Daniel 1 - Different On Purpose
Main Idea: Determine to trust and obey God regardless of the culture around you.
GOD HAS PLACED YOU IN AN UNGODLY CULTURE (vs. 1-7)
All of this earth’s systems and nations are sinful and broken.
God has placed embassies of Heaven across the globe.
God intentionally placed you in your family, workplace, and home.
YOU MUST DETERMINE IF THE UNGODLY CULTURE WILL BE IN YOU (vs. 8-16)
Obedience begins on the inside, with your mind, will, & emotions.
A biblical counterculture is done in a godly manner.
God’s ways will always be superior to this world’s.
YOU CAN SHOW GOD’S WISDOM TO YOUR CULTURE (vs. 17-21)
Show others that God’s people value all truth as from Him.
Show others that God’s people value their work as for Him.
Show others that God’s people know their real Home.
Sermon Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)
Today, we are beginning our new study in Daniel 1 through 6, and I've entitled this series, Thriving in Exile.
Over the past two, three months, somewhere in that range, we've been going through the Gospel of John, looking at the life of Jesus, but wanted to take a brief respite from that portion of scripture as we approach election season 2024, because,
though certainly Daniel back over 2,000 years ago, though he didn't live in a democracy, he lived in a place that had a government. And lo and behold, today, we still have some governments.
And we want to know how do we interact with the world around us, with governments and kings and rulers, in a way that is biblically faithful. Because I can promise you, there are lots of really bad ways to interact with the world around us.
And you can turn on the news for any amount of time, and you will certainly get frustrated and angry and go, okay, what am I supposed to do as a child of God in this world in 2024?
And the goal would be that as we look at a situation in which Daniel and his friends, they interacted with a government that was far worse than our own, but how they were able to shine as lights for the Lord within their time period, that over 2000
years later, we're still talking about it. It's written down for us in Holy Scripture. And so we want to be faithful in how we interact with our world.
So I wanted to start off this series with a startling quote by Sir Isaac Newton, as quoted by Pastor Jay Vernon McGee from in the 20th century, a great pastor, I believe down in, was he down in Texas?
I don't remember where he pastored, but I grew up reading his commentaries on Scripture. And he said this, he said, to reject Daniel is to reject the Christian religion, which is a very big statement.
Certainly, if we reject any of God's word, it is a rejection of what God has expressed.
But as we look at the book of Daniel in particular, it gives us so many indications about Jesus, prophecies of the messiah of who Jesus would be, when he would come, what he would accomplish. It also tells us so much about world history.
And people have even tried to say at different times that Daniel must have been written after Rome became an empire because it gives such startling accuracy to all of the events that took place in the centuries after Daniel and the Babylonian kingdom
were around. So the Book of Daniel is a wonderful treasure trove for us, but I want to give us just a brief background about the book.
First, when God brought Israel into their land in about 1400 BC, he told them that abandoning his paths would result in them being returned to the nations of this world.
That is, Israel had initially come from Abraham and his descendants from this area of Babylon. And they had traveled to the area we would know now as Israel or Palestine. Then they went down during the time of Jacob and his sons down into Egypt.
And then God called them up from Egypt in the Exodus back up to Israel.
But God told them before they got in, if you do not walk in the path that I have for you, the other path leads straight back out into the nations of this world that you came from.
And in about 626 BC., the prophet Jeremiah told Judah, that southern nation of Israel, that God would be faithful to his word and that Babylon would destroy their idolatrous evil nation.
He said, guys, for now about 800 years or so, you guys have been completely neglecting what God has said. You haven't been following his ways. You haven't been worshiping him alone.
And so all of this is headed towards our own destruction. In between 609 and 605 BC, the prophet habakkuk also warned Judah that their unrepentant wickedness would result in their full destruction.
So for centuries and then for decades prior to the events that we're going to read about here in a moment, God had been warning the people, it's coming. Then in 605 to 597 BC, Babylon demanded tributes from Judah, including people.
If you know anything about world history, Babylon was kind of the huge world empire there in the Middle East right after Assyria, and Babylon grew in power. They took over a lot of different countries, different lands.
They subdued Egypt, and then they started, if you will, taxing or taking tributes from lots of the fringe nations around their borders. And so, they were doing that for Judah.
And then in 586 BC, Babylon destroyed Jerusalem, and by effect, the southern kingdom of Judah or Israel, after King Zedekiah's rebellion.
