How to Teach Isaiah in Come Follow Me (Without Losing Your Class)

If you have looked ahead at the 2026 schedule and seen five straight weeks of Isaiah sitting there in September and October, you may have felt a small wave of dread. You are not alone. Isaiah has a reputation, and it is mostly earned. The language is dense, the imagery is layered, and the chapters jump between judgment, comfort, and prophecy without much warning. It is the block of the Old Testament year that teachers start preparing for months in advance, and for good reason.

The good news is that Isaiah's difficulty is not really about the doctrine being hard. It is about the packaging. Once you have a few tools for unwrapping it, Isaiah becomes one of the richest blocks in the whole Old Testament, and your class can feel that instead of just enduring it.

Why Isaiah Feels So Hard

Part of the problem is structural. Isaiah writes in Hebrew poetry, which relies on parallelism, repeated imagery, and layered meaning rather than a straightforward narrative. There is no Joseph-in-Egypt plot to follow. Instead you get oracles against nations, poems about servants, and prophecies that seem to describe events centuries apart in the same breath. Add in names and places that meant something to a sixth-century-BC audience but nothing to us, and it is easy to see why a class can go quiet fast.

There is also a translation problem. The King James Version, for all its beauty, uses vocabulary and sentence structures from the 1600s to render Hebrew poetry from 700 years before Christ. That is two layers of distance stacked on top of each other. A verse like Isaiah 55:1, "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters," is gorgeous once you catch the invitation. But the "Ho" at the front trips a lot of readers before they ever get to the point.

Why Nephi Loved Isaiah So Much

Here is the part worth sitting with as you prepare. Nephi quotes more Isaiah than any other Book of Mormon prophet, and he tells us exactly why in 2 Nephi 25:4: "For my soul delighteth in the words of Isaiah, for I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning." Nephi was not claiming Isaiah was easy. In the very next verse he admits that many of his own people did not understand him, because they did not know "concerning the manner of prophesying among the Jews."

What Nephi did instead was liken it. He read Isaiah as a message written directly to his own family, his own choices, his own future. That is the whole key, and it is worth saying plainly to your class before you ever open Isaiah 1: this book was not written to confuse anyone. It was written to comfort and warn real people, and it still does both today if we are willing to do the work Nephi did.

Five Techniques That Actually Work

1. Context first, verses second

Before you read a single verse, spend two minutes on who Isaiah was talking to and why. Isaiah prophesied in Judah during a period when Assyria was the dominant regional power and the kingdom of Israel to the north had already fallen. His audience was scared, and some of them were tempted to make political alliances with foreign powers instead of trusting God. Once your class knows that Isaiah is speaking to a specific, frightened nation, phrases like "trust in the Lord" and warnings against "the arm of flesh" land as real advice to real people, not abstract poetry.

2. Build a symbol glossary

Isaiah reuses a small set of images over and over: light and darkness, water in the desert, a vineyard, a shepherd, a highway being made straight. Instead of explaining each one fresh every time it appears, put a running list on the board. "Water in a dry place" almost always means the relief and life that comes through Christ. "A highway" almost always means removing obstacles so the Lord can come to His people, or His people can come to Him. Once your class has the glossary, they start decoding new verses themselves, which is a far better feeling than being decoded to.

3. Find the Christ-centered throughline

Every Isaiah week in this year's schedule has an obvious center of gravity in the Savior. Isaiah 9 gives us "unto us a child is born." Isaiah 53 gives us the suffering servant, "wounded for our transgressions." Isaiah 40 opens with "comfort ye my people" and moves into "he shall feed his flock like a shepherd." If you get lost in a chapter, that is always the direction to walk. Pick the Christ-centered verse in the block first, then work outward to the surrounding context, rather than starting at verse 1 and hoping you arrive somewhere meaningful by verse 30.

4. Teach dual fulfillment openly

One reason Isaiah confuses readers is that his prophecies often apply to more than one time period at once. A prophecy about deliverance from Babylon can also point toward the latter-day gathering of Israel, and beyond that toward the Second Coming. Rather than hiding this complexity, name it for your class. Say plainly that Isaiah often speaks with more than one fulfillment in mind, and that part of the assignment as readers is to ask, "when has this already happened, and when might it happen again?" That question alone turns a confusing passage into a genuine discussion.

5. Go one verse deep instead of one chapter wide

This is the single most useful shift for a short lesson. Do not try to cover an entire chapter of Isaiah in one sitting. Pick one verse, maybe two, and actually sit in it. Ask what it meant to Isaiah's original audience, what it means about the Savior, and what it means for someone in your class this week. A single well-chosen verse, discussed honestly, teaches more Isaiah than a rushed tour through twelve chapters ever will.

Adapting for Different Ages and Callings

For Primary, Isaiah is almost always best handled through one image rather than the full text. Isaiah 9's "unto us a child is born" works beautifully for younger classes around the Christmas week, and the image of the Good Shepherd from Isaiah 40 gives Primary-age kids something concrete to hold onto. Save the political history for older classes.

For youth, the "trust in the Lord versus trust in ourselves" tension in Isaiah's early chapters translates directly into decisions teens are already facing, and it is worth naming that connection out loud rather than assuming they will see it.

For adult Sunday School, Gospel Doctrine, Elders Quorum, and Relief Society, the dual fulfillment technique and the symbol glossary tend to generate the best discussion, since adults are usually ready to sit with ambiguity once they have a framework for it.

Building These Lessons Ahead of Time

Because these five weeks come one after another, it is worth preparing them as a set rather than scrambling each Saturday night. If you want a running start, we keep the full breakdown for each week on the site: The Prophecies of Isaiah Begin (Isaiah 1-12), The Desert Shall Blossom (Isaiah 13-30, 35), Comfort Ye My People (Isaiah 40-49), The Suffering Servant (Isaiah 50-57), and Arise, Shine (Isaiah 58-66).

This is also where a tool like ComeFollowMe.io earns its keep. Tell it which calling you are teaching, whether that is Primary, Sunday School, Elders Quorum or Relief Society, or your own family home evening, and it will build a lesson already sized to your class length, with a symbol-glossary style explanation of key images, honest discussion questions, and a clear Christ-centered throughline for that week's Isaiah block. It will not decide what your class needs to hear this year. That part is still yours. But it can save you the hour you would otherwise spend just figuring out where to start in a dense chapter.

The Payoff

Isaiah rewards patience more than almost any other book in the Old Testament. The teachers who dread these five weeks in July often end up saying, by October, that Isaiah gave them some of their best lessons of the whole year. Nephi felt the same way about a book his own people struggled to understand. If you go in with context, a short glossary of images, a Christ-centered anchor verse, and the willingness to go deep on one verse instead of wide across a chapter, your class will feel the difference. Isaiah was never meant to be survived. He was meant to comfort people who were afraid, and that has not changed in twenty-seven hundred years.