Daniel declared, May the name of God be praised forever and ever,
for wisdom and power belong to him.
He changes the times and seasons.
He removes kings and establishes kings.
He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have
understanding. He reveals the deep and hidden
things. He knows what is in the
darkness, and light dwells with him.
Ioffer, thanks and praise to you, God of my ancestors,
because you have given me wisdom and power.
And now you have let me know what we asked of you, for you
have let us know the King's mystery.
One of my favorite things to talk about is the fact that I
was homeschooled. If we've had a conversation,
right, Yay for the homeschoolers.
OK, let's see one of the only places they're going to hear
clapping. So I love to talk about having
been homeschooled, even though it was so long ago.
But it was a huge influence upon my life and I was homeschooled
almost the entire way through. Not because we're against my
family's against public schooling, It was the fact that
we lived somewhere that didn't have very good public schooling.
So my parents decided to home homeschool us.
I grew up in Lansing, MI for the 1st 12 years of my life.
So kind of the Midwest. I identify where someone lives
in Michigan by going like this and pointing, you know, if you
know someone from Michigan. But after that, I moved to
Buffalo, NY and if you have been to New York, you know, New York
is a completely different place than the Midwest, just a
different vibe, right? Not good, not bad, but a
different vibe. And so me and my family, we
moved to Buffalo, NY. My parents were really excited.
I was not, I was devastated. I still have wounding from that
move. But when we did that, my parents
decided that we're going to try new things.
And I don't like trying new things, but I did it anyways.
And one of the things we tried is I tried going to public
school for, for 6th grade, something I don't often talk
about. And let me tell you, it was an
experience. I don't want to say if it was
good or bad, but it was an experience.
It was a place, though, where I felt completely out of place,
right? For one thing, I couldn't wear
pajamas all day. That stunk.
I positive I didn't have to unload the dishwasher.
That was a really nice thing about going to public school.
I could kind of make up my own schedule with home schooling at
public school. I, I had to like follow where I
needed to be. In fact, I can remember being so
stressed about like needing to be in certain places at certain
times that there was a week at school where I didn't even go to
my locker. I just carried all of my books
and all of my notebooks and stuff with me wherever I went.
I was so and I still, I still have dreams about that.
I was completely out of place and I knew it.
I wish that I could say like I was like a confident 6th grader.
There is none by the way. There's no confidence graders.
But man, I felt nervous, I felt anxious, I felt lonely.
I felt completely like I didn't belong.
Some of our favorite stories are about characters like that in in
film. We call these fish out of water
stories, right? Whether you're a Marvel fan and
it's Thor cast out of Asgard down into Oklahoma, and he's
walking around assuming things are the way they are.
He goes to a restaurant, gets really good coffee, and what
does he do? He throws the coffee mug on the
ground and says, I'll have another.
Or maybe it's Captain America, a man at a time.
He's used to the 1940s, and when he's now in our current day, he
feels completely out of place. If you don't like Marvel movies,
think who remembers George of the jungle?
Raise your hand if you remember George of the jungle.
George. George Georgia of the jungle.
Wash up for that tree. Yeah, that's my singing this
morning. We love these stories about
about characters that are in places where they don't feel
like they belong or honestly, they they don't fit in.
It resonates with us because we've all felt that way.
Am I right? We've all had a time where you
felt like you didn't belong. For some of you, it's when you
move from one place to another, right?
The West Coast is very different than the East Coast is very
different than the Midwest. Even more so if you move
countries, right? Europe is a completely different
vibe than America, than Asia, than the Middle East.
For some of you, it's just moving jobs, right?
Different work cultures are different.
Maybe you like worked at a really healthy culture where
everyone was able to speak their mind, everyone felt safe, and
you move to a toxic work environment where everyone was
watching their own back. We all have times where we feel
like we don't belong and all we want is to be home.
And the language of scripture, this feeling is what we call
exile. Exile is not simply being far
from home. Exile is being in a place with a
different thought value and heart.
