Reading 1 – Joseph Smith described these three roles or callings as follows: “The spirit of Elias is first, Elijah second, and Messiah last. Elias is a forerunner to prepare the way, and the spirit and power of Elijah is to come after, holding the keys of power, building the Temple to the capstone, placing the seals of the Melchizedek Priesthood upon the house of Israel, and making all things ready; then Messiah comes to His Temple, which is last of all” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p.340)
Isaiah 53:3-4
Reading 2 - “Literature . . . exists to communicate significant experience–significant because concentrated and organized. Its function is not to tell us about experience but to allow us imaginatively to participate in it. It is a means of allowing us, through the imagination, to live more fully, more deeply, more richly, and with greater awareness. It can do this in two ways: by broadening our experience–that is, by making us acquainted with a range of experience with which, in the ordinary course of events, we might have no contact–or by deepening our experience–that is, by making us feel more poignantly and more understandingly the everyday experiences all of us have. . . .
“Poetry. . . . has been regarded as something central to existence, something having unique value to the fully realized life, something that we are better off having and spiritually impoverished without.
“Initially, poetry might be defined as a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than does ordinary language.
"The difference between poetry and other literature is one only of degree. Poetry is the most condensed and concentrated form of literature, saying most in the fewest number of words. It is language whose individual lines, either because of their own brilliance or because they focus so powerfully what has gone before, have a higher voltage than most language has. It is language that grows frequently incandescent, giving off both light and heat." (Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, Laurence Perrine, Ed., 1983, 517-524)
Reading 3 – Isaiah 52:7
Reading 4 – Mosiah 13:15-18
Reading 4A: 2 Nephi 2:6-8
Reading 5 – Isaiah 50:5-7
Reading 6 – Isaiah 51:6
Isaiah 51:22
Reading 7 – Doctrine and Covenants 19:15-20
Isaiah 53:5
Reading 8: In speaking of the agony at Gethsemane, B.H. Roberts wrote: "He felt the whole burden and mystery of the world's sin, and encountered the fiercest assaults of Satan.... His sorrow did not spring from His own life, His memory or His fears, but from the vicarious nature of the conflict. The agony was a bearing of the weight and sorrow of our sins, in loneliness, in anguish of soul threatening to crush His body, yet borne triumphantly, because in submission to His Father's will." (The Seventy's Course in Theology, 2:127)
Reading 9: Isaiah 53:8-11
Reading 9A: Elder Russell M. Nelson said: “His Atonement is infinite . . . in that all humankind would be saved from never-ending death. It was infinite in terms of His immense suffering. It was infinite in time, putting an end to the preceding prototype of animal sacrifice. It was infinite in scope—it was to be done once for all. And the mercy of the Atonement extends not only to an infinite number of people, but also to an infinite number of worlds created by Him. It was infinite beyond any human scale of measurement or mortal comprehension” (Russell M. Nelson, “The Atonement,” Ensign, Nov. 1996, 35).
Isaiah 51:1, 4, 7
Reading 10: Isaiah 52:1-2
Doctrine and Covenants 113:7-10
Isaiah 52:11
Reading 11 - President Spencer W. Kimball said: "The Lord said, 'Be ye clean, that bear the vessels of the Lord.' (Isaiah 52:11.) And we must state and restate and call to the attention of our children and their children that chastity and cleanliness are basic in the Church. Parents should teach their children in their home evenings and in all their activities as they rear them that unchastity is a terrible sin, always has been, always will be and that no rationalization by any number of people will ever change it. As long as the stars shine in the heavens and the sun brings warmth to the earth and so long as men and women live upon this earth, there must be this holy standard of chastity and virtue." (quoted in Companion To Your Study of the Old Testament, pp305-306)
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