Lesson 2: “My Soul Doth Magnify the Lord” – Scriptures and Quotes

Lesson 2: “My Soul Doth Magnify the Lord” – Scriptures and Quotes

Reading 1: Many years ago a young lady wrote these words as she began a study of the New Testament. The question to which she was responding is the one found in Matthew 22:42: “What think ye of Christ?”

 “I know quite a bit about Christ and I really believe that he is my Savior, but more than anything else in life right now I want to get to know Jesus as a brother and I want to be his friend. I have thought about Christ a lot lately and I know that somehow I have got to gain a testimony so that I know for myself that he lives.”

At the conclusion a year studying the New Testament, she responded again to the same question. She wrote this:

“I hardly know where to begin. Jesus Christ is the most important [person] in my life. I know, without a doubt, that he lives, that he is the Son of God and that he loves me with a most complete and perfect love. 

“This past . . . year I have grown so much! I have learned about the Savior’s life, his mission, and all the things he taught. But most important, I have come to know that Christ lives. He is a real person with feelings, and personality. I love him very, very much and I hope I always will. I know that if I will just live the teachings that he taught, I will never have to wonder and doubt again.” (Ted Gibbons, LDS Living, New Testament Lesson 1, December 29, 2010)

Reading 2 - President Harold B. Lee told of how he prepared when he was asked to give an Easter radio address a few days after becoming a member of the Twelve: "During the days which followed, I locked myself in one of the rooms over in the Church Office building, and there I read the story of the life of the Savior. As I read the events of his life, and particularly the events leading up to and of the crucifixion, and then of the resurrection, I discovered that something was happening to me. I was not just reading a story; it seemed actually as though I was living the events; and I was reading them with a reality the like of which I had never before experienced. And when, on the Sunday night following, after I had delivered my brief talk and then declared, simply, 'As one of the humblest among you, I, too, know that these things are true, that Jesus died and was resurrected for the sins of the world,' I was speaking from a full heart, because I had come to know that week, with a certainty which I never before had known." (CR, Apr 1952)

Reading 3 - Brigham Young said:  The greatest and most important of all requirements of our Father in Heaven and of his son Jesus Christ is . . . to believe in Jesus Christ, confess him, seek him, cling to him, make friends with him.

    Take a course to open and keep open a communication with . . . our Savior (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 8:339)

John 17:3

Reading 4: Luke 1:5-7

Reading 5 – Elder Neal A Maxwell has said:  The issue for us is trusting God enough to trust also His timing. If we can truly believe He has our welfare at heart, may we not let His plans unfold as He thinks best? The same is true with the second coming and with all those matters wherein our faith needs to include faith in the Lord’s timing for us personally, not just in His overall plans and purposes.   (Even As I Am (1982), 93.)

Reading 6 – Luke 1: 11-17

Luke 1:26-33

Reading 7 – Luke 1:39-47

Reading 8 - Speaking of Jesus Christ, Elder Bruce R. McConkie taught:  “God was his Father, from which Immortal Personage … he inherited the power of immortality, which is the power to live forever; or, having chosen to die, it is the power to rise again in immortality, thereafter to live forever without again seeing corruption. … 

“… Mary was his mother, from which mortal woman … he inherited the power of mortality, which is the power to die. …

“It was because of this … intermixture of the divine and the mortal in one person, that our Lord was able to work out the infinite and eternal atonement. Because God was his Father and Mary was his mother, he had power to live or to die, as he chose, and having laid down his life, he had power to take it again, and then, in a way incomprehensible to us, to pass on the effects of that resurrection to all men so that all shall rise from the tomb” (The Promised Messiah [1978], 470–71).