Hello, my friends. Welcome to another Follow Him Favorites. My name is Hank Smith, and I'm

here with the amazing John, by the way. Welcome, John.

Hank. If you've been following Follow Him Favorites this year, you know that we are taking

a single question from each week's lesson and studying it just for a few minutes. John,

in the manual for this week's lesson of Nehum, Habakkuk, and Zefania, there's a lot of syllables

there. It says right in the beginning, reading the Old Testament often means reading prophecies

about destruction. The Lord frequently called prophets to warn the wicked, and then this question

is posed in the very first paragraph, and this is our question today. Why is it valuable to read these

prophecies today? So John, what would you say to someone who's reading these three books going,

wow, this is a lot of destruction. Why do I have to read this? What do you think?

The first thing that comes to my mind is that they have been warned, they have been taught, and now

they are getting consequences. And one of the things that I think Satan tries to do is say there's

no consequences, like jumping over to the book Mormon in the Korahor story. When a man is dead,

that's the end. Whatsoever a man did was no crime, no consequences. And here we're finding out, wow,

they learned the hard way that choices have consequences. Every choice has a consequence, and that

can be a good thing. I remember raising my kids, if they did something wrong, do I get a consequence?

And I didn't want them to think of consequence as a negative word because sometimes consequences

are wonderful. It can be positive, yeah. So Elder Maxwell, Elder Neil M. Maxwell said once,

we had better want the consequences of what we want. So maybe that's a good lesson here. And

my mission president used to say, why is people learned from experience, but super wise people

learn from others experience? What are the scriptures, but the experiences of others, and maybe we can

learn from these destructive consequences? Okay, what choices did they make that brought this on?

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