Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Come Follow Me.
Speaker: It's good to be here with Cassie, and we are going to cover this week Matthew chapters 15 through 17 and Mark 7 through 9.
Speaker: There are some great stories here about Christ continuing to perform miracles, and there's some great theology.
Speaker: We learn a little bit more about Christ and his mission, and the apostles learn a little bit more about who the Savior is and what is going to soon happen to him.
Speaker: I just want to get started with
Speaker: a great miracle from these chapters, a miracle that we've seen before, which was Jesus fed the 5,000, but he does it again.
Speaker: And we don't hear as often, maybe we don't talk about as often when he fed the 4,000.
Speaker: It's very similar experience.
Speaker: They took seven...
Speaker: seven loaves and a few little fishes, it says.
Speaker: And Jesus multiplied that all for everyone to feed, for everyone to eat.
Speaker: And just as reading this story and as we'll talk about with some of the other miracles that are in this week's reading,
Speaker: It just got me thinking about, you know, if Christ is able to perform such great miracles, if he's able to take away illness and infirmity and heal people and cause the blind to see.
Speaker: And, you know, even in the case of Lazarus and the one young girl raised them from the dead, you know,
Speaker: And even if he can feed 4,000, 5,000 people, I think the question that gets brought up a lot in today's modern day is, you know, where are these miracles now?
Speaker: And why isn't Christ intervening in behalf of all of us?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: If there's millions of people that are suffering from from hunger and.
Speaker: You know, it's very apparent in these chapters that Christ possesses power over the elements.
Speaker: Christ can take seven loaves of bread and a couple of fishes and multiply it such that everyone is full and fed.
Speaker: So why doesn't he do that in these instances?
Speaker: And I think that's an interesting philosophical question.
Speaker: theological question to think about that we're going to talk about as we go into one of these stories, one of these miracles.
Speaker: Cassie, do you want to talk about the miracle of the... Was it the father and his son?
Speaker: Yeah, I just wanted to...
Speaker: Before we move on there, I just wanted to point out that I think it's interesting.
Speaker: I think we have a theme here, not only today and how we teach the gospel, but also the fact that there are four gospels and then also the repetition of this particular miracle.
Speaker: We see a lot of repetition.
Speaker: And oftentimes, I think all of us
Speaker: in a more modern day context, sometimes I get frustrated when I feel like we're being taught the same lessons again and again.
Speaker: The other day, actually, we had a fifth Sunday lesson about something and I was complaining to some of my friends that why do we need to have this lesson every six months?
Speaker: Don't we get it by now?
Speaker: Is it ministering?
Speaker: It was not ministering, no.
Speaker: But I think the point is maybe we're not getting it.
Speaker: You know, we've seen Christ before feed the multitude.
Speaker: And we've seen Christ after he fed the multitude, ask his disciples, like, who do you think that I am?
Speaker: And some of them know and some of them don't know.
Speaker: And again, we see him again feeding the multitude and having powers over the elements.
Speaker: But there's still confusion about who he is.
Speaker: And so I think that's why we see the repetition.
Speaker: And I was thinking about also this week, you know, we have these four gospels.
Speaker: And then I was thinking in relation to Easter, you know, Christ is resurrected.
Speaker: And he appears to all of these different people, all of these different witnesses, right?
Speaker: And it's interesting because as many of you know, I'm in law school.
Speaker: And so I'm in an evidence class right now.
Speaker: And a lot of my evidence class has been talking about like witnesses and what evidence is admissible and what you can and can't say on the stand.
Speaker: And I think the rules are kind of funky and that's a totally different discussion.
Speaker: But my point here is really just that most of us have not seen Christ.
Speaker: We felt his presence.
Speaker: We've maybe felt his spirit.
Speaker: We felt his direction.
Speaker: We felt his comfort, et cetera.
Speaker: But most of us are not in the position where we have laid eyes on him ourselves.
