I'll just give you kind of a highlight reel of what we've
experienced so far in this book so you can feel all caught up.
So, so far in our journey, we've seen how Daniel and his friends
have been captured and taken into exile in Babylon.
How God honors their faithfulness and even at times
gives them favor with their captors.
How Daniel receives from God this ability to interpret dreams
and how Daniel uses that to save his life and the lives of
others. And how God rescues Daniel's
friends from death in a fiery furnace when they refuse to
worship Babylon's idols. And we are not even in chapter 4
yet, so a lot has happened. Suffice it to say that Daniel is
a gnarly book, as we would say in Southern California.
And hold tight, friends, because it's about to get even gnarlier.
So today we're going to jump ahead to Daniel 5.
Daniel Chapter 4 is kind of summarized within Daniel 5, so
that'll be helpful. But at the center of this
chapter is this strange and unnerving vision that gave rise
to the phrase the writings on the wall.
Now I grew up in the 90s in the early 2000s, so when I hear the
writing's on the wall, I think of the album by Destiny's Child.
If you don't know who Destiny's Child is, that was the girl
group that gave us the gift of Beyoncé.
And I actually own that album when I was a tween, which
thinking about is maybe a problematic, but I never
understood what the title meant until now.
And the writings on the wall means that there are clear,
unmistakable signs that failure or disaster is imminent.
So it sounds ominous, right? But it fits the scene.
In Daniel 5, we have this Babylonian king who is throwing
like a debaucherous feast with his Lords and wives and
concubines, when suddenly a disembodied hand appears and
begins to write on the palace wall.
And that writing on the wall turns out to be a dire warning
that the arrogance and the idolatry of the king has finally
caught up to him and God is about to bring an end to the
Kingdom of Babylon. So, like the mysterious
overtones of the story, I would say make it pretty engaging, but
it might be kind of difficult to relate to.
I mean, has anyone here ever, like, interpreted words written
by a disembodied hand and like, predicted the imminent downfall
of your oppressors? Anyone.
No show of hands, no happy Mother's Day, by the way.
I feel like this is a really good already you can feel you
can feel the thematic vibes. No, we didn't choose something
for Mother's Day. We just went straight to the
next chapter in Daniel. But OK, so with as with many
biblical prophecies, it can really help to take a step back
from, you know, all the like Addams family vibes and to
really look at the heart of the message and at the heart of the
message. We discover some themes that
might actually feel closer to home, like we see a challenge to
the arrogant abuse of power. We see this exhortation to
choose humility over our own egos, and we see a question of
whether we will continue to build our selfish kingdoms or
seek God's eternal Kingdom. So just some like light easy
topics for us to dive into this morning.
But before we dive in, let me just take a moment to pray for
us that God would really speak to us through his word this
morning. Lord God, we, we come before you
grateful for your Word and also aware of all the ways in which
it challenges us. We are grateful because it talks
about things that are so relevant in our world today.
And also, sometimes it talks about things that we're not
currently thinking about, but that we really need to sit with,
to be challenged by, to ruminate over, and to be asking the
questions of how is it that you, God, are inviting us to live in
this world? Who are you?
What are you doing? And how are you inviting us to
respond to what you were doing? And so we would come before you,
God, and we ask that you would give us this morning humble
hearts to receive your teaching, to be present to how your Spirit
is speaking. And I think you got in
particular that your word puts on full display your character.
God, we are in awe of you. God, when we think about the
brokenness in the world, when we think about the powers of this
world who throughout so many centuries have repeated these
patterns of violence and arrogance and corruption and
brokenness, we thank you that you, Jesus, are good.
We thank you that you are a God of grace.
We thank you that you are a God of steadfast love.
We thank you that you are a God who invites us to become like
you and to live differently in this world.
And so this morning, God, I ask that you would just speak to
each of us and bring us a deeper into that invitation to separate
ourselves from the things of this world that are not of you,
that are not like you, and to draw nearer to you that you
would make us more like you through your word.
