🎵 Update: The Wild Man lyric video is temporarily delayed while our video editing service completes a system upgrade.

To get notified as soon as a video is dropped, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel – or just check back later today.

Back to the lesson

Jan 26–Feb 1: “Teach These Things Freely unto Your Children” (Genesis 5; Moses 6)

From “just a lad” to a mighty seer. This week, we walk beside Enoch as he learns that God doesn’t call the confident — He creates them.

Shout For JoyShout for Joy

March 2–8: “Let God Prevail”

From Rebekah’s 300-gallon act of kindness to Jacob’s all-night wrestle, we follow a family learning to “Let God Prevail.” We discover that God’s blessings aren’t things we have to “trick” others to get; they are gifts He freely gives to all who persevere with Him.

Shout For JoyShout for Joy

Bible Songs

Listen onSpotify Listen onApple Music Watch onYouTube

After Update

1. We Already Have a King — The Day Israel Asked for a Downgrade
   [1 Samuel 8:5-7, 10-18; Mosiah 29:16-17; D&C 1:19; 2 Nephi 4:34]

Picture a crowd of people standing at Samuel's door, arms crossed, voices raised, making a demand that would change their entire national destiny. They're not asking for more food, or better roads, or relief from their enemies. They're asking to be more like everyone else. 'Give us a king,' they say, 'to judge us like all the nations' (1 Samuel 8:5). And if you read that sentence carefully, you'll notice the problem is hiding right in the middle of it — 'like all the nations.' That's the whole issue in four words.

Samuel is old. His sons, who were supposed to carry on his work, have turned out to be corrupt judges who take bribes and pervert justice. The people have a legitimate grievance. But their solution? Completely wrong. Instead of crying out to the Lord who had delivered them from Egypt, parted the Red Sea, and fed them manna in the wilderness, they look sideways at the Philistines and the Moabites and think, 'What they have looks pretty good.' A king. A crown. Someone tall and impressive to march out in front of the army.

The Lord's response to Samuel is one of the most quietly heartbreaking lines in all of scripture: 'They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them' (1 Samuel 8:7). He's not surprised. He's not even angry in the way you might expect. He just tells Samuel to warn them — clearly, specifically, and without softening it — about exactly what a human king will cost them. And Samuel does. He lays it out in 1 Samuel 8:10–18 like a bill of sale: your sons will be taken for his army, your daughters for his kitchens, your fields and vineyards for his officials, a tenth of your grain and flocks for his servants. You will be his servants. And when that day comes and you cry out, the Lord says, He won't answer.

They hear every word. And they say, 'Nope. We still want a king.'

This is the Restoration's core warning in ancient dress. The Doctrine and Covenants is full of the Lord pleading with His people not to trust in the arm of flesh (D&C 1:19). The Book of Mormon's entire political history is a long, painful demonstration of what happens when a people substitute human power for divine covenant. Mosiah 29 is practically a commentary on 1 Samuel 8 — Mosiah warns his people that a wicked king can destroy an entire nation in a single generation.

For your family today, the question isn't whether you want a literal king. It's subtler than that. What are the 'nations around you' whose approval you're chasing? What does your family look to for safety, identity, and direction — and is Jesus Christ actually at the top of that list?

————————————————

1. The Nervous King — How Saul Started Small and Grew Proud
   [1 Samuel 9:2-3, 21; 10:9, 21-22; 15:17; Moses 6:31-36; Jeremiah 1:6; D&C 1:17-19; Ether 12:27]

Here is a detail about Saul that most people completely miss, and it changes everything about how you read his story. On the day he was supposed to be presented to all of Israel as their first king — the big moment, the coronation, the crowd assembled and waiting — Saul was hiding. Not strategically. Not humbly stepping aside. He was literally found 'hid among the stuff' (1 Samuel 10:22). Luggage. He was hiding behind the luggage.

This is the same man who, just chapters earlier, had been wandering the countryside looking for his father's lost donkeys and stumbled into a divine appointment with the prophet Samuel. He came from the tribe of Benjamin — the smallest tribe — and his own family, he told Samuel, was 'the least of all the families' of that tribe (1 Samuel 9:21). When Samuel anointed him privately and told him he would be king, Saul's response wasn't ambition or excitement. It was something closer to bewilderment. He was, as the lesson puts it, 'little in his own sight' (1 Samuel 15:17).

And here's the tender part: the Lord knew all of that, and He called him anyway. More than that — He gave Saul 'another heart' (1 Samuel 10:9). That phrase is remarkable. The Spirit of God came upon Saul, he prophesied among the prophets, and he was genuinely changed. The Lord didn't wait for Saul to become worthy of the calling. He equipped him for it.

This is the pattern of prophetic calling throughout scripture. Moses told the Lord he couldn't speak well (Exodus 4:10). Enoch said he was 'but a lad' and 'slow of speech' (Moses 6:31). Jeremiah said he was too young (Jeremiah 1:6). The Lord's answer is always essentially the same: I know. I called you anyway. I'll be with you.

The tragedy of Saul isn't that he started weak. It's that he stopped relying on the One who had strengthened him. Somewhere between the luggage pile and the throne, the humility curdled into insecurity, and the insecurity hardened into pride. He started making decisions based on what the people thought, what looked impressive, what felt politically safe. And that drift — slow, almost invisible at first — is what eventually cost him everything.