Speaker: And so we are all, with the exception of, you know, maybe the prophets, um,
Speaker: going off of the accounts of these different witnesses.
Speaker: And I think their witnesses are powerful and they're important, but I think there's also multiple of them because often they don't get it.
Speaker: Just as we sometimes don't get it on the first go around, they also don't get it on the first go around.
Speaker: And so we need both the repetition of his teachings, his miracles, but also a repetition of witnesses and different witnesses to testify of what he did.
Speaker: That's a great question.
Speaker: That's a great point.
Speaker: And I think maybe that's why we see the repetition with this miracle, feeding the 5,000 and feeding the 4,000, why Christ is so often healing people.
Speaker: I mean, the whole New Testament is, seems like lines and lines of people that he heals.
Speaker: So it is a nice, the repetition is a nice reminder that he can also heal us in our life.
Speaker: I want to talk about that one parable in particular that I know you like as well, not parable, miracle story.
Speaker: And it's towards the end, it's in Mark chapter nine.
Speaker: And we basically, we read about a man whose son is possessed with an evil spirit and he comes to the apostles and he's, and he
Speaker: he asked them to cast out the spirit and the apostles try and they can't do it.
Speaker: Uh, and the son is, is it says on the felt fell on the ground and wallowed foaming.
Speaker: Um, and then they come to Jesus, the apostles bring, bring the son and the father to Jesus.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: And, you know, basically, Jesus, you know, questions the man and says, you know, if you believe, you know, all things are possible, like, like this can happen, this miracle will perform it.
Speaker: And the man I'm sure has heard,
Speaker: he's heard the stories of Jesus healing people.
Speaker: Um, but that seed of doubt, I'm sure it's there within him.
Speaker: I mean, the apostles just tried to heal his son and couldn't do it.
Speaker: Um, so I'm sure there is, there is doubt within him.
Speaker: He, and he has in many ways reasons to have doubt.
Speaker: Um, but what he cries out and it says with tears is very powerful as well.
Speaker: It is so powerful.
Speaker: It says, Lord, I believe helped out my unbelief.
Speaker: And I
Speaker: you know, Christ in these chapters as well, it makes reference to, if you have faith, the size of a mustard seed and, you know,
Speaker: it's really powerful for two reasons.
Speaker: One, because a mustard seed's tiny, right?
Speaker: So he's saying, you know, if, if you have a tiny bit of faith, you can do great things.
Speaker: Um, but also he's saying, you know, it doesn't take a whole lot of faith and, and Christ can magnify whether it's the seven fishes or a couple loaves of bread.
Speaker: Um, Christ can magnify our, our small, um,
Speaker: offering and make it into something grand and ultimately you know that's all that's none of us have had perfect belief um if we had perfect knowledge we'd have no need for faith
Speaker: But really the prayer that we give is, you know, we believe and we ask Christ to help us with our unbeliefs and in the areas in which we're lacking.
Speaker: And when we do that and when we express that humility like this father did, ultimately Christ is able to intervene in our lives.
Speaker: I think that's awesome.
Speaker: Well, I really have two thoughts about this.
Speaker: And I also love this story.
Speaker: So the first is just about unbelief in general.
Speaker: I remember the first time that I, so thinking about like the restoration of the gospel and just not even just the restoration, but also all of these miracles, right, that Christ has done.
Speaker: Some of them seem like
Speaker: I mean, they're miracles.
Speaker: They're something that the average person couldn't do.
Speaker: Some of them seem a little bit like out there, like kind of like you're reading a story.
Speaker: And the story is not really true, but there's some sort of magic involved.
Speaker: But I never really questioned that.
Speaker: I just accepted it as truth, right?
Speaker: Until I remember the first time that that occurred to me, that somebody might think that all of these things, all of these miracles that happened both in Christ's time and at the time of the Restoration happened.
Speaker: might be a little crazy, was a friend of mine in high school, a friend of mine's dad was telling a story about how he'd been at a work dinner and he was talking to some client and the client asked him about the church.
