Hello and welcome to the Scriptures and Real podcast.

This is the podcast where we talk about elements of the scriptures that have made them become real to us,

because we believe there's a great deal of power in the scriptures, and the more real they are, the more we can draw on that power, and we certainly need it these days. I'm your host, Kerry Mulestein,

and I'm so happy to have back with me, my dear friend and colleague and repeated guests,

Andrew Skinner, who we've introduced before, so maybe we won't say too much in the way of

introduction, but he's been a friend, a mentor,

a good, good, good man, a bestselling and prolific author,

dean of college of religious education, chair of ancient scripture, director of the Maxwell

Institute, all sorts of things.

But we're just going to say today, as the holidays

are closing, we're just going to say, he's a good husband, father, and grandfather. And I know that.

And he also has an amazing wife. So welcome, Andy. Good to have you with us.

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be with you.

And today, well, maybe I've been trying to remember to be in

the habit of telling ahead of time a little bit of what we're going to talk about. So today we're

going to talk about John, John the Baptist and his role as a forerunner and what that means,

how that affects Christ's ministry and how we should

Christ's ministry and so on, and just how we should understand that. So with that introduction,

Andy, why don't you just kind of talk to us about some of the things you have in mind about John

the Baptist? Wonderful. Thank you very, very much. When we talk about John the Baptist, we are talking

about one of the most extraordinary men to have ever lived, and that's because he possessed an

extraordinary responsibility. As we know, Heavenly Father was sending his beloved son to earth as a mortal being.

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