I did find it humorous that Israel and Judah, they weren't just content with rebelling against God for hundreds of years, but they also rebelled against the nation that could come and destroy them as it did.
A member of the royal family of the tribe of Judah, a young teen named Daniel, was taken from Jerusalem almost 900 miles from home. He was made a eunuch and was renamed to honor a god of the people who had captured him.
And he lived the rest of his life counseling Babylon's kings. However bad you think that your current situation is with your government, I don't think you're this far off. I don't think you're going through quite that.
The point of the Book of Daniel is what Daniel highlights for us in Chapter 2. He says, 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. The whole point of the Book of Daniel of thriving in an exile is this. God is sovereign over the nations, and he has an individual plan for you within his grander plan.
So today, we want to find out what is God's plan for my life. And the challenge that I want to issue to us today is to determine, to trust and to obey God regardless of the culture around you.
Today, we're going to learn about being different on purpose. None of us want to be accidentally different. You know, you show up to a party, and you think it was, you know, a costume party.
Everyone else thought it was a black tie affair. And you show up, and you're there in a cow costume, and you're like, oh, great. You don't want to be different on accident.
You want to be different on purpose. You want to have some intentionality in you being different. And today, we're going to look at determining to be different in that we trust and obey God, regardless of the culture around us.
Let's pray together. Dear Jesus, thank you for today. God, thank you for your word.
And I pray that today, as we study, as we Lord ask for you to show our hearts, Lord, for you to speak to us individually. God, I don't know every circumstance and situation that people are in today, but you do.
And so, God, I ask that as your word is declared, that you would bring the specific actions and steps and words and thoughts that people need to their hearts and minds. God, I pray that we would be open to whatever you have for us today.
May Jesus be glorified, and may we be encouraged and edified to live for you. We love you, God, and we pray all this in your name. Amen.
First today, from Daniel chapter 1, I want us to notice that God has placed you in an ungodly culture. God has placed you in an ungodly culture. And we can see this in verses 1 through 7 of the passage.
It says this, In the third year of the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to Jerusalem and laid siege to it. The Lord handed King Jehoiakim of Judah over to him, along with some of the vessels from the house of God.
I do want to take a note real quick. We can just super easily like read over all this and not pay attention. God didn't lose to King Nebuchadnezzar or the Babylonian gods.
God handed over Judah to Nebuchadnezzar. God handed over these vessels from the temple there in Jerusalem, which was an incredibly beautiful temple that Solomon had built several centuries prior, but the Lord handed all of this over.
Nebuchadnezzar carried them to the land of Babylon, to the house of his god, and put the vessels in the treasury of his god. So here we get the very first indication.
God is working behind the scenes, and Nebuchadnezzar has no idea who's really in charge. He thinks that his gods, that marduk or Bel or Akku, is one of the ones that handed over this little nation of Judah to him.
But God was truly the one that was in control. Verse number three, The king ordered Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the Israelites from the royal family and from the nobility.
Young men without any physical defect, good-looking, suitable for instruction in all wisdom, knowledgeable, perceptive, and capable of serving in the king's palace. It sounds like what some of you single people put on your wish list for your spouse.
He says he was to teach them the Chaldean language and literature. The king assigned them daily provisions from the royal food and from the wine that he drank. They were supposed to get royal reserves.
He says they were to be trained for three years. That was the kind of common length. That's how long it took to get a bachelor's back in ancient Babylon.
And at the end of that time, they were to attend to the king. Among them from the Judahites were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. All of these are good ancient Hebrew names.
Daniel means God is my judge. Hananiah means Yahweh has acted graciously. Mishael, his name means who is what God is.
And then Azariah's name means Yahweh has helped. But, verse number 7, the chief eunuch gave them names. He gave the name Belteshazzar to Daniel.
That name meant Belle protect him, which was one of the Babylonian gods. He gave the name Shadrach to Hananiah, a name that meant the command of Akku. He gave the name Meshach to Mishael.
That name, instead of Meshach or Mishael, who is what God is, to Meshach, who is like Akku and then Abednego or the servant of Nebo to Azariah. So it was a total stripping of their identity, their national identity, their Jewish identity.
They were taken 900 miles away from home and placed into this ungodly culture. They were given a college education and royal rations, and they had this whole list of how wonderful they were, that they were knowledgeable.
These were going to be the people that once the Babylonians trained them and what it really meant to be a Babylonian, they were going to be the best of the best.
And so they were going to help all of their people understand, yeah, like I know we used to live in Jerusalem and in Judah, but now it's so much better here. See how better the resources are. And you guys should just come along.
