Hank Smith: 00:04 Hello, my friends. Welcome to another followHim Favorites. John and I are taking a part of this week’s lesson, which is Matthew 1 and Luke 1, and just talking about a tiny portion of it. John, we’ve got all sorts of people listed in Matthew 1 and Luke 1, from Abraham to David, to Joseph and Mary, and Elisabeth and Zacharias. Then you go into the rest of the Christmas story and you’ve got shepherds, and angels, and Herod and wise men. What do you take from all these characters? Is there any of them that stand out to you?

John Bytheway: 00:38 One fun way to look at it, whenever you see a name in the scriptures is to ask yourself, is this person an example, like I want to be like that, or is this person a warning, I don’t want to be like that. Boy, do we have some contrasts here. We’ve got Joseph, who the Angel of the Lord visits him in a dream. We’ve got Herod, who is so wicked. Sometimes when there’s not a whole lot of doctrine being taught, we can look at the examples of the people and say, “Which one of those do I admire? Which ones do I want to avoid?” I mean, I’ve heard you talk about Herod before, and Joseph, and what a contrast those two are in their personal character.

Hank Smith: 01:15 Matthew put them side by side, and here you’ve got Joseph, who is very responsive to dreams, very responsive to promptings. The one thing that I’ve noticed about Joseph is that he’s slow to act in emotion. He finds out that his fiancé is pregnant. It says he’s a just man. He doesn’t want to make her a public example. He wants to maybe end this privately, to divorce her privately. Then while he thought on these things, behold the Angel of the Lord appeared unto him. There’s something to be said about not being governed, not having kind of a knee-jerk reaction to something, but to be slow, and calm and deliberate, where Herod just seems to be governed by his emotions in every aspect of his life. He’s governed by jealousy. He’s governed by his insecurities. We don’t get to talk much about Joseph. We talk about Jesus and we talk about his mother, but it’s nice for us to say, “What’s the example of Joseph for us in this chapter?”

John Bytheway: 02:16 Yeah, I remember Elder Holland giving a talk about things we could think about during the sacrament. My mom used to say, “think about Jesus,” when I was a kid during the sacrament.

Hank Smith: 02:24 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 02:25 He gave this talk about always remembering, and he just made a little comment about Joseph that I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Joseph is a reminder that plain unpretentious people have pushed this work forward from the beginning, and that if you feel you’re serving almost anonymously, so did one of the best men who ever lived,” and that was Joseph. That’s a good way we can think of… We don’t know much about Joseph, but just like you said, he was slow to respond. He was trying to protect Mary by not embarrassing her in public with something he didn’t understand, and the Lord gave him understanding about.

Hank Smith: 03:02 He was open to the Holy Ghost. He was open to these promptings of the Spirit. So I’d like to… Let’s say Joseph is a great example of someone in the scriptures this week. You can say, “You know what? How can I be more Joseph-like? How can I walk away from this chapter being more Joseph-like?”

  03:20 We hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts, and then come back next week and join us for another followHIM Favorites.