he recognizes the power and authority that's here. And there's one extra word in the Luke account that is not here in Matthew 8, 9, but in Luke, he says, I am also a man under authority, kind of acknowledging that I know that you are

a man of authority saying to the Savior, which I think is interesting. Yeah. And then in verse 10, we get Jesus's reaction. When Jesus heard it, he marveled and said unto them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith. No, not in Israel. And I say unto you that many shall come from the east and west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Jesus' response here is fascinating.

He recognizes the exceedingly great faith of this man. Again, faith and healing are constantly bouncing off each other here. And he draws attention to the fact that this is a Gentile. This is someone who's not part of the covenant people, was not raised on the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He wasn't raised living the law that was given to Moses. And yet through his faith in Jesus, he's able to find the healing and rescue that he's looking for here. And Jesus points out many of these people outside the covenant through the same process, their faith are going to be able to come and receive

the same blessings of the covenant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The flip side is true as well. Many that inherit the covenant through their family, if they lack faith, are not going to receive those blessings. It's one of the many places in the gospels that highlights the fact that being born in the covenant is not an automatic ticket to heaven. It's your faith in Jesus Christ that ultimately is the determining factor here. In that sense, this is similar to the Book of Mormon. We'll reiterate the same principle. The Book of Mormon is speaking to the remnants of Israel, but it's also trying to convince Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ.

For example, the person in the Book of Mormon who's thinking the hardest about how do Gentiles gain salvation is Moroni. Moroni knows that the Book of Mormon is going to go to the Gentiles first in the last days. It's going to be translated by a Gentile. It's going to come forth through them to the remnant of Israel. So Moroni is thinking hard, what does it mean for these Gentile people to be saved when they're not part of the covenant, at least yet. And one book where Moroni explores that especially is the book of Ether. You see in Ether that Moroni speaks directly to Latter-day Gentiles constantly, more than anywhere else in the Book of Mormon, where they're the direct named audience there. And it's a great place to explore this idea of Gentile salvation

because the Jaredite people whose history he's abridging are Gentiles. So Moroni looks at this as a great place to explore. So a couple of years ago, the Maxwell Institute at BYU published a new series of books on the Book of Mormon called the Book of Mormon Brief Theological Introductions and the Ether Volume by Rosalind Welch. She has a chapter where she explores this, how that's one reason that Moroni shares the story of the brother of Jared, because she's using him as a model for Gentiles. How can you be saved when you're outside the covenant line here? And it's through the brother of Jared's exceedingly great faith. Even before he knew the name of Jesus Christ, he exercised

such great faith that that veil parted. And Moroni uses that story and then speaks to modern Gentiles. This is how you do it. So the Jaredites are both a cautionary tale. You know, Gentiles, if you don't repent, you could be destroyed too. But also a model of what to do using the brother of Jared is this example that faith is the key to coming unto Jesus, no matter what your family background and covenant status is. So I think the centurion here in the gospel of Matthew is playing a similar role. There's different Gentiles highlighted in the gospel of Matthew to show these examples of how do can Gentiles approach the son of God. And it's through the faith that they exercise in him. I'm writing this down in my book of ether. Yeah. The brother of Jared is a Gentile believer. Moroni is using him as a model.

And we can use this centurion the same way. The centurion is a Gentile. Yeah. And I like the way he said that. They'll come from the east and the west. They'll come from all over. They'll sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, children of the kingdom cast into outer darkness.

And notice who Jesus is saying this to. It says he's speaking to those that follow him. So fellow Jews trying to make this clear. And remember, one of the reasons the centurion might have been hesitant to let Jesus come under his roof is because he knew the sensitivity of a lot of Jews where they thought it's inappropriate to go in the house of a Gentile. So Jesus might be doing a little bit of rebuke to that attitude. Again, this plays into how would we understand the love of God? There were many of these people in the covenant who felt God loves us, but doesn't love people that are not in our group. So they had these traditions and expectations. And Jesus has a

kind of a sharp rebuke to those people here on that attitude. And again, it goes back to what the apostles recently said in the restoration proclamation. We solemnly proclaim that God loves his children in every nation of the world. Anytime we start saying God doesn't love these people or limiting that, we're getting into a little bit of trouble. So God loves faith more than he loves what your family history is. Not that the family history is not important, but these people should be on the front lines welcoming Jesus. But instead, you have this guy exercising greater faith than they did. That's why Jesus marvels. Despite all the advantages these people have with the Old Testament and the covenant history, they should be the first in line to recognize the Messiah and proclaim him to the world.