By your Spirit. We thank you that you were able
to do that. Jesus, we pray all that in your
name, Amen. Amen.
All right, So I don't think this is on your handout.
So I'm just going to start summarizing the parts that we're
missing. But at the beginning of Daniel
chapter 5, we are just abruptly introduced this new king of
Babylon named Belshazzar. So the book suggests that
Belshazzar is either the son or like an immediate descendant of
King Nebuchadnezzar, who is who we've been hanging out with in
recent chapters. So we first meet Belshazzar as
he is throwing like this extravagant party full of
indulgence and lust and depravity.
And then he figures, you know, what's a party without a little
sacrilege? And so Belshazzar takes these
golden cups that were looted from the temple in Jerusalem.
So these cups are like holy vessels, right?
They're, they're used by Israelite priests in their
rites. But Belshazzar fills them with
wine and offers up like a toast to his Pagan gods.
So at first glance, it might seem like Belshazzar is just
kind of like a party animal who has no reverence for the God of
Israel. But historians note that it
doesn't really make sense that Belshazzar would be throwing
like a raucous feast at this particular moment in time
because things are not going well for Babylon.
They're no longer the biggest, baddest nation in all the land.
They are an empire that is on the decline.
And their enemies, the Medes and the Persians, are like on the
rise. So at this point, the Medes and
Persians have already conquered neighboring regions.
So Babylon should be fully aware that their enemies are coming
for them next and that they are likely not strong enough to
stand up against them. So this wild feast that
Belshazzar is throwing is probably like 1/3 denial that
disaster is coming. Maybe like 1/3 political bravado
because, you know, obviously they wouldn't be partying unless
they were confident that they could defeat their enemies.
And then maybe like 1/3 distraction to kind of keep the
other nobles and Lords from realizing how bad things are or
how scared Belshazzar really is. So that act of kind of drinking
from these holy Israelite vessels probably falls under the
category of political bravado. Like, you know, it's this
attitude of we're not afraid of foreign nations and their gods.
We've conquered our enemies in the past and we'll do it again.
But instead, this act of arrogance is immediately met
with a warning from the God that they've affronted.
Belshazzar sees like that floating hand riding on the
wall. And he's like, shook.
Like the level of detail in the book about the King's reaction
is like an underlying, like, all caps emphasis that Belshazzar is
like, not OK. It says the King's color
changed. And his thoughts alarmed him and
his limbs gave way and his knees knocked together.
Like, it sounds like a cartoon character, like he's reacting
very strongly to what's happening here.
But for some reason none of the wise men, the Babylonian wise
men, can read or interpret the writing on the wall until
someone says, wait, isn't one of the Jewish exiles gifted in
interpreting visions? I think his name is Daniel.
And so Daniel is fetched and he is able to read the four words
that are written in ancient Aramaic on the wall.
They say meanie, meanie, tackle, and Parson, which roughly
translates to numbered, numbered, weighed and divided.
God has numbered the days of the Kingdom of Babylon.
The king has been weighed in the balances and been found wanting,
and so Babylon will be divided and given over to its enemies.
So this is like the centre point of the story, like the end of
one ancient empire and the rise of a new power.
So as we explore Daniel chapter 5, the major task ahead of us is
to bring like this dramatic, otherworldly story down into our
reality today. So to do that, we're going to
focus on like 3 key lessons that we can learn from the
Babylonians, tragic mistakes and from Daniel's courageous faith.
So first, we need to know where real power comes from.
Second, we need to humble our hearts.
And 3rd, we need to choose the Kingdom that will last.
So first, as followers of God, we need to know where real power
comes from. So when Belshazzar calls Daniel
in, he kind of starts by buttering him up.
He's like, I have heard that the spirit of the gods is in you and
that light and understanding and excellent wisdom are found in
you. And in exchange for his service,
Belshazzar offers Daniel 3 gifts.
So purple clothing, which is like a symbol of high status, a
chain of gold, which is like a token of wealth, and then the
position of third ruler in the Kingdom.