Speaker: And he told essentially the first vision story about how God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph Smith.
Speaker: And the client's reaction to this story was, wow, that's awesome.
Speaker: Now, originally, when I thought he was saying, wow, that's awesome, as in, wow, that's so cool.
Speaker: I'm super interested in the church.
Speaker: Can I, like, refer me to the missionaries?
Speaker: That's not what he meant by awesome.
Speaker: His use of the word awesome was, like, wow, that's crazy.
Speaker: Like, wow, I don't know how you believe that.
Speaker: And that was really the first time that it occurred to me that somebody could think, um,
Speaker: that some of the things that we believe in are kind of out there, or just it seems unlikely that that would happen in the world that we know and conceive of today, right?
Speaker: But especially with last week being Easter, thinking about like Christ's resurrection,
Speaker: If at the center of Christianity and what is really universal to all Christians is that Christ was resurrected, that he was buried in a tomb and after three days he arose from the dead.
Speaker: And we have all of these witnesses.
Speaker: If I believe that, then everything else, all of the other miracles, however far fetched they might seem or kind of crazy, those are all super secondary because
Speaker: If he can be raised from the dead, then really God has the power and the power that he then grants to his son and maybe at times to all of us in different capacities to do anything.
Speaker: He has complete control over the elements.
Speaker: And so I think sometimes when you're confronted with some of these things that you think, that seems kind of unlikely or how far am I being asked to suspend my belief, like suspend disbelief?
Speaker: I think you just have to like for me, I just go back to but I believe he was resurrected from the dead.
Speaker: And so everything else is also possible.
Speaker: Isn't it fascinating that modern technology and medicine hasn't been able to bring someone back to life?
Speaker: Yeah, it is interesting.
Speaker: And I also think that like, this is a super side point, but I also think that the way that God speaks and shares his like light and source and power to people changes over time.
Speaker: And so people at different times respond to different things.
Speaker: And so for what my,
Speaker: then have been a miracle in one form, we now see similar miracles.
Speaker: We just see them in different ways.
Speaker: And they're easier for us to explain away by science.
Speaker: But I think the scientific discovery of the last 200 years is also a miracle in and of itself.
Speaker: But that's a side point.
Speaker: The other thing I wanted to talk about here real quickly is
Speaker: The other night we had the sister missionaries over for dinner.
Speaker: And when they got to share their message, like missionaries always do, they asked us to think about our why.
Speaker: And this is not a new question.
Speaker: I've heard this question before and I like this question.
Speaker: And I think it's a good question to think about every now and again.
Speaker: Like, what is your why?
Speaker: Why do you stay?
Speaker: Why do you have faith?
Speaker: Why do you have a testimony?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Et cetera.
Speaker: And really, my why is in these verses right here when it says, help thou in my unbelief.
Speaker: So for me, I think this church and the beauty about like this church and the restored gospel is that it started with a question.
Speaker: Joseph Smith had a question and he prayed and he got an answer.
Speaker: I'm sure Joseph Smith also had a lot of other questions that weren't answered as well.
Speaker: But he did get an answer and he got a number of answers to a number of his different questions.
Speaker: We still today have questions.
Speaker: Just because Joseph Smith's question answered a lot of mine, but it didn't answer all of them.
Speaker: Just as I don't think it answered anyone's, all of their questions.
Speaker: And so what I love about this restored gospel is that God wants us to ask questions.
Speaker: He expects us to ask questions.
Speaker: Not only that, he expects us to ask the hard questions.
Speaker: No, absolutely.
Speaker: If I can add to that, Cassie, I think there's a story from this week's reading that compliments what you're saying.
Speaker: And that's when Christ asks his apostles, you know, this is people, some people I'm saying, I'm John the Baptist.
Speaker: Some people I'm saying, I'm this, I'm Jeremiah, I'm Elias, I'm one of the prophets.