Jesus being a follower of Jesus means that you and I feel that
on a daily basis. Am I right?
If you're following Jesus and you're on social media and
you're watching maybe friends argue, that feels out of place.
If you're if you hold a biblical sexual ethic that feels out of
place in our world. If you hold a biblical ethic
about justice that can feel out of place in our world.
Jesus gives us a different vision of of sexuality, a
different relationship with money, and a different posture
towards power. We all have a sense that we are
not quite home. But what if this isn't so much a
bug, but it's a feature of being human?
What if it's just a reality of being human?
We're going to talk this week about how we are able to live as
exiles in the place we live. And last week Pastor Ben began
our conversation about this as we begin the book of Daniel and
and teaching through that. So last week Pastor Ben talked
about the fact that we are exiles and learning how to stand
resolute, how to stand firm in what you believe, how to not be
swayed by the culture around you.
But this morning we're going to talk about the other side of the
coin. We are going to talk about how
you and I, as exiles in our culture, can live as as a
presence of love, healing, truth, wisdom, and God himself
in the place that we are. How can the people of God
influence the culture around them without becoming captive to
it? So we're going to read Daniel 2.
Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to to Daniel 2.
We're not going to read the whole thing because it's 40
something verses and you guys don't want me to preach that
long. You guys were quiet.
Maybe I will. That's good.
I'm kidding. We're going to look at Daniel 2
and then we're going to be a little nerdy today.
I love when I get to say this. If you have like a notebook or
something, this is a note taking sermon.
We're going to get a little a little nerdy, so go ahead.
We're going to start in Daniel 21.
Last week, if you weren't here, we started the Book of Daniel.
This is the opening crawl, right of if you're a Star Wars fan,
I'm going to give you that Babylon is the world power at
the time of Daniel. They invade, they take over
other cultures and bring them in.
And so Israel is invaded by Babylon and Babylon kidnaps the
top leaders of Israel. Now why do they do that?
Why do they take only the top leaders?
See, Babylon doesn't take all of the slaves and bring them in.
Usually what Babylon does is is much more sneaky.
Babylon will take like the top leaders and take them to Babylon
and then begin to train them up in Babylonian ways, train them
in their way of living, train them in their religion, their
ways of thinking. And then they would send those
people back to their their home. And as those leaders had become
more Babylonians, the people underneath them would slowly
become more Babylonian because as the leader goes, so goes the
culture. So Daniel's kidnapped, he's
taken to Babylon and him and the others are begin this like
training regimen, right? This training regimen to be to
be wise men or or rulers with within Babylon and the the
Jewish people. And Daniel manages to stand
resolute against them, but not in a hostile way, right?
And so this week we began a couple years later, verse one,
now in the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar.
Nebuchadnezzar had dreams and his spirit was troubled and his
sleep left him. How many of you have had a bad
dream before that kept you up? You just kept thinking about it.
That's this guy, right? This is Nebuchadnezzar.
Nebuchadnezzar is one of the most powerful men in the world,
and he is brought to anxiety by a dream.
Part of the reason is not just the dream itself, but in the
Babylonian culture, they believe that dreams were the way that
the gods would speak to you. So Nebuchadnezzar has had some
kind of dream that he believes is a message from the gods and
it terrifies him so much so that he's unable to keep sleeping.
And so verse 2, then the king gave orders to call him the
soothsayer priests, the conjurers, the sorcerers, and
the Chaldeans. The Chaldeans is not a word that
we have in our everyday life. Chaldeans this is there's
there's two things that a Chaldean would be OK.
First, we know that Babylon goes and takes over other cultures,
but if you were an original like OG Babylonian actually from
Babylon, you would be called a Chaldean, right?
It's like superheroes in comic book.
Things are cool now and I like them.
Back in the early 90s when I was just a little nerd, I was an
original nerd. That's what Chaldean is.
But the more interesting thing about the Chaldeans is what they
did see the the sorcerer's and the soothsayers and the Mystics.
