Hank Smith: 00:04 Hello, my friends. Welcome to another followHIM Favorites. My name is Hank Smith, and I’m here with the incredible John Bytheway. We like to cover on followHIM Favorites just a tiny portion of this week’s lesson. And we are in Matthew chapter two and Luke chapter two this week.

  00:19 John, we covered quite a bit with our guest on followHIM, our full podcast, Dr. Brad Wilcox, but there’s something we didn’t cover that we wanted to hit in this little followHIM Favorites. That is what do you learn from the shepherds’ reaction to the angels. So the angels come and tell the shepherds, “We bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.” Then there’s this multitude of heavenly hosts praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” What do you learn from what happens at that point?

John Bytheway: 00:53 Well, these two verses are so good, 16 and 17, “And they came with haste.” And I’ve thought, “Mary and Jesus weren’t going anywhere,” but they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger. So everything like the angels said. And then look what they do in 17, “… when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.”

  01:17 So I think that there’s a Christmas carol. Sometimes you hear Go Tell It on the Mountain. That’s what they did. They were, “We’ve got to tell everybody what the angel said. And the angel was right. We came, we saw the sign, and now we’ve got to tell you.”

  01:30 So Sister Bonnie Cordon in her first presidency Christmas devotional, talked about the shepherds and not only did they receive the sign and the gift, but then they sent it out and they went to tell everybody. They were like missionaries, these shepherds.

Hank Smith: 01:45 Yeah, beautiful. There’s this word in verse 15. Look at this. “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem.” Let’s go right now. Let’s not wait till tomorrow. Let’s not wait till next week. Let’s not wait till next month. Here it is, the middle of the night, abiding over their flock by night, but let’s go now. They could have waited till morning. And I think there’s something to be said on when you feel a prompting, when you feel that the Lord wants you to do something, let’s go now.

  02:13 It was Mormon, as a child, Ammaron says, “I can see that you’re quick to observe.” It sounds to me like Mormon watches, is careful, and acts. He’s observant and then he acts. He moves when he gets a prompting. I remember Elder Bednar talking about that.

  02:29 So when you feel something good, “Maybe I ought to do this. Maybe I ought to go text this person. Maybe I ought to take so-and-so a little tree. Maybe I ought to…” Remember these shepherds. Let us now go. Make haste. Let’s move our feet and go do what we’ve been asked to do.

John Bytheway: 02:47 Yeah, we don’t usually talk about that, but that’s a great little thing about those shepherds. They were so lucky. They saw the angels, they got the sign, but then they acted. They did something about it.

Hank Smith: 02:59 Yeah. So I think there’s a great principle there to write in our scriptures of act, go, move, tell, become a missionary. Let’s do it.

  03:08 We hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. Like we said earlier, we’re with Dr. Brad Wilcox this week. We think you’re going to love it. Come join us over there and then come back here next week for another followHIM Favorites.