So significant influence, status, wealth and influence are
what Babylon is built on, like what most empires have been
built on. And so when King Belshazzar is
desperate, like these are the rewards he offers.
This is what he assumes anyone would want except for Daniel.
Daniel says to the king, let your gifts be for yourself and
give your rewards to another, which is kind of another way of
saying you have nothing to offer me worth having.
King Belshazzar, I'll speak this prophecy because God compels me
to, but I can't be bought. Mic drop.
Like it's a fierce reply, right? And it reveals a lot about
Daniel's mindset. He sees through the illusion of
worldly power because the secret of worldly power is that it is
fragile. Babylon coming to power through
violence. Like that's how it works for
ancient monarchs. Like you'd conquer and oppress
foreign nations, you'd like assassinate the existing rulers
and take their place. But once you were in power, you
had to just keep showing how formidable and fierce you were
so that no like ambitious young whippersnappers would get any
fancy ideas. But that explains why so many of
the rulers that we see in scripture and throughout the
history books are like deeply paranoid and even like quick to
execute anyone who shows the smallest sign of dissidence.
Their titles declare that they are powerful men, but their
actions declare that they are controlled by fear, enslaved by
self preservation, because on some level they know that their
power depends on everyone around them giving their yes.
Because nobody can build an empire alone, someone has to
believe that it benefits them to keep the king on the throne.
They might hope to share in his power or his protection.
And so they give their yes, while others are maybe just
trying to kind of stay small and stay out of the way to survive
another day. And so even passively, they give
their yes. But the powerful lesson in this
story is that Daniel refuses to give his yes to this corrupt and
idolatrous king. His integrity and his priorities
cannot be swayed. Think about how extraordinary
that is. Daniel is living in captivity,
and yet he doesn't respond to King Belshazzar as if he has
ultimate power. Essentially, he says, keep your
gifts. I'm not interested.
I serve a greater king church. We also live in a world that too
often rewards arrogance and violence.
But that doesn't mean that we have to give in or just like
take what we can get and try to be content.
We can decide that we answer to a higher power, that we don't
give our yes to anyone but God. When I think of resisting with
integrity, I think of the civil rights movement, the bus
boycotts, the acts of civil disobedience that declared we
will not give our yes to a system that denies basic human
rights to an entire class of people.
I think of survivors of sexual violence who insist on justice,
even if it comes at a steep cost to themselves, but still they
say we will not give our yes to a system that protects predators
and silences our voices. Or I think of the many people of
faith today who are pushing back when they see the name of Jesus
being misrepresented. And these are not necessarily
people who make headlines or who go viral, but instead they are
not giving their yes to any of the ideologies of this world,
but they are faithfully walking in the way of Jesus in their own
communities. Church, we are also called to
walk in the way of Jesus. Jesus doesn't negotiate with
corrupt rulers. He did not feel the need to
justify his faith when people slandered him or even threatened
him. He did not even try to
circumvent suffering when it came because his commitment to
God led him straight to the cross.
Jesus only gave his yes to God the Father.
And the path that he walked was not one of force and might and
striving for victory. It was a path of humility and
submission and self sacrifice and deathless love.
And that is where true power is. I mean, I've never met anyone
today who celebrates the power and glory of King Belshus heart
of Babylon, right? Like most people don't even know
his name. I know countless people who
celebrate the power and the glory of Jesus because His power
is one that lifts up the powerless, that heals the broken
hearted, that cultivates mercy in a hurting world.
And that is where real and lasting power lies.
Jesus walks in true power, and the story of Daniel reminds us
that at the end of the day, worldly power is ultimately an
illusion. It's like that scene in The
Wizard of Oz where Toto, like, pulls back the curtain and it
turns out the mighty Wizard is like, just some guy with a smoke
machine. You know?
That's how Daniel can so confidently reject the King's
rewards. He knows the offer is empty.