They would sit and they would like seek the gods for answers
or seek the spiritual world or or they would, they would speak
to the dead. But the Chaldeans were much more
analytical. They were like prophetic nerds.
OK. The Chaldeans had these books
that were were full of different dreams.
And then what did they mean? I mean, it was literally we, we
can, we can go in the historical record and we still can find
these. They're just these manual of
different dream images and what they mean.
And so if if you had a dream, you could go to a Chaldean, you
could say, hey, I had this dream.
I dreamt that the moon was really big and my mom came in,
but she had a goat head. I don't know what that means.
What did it? Would it mean Chaldean in the
Chaldean would be like, oh, that's very interesting.
He'd open his manual and he would look and go, oh, big moon
mom comes in and go ahead and he could give you an answer.
And so it makes sense that that Nebuchadnezzar brings all of
these people in in order to help him find the answers he's
looking for. So the king says, verse 3, I had
a dream in my spirit. My inner being is anxious to
understand the dream. Then the Chaldean spoke to the
king in Aramaic. O king, live forever.
Tell the dream to your servants. Nothing wrong with this request,
right? This is how it usually works,
and we will declare the interpretation.
The King replied to the Chaldeans.
The command from me is firm. If you do not make known to me
the dream and its interpretation, you will be torn
limb from limb and your houses will be turned into a rubbish
heap. Now the Chaldeans didn't usually
receive this response, right. Usually you would come in and
say, Mr. Chaldean, Sir, I dream that the moon was really big.
My mom walked in and she had to go ahead and then the person
would give an answer. They did not have people coming
in and saying, hey Chaldean, I had a dream, tell me what it is.
So the Chaldeans are are a little bit confused by this and
I imagine they're a little bit concerned about the amount of
aggression that Nebuchadnezzar has.
I don't often go places and have someone say, hey, if you don't
do your job, I'm going to tell you limb from limb and make your
house rubble, right? But Nebuchadnezzar in that time
period, it makes a little sense why he's doing this.
See Cause for Nebuchadnezzar during that time period, there
was political betrayal often. There was often conspiracies,
power struggles, backstabbing, betrayal.
It was Game of Thrones all the time.
Not that I've seen it or right I don't.
Anyways, So for Nebuchadnezzar, he's constantly looking out for
enemies and he's looking for what is true.
And so he looks at these wise men and he says, I have a
problem. I need you to answer me in all
your mysticism and your dream analytics, and you're talking to
the dead. And I want you to tell me what I
dream so I know that you're legit.
Because if you're not legit, what are you doing?
Are you trying to manipulate me? Are you looking to betray me?
What's going on? So Nebuchadnezzar, he has a
short fuse about this. This is what anxiety does.
If anxiety is left untreated, it turns us outward and it turns us
aggressive. And so the wise men, they, they
try again. The wise men feel like maybe
they, they misheard the king. And in the verses it says, let
the wise men go, oh, king, king, listen, if you could, just like
if you could tell us the dream. I know you're looking for us to
tell you the dream, but that's not really how it works.
Actually. You tell us the dream, and then
we'll be able to give you the answer.
But Nebuchadnezzar doesn't have it.
Nebuchadnezzar repeats it. Listen, I'm going to wipe you.
I'm going to destroy you, OK? I'm going to destroy you.
If you can't give me an answer. And they're scared, how would
you like it if your boss said that to you at work?
And so Daniel then finds out what Nebuchadnezzar has said
about the wise men. Verse 17.
Then Daniel went to his house and informed his friends
Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah about this matter.
Now notice we haven't heard from Daniel yet in this passage.
And the first time we do in chapter 2, he is in danger, OK?
It's like Daniel's like hanging out at his home, probably in
some kind of like fraternity with other young wise men
people. Guards come to the door and
like, listen, hey, we got to wipe you out.
And So what does Daniel do? Daniel asks for more time.
