Before You Teach
Teacher Quick Brief
A prep snapshot before the full lesson flow.
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Before You Teach
Teacher Quick Brief
A prep snapshot before the full lesson flow.
Teacher Quick Brief
What This Week Is About
This week follows four kings of Judah across nearly two centuries, and each one becomes a test case in the same question: where do you put your trust when the pressure is real? Asa trusted God against impossible odds, then quietly stopped. Jehoshaphat made a costly alliance, course-corrected, and later prayed Judah through a three-nation invasion without ever drawing a sword. Uzziah prospered for fifty years and let that very prosperity destroy him. Hezekiah reopened a closed temple and invited a divided, scattered people back to it anyway. These chapters belong together because Chronicles is building one argument across four reigns: self-reliance and pride are slow leaks, and turning to God is a decision made over and over, not once.
Main Points To Teach
- Trust in God is not a single decision made in a crisis; it has to be renewed. Asa prayed his way to victory over a million-man army in 2 Chronicles 14, then a chapter later hired a pagan king instead of praying his way through a smaller threat, and imprisoned the prophet who called him on it (2 Chronicles 16:1–10).
- Pride often follows success, not failure. Uzziah's fall came after fifty-two years of God-given prosperity: "when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction" (2 Chronicles 26:16).
- Dependence on God can look like doing nothing militarily and everything spiritually. Jehoshaphat's prayer, "we know not what to do: but our eyes are upon thee" (2 Chronicles 20:12), is the manual's centerpiece, and the Lord's answer, "the battle is not yours, but God's" (2 Chronicles 20:15), reframes what courage in crisis actually looks like.
What Is Happening In The Scripture Story
Asa begins well, removing idols and trusting God completely when Zerah the Ethiopian invades with an overwhelming army (2 Chronicles 14). The prophet Azariah renews the covenant with Judah (2 Chronicles 15), but when Baasha of Israel threatens Judah's border, Asa hires Syria instead of praying, rages at the prophet Hanani for confronting him, and dies without ever seeking the Lord about his illness (2 Chronicles 16). Jehoshaphat succeeds him, fortifies the kingdom, and sends teachers of the law throughout Judah (2 Chronicles 17), but then allies with wicked King Ahab and nearly dies at Ramoth-gilead after the prophet Micaiah, alone among four hundred prophets, tells the kings the unpopular truth (2 Chronicles 18). Confronted by the prophet Jehu, Jehoshaphat reforms Judah's courts (2 Chronicles 19), and when three nations invade together, he gathers all Judah at the temple to pray rather than to plan a battle, and the Lord destroys the invaders without Judah lifting a weapon (2 Chronicles 20). Generations later, Uzziah reigns fifty-two years of prosperity, then enters the temple to burn incense himself, a priestly act forbidden to him, and is struck with leprosy on the spot (2 Chronicles 26). Finally, Hezekiah reopens the temple his father had closed and invites the broken, scattered northern kingdom to keep Passover in Jerusalem, praying for those who arrive unprepared rather than turning them away (2 Chronicles 30).
Why It Matters For Adults
Adults in this class are not facing invading armies, but they are facing mortgages, diagnoses, difficult bosses, wayward children, and the quiet pressure to go along with the crowd at work or online. This material gives them permission to talk about the specific moment they stopped praying about something and started just managing it themselves, and to ask honestly why prosperity and competence can be just as spiritually dangerous as crisis.
Full Lesson Flow
Teaching Outline
Use the sections below as a menu. Swap cards and activities to keep the class interactive.
OPENING
Here is a strange detail buried in 2 Chronicles 16. Asa, the same king who once prayed his way to victory over a million-man army, gets sick in his old age. The text says plainly: "in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians" (2 Chronicles 16:12). Not "he sought the Lord and also physicians." Not "he sought the Lord first." He sought the physicians instead. This is the same man who, decades earlier, stood before an army that outnumbered his own and said, "Lord, it is nothing with thee to help, whether with many, or with them that have no power: help us, O Lord our God; for we rest on thee" (2 Chronicles 14:11). Something happened to Asa between chapter 14 and chapter 16. He didn't lose his faith all at once. It eroded.
That's the puzzle worth sitting with this morning. How does a man who prayed like that end up dying without praying at all? And if it happened to Asa, who had already seen God show up, what does that say about the rest of us, who have also seen God show up and still sometimes quietly stop asking?
SCRIPTURE EXPLORATION
Start with Asa's two crises, because Chronicles places them side by side on purpose. In chapter 14, Zerah the Ethiopian comes against Judah with a million men and three hundred chariots (2 Chronicles 14:9). Read verse 11 together slowly: "And Asa cried unto the Lord his God, and said, Lord, it is nothing with thee to help, whether with many, or with them that have no power: help us, O Lord our God; for we rest on thee, and in thy name we go against this multitude." Ask the class: what does it mean that he names both possibilities, "many" and "them that have no power," before God? He isn't negotiating. He's stating a fact about who God is regardless of the odds.
Now jump to chapter 16. The threat this time is smaller, a single king, Baasha, building a blockade at Ramah. And Asa's response is different: "Then Asa brought out silver and gold out of the treasures of the house of the Lord and of the king's house, and sent to Ben-hadad king of Syria" (2 Chronicles 16:2). No prayer is recorded. When the prophet Hanani confronts him, he says something that should stop the class cold: "the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him. Herein thou hast done foolishly: therefore from henceforth thou shalt have wars" (2 Chronicles 16:9). Ask: why does a smaller problem sometimes get less of our faith than a bigger one did? Is it possible that the manageable crisis is actually the more dangerous one, because it feels solvable on our own?