Like Belshazzar can present Daniel with gifts today, but he
can't promise him tomorrow. And within hours of their
conversation, Belshazzar is killed by his rivals, and his
promise of, like, status and wealth and influence becomes
completely worthless. And still, I mean, I find it
really inspiring how swiftly and confidently Daniel rejects the
gifts of Babylon. Because this is easier said than
done. As humans, we are also tempted
by the promises of status and wealth and influence.
You know, we want to be admired by others.
We want material comfort and even luxury.
We want to feel like we're in control of our environment and
our relationships. But the more that we are willing
to sacrifice to fulfill those desires, the more we slip into
idolatry. And the one thing that the book
of Daniel has really underscored for me is that idolatry can
point to this desire for power. You know, if we start like,
feeling unimportant or invisible, we crave the
affirmation of others. So we desire status, you know,
to have the power to shape how other people see us.
Or maybe the discomfort and the anxiety and the unpredictability
of this world starts to get to us.
And so we desire wealth so that we have the power to get
anything we want to kind of buy a sense of security or
distraction, you know, from our existential angst.
Or we resist the vulnerability of not being in control of other
people, of our circumstances. So we desire influence, the
power to persuade others to do what we want, to kind of make
the world operate the way we think is best in every
situation. We are being sold the illusion
of power. And if we pursue them, these
idols will disciple us in the way of selfishness.
Or just think of Belshazzar as an example.
Like enemy armies are at his doorstep and instead of taking
action to protect his people, he throws a self indulgent party.
He sacrifices his Kingdom to keep up appearances.
He distracts himself from his own fear by like indulging in
pleasure. His commitment to his own
status, his own wealth, his own influence has made him deeply
selfish. Now compare that to Jesus.
Instead of seeking wealth, Jesus doesn't even seek a home to call
his own. He goes wherever people need to
hear the good news of God's Kingdom.
Instead of seeking influence, Jesus uses his actual spiritual
authority to bring people healing and freedom.
Instead of seeking status, Jesus lays down his life to pay for
our sins. Jesus doesn't offer us shallow
gifts or temporary band aids. He invites us to find fullness
of life in Him, to find true and lasting peace and faith in Him.
Now God is the only one who doesn't have to strive and self
protect to maintain His power. Because only God has actual
power. And how does he use it to serve,
to heal, to love and to save? And he will use your life if you
give him your Yes, he will give. He will use your life to serve,
to heal, to love and to save, to be a part of the better world
that He is bringing about. S 1st, we need to understand
where true power comes from. And secondly, Daniel's story
warns US against the mistakes of King Belshazzar and instead
calls us to humble our hearts. So before Daniel interprets the
writing on the wall, he kind of gives a little history lesson.
He compares Belshazzar and his predecessor Nebuchadnezzar, and
says that God gave Nebuchadnezzar sovereignty and
greatness and glory and splendor.
But when Nebuchadnezzar, when Nebuchadnezzar's heart became
arrogant and hardened with pride, he was deposed from his
royal throne and stripped of his glory until he acknowledged that
the Most High God is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and
sets over them anyone he wishes. That's what it says.
So here's the icing on the prophetic cake.
Daniel concludes that you, Belshazzar his son, have not
humbled yourself though you knew all this.
Instead, you have set yourself up against the Lord of Heaven.
You praise the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, wood, stone
and iron, which cannot see or hear or understand.
But you did not honor the God who holds in his hand your life
in all your ways. So Belshazzar has witnessed like
a real life cautionary tale of what can happen when a ruler
elevates himself above God, and yet he brazenly does the exact
same thing. This is the height of hubris.
This is the sign of a deeply fallen human ego.
And you know, ego as we'll use it today is like that inflated
sense of self, that false superiority, like a refusal to
admit that anything might be wrong with us or like the way
that we're living. When I think of the ego, I think
of the Garden of Eden and the fall of humanity.
Many of you will know the story how Adam and Eve lived in
comfort and security and relational richness with God.
And the one boundary that God set was that they were not
permitted to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And all was well until the serpent came along.