He says, listen, I don't, I don't know what's going on here,
but I hear that the the wise men and the Chaldeans and the other
like sorcery people, they can't give you an answer, but I can
definitely give you an answer. You just got to give me some
time to go and find it. And by the grace of God, they
say yes. We got to remember that this is
not Daniel like at his prime. This isn't like 45th year old
wise men beard probably like a staff and a bunch of scrolls
looks really wise in the eyes. It's not like Gandalf Daniel.
This is like Frodo Daniel. This is young Daniel.
From the beginning of the story, we know that this might be
Daniel during his training or or at most this is Daniel like very
beginning of his career. But what we do know is Daniel
has no influence at all. All that is known about Daniel
by the Babylonians is that he is a man of integrity.
From the story before with the food and the wine and stuff,
right? And so immediately in response,
Daniel gets his friends together and they begin to pray.
And what do they pray for verse 18?
That they might request compassion from God of heaven
concerning this secret so that Daniel and his friends would not
be killed with the rest of the wise men of Babylon.
Then the secret was revealed to Daniel in a night vision and
then Daniel blessed the God of heaven.
Daniel said, may the name of God be blessed forever and ever, for
wisdom and power belong to him so that they might request
compassion from the God of heaven.
Now this phrase, God of heaven, you can take a highlighter at
home. Here's some homework.
I like homework. Maybe you do go read the book of
Daniel and highlight every time God of heaven shows up.
This is a really important phrase.
Why? Think about the source that
everyone else was seeking an answer for from?
It was all what they could do right?
Whether it was the Chaldeans and their books of knowledge or the
sorcerers that were seeking the spiritual world or the dead, it
was all internal. It was all about what they could
do to seek an answer. But Daniel, Daniel is going to
the God of heaven, the the, the creator of God, Yahweh Elohim,
the creator of heaven and earth, the one who made the stars that
made the spirits that gives dreams.
So Daniel gets his answer and I want you to look at what his
response is. It's worship.
Read along with me because this is it's beautiful.
It's why we read it before. This is literally Daniel's
worship song. It's it's praise.
It's theologically rich. Verse 21 God.
It is he who changes the times and the periods.
He removes kings and appoints kings.
He gives wisdom to wise men and knowledge to people of
understanding. It is he who reveals the
profound and hidden things. He knows what is in the
darkness, and the light dwells in him.
To you, God of my Father's, I give thanks and praise, for you
have given me wisdom and power even now.
You have made known to me what we requested of you, for you
have made known to us the kings matter.
Listen to all of these things that Daniel is saying about God.
Daniel acknowledges wisdom and that wisdom and revelation are
from God, that God is eternal, that God knows all, that God is
sovereign, He's king, he's powerful.
He gives wisdom, knowledge, and understanding that God is
faithful and that God answers prayer.
See, ultimately the difference between what Daniel did and
everyone else is that Daniel was seeking the giver, everyone else
was seeking the gift. Daniel was looking to God.
He was going for a relationship with the Father.
It says that he went and he sought compassion from God.
He didn't just go looking for an answer.
And so after that, Daniel goes to Iraq.
He's the the captain of the guard and he says, hey, so
listen, you were here yesterday and you said we're all going to
die. But listen, I have an answer for
you. I went and I prayed and I, I
have an answer. And Iraq, he probably is a
little surprised, but he takes Daniel and he takes him into the
throne room. And then verse 25, then Aria
currently brought Daniel into the King's presence and spoke to
the king as follows. I have found a man among the
Exiles from Judah who can make the interpretation known to the
king. The king said to Daniel whose
name was Beltazar. Real quick, this is a little
thing I learned in my research. It's a little aside.
Every time you see the name of a Babylonian God, like even in the
names of the people, it's spelled wrong.
Every time that the Babylonian gods show up and Daniel, they're
spelled wrong. We scholars used to think it was
like a little error, but we've found a ton of manuscripts.
It's always spelled wrong. It's as if Daniel's looking at
the Babylonian God names and goes, I don't care.
The king said to Daniel, whose name was Belchazar.