Then move to the chapter the manual centers everything on, 2 Chronicles 20. Three nations, Moab, Ammon, and the Meunites, march on Judah together. Jehoshaphat's first move is not military. "Jehoshaphat feared, and set himself to seek the Lord, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah" (2 Chronicles 20:3). He gathers the whole nation, men, women, and children, at the temple, and prays the line that gives this week its name: "O our God... we have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee" (2 Chronicles 20:12). The Lord's answer through the Levite Jahaziel is worth reading in full: "Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God's... ye shall not need to fight in this battle: set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of the Lord with you" (2 Chronicles 20:15, 17). Ask the class: what's the difference between Jehoshaphat's "we know not what to do" and Asa's silence in chapter 16? Both men faced threats. Only one of them said the quiet part out loud.
Cross-reference Exodus 14:13–14, where Moses tells a terrified Israel at the Red Sea, "the Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace," and D&C 123:17, "stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God." This is not a one-time biblical moment. It's a pattern God seems to use repeatedly with people who run out of options.
DOCTRINAL DISCUSSION
The connecting thread across Asa, Jehoshaphat, and Uzziah is that trust in God is not a permanent setting you switch on once. It has to be renewed, almost like a covenant relationship requires ongoing maintenance rather than a single ceremony. Asa proved that you can pray with total conviction in one decade and stop praying altogether in the next, without ever consciously deciding to walk away from God. Elder D. Todd Christofferson taught on exactly this dynamic: our relationship with God, like any relationship, requires continual attention or it quietly drifts (Christofferson, "Our Relationship with God," Liahona, May 2022, 78–80). Ask the class: when have you noticed your own trust in God shift, not from a crisis of faith, but simply from inattention?
Uzziah's story adds a second layer to this. His reign opens with the line "he sought God in the days of Zechariah... and God made him to prosper" (2 Chronicles 26:5), and for decades that's exactly what happens: military victories, agricultural innovation, fortified cities. Then comes the turn: "But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction: for he transgressed against the Lord his God, and went into the temple of the Lord to burn incense upon the altar of incense" (2 Chronicles 26:16). He takes for himself a function reserved for the sons of Aaron, and he is struck with leprosy while the censer is still in his hand. President Ezra Taft Benson described this exact pattern in "Beware of Pride," noting that pride is the sin that grows out of success rather than failure, the temptation that comes not when we are weak but precisely when we are strong. Ask: why might prosperity be a harder spiritual test than hardship? What guards against letting your own competence convince you that you no longer need God's input on something?
Micaiah offers a third angle entirely: courage under social pressure. Four hundred prophets tell Ahab and Jehoshaphat exactly what they want to hear. Micaiah alone is summoned reluctantly, and Ahab's own messenger pressures him to fall in line: "let thy word... be like one of theirs, and speak thou good" (2 Chronicles 18:12). Micaiah's answer is unflinching: "as the Lord liveth, even what my God saith, that will I speak" (2 Chronicles 18:13). He is struck and imprisoned for it, and the prophecy comes true anyway when Ahab dies in battle exactly as foretold (2 Chronicles 18:33–34). Ask the class: what does it cost, in your own life, to be the one voice saying something unpopular but true? Where do you find the courage Micaiah found?
PRACTICAL APPLICATION
Most adults in this room are not choosing between trusting God and hiring a foreign army. But the Asa pattern shows up in smaller, quieter decisions: managing a health scare on your own without ever praying about it the way you prayed about the bigger crisis years ago, handling a financial strain through sheer effort and Google searches while prayer becomes an afterthought, parenting a difficult teenager with strategy and willpower instead of the kind of dependence on God you had when that same child was a newborn and everything felt fragile and sacred. The line is rarely a dramatic rejection of faith. It is a slow substitution of "I'll handle this" for "our eyes are upon thee."
The Uzziah pattern shows up at work, in a calling, in a marriage that has been going well for years. Success can quietly convince any of us that we've graduated past needing counsel, correction, or God's input on decisions we now feel qualified to make alone. And the Micaiah pattern shows up every time a group chat, a meeting, or a family gathering moves toward a consensus you don't actually believe, and staying quiet would be so much easier than being the one dissenting voice.
President Russell M. Nelson's counsel applies directly here: he described moving from putting question marks behind a prophet's statements to putting exclamation points instead, and simply doing it, noting "the blessings just pour" (in Lane Johnson, "Russell M. Nelson: A Study in Obedience," Ensign, Aug. 1982, 24). That same posture, trust acted on rather than just held intellectually, is what separates Jehoshaphat's prayer from Asa's silence.
CLOSING TESTIMONY & INVITATION
Every king this week eventually faced a moment where the resources he had were not enough for the problem in front of him. Asa had an army and still needed God. Jehoshaphat had fortified cities and a standing army, organized by family, stationed throughout the kingdom (2 Chronicles 17), and when three nations came at once, he still gathered everyone at the temple instead of just calling up his troops. Having resources was never the issue. The issue was always where his eyes went first.
Take this question home this week: when something hard shows up, what is the very first move you make? Is it to solve, manage, and strategize, only praying about it once you've exhausted your own ideas? Or can you let your first move be Jehoshaphat's: "we know not what to do: but our eyes are upon thee" (2 Chronicles 20:12)? That prayer didn't come from a man who had given up. It came from a man being honest about the size of the problem and the size of God.