And the voice of the serpent subtly pushes the word of God to
the side when he says, did God actually say you shall not eat
of any tree in the garden? And then the serpent shifts to
directly contradicting the voice of God.
He says you will not surely die. And finally, the serpent offers
an alternate version of what is good and what is worth pursuing.
He says God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be
opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
The voice of the ego follows a very similar pattern.
It starts by subtly pushing God's word to the side.
Did God actually say? And then if like no consequences
seem to immediately appear, the ego gets bolder and begins to
directly contradict God's word. And finally, when the ego
becomes powerful enough, it gets to work building its own
Kingdom, setting its own rules, defining good for itself.
So we can even see this playing out in real time with King
Belshazzar. Like, he knows the story of
Nebuchadnezzar, but he pushes it to the side.
Like, surely that won't happen to me.
And then as the ego gains momentum, Belshazzar might
think, like, how do we really know what happened anyway?
Like, maybe the God of Israel had nothing to do with what
happened. And as the ego gets more and
more inflated, Belshazzar might say to himself, the God of
Israel can't touch me. I'm too powerful.
I'll drink with his holy vessels and toast my own gods, and
nothing will come of it. But of course, he could not be
more wrong. See, the ego is a tricky thing
because it's subtle. Like, it's smooth, like the
voice of the serpent. It builds the momentum slowly,
kind of starts with an argument that sounds reasonable, and then
it builds towards more and more selfishness and self-reliance.
I'll give you an example of how this might look for someone who
is not a Babylonian king. Maybe more relatable.
So there was a time in my life when I was really frustrated
with someone. Is that relatable so far?
Have you guys ever been frustrated with someone?
Yeah. Have you ever been frustrated
with someone and started, like, rehearsing little stories about
why you're right and they're wrong or that's hilarious?
I heard I never, well, sarcasm in the audience keeping you guys
lively. Have you ever started out, let's
say you started out feeling hurt, right?
But then you get angry, Angry maybe that the person isn't
fixing the fact that you're hurt.
So then you start blaming them and resenting them to the point
where you actually become hardened against them, where it
even changes how you treat them and how much grace you're
willing to extend to them. So that was what was happening
in my heart. In my situation, I felt that I
had done something kind for someone and that their response
was ungrateful and even a little cold.
And in my heart, I started making up like little stories
that justified my being cold in return.
Because the the ego feeds on self justification.
Like it starts whispering things like you deserve better.
You just stop being so nice. If it's not going to be
reciprocated, you should leave them on red and see how they
like that. Fortunately, that internal
dialogue did not last long because the Holy Spirit was not
having it. So God, that's what happens when
you like pray for wisdom about something is like sometimes God
just comes down with the hammer of conviction.
You're like, oh I see what I'm doing.
And in this situation I feel like God revealed to me that
what I was actually doing is my ego was giving me permission to
withhold love from someone and that my friends, is not the way
of Jesus. So instead of extending grace
and even seeking repair, it justified the the grudge that I
was holding. Instead of seeking the good of
the other person, I had structured a sound argument as
to why I shouldn't have to. And maybe this seems like a
fairly tame example compared to like, the big problems in
society. But a little platform for the
ego is all that it takes. A little leaven leavens the
whole lump. Like justifying our selfishness
and our resentment, rationalizing our resistance to
loving others is our downfall. Listening to our egos is how we
got the broken world that we're living in today.
So how do we resist? Like, how do we recognize the
voice of the ego and silence it? Well, I'm going to propose today
that the antidote to ego is worship, specifically of Jesus.
We need to flip the hierarchy so that our opinion of our own
greatness, our own rightness, is lowered and God is elevated to
the highest position in our hearts.
Because the ego wants to worship itself.
The ego longs for power, and so it'll build alliances with
anything that will help it to secure power.
So to resist, we have to choose to lay our power down at the
feet of Jesus, and Jesus even models this for us.
Like during his earthly life, he was continually submitting
himself to God the Father before he chose the 12 apostles.
He spent all night in prayer before going to the cross again.