Are you able to make known to me the dream which I have seen and
its interpretation? Notice he's asking, Can you tell
me what the dream is and interpret it?
Daniel answered before the king and said.
As for the secret about which the king has inquired, neither
wise men, sorcerer's soothsayer, priests nor diviners are able to
declare it to the king. However, there is a God in
heaven who reveals secrets, and he has made known to King
Nebuchadnezzar what will take place in the later days.
This was your dream, and the visions in your mind.
Well, on your bed pause. Want you to, before we talk
about the dream, want you to notice a couple of things.
First, contrast Aryak's posture with Daniel's posture.
Aryak is doing what we call image management.
It's something that you and I still do.
It's when we go in and we make sure people see what we have
done. Aryak's trying to build
influence for himself. He's trying to build power for
himself. He's saying, King, notice me,
look what I did. He's trying to to get a
platform. Contrast that with David.
David said there is a God in heaven who reveals secrets.
Daniel takes zero credit for this.
He does not come in and say, listen, I have an answer.
He says, listen, God has an answer for you.
He pushes all glory, all praise up to God.
Daniel is humble. Second, notice who the
revelation is for. It's for King Nebuchadnezzar.
God doesn't answer the prayer just to get Daniel out of
trouble. God answers the prayer because
even though it is a foreign culture and enemy of Israel, he
still has love and compassion for King Nebuchadnezzar.
He still has a revelation. He still has a word for
Nebuchadnezzar. So what about the dream?
The dream is like 20 versus long.
We're not going to read it, OK, And honestly, we're not going to
spend a lot of time on it, but I do want to touch on it so that
we stay faithful to the word. OK?
So let's talk about what happens in the dream.
The king has dreamt about a giant statue, OK?
Think like Statue of Liberty and the head, its gold, its chest
and its arms, its silver. Its belly and its thighs are
bronze. Its legs are made of iron and
its feet are partially iron and partially clay.
It's symbolism. It's not because someone was
lazy and planning how to build a statue, OK.
And so Nebuchadnezzar is looking up at this giant, beautiful,
extraordinary statue. And then all the sudden, from
the sky, a stone comes and bashes the statue and it
crumbles to pieces. The stone embeds itself in the
ground and then grows up to be this giant mountain.
Weird dream, right? First, what can we learn from
this passage? Or what do we know about this
passage? First, Daniel says that the gold
head that the statue has is Babylon.
He says in verse 36, this was the dream, and now we will tell
you its interpretation before the king.
You, O king, are the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven
has given the Kingdom the power, the strength and honor.
And wherever the sons of mankind live, or the animals of the
field, or the birds of the air, he has handed them over to you
and has made you ruler over all of them.
Listen to the language right there.
It's very simpler, similar to Genesis one, right when God
creates man, He says, I've created him in my image and my
likeness. And what does he tell mankind to
do? To have dominion over the earth,
to care for it, to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of
the air, and the creatures of the ground.
Daniel is speaking Genesis 1 to the king, saying listen king,
you have the opportunity to live out being a king that God has
created you to be. Being a king is not bad.
Being a king of Babylon is not bad.
It's all in how you do it. 2nd, the use of these different
kingdoms. I want to talk about why they're
there, because maybe you've been raised in the church and maybe
have like a study Bible or you've done a study of Daniel
before and there's lots of different interpretations of
what these different layers are. Some people think like, oh, OK,
so it's Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, America, or there's,
there's a bunch of them. You can go and look at them.
But I, I don't think that God or Daniel is wanting us to focus on
exactly what Kingdom is, which I think he has like a deeper
message to us. And I think that because the
number four and five that he gives like the, the four layers
or the five layers, depending on how you look at it, that's a, a
literary device to help you remember that there's, there's
a, a multitude, OK, we see it throughout writing four or five.
And what I think that Daniel is communicating is that Babylon
and the other kingdoms will not last.
And they don't. So whether it is Babylon,
whether it's Greece, whether it's Persia, whether it's Rome,
whether it's America, all of these kingdoms will not last.
