Behind a Mighty Man Stands a
Mighty God
Dan
6
Praise
God for the generous spirit He has
given so many of you. So
many have sponsored GFA children, so many are going on STM trips. We’ve not received to just enjoy, but to be a
blessing. [GFA
picture]
Take
advantage of the fellowship today. Enjoy
your old friendships, please embrace some new ones
too. If you see someone alone, please
extend a hand of fellowship. [picnic picture]
Darius the king has set up
his government with Daniel as one of his top 3 administrators over his
kingdom. Daniel does such a good job
that Darius wants to have him rule the entire kingdom, but the other
administrators and the satraps get jealous.
They try to find some way to attack Daniel, but after investigating,
they found Daniel squeaky clean. And so
they came up with a plot. They
approached King Darius with a proposal, that for the next 30 days, no one
should pray to any god or man except him.
And if any one does, that offender should be thrown into the lion’s den.
Darius agrees and this is
made into law.
Daniel knows of the decree,
but prays by his window facing
The king is distraught and
distressed. He miserably endures the
night, and first thing in the morning he goes to the lion’s den and calls for
Daniel. Daniel responds, “My God sent
his angels and shut the mouths of the lions.
I am innocent before God and before you O King.”
Daniel is lifted from the
lion’s den, and the accusers are found and thrown in, along with their
families, and they are all immediately crushed and devoured.
Darius writes to all people,
that the God of Daniel is the living and eternal God. He has rescued Daniel from the lions.
Daniel
is such an impressive character
1. Impressive abilities
(v. 3)
He stood out, top of the
class
to become the highest rank in
the land, and that as a foreigner
Daniel was not some lazy,
stupid, awkward guy. He was sharp. Against enormous obstacles, he made law
review and got a federal clerkship, got into Harvard Med, Rhodes Scholar, etc. Daniel was a top notched guy—they didn’t come
any better.
Sometimes God uses the weak, the foolish. He uses uneducated fishermen or immoral
prostitutes. But sometimes God uses the
sharpest, the best. Paul was a sharp mind, Solomon was incredibly wealthy and wise.
2.
Impeccable character (v. 4-5)
even with jealous peers, looking
for dirty, he comes out completely blameless
most of us probably have some
secrets, things we hope people never find out
Daniel had no dirt: no shady
past, no questionable income tax filings or business
practices, no steroid use, no secret addictions. His life had been sifted through with a fine
tooth comb, and he came out spotless.
Live such good
lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may
see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. 1 Peter 2:12
Perhaps that should be our ideal, to live in such a
way that if our enemies wanted to attack us, they’d have no ammunition. The more they see, the more impressed they
are.
3.
Prominent prayer life (v. 10)
Even though he was a busy man with many important
responsibilities, running an empire,
He set
aside 3 times a day to pray
Even though he was a very talented, intelligent and
able man,
He was constantly asking God
for help, and giving thanks.
He was disciplined and structured with a prayer life
You get a sense that Daniel had a vibrant
relationship with God. He spoke with God
and God spoke with him (and helped him interpret many dreams).
4.
Fearless and uncompromising commitment (v. 10)
Even against the edict, he continued to pray
He so easily could have
avoided the clash: not pray by the window or toward
He would not stop praying, even against threat of
death.
What does it take to stop us from praying? Almost nothing.
A life-threatening edict
could not stop Daniel from praying. But
all the freedom and opportunity in the world often isn’t enough to get us to
start praying.
I felt God was challenging me in my own prayer life,
and so I’d like to make a commitment and invitation: by God’s grace, I will pray consistently
every day for 30 days (until May 24).
Not that I shouldn’t be doing that already, but I’d like to make that a
commitment. And I say this because I’d
like to invite you too, if you feel at all prompted that God wants you to focus
on your prayer life, let’s do it together.
Email me, and we can share some of our prayer requests and hold each
other accountable. I’d suggest, like
Daniel, you set a time and a place, and decide today that you’re going to honor
this commitment.
5. Undeniable witness
Everyone knew whom Daniel
served.
How is Daniel
addressed? (16) “May your God, whom you
sere continually, rescue you.” (20)
“Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually,
been able to rescue you from the lions?”
Darius could not call Daniel
without also including how he serves his God.
Even his enemies knew his
prayer life and his faithfulness to his God.
What do people see in our
lives? Do people know who you serve, whom
you trust in? It’s so easy in our work
places and campuses to hide our faith, to avoid talking about it. But Daniel is an open book. In a Babylonian world where it was not
fashionable to follow Yahweh, Daniel stood tall.
As wonderful and impressive
as these qualities are, I think it would be simplistic and superficial to stop
at these more immediate and external observations.
There’s something deeper
going on. What made Daniel so great was
not that his character or moral strength, as much as his faith, his
relationship with God.
I
don’t think it was that Daniel, against his fears, mustered up his courage to
defy the edict to obey God.
There were no laws that required Daniel to pray 3 times a day,
by his window. This was not about
obedience or disobedience. I don’t think
Daniel saw this as something about courage or obedience.
Rather, it seemed that the
edict simply didn’t matter to him. The
plot of his enemies, the edict didn’t scare him. The edict wasn’t a big deal because God was a big deal.
The treasures of
Why be fearful of the playground bully when your Dad
is Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Why be fearful of kings when you talk with the
Creator of the Universe.