He was labouring all night in prayer, like wrestling with the
hard path that lay before him and then surrendering to God's
plan. Jesus walked in beautiful
humility. Philippians 2538 says that Jesus
being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God
something to used to his own advantage.
Rather he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a
servant. He humbled himself by becoming
obedient to death, even death on a cross.
If that last sentence is insane, he humbled himself by becoming
obedient to death. And maybe another way to look at
it is Jesus did not seek full satisfaction in this life.
He thought full satisfaction in doing God's will and in building
towards an eternal Kingdom. So Jesus is modeling the path
that we are invited to take, where instead of building like
little fragile kingdoms to support the whims of our egos,
we are invited to delay our egos down to give our allegiance to
the true and eternal King. I attended a prayer meeting this
week with some folks across several different churches in
the Boston area. And just being there, I was
thinking. It really reminded me how being
in a room with other people who are really focused on seeking
God's will feels freeing. Like there's like a lightness to
surrendering to God, which is so different than the feeling of
giving in to our egos. Like there's like a tension in
like a striving when we're operating in our egos.
Because again, the ego is self protective.
It has to like posture itself against others to like defend
it's logic because it doesn't have the benefit of resting in
God's truth and God's way. The path of the ego is tempting,
but if you walk it long enough, you'll discover that it's
burdensome. But worship unburdens our souls
and opens us up to receive the fullness of joy and peace that
can only come from God's Spirit. So God's invitation to us is to
humble our hearts and to receive him as our King.
And finally we reach the interpretation of the writing on
the wall. So in verse 25 it says this is
the inscription that was written.
Meanie, meanie tackle Parson. Here is what these words mean.
Meanie God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to
an end. Tackle You have been weighed on
the scales and found wanting. Periods.
Your Kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.
And then in verse 30, that very night Belshazzar, king of the
Babylonians was slain and Darius the Mede took over the Kingdom
again. This is an example of how
fragile worldly power really is. And it kind of feels symbolic
that the entire reign of King Belshazzar can be just
summarized in a single chapter. Like he appears suddenly at the
start of chapter 5, and by the end of the chapter, he's gone,
like blinked twice and it's all over.
The writing on the wall is clear.
The Kingdom of God will outlive the Kingdom of the ego every
time. And the lesson that's really
been standing out to me as we've studied the book of Daniel is
that empires rise and fall, but as followers of God, the calling
on our lives remains the same. Like no matter our external
circumstances, we're facing the same challenge to decide what
kind of Kingdom we are building towards.
And both today and throughout church history, there have been
people who believed that it's our job to make the Kingdom of
God common earth. And so they'll try to do it by
force, by trying to conform the world around them to whatever
they think a Christian society ought to look like.
That's how we got the Crusades. My question is, when do we see
Jesus doing that? Like when do we see Jesus
leading by force? When do we see Jesus persecuting
those who disagree with him? When do we see Jesus even acting
concerned about his platform or his power?
The radical countercultural thing about the ministry of
Jesus is that it was humble, it was relational, it met people in
deep places of pain and brokenness with transformative
power. And that's the reason that the
Kingdom of God can still flourish in exile, in captivity,
when external circumstances are at their most dire.
It's because the Kingdom of God is about the transformation of
the human heart. And so it flourishes when people
choose worship over ego. It flourishes when people choose
truth and justice over compromise and conformity.
It flourishes when people choose sacrificial love over self
preservation. That is the power that Jesus
offers us. No matter what challenges we
face, we always have the option to choose faith and to trust God
for the outcome. There's this great story in the
book of Acts where Paul and Silas, who are evangelists and
church planners, they're thrown into prison basically because
they liberated a slave girl who is possessed by a demon.
So they're imprisoned, and Paul and Silas are praying and
singing hymns to God in the middle of the night.
And the other prisoners are all listening to them, when suddenly
there's this big earthquake and the whole prison is shaken and
the doors fly open and everyone's chains are undone.