They do eventually fall. The only victorious ruling
forever Kingdom is the mountain, the Kingdom of God.
Verse 44. And in the days of those kings,
the God of heaven will set up a Kingdom which will never be
destroyed, and that Kingdom will not be left for another people.
It will crush and put an end to all of these kingdoms, but it
will itself endure forever. God is sovereign, God is in
control, He is above all. He is king.
And this is the heart of the book of Daniel, is that God is
ultimately in control, even though Babylon thinks it is.
At the beginning of Dan, at the beginning of Daniel, Daniel won.
It says that Babylon comes in and it takes over, takes over
the Israel, that it kidnaps the people.
But along with that it says God handed them over.
It's Daniel's way of saying, listen, Babylon thinks it's in
charge, but God's actually in charge.
Babylon thinks it's in charge when it's trying to get Daniel
to eat certain food, but Daniel goes, I'm not going to eat that
food. Who's actually in charge?
Later on with the the Daniel and the lion's den, you all know
this story. Babylon says, listen, you're not
allowed to pray to anyone but the emperor for a while.
What does Daniel do? Daniel keeps praying because he
knows that God is in control. Daniel wants you.
Daniel wants I Daniel wants King Nebuchadnezzar to know that God
is sovereign and he is in control.
And So what happens? Verse 46 Then King
Nebuchadnezzar fell on his face and paid humble respect to
Daniel and gave orders to present himself, to present him
an offering, an incense. The king responded to Daniel and
said, your God truly is a God of God and a Lord of kings and a
revealer of secrets. Since you have been able to
reveal this secret. Daniel's faithfulness leads the
Babylonian king to worship God. The way Daniel lives allows the
king to see God's goodness. And so Daniel's promoted.
He's put over the other wise men.
Daniel the exile, a man with no real power influence, brings a
king to worship God. See, my friends, Daniel's way of
life did more than keep Babylon from getting into him.
It made him the kind of person through whom the presence and
wisdom of God could enter Babylon.
Our way of life does more than keep the culture from forming
us. It makes us the kind of people
through whom the presence and wisdom of God can enter the
world around us. This is the way that the Kingdom
of heaven works, not through hostility, not through what what
sociologists call hard power, that's like military power or or
hard force, but through what sociologists call soft power,
that slow gentle influence, whether it's Jesus and his
disciples, whether it's the early church in the book of Acts
or the early church in Rome. I would love to talk all day
about how early Christians in Rome in a culture that viewed
children, that viewed like baby girls as as nothing, that viewed
the the sick and the infirm as nothing.
They create, They create orphanages, hospitals, hotels
through the Middle Ages. They create libraries and
breweries and like all of this culture making stuff.
Our way of life has a way of bringing goodness and truth of
God into the world around us. So I want to talk for just a
moment before we talk about what?
What exactly can we pull from the book of Daniel?
I want to talk for a moment about what culture is and the
tension that you and I feel within it, because you'll hear
Pastor Ben and I talk a lot about culture.
If you've been with us the last year, we talk a lot about
culture because it's really important because it has more
influence than a lot of other things in our lives.
Culture is the water that we swim in.
So what is culture? Culture is, according to Andy
Crouch, what we make of the world, OK Dallas Willard says
that culture is what you and I do naturally.
Therefore, culture is not bad. It just is, OK.
You're a family has a culture. Maybe it's quiet.
Maybe you guys pray after dinner.
Maybe everyone gets along. Or maybe it's a little bit
chaotic. Maybe the TV's on a lot more
than it should be at my house, and our daughter won't sit at
the dinner table. Work has different types of
culture, right? You might have a culture, again,
that feels safe, where everyone is able to share, where people
show up on time and try to do a good job.
Or maybe you have a culture where people are cutting
corners. Culture is what we make of the
world. It's like if you went to a
couple fish and asked them how the water is.
The fish don't necessarily know what what water is.
It is just what they swim in. They don't know what's beyond
it. And so the tension that you and
I have with culture is how do we walk faithfully without becoming
synchronistic or isolate or becoming isolated, right?
