The New Testament year opens with two impossible pregnancies. Zacharias, a priest, and his wife Elisabeth were “righteous before God” (Luke 1:6), yet they had prayed for a child for years with no answer, and now they were old. When Zacharias finally drew the once-in-a-lifetime lot to burn incense in the temple, the angel Gabriel told him, “thy prayer is heard” (Luke 1:13). Zacharias asked how he could know it was true (1:18) and was left unable to speak until John was born. Six months later, Gabriel told a young woman in Nazareth named Mary that she would be the mother of the Son of God. She asked, “How shall this be?” (1:34), heard the answer, and said, “Be it unto me according to thy word” (1:38).
Fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds are old enough to have real unanswered prayers: a family that’s struggling, a friendship that fell apart, a team or a part they didn’t get, a loneliness nobody sees. Elisabeth and Zacharias show what faithfulness looks like while you wait: they kept serving, kept praying and kept going to the temple. In his October 2020 conference talk “Waiting on the Lord,” Elder Jeffrey R. Holland gave an apostolic promise that our prayers are heard and answered, even when the timing or the answer isn’t what we wanted (see the quote below). Be careful not to promise that faith guarantees the exact blessing someone wants; promise instead that God hears, knows and will answer in His way.
Joseph is a quiet hero this week, and he speaks straight to a generation that lives online. When he learned Mary was expecting a child that wasn’t his, he was “a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example” (Matthew 1:19). He had a reason to feel hurt and every chance to expose her, yet he planned to handle it privately and kindly. Then, after an angel came in a dream, he “did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him” (1:24). In a world of screenshots and call-outs, choosing not to make someone a public example is a real form of discipleship.
The chapter also echoes the restored Church. Zacharias held the office of priest and served in the temple, an angel ministered to him, and his son John would later hold the keys of the Aaronic Priesthood and restore them to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in 1829 (Doctrine and Covenants 13). Teachers and priests in your class are part of that same priesthood today. Finally, point to the titles in these chapters: Jesus (“he shall save his people from their sins,” Matthew 1:21), Emmanuel (“God with us,” 1:23) and “the Son of the Highest” (Luke 1:32).