It's this outsider who's coming and seeing it faster than they are. That's a great takeaway from this story. God loves, and when we start to limit God's love, we're getting into trouble. So then verse 13 wraps up the story. And Jesus said unto the centurion, go thy way. And as thou hast believed, so shall it be unto thee. And his servant was healed in the self sameame hour. So we get what the centurion was looking for. He had that confidence, that trust in Jesus, and he was able to find that. I wanted to read something from an old commentary called Matthew Henry's concise commentary. It says this centurion was a Roman soldier, though he was a soldier, yet he was

a godly man. No man's calling or place will be an excuse for unbelief and sin. See how he states his servant's case. We should concern ourselves for the souls of our children and servants who are spiritually sick, who feel not spiritual evils, who know not that which is spiritually good. And we should bring them to Christ by faith and prayers. Observe his self-abasement. Humble souls are made more humble by Christ's gracious dealings with them. Observe his great faith. The more definite we are of ourselves,

the stronger will be our confidence in Christ. He goes on to say more about this centurion, but I love that. Observe his self-abasement. Humble souls are made more humble by Christ's gracious dealings with them. So that's the end of the story of the centurion's son. And Matthew goes on from there, but in Luke, it continues into a related story that comes after, and you only find it in Luke here. And so we're going to jump now to Luke chapter seven and pick up in verse 11, which is right after the centurion story in Luke's version. And this is a story that you don't get in Matthew? Yeah, this is unique to Luke.

And Luke often has in his gospel what are called Lucan doublets. He likes to put pairs of stories that are related to each other and go back to back so that you can compare and contrast the stories. This is an example of that. You have to read the story of the centurion servant back to back with the story that follows here in Luke chapter seven, verse 11. In verse 11, it says, and it came to pass the day after that he went into a city called Nain and many of his disciples went with him and much people. Now, when he came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, there was a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and much people of the city was with her. And what Luke highlights here is that she's a widow

and she just lost her only child. And he's really highlighting the plight of this woman. So she has no husband to care and provide for her, and now she's lost her son, who presumably was going to be her economic support with the loss of her husband. So now not only does she have the tragedy of losing a family member, but she's going to be in quite a plight here. So she's just in a devastating situation. Then in verse 13, when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said unto her, weep not. And he came and touched the beer. That's the wooden thing that they would have been carrying the body on. And they that bear him stood still. So he stops the procession here. It's probably quite dramatic and maybe unexpected for these people. And he said, young man, I say unto thee, arise. And he that was dead sat up and began to speak. And he delivered him to his mother.

And there came a fear on all, and they glorified God, saying that a great prophet is risen up among us, and that God hath visited his people. And this is a wonderful story, and it's especially significant, again, when you contrast it with the story that Luke has placed right before about the centurion's servant. Because again, these little doublets that Luke does, he wants you to compare and contrast. So think about how much these two stories are complete opposites of each other. You've got the centurion is a man, and the widow is a woman. The centurion is a Roman and the woman is Jewish. The centurion is rich. The woman is poor. And we've saw bad economic circumstances. He came to Jesus with faith and expressed request for help, whereas she had no idea who Jesus was, and Jesus came to her without being asked.

His servant was only dying, but her son is already dead. There's all sorts of ways in which you can see a huge contrast between these. I think Luke is paradigm because they're very much opposites in almost every way you can think about. I think there's an important lesson there. If you just had one healing story, you might be tempted to think, well, God loves people in this kind of a situation, or God is going to respond in these circumstances. But by showing the complete opposite, it kind of breaks that down. God doesn't just love him because he's a man or he's rich or he came with this humble request. God is willing to heal and help us in all the opposite situations as well. So it kind of encourages us again to see God's love as being inclusive and for a variety of circumstances and that it doesn't have to be just one way in the way in which we approach Jesus and seek that healing. Yeah. One of our colleagues, Keith Wilson, gave a talk on this very miracle in a BYU devotional called BYU Matter to Him.