Like at the end of the day, you want to be faithful to Jesus,
right? You want to follow him, You want
to be faithful to him. You want to be a loving person,
but there's this tension in us where we don't want to become
unpopular in the world. We don't want to lose influence
with people. We don't want to have like, send
people away from us, but we also don't want to, like, adopt all
the values and stuff of the world.
So quick word on syncretism and isolation.
Syncretism is the blending of beliefs, practices, symbols and
traditions from different religions or cultures producing
a new expression of life. So syncretism is when we adapt
the thoughts, beliefs and practices to fit our host
cultures. OK.
This would be like Christians being willing to say certain
things or have certain views in order to get influence on social
media. It's when you and I decide to go
against what we know scripture says and adapt new new beliefs.
It's, it's like in The Jungle Book, OK, Mowgli starts living
like an animal instead of a human.
There's syncretism there. He's become like his host
culture. So we don't want to have that.
We don't want to become like our host culture, but we also don't
want to become isolated, which is when we run away from the
culture and we just like make Christian media or Christian
like businesses. We try to completely wall
ourselves off from anything of the world, Pastor John Stott
once wrote. Although Christians are or
should be morally and spiritually distinct from non
Christians, they are not to be socially segregated.
Why? The world is dark, Jesus
implied, but you are to be its lights.
The world is decaying, but you are to be salt and to hinder its
decay. John Stott is of course working
off of Jesus's words and the the Sermon on the Mount where he
says you are the light of the world, a city on the hill.
A great example of this is Chick-fil-A, the light of the
world in fast food restaurants. But think about it for a moment.
Chick-fil-A does not call itself just a Christian organization.
It's not just going towards Christians.
It exists in the public sector. Anyone can go and eat at
Chick-fil-A, but Chick-fil-A holds to Christian values like
being closed on Sundays for a Sabbath for their employees.
And by doing so, they are having an influence on the culture
around it. We see Jesus in his words in one
of his final prayers. I'm not asking that you take
them out of the world, but to keep them away from the evil. 1
Jesus wants us to seek reconciliation instead of
rejection, right? He wants us to be peacemakers.
He wants us to stand in the in the in between where we have two
sides that are hostile to one another.
And He wants us to find a way to make peace between them, not
just for peace for us and the world.
We need to have discernment about what we watch or play or
produce. I think about like when I was
10, again, homeschooled, and Pokémon was really big.
I loved Pokémon, I loved it. I could name the 1st 150 Pokémon
no problem. And I know that there are some
of you in the room that can still do it.
You're smiling and nodding. But there was a magazine that my
mom used to get and it was a homeschool magazine and it had
like a three page article about Pokémon and how it was evil.
And my family, like we laugh about it now.
But like my family did wrestle with like, do we do Pokémon?
Is it faithful to God? And I applaud my parents because
they were prayerfully discerning about it and they raised a nerd
to continue on. So I definitely still did
Pokémon, but we need to have discernment like that in the
world we live in. We need to not just adapt what
the host culture says or just isolate ourselves.
We need to ask questions about like if our kids are involved in
activities, how much activities are OK?
Do I completely take my kids out of sports in order to follow
Jesus or do I just let my kids do whatever and to run my
schedule? Should I watch love island?
Should I watch The Walking Dead? What am I watching?
What am I listening to? Think lighthouses, not castles.
Think relationships with people that influence.
We need to find ways for the Kingdom of heaven to break in to
our lives. This is what Jesus is talking
about in the parable of the mustard seed.
Jesus said he presented another parable to them, saying the
Kingdom of heaven is a mustard seed which a person took and
sowed in its field, and this is smaller than all the other seed.
But when it is fully grown, listen to this.
This is something that I missed for a long time.
When it is grown, it is larger than the garden plants and
becomes a tree. So that what happens, the birds
of the sky come and nest in its branches, the Kingdom of heaven.
The reason that Jesus came is not for us to escape the world.