That’s why his character was
so clean, because he wasn’t looking at his enemies, but because he was looking
at his God. He was living in the reality
of a God who sees his life, living in the presence of God. He wasn’t thinking about enemies who might
inspect his life, he was thinking about the God who indeed already sees his life.
That’s why prayer is
important, because God is important. Daniel
gives thanks to God who gives him all things, Daniel asks for help from the One
who can do all things. He saw the
reality that God is the most important factor in everything.
We
may all have the biblical knowledge that God is almighty, but Daniel liked like
it.
I believe Einstein said
something like, when he saw the universe, with it’s billions of light-years in
dimension and billions of stars in just the Milky Way galaxy,
he had this enormous view of God.
But when he heard Christian preachers, when he saw
the church, he felt like they were blaspheming.
How could they be speaking of or offering worship to the same God he saw
in the universe.
Sometimes
our lives betray a truer understanding of who God is.
We worry, fear, doubt, regret, as if to imply that
at our care, we see God as rather small.
Daniel
displays a grander God.
What
do we see about God?
God saves where Darius could not.
Darius
was worrying helplessly. In the story,
we read repeatedly that once signed, an edict cannot be changed, even by the
king himself (12, 15). Darius is doing
everything he can to try to save Daniel, but he can’t (14). In the end, Darius is just a man too.
Where kings fail, God succeeds.
Do you really believe this?
Do you believe that even if
you personally knew Amy Guttmann (President of Penn) or Jack Welch (former CEO
of GE), God can do more? Even if you
were related to Bill Gates or Bill Clinton, God could do more?
Have you seen those TV shows
where, say, Oprah or Extreme Makeover [picture?]
takes a troubled life and builds them a new house, gets them all the needed surgeries,
makes them beautiful, reunites them with loved ones, gives them their dream and
a ton of cash?
God says, where Oprah’s
fail, I succeed. You have a stronger
ally than Orprah.
And when you saw Oprah or
these shows, did you ever say to
yourself, I wish I had an Oprah in my life?
I wish I had some rich and powerful friend taking care of me?
God says,
you do. Daniel lived with the conviction that greater
than kings or Oprah’s, God Almighty is covenantally
committed to him and his people.
God says, Where Darius’s and
Oprah’s fail, I succeed. And Daniel
believed that to down in his bones.
God does save
I want to make a
distinction.
God does not always save us
from the lion’s den. Many Christians are
martyred, dying for their faith. Many
Christians lose their jobs, get rejected from grad school, don’t get married,
struggle with infertility, etc.
God does not save every time
and in every way.
The
message is not a promise that God will save each of us from everything.
The
message is that God does save.
In the big picture, God will
save his Jewish people from their Babylonian captors. God will restore them to
For the Christian, that
message takes on greater clarity and assurance.
We believe that in the final
and greatest trial, God saves us. [cross picture]
We are saved.
God may not choose to save
us from all our financial stresses or academic pressures or medical problems or
loneliness needs. But that does not take
away from the fact that God does save.
We have already been saved.
That God rescued you from
the burning building is not in any way diminished if he does not rescue you
from your stomach ache.
That God rescued you from
death row is not in any way diminished if he does not rescue you from a parking
ticket.
In the final and ultimate story,
we are already rescued.
Little Johnny’s frustrations boiled over in his
daily life. He wasn’t as strong his
brother Mark. He wasn’t as smart as his
sister Lucy. Compared to his siblings,
his stories were never as funny, his artwork was never as neat, and his piano
pieces always had a few more wrong notes.
And to top it off, severe asthma and frequent lung infections kept him
away from playing sports. He always felt
a little resentful that he didn’t have more in life.
That is, until the day he stumbled across a box
tucked away in the attic. What began as
a search for old clothes to doctor up his Halloween costume ended in a
discovery that completely changed his perspective… and his life. Inside the box – a Russian birth certificate,
medical papers detailing the vascular surgery performed to repair a collapsed
lung, and a newspaper article highlighting the tragedy of an earthquake that decimated
a small Eastern European village.
As he poured over the
papers, footsteps softly crept up the ladder leading to the attic. In a hushed voice, Johnny’s mother lovingly
began to tell him a tale of a little baby who was pulled from the rubble of a
devastating earthquake that had destroyed the baby’s home and had killed the
baby’s family. With tears trickling down
her cheek, Johnny’s mother continued on about the international rescue effort,
the life-saving surgery, and the surgeon who could not leave this orphaned baby
to the care of others. The surgeon’s
name would one day simply be known as Dad.
Mark and Lucy would become brother and sister. And the tear-stained face of the one telling
the story would forever be Mom.
It would take Johnny some time to overcome the shock
of this story. But, in time, he came to
realize that the insult of not being able to play sports like other children, and
the disappointment of not being the strongest, smartest, or most talented
somehow faded against the backdrop of a true love story where he was the main
character, saved from the clutches of death and given new life.
If you’re a Christian, and
you embrace the Gospel, we celebrate that God does save. God has already saved. We live, by faith, in the celebration of our
victory, our deliverance, our treasures, our rescue.
God’s message to his people
is that He saves us. And we rejoice.
Daniel lived in this
God-reality. As he focused on this
Almighty and Faithful God, he was empowered to live blameless, prayerfully,
uncompromisingly, transparently.
Friends, behold, we have a
God who is greater than kings, and He fights for us, indeed He has already
saved us. Go and live like you believe
that.