He says, the sequence of events is very important. Capernaum is situated on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, 600 feet below sea level. Nain is about 30 miles away from Capernaum at 700 feet above sea level, thus requiring an arduous uphill climb of more than 1,300 feet to get to Nain. In order to walk from Capernaum to Nain, it would take at least one or two days. He says recently it took a group of BYU Jerusalem students nearly 10 hours to walk this route. This means that Jesus probably had to walk during the night in order to intercept this burial procession the day after. And he goes on and he talks about this story. And he says, naturally, the crowd of villagers and Jesus's followers were awestruck as their grief turned to shared joy.

But this miracle was not just about impressing a community. It was all about rescuing one desperate soul. Jesus was aware that something was very wrong for this woman, someone who was a true nobody in her culture. Her situation cried out for his immediate attention. Even if he had to skip a night's rest, he knew her desperate situation and he came running. President Monson spoke undeniably of this truth when he said, one day when we look back at the seemingly coincidences of our lives, we will realize they were perhaps not so coincidental at all.

In this section for the widow of Nain, he finishes, I hope this woman's experience will be a great comfort to each of you, especially when you feel rather insignificant. Jesus hurried to the widow and he will hurry to you as well. Yeah, I appreciate that because yeah, the fact that Jesus had to hasten uphill rapidly to get there just shows, you know, how much he wanted to be there to help her out. I had an experience on my mission where as missionaries do, we had goals that we weren't quite hitting on a certain week. And we sat down one night and we thought we've got to increase the number of new investigators or contacts that we followed up on, things like that. We had a goal for the week we need to get done. So we had our nightly planning meeting and we decided to try to contact all the people we'd met on the street that had said we could come back sometime

and we'd try to find them. We sat down, we spent like a good 45 minutes, I think, with this map and getting all these addresses and names we had and making a little map, you know, here we are, and here's where we need to end up. And we'll hit all these places in this route on the way. We had it all set. The next day after lunch, we set out to do this. And the vast majority of them were fake addresses, which was discouraging, or not right now or no, whatever it is, we didn't get into any doors. And we spent a long time knocking these all to the lift. We knocked the last house thinking it's now or never and nothing, no answer. So we were going somewhere else and we were walking past the house next to the last one

that we had just knocked. And the door burst open and this woman came running out sobbing, saying, Elders, Elders, mi papá está muerto. Mi papá está muerto. Elders, elders, my father's dead. My father's dead. And we went in with her and she was just a mess. She was crying and it took her a while to really explain what was going on. And when she was able to discuss, it turned out she was a member who hadn't been in church in many years. And she had just gotten a phone call saying that her father had unexpectedly died. And in shock, she put the phone back on the receiver and she

turned around just kind of in this daze and straight out the window saw us walking right in front of her house. And she remembered the missionaries from years ago. And so without thinking another thought, she just ran outside to go get us. She needed help. I was thinking about that later that night while writing in my journal. And one thing this taught me is the interesting thing about revelation. We didn't really feel it was this dramatic revelatory experience in our planning meeting. There was no light from heaven coming down and felt like it was filling us with inspiration. But you think

about the coincidence of the timing there, that there's about a five second window, maybe at most, if that, where we had to be right in front of her house when she was turning around, looking out the window. If we'd been 10 seconds ahead, 10 seconds behind, we would have missed her completely. So I realized inspiration had come the night before to plot things exactly as we have so to be in the right place at the right time. And that's how revelation goes. You usually don't recognize in the moment that it's revelation, but you're trying to do what God wants and he guides you. But the other big thing I took from that again was just what love does heavenly father have to have for this daughter of his, even though she hasn't come to church in years and probably wasn't