It is so that we become a safe place for the world to find
healing and reconciliation. The Kingdom of heaven is not
where good people go to escape the world.
It is God's invasive hope breaking into the world to make
all things new. So a couple of quick words of
how we're able to do this out of Daniel 2.
First, what does Daniel show us? Daniel lives a life that
prepared him. Daniel lived by a rule of life,
which is a set of practices that kept his heart, mind and body
oriented towards the father. You see this throughout the
book, right? Daniel will only eat certain
things. Daniel prays with his friends
later on in the book of. In the book in chapter 6, I
believe it is when the king says that no one's allowed to pray to
anyone but the king. Daniel has a prayer rhythm
through the day where he prays at the same time every day.
None of this is random, and none of it was just religious duty.
These practices were forming him into the kind of person who
could remain faithful under pressure.
So when the crisis came, Daniel did not have to invent a
spiritual life on the spot. His way of life had already
prepared him to hear from God, to stand with humility, and to
become the source of good for Babylon 2.
Daniel's posture positioned him right.
Daniel answered. And As for the secret about
which you you're inquired, either the wise men, the
sorcerer's, the soothsayer priest, or the diviners could
tell the king. However there is a God in heaven
who reveals secrets. Daniel could have built a
platform right here in the passage when he looks and says,
listen, all of them could not answer.
He could have said, but I can. But instead, Daniel positions
himself to present God himself. And that's a hard word for you
and I because we like to have influence.
But the way that you and I hold our posture will determine how
God will show up in our lives. God is not looking to build your
platform. God's not looking to make you a
person of influence for your your business or your TikTok or
whatever. God wants to work through you,
not build you up Finally. Finally, Daniel's prayer
empowers him. The center of the passage is
about Daniel's seeking of God and nothing else to answer the
question. At its heart, this is a story
about a person who learned to seek God's presence before
anything else. When the crisis comes, Daniel
does not begin with strategy. He does not reach out for
control. He gathers friends and they
pray. And that's what your workplace
needs. That's what your family need.
That's what your neighborhood needs.
That's what Ankeny needs. We need prayerful people, people
who seek God together and receive his wisdom for the
places that we live in. It's about learning to notice
God in our daily decisions about our work.
It's it's asking God, how should I respond to the situation, to
this person? How do I stay humble?
How do I stay patient? It's learning to practice
discernment. Because this is how God's people
influence culture. Not by becoming louder, not by
chasing platforms, not by winning every argument, but by
becoming the kind of people who recognise what God is doing and
respond with wisdom, courage and love.
So look at the way you live life.
Let's talk about this really practically.
Look at your pace of life. Do you live at a pace of life
where you could hear God? Look at your calendar.
Do you have space where you can hear God?
Look what receives your attention right?
Like what are you putting in front of your eyes?
Who has the most influence on how you think?
Who are the voices that you're listening to?
See, when trouble came, Daniel already knew where to turn.
And so I'm going to ask the worship team to go ahead and
come on up. So the question at the beginning
is, how do you and I influence our culture?
And it is by becoming a prayerful people, a prayerful
people that are seeking God himself that are seeking God's
presence, right. We are presence church and what
do we do? We want to be a presence in our
city, but through him. And so like Daniel this this
week, as you encounter work situations, as you encounter
difficult conversations, the invitation is to go and to seek
God. And so some of you just need to
createspace, some of you need space in your calendar to go and
see God's voice. Some of you need a place.
Do you have a place in your house, apartment, wherever?
Maybe it's a park where you can go and you can listen for God's
voice, check your posture or whose platform are you building?
Are you building up you, are you building up your business?
Are you building up a place where you can have a voice?
Or are you positioning yourself so that's the invitation this
week is to begin prayerfully asking God, how am I supposed to
influence my place of work, my family, my city?
We become so deeply formed in the presence of God that his
presence begins to shape every place we enter.
So this week, do not begin by asking how can I become more
influential? But the ultimate question is how
can I be present to God?