Hello everyone, welcome to Follow Him Favorites. My name is Hank Smith. I'm here with the incredible, wonderful John, by the way.

We are doing Follow Him Favorites where we take a single question from each week's lesson to talk about.

The two books we're covering in this week's lesson are Ezra and Neha Maya.

These are ones that I'm sure you've spent a lot of time in John, Ezra and Neha Maya.

They talk a lot about rebuilding the temple. So the question that I get, and I'm sure you get it too, is I'm going through the temple soon.

How do I prepare? What do you think I should do? What advice do you have for me to prepare to go to the temple?

So John, when someone comes to you with that question, what do you say? I bet there's a couple things you say every time.

What I love from these chapters before I answer that is just how excited they were to rebuild the temple. This is in a nutshell, there's the Babylonian captivity.

Well, King Cyrus has let them leave Babylon and they're, we're going to go back to Jerusalem. We're going to rebuild the temple.

And I just love the feeling of excitement for that and discovering things in the scriptures and trying to put that all together.

And I'm glad people are asking that question. There ought to be some great excitement for going to the temple. And how do you prepare for that?

You stay on the covenant path. You be where you're supposed to be. You tell your bishop, I want to go to the temple.

For me, you show up at the sacrament table every week. That's a great way to prepare. If you are prepared, if you want to learn more, because maybe you're a little nervous, what is that we don't talk about it because we feel it's too sacred.

So what do you, if you're nervous about it, there's a book, our friend wrote Tony Sret wrote a book called The Holy Invitation. I've given that to my students before who are asking that same question.

That I think could call many nervousness you might have about going because it's something really to look forward to expect to feel the presence of the Lord in such a such a wonderful place.

The people who will open the doors and greet you will be so nice and so kind and so loving.

When I was a bishop, I just loved it when somebody wanted to come and get a renewal recommend and I just always had that feeling the Lord wants this person in the temple.

Our friend Matt Gray came onto our podcast and we talked about the ancient tabernacle, if you remember, John. He had some great visuals.

So if a student comes to me or a young person comes to me and says, hey, brother Smith, I'm going through the temple soon. What do you advise to give? I usually say, how much time do you have? How much time do you want to give to this preparation?

If it's five minutes, then watch this little film. If it's an hour, then do this or that. So we're going to assume you want to put hours in for preparing and not a 10 minute quick preparing.

So I'll give you a couple of things. John, you mentioned our friend Anthony Sweat. He just gave a BYU devotional called we need an endowment.

First thing I would do if I was going to go through the temple soon is I would sit down with that devotional and I would read it and listen to it at the same time and I would walk through it carefully because of what Anthony does there.

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