living the gospels fully as she could have, but he knew that she would be hurting and that she needed help and that he happened to have a couple servants in the area who had nothing better to do that afternoon. And he made sure that they were there in the right place and time to offer her comfort. And we had a wonderful discussion. We read from a benedict testimony of the resurrection. She came to church that Sunday, but we were there when we needed to be because Heavenly Father loved her, regardless of what else was going on in her life. And he wanted to give her that comfort. When Jesus walks to Nain to be there for that funeral, that reminds me that just these tender mercies we get where we recognize he really does know

about our individual situations. We're all significant to him. Yeah. What a perfect compliment to that story. Yeah. That's beautiful. With that, I'm wondering if we can jump now to the stilling of the storm. Look at that story. Should we stay in Luke? Where do you want to go with this one? Well, it's found in Mark, Matthew and Luke, but our reading this week in the manual just has Mark and Matthew chapters. So we'll do those. We'll start with Mark. Okay. So this is Mark chapter four, starting in verse 35. The thing to first recognize about this story is that most of Mark chapter four has been a collection of parables up to this point.

And Jesus's parables sound really familiar and comforting to us because we've all accepted them for 2000 years. But when he told them they were often very controversial and provocative. I think that plays a role in why we have the miracle of the stilling of the storm right after this. Verse 35 goes through some pains editorially to link these together here, because look at verse 35. And the same day, meaning the same day after he just taught all these parables, then you get the stilling of the storm story. So Mark wants you to imagine these.

He's teaching a bunch of parables, and then we get the stilling of the storm. And this shows Jesus's power over the physical elements and that divine authority he has as if to say, this guy doesn't just talk the talk. He can walk the walk. He's got authority behind these words to back it up as manifest now by this very physical miracle that he's going to perform. So that's kind of some setup there of maybe why Mark has this placed where he does. So verse 35, and the same day when the even or the evening was come, he saith unto them, let us pass over unto the other side, meaning the other side of the sea of Galilee. So they get in the boat. Verse 36, when they had sent away the multitude, they took him even as he was in the ship.

And there were also with him other little ships. And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship so that it was now full. And he was in the hinder part of the ship asleep on a pillow. And we can just stop there. I think this is always remarkable to people. This is a ship where everyone thinks they're going to die and yet he's asleep. Elder Holland actually had some comments on this in a talk he gave to the LDS Family Services employees a few years ago. And this was in the ensign, the June 2018 ensign. They reprinted this. And Elder Holland says this, for those of you who earnestly seek to bear one another's burdens, it is important that you re-fortify yourself and build yourself back up when others expect so much

of you and indeed take so much out of you. No one is so strong that they do not ever feel fatigued or frustrated or recognize the need to care for themselves. Jesus certainly experienced that fatigue, felt the drain on his strength. He gave and gave, but there was a cost attached to that, and he felt the effects of so many relying on him. I've always been amazed, this is still Elder Holland, that he could sleep through a storm on the Sea of Galilee so serious and severe that his experienced fishermen disciples thought the ship was going down. How tired is that? How many sermons can you give and blessings can you administer without being absolutely exhausted? The caregivers have

to have care too. You have to have fuel in the tank before you can give it to others. And he goes on to counsel things, you know, seek balance, get enough sleep and all those kinds of things to recognizing if Jesus is not immune to this kind of fatigue of giving and caring for others, you're not either. Please take care of yourselves. You can't take water from an empty well. You've got to replenish the well. It's kind of the run faster than you have strength idea in the book of Mormon too, that do what you can do, but you don't have to do more than you can do. Do you know what this reminds me of? Have you ever heard the story of the kid that was applying to work as a farmhand and he told the potential employer, I can sleep when the wind blows. Does that ring a bell to you?

No, tell it. That story was so good. What happened was a big storm comes in the farm. Are the horses locked up? Are the cows where they're supposed to be? Are the animals where they're supposed to be? And this kid, by saying, I can sleep when the wind blows, what he meant was he would prepare for storms and he was ready so that when the storm came and the farmer came out to see if everything was secure, It was already secured. And that's what he meant by, I can sleep when the wind blows because he was prepared for all those eventualities. And I thought about Jesus in this same story.

Why are you so fearful in verse 40? Because he's prepared for all of that and wasn't worried and he cares for them. So he knew he could sleep through this and be okay, but they woke him up. Please join us for part two of this podcast.