Speaker: You know, who do you guys think I am?
Speaker: And Simon Peter says, thou art Christ, the son of the living God.
Speaker: And it says, Jesus answered and said unto him, Simon Bar-Jonah, blessed art thou, for flesh and blood hath not revealed unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.
Speaker: Then he says that, you know, that's the principle that he's going to, that's the rock that he's going to build his church upon.
Speaker: um and going back to that principle of it started with a question it started with joseph smith in the woods the foundation of of christ's church is the testimony of christ the son of the living god that comes through heavenly father and the wonderful thing about that testimony whether it's um you know sharing with a colleague at work or
Speaker: or remembering your why, I think we can understand our why because we can take those questions that we have to Heavenly Father.
Speaker: And whether it's the most important question of, you know, who is Christ and...
Speaker: or you know the this you know menial small questions um that we have in everyday life i think it's a great thing that we believe in a living god um who hears us who listens and who answers yeah i think that's awesome and i i guess i would just kind of
Speaker: Wrap it up by saying, you know, for me, the thing that strengthens my testimony the most is when I ask hard and difficult questions and when I study and try to find answers.
Speaker: And even though I. I won't say I've always found an answer or the answer, but I've always left satisfied, satisfied that it's enough for now.
Speaker: and satisfied that I feel peace about where I've come to.
Speaker: And if I don't have the exact answer now, I know I will have it someday.
Speaker: I think the most important thing that you can do is take those things off the shelf and dust them off and figure out, ask your hard questions and study.
Speaker: And I think you can find peace.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I want to wrap up with one story if I can.
Speaker: I just love this story too much to not share it from this week's reading.
Speaker: But Matthew 17, the last couple of verses, they go into Capernaum and someone questions them and says, you know, they're paying tribute money as the Jews do.
Speaker: And they say, you know, to Peter, does your master not pay tribute?
Speaker: And Jesus, you know, basically,
Speaker: through his words kind of helps them figure out that who are you paying tribute to?
Speaker: Sorry, it was Rome they were paying tribute to.
Speaker: That was the tribute money, not a Jewish thing, but the Jews pay tribute.
Speaker: And so he kind of questions the purpose of the tribute.
Speaker: But to comply with it, he says to Peter, you know, go fishing.
Speaker: And when you go out to sea, you'll cast a hook.
Speaker: And the first fish that comes up that you catch, you know, in the fish's mouth is going to have a piece of money.
Speaker: And you can take that and go pay tribute for you and I with that.
Speaker: And I think this is a great story because one story I just came across once and I was like, I've never heard of that before.
Speaker: And I don't think it's a story, a miracle story that we ever talk about because it's kind of obscure.
Speaker: But it's really interesting.
Speaker: It's kind of cool.
Speaker: It's go catch this fish and there's going to be a piece of money in the fish's mouth and you can pay a tribute with that.
Speaker: And that's just to say, you know,
Speaker: whether it's healing whether it's feeding um or whether it's just some obscure fish in the middle of the sea that christ is going to know its exact whereabouts and you can go catch it and it has a piece of money in its mouth it's a small thing it's not a life-changing thing i'm sure they could have come up with the tribute money pretty easily otherwise but that's just to say um
Speaker: you know, Christ is aware, you know, Heavenly Father is aware of us.
Speaker: And as we, as we are cognizant of that and exercise faith and, and reach out to the Lord and for help and, you know, whether it's with our unbelief or, um,
Speaker: whether it's in magnifying our small offering, you know, they are there for us.
Speaker: And I think we can have full faith and I, you know, I have full faith and I like to hope that I can have faith and develop faith that, you know, everything is going to work out.
Speaker: And there is a plan and, you know, I appreciate you joining me Cassie to testify of that as well.
Speaker: Thanks Will.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: We'll wrap up there.
Speaker: Hope to continue next week.
Speaker: And thank you for joining us.