And their jailer responds by falling down before Paul and
Silas, trembling with fear. And he says, Sirs, what must I
do to be saved? And of course they tell him
about Jesus, and the man and his family are baptized that very
night. This is the Kingdom of God on
full display in this story. You would think that the chains
had power, that the prison Doras had power, that the jailer had
power. You would think that the Roman
Empire would be the ones to get the final say on Paul and
Silas's fate. You might even wonder why God
would bring these two faithful men into this desperate
situation where they're imprisoned literally for doing
good. But in the most unexpected way,
God is actually answering their prayers.
They were preaching the Gospel, longing for people to come to
know Jesus and to be saved. And God brings them right where
they need to be, into a jail cell so that they can proclaim
the good nose of Jesus to their own jailer.
Daniel and his friends are in exile, so you would think
Babylon has all the power. You would think Daniel shouldn't
speak so boldly to the king or he might be executed.
You would think that God's Word can't breakthrough in a place
like this. But God works through Daniel and
his friends to put his glory on display.
And when needed, he even speaks directly through extraordinary
visions and dreams to show that he is present and at work.
Because the things that we see as limits, these external limits
are not limits for God. The worldly powers that we see
as in control are blips in the history book.
But the Kingdom of God will last forever.
And that means that the Kingdom work that God does through our
lives will last forever. So what are you building towards
in your life right now? You don't need a flashy job or
ministry or a big platform to make an impact.
You don't need status or wealth or worldly authority.
You need faith. The kind of faith that humbly
submits to God's plans. The kind of faith that sees
beyond external circumstances to the invisible Kingdom that God
is building all around us. The kind of faith that faces
every challenge the world can throw at you.
With this response, God is able. God is able to save us from the
fiery furnace. God is able to preserve our
souls. God is able to bring corrupt
leaders to justice, whether in this life or the next.
God is able to disrupt the momentum of evil.
God is able to work through our lives for good, even in exile.
God is able to bring his Kingdom to earth as it is in heaven.
God is able. Where do you need that phrase
today? Where do you need to counter
your fears, or the lives of the serpent, or the force of your
own ego? With these words, God is able.
So as we close, I'm going to read just a list of different
ways you might fill in the blank behind those words.
God is able. So just listen, let the phrases
wash over you, and just notice if one stands out.
And if it does, lift that up as a prayer to God, and we'll trust
that the Holy Spirit can speak what each of us needs to hear
this morning. God is able to heal.
God is able to rescue. God is able to change you, to
give you a new heart and a new spirit.
God is able to cover your darkest sins with his redeeming
love. God is able to take what man
meant for evil and use it for good.
God is able to restore the years that the locusts have eaten.
God is able to transform your current suffering through the
glory of His cross. God is able to use your life to
bring others into eternal life. God is able to save and redeem
in the places you cannot reach. God is able to keep His
promises. Let me pray for us.
Lord God, we thank you that you are able.
Jesus, we're so grateful that it is not down to us or our own
abilities or our own power. God, we are thankful that the
power is with you, God, and you are building towards a lasting
eternal Kingdom. God, we pray that you would help
us to take the things that we grieve, the things that we are
maybe angry about, the injustices that we see, the
things that feel like obstacles in our own lives, the things
that weigh us down. We thank you that we were
invited to lay all of these things down at your feet and ask
you to work. God, would you give us the gift
of greater faith? Jesus, a faith that would help
us to lay down our pride, to lay down our idea of how things
should go, what things should look like, and to really trust
in your plan and your ways. God, and the kind of faith that
makes us hold. The kind of faith that enables
us to keep singing hymns and praises from a jail cell.
The kind of faith that enables us to speak truth to power what
we're called upon to do it. The kind of faith that enables
us to live humbly and faithfully every single day in obscurity.
God, whatever invitation is before us this morning, we pray
that you would give us the faith to say yes to you, to say yes to
you, and to continue to walk in Your ways.
Thank you, Jesus, for being present to us.
Thank you for the gift of your love and your forgiveness.
We pray that all in your name, Amen.