For parents, this is worth sitting with. The Lord calls imperfect people to callings they feel unqualified for all the time. That's not a bug in the system. That's the system. The question is whether we stay tethered to the Source of the strength, or whether we start taking credit for it ourselves.

————————————————

1. To Obey Is Better — The Compromise That Sounded Reasonable
   [1 Samuel 13:5-14; 15:1-23; 1 Nephi 3:7; D&C 82:10; Mosiah 2:41; 2 Nephi 9:28-29]

Saul's downfall didn't happen in a single dramatic moment of rebellion. It happened twice, in two separate incidents, and both times he had what sounded like a perfectly reasonable explanation.

The first crack appears in 1 Samuel 13. The Philistines have assembled a massive army — 30,000 chariots, 6,000 horsemen, and soldiers 'as the sand which is on the sea shore' (1 Samuel 13:5). Saul's own troops are so terrified they're hiding in caves and thickets and pits. Samuel had told Saul to wait seven days for him to arrive and offer the burnt offering before battle. Seven days pass. Samuel doesn't show. The army is melting away. So Saul does the offering himself — a ritual that was not his to perform. And the moment he finishes, Samuel walks up the road. The timing is almost painful to read.

Saul's explanation? 'I forced myself' (1 Samuel 13:12). The situation was urgent. The people were scattering. He felt he had to act. Every word of that is probably true. And none of it was the point. The point was that the Lord had given a specific instruction through His prophet, and Saul had decided his own read of the situation was more reliable than that instruction.

The second and fatal incident is in 1 Samuel 15. The Lord commands Saul through Samuel to utterly destroy the Amalekites — their people, their livestock, everything. Saul wins the battle, but he spares the Amalekite king, Agag, and keeps the best of the sheep and cattle. His explanation to Samuel? They were going to sacrifice them to the Lord. The best stuff, saved for a holy purpose. Surely that's better than destroying it?

Samuel's answer is one of the most quoted lines in the Old Testament: 'Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams' (1 Samuel 15:22). Then he adds the diagnosis: 'For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry' (verse 23). Strong words. But notice what Samuel is identifying — it's not that Saul did something obviously wicked. It's that he substituted his own judgment for the Lord's revealed word, and dressed it up in religious language.

The Book of Mormon's Nephi understood the opposite principle in his bones. 'I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them to accomplish the thing which he commandeth' (1 Nephi 3:7). That's the contrast. Saul looked at the obstacle and improvised. Nephi looked at the commandment and trusted.

For your family: where are the places we're tempted to offer the Lord our version of obedience — the modified, slightly-more-convenient edition — and call it good enough?

————————————————

1. The Shepherd Boy Nobody Thought to Invite — How God Sees
   [1 Samuel 16:1-13; 1 Samuel 16:6-7; Jacob 4:13; D&C 1:17-19; Moses 6:31-36; Mark 12:41-44; Luke 19:1-9; John 4:5-30; 1 Corinthians 1:27-29]

Samuel arrives in Bethlehem on what looks like a routine errand — he's there to offer a sacrifice, and he's invited Jesse and his sons. The Lord has told him that the next king of Israel is one of Jesse's boys, and Samuel is ready to anoint him. Jesse lines them up. Seven sons. And they are impressive. Eliab steps forward first, and Samuel's reaction is immediate and visceral: 'Surely the Lord's anointed is before him' (1 Samuel 16:6). Tall, strong, firstborn — everything a king is supposed to look like.

The Lord stops him cold. 'Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart' (1 Samuel 16:7). Six more sons pass by. Six more times, Samuel hears the same quiet answer: not this one.

Then Samuel asks Jesse the question that should have been obvious from the start: 'Are here all thy children?' And Jesse, almost as an afterthought, mentions there's one more. The youngest. He's out in the fields with the sheep. Nobody thought it was worth bringing him in.

David comes in from the fields — ruddy, bright-eyed, the text says 'goodly to look to' (1 Samuel 16:12), though clearly not in the imposing way Eliab was. And the Lord says immediately: 'Arise, anoint him: for this is he.' Samuel anoints him right there, in front of his brothers, and the Spirit of the Lord comes upon David from that day forward.

The detail that gets me every time is that David wasn't even in the room. He wasn't lobbying for the position. He wasn't trying to make an impression. He was doing his job — faithfully, quietly, out in the fields where nobody was watching. Or so he thought. The Lord was watching. The Lord is always watching the fields.

This is one of the most consistent patterns in Restoration theology. The Lord calls the unlikely, the overlooked, the ones the world has already sorted into the 'not quite' pile. Joseph Smith was a farm boy from Vermont. The Book of Mormon was translated by a young man with almost no formal education. The Savior Himself was born in a stable in a backwater province and raised by a carpenter. The world's metrics for greatness and the Lord's metrics are almost perfectly inverted.

For your family today: who in your life might you be underestimating because you're looking at the outside? And maybe more personally — are you underestimating yourself for the same reason? The Lord who saw a king in a shepherd boy sees something in you that you might not be giving Him credit for.