It's great here in Babylon. That was the goal. But, well, I'll save that until we get to verse number eight.
I want us to see first from this section of scripture that God has placed you in an ungodly culture first, that all of this earth's systems and nations are sinful and broken. I don't think I have to expound very much on this for you all today.
I think you guys realize that. God had set up government to be able to protect and preserve human life. We read about that in Genesis chapter 10, with God saying, whoever sheds man's blood by man, his blood will be shed.
That is that there is a vengeance, there is justice that takes place for the taking of human life.
In Romans 13, Paul told the church there in Rome, in the capital city of the Roman Empire, he says that the government, the king, is there for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of them that do well.
Government fails when it fails to punish those that have committed crimes and injustices, and it does not rectify that. It also errs when it punishes those that do not deserve punishment, and yet it unjustly persecutes or punishes them.
And not only that, but the government is also for the praise of those that do well, that the government is to help and to commend. It is to help those that are doing well towards others.
As you look at the Old Testament scriptures and how God set up the nation of Israel to work, that they were to care for the widows, the orphans, the foreigners, and the poor and needy, that was part of what God commanded them to do as part of their
God-led government. And when the government fails in any of those ways, it shows us we have not reached up to the level. We haven't reached the intentions that God has wanted us to.
But the truth of the matter is that in our sin-cursed, sin-addled world, no system or nation is ever going to cut it.
That's as we look at the rest of the Book of Daniel, that's the whole point is God needs to come in and make a whole new system with one very special person at the head of that system. I'll give it away. It's Jesus.
Jesus is the one that we need. He's the ruler and the king that we ought to follow. So all of this earth systems and nations are sinful and broken, but God didn't just leave it that way.
He doesn't say everything's messed up. Good luck, have fun with it. God placed embassies of heaven across the globe.
God had not lost here in Daniel 1 to Nebuchadnezzar and to Babylon's gods. He had handed over his items from his temple and he'd handed over his wayward children for a short time so that they would see how much better life with God would be.
Like, I don't know if any of you ever saw some of the shows like The First 48 or Scared Straight where you would take someone that was going to juvie and you would put him in jail for a little bit of time and they go, okay, no, I'm never doing that
again. I'm obeying mom and dad. I'm never playing hooky again. Like, I'm going on straight and narrow.
Here is somewhat like what God was doing with the exile, that he took Israel and went, okay, you guys keep on acting like all the nations around you. So, let me take you to the nations around you and show you that it's no better.
So, come back and return to the Lord. And even in his handing over, God still retained control over the whole process. He would use those vessels that we just read about.
Decades later, to prove his righteous judgment on Babylon.
So, when Babylon itself was later destroyed by the Medo-Persian Empire, one of the reasons that that occurred was because the Babylonians were using the holy sacred vessels from the temple in their riotous parties.
And God would use the captives from Jerusalem to share the one true God with Babylon's rulers for over half a century. So, God intentionally placed these people in that place for that time. Today, God is not ineffectual in the face of evil and wrong.
He has placed his embassies and his ambassadors all around the globe to combat evil through declaring the person and work of Jesus Christ and through living like citizens of heaven here on earth. We can read about that in St. Corinthians 5.
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. Since God is making his appeal through us, we plead on Christ's behalf be reconciled to God. He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
You have a mission to tell people around you about your heavenly home, about your God, about the way that God has called you to live, and the way that he has called all of humanity to follow. The question today is not, are you an ambassador?
The question is, are you a good ambassador who really shows people what citizens of heaven talk and act like, or are you a poor ambassador who does not reflect your home country at all? God has placed his embassies all around the globe.
I don't know if you knew this, but when you entered this building today, you entered a place that is not necessarily a part of the United States of America.
You're standing on sovereign ground, the ground of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, the one who will reign forever and ever. Today, what kind of ambassador are you to those around you? Do they know that you're an ambassador?
Do they know the work that you've been sent here to accomplish? And that leads us in to our next point, that God intentionally placed you in your family, your workplace, and your home.
Notice here that Daniel, Hananiah, Michelle, and Azariah, or as most of you might know them, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, God placed them in their families intentionally. He placed them in the tribe of Judah.
He placed them in the royal family, in the nobility, so that they would be taken to here in Babylon and declare Jesus, or that's a little anachronistic, declare the Lord.
God placed them in the city that they were in, in Jerusalem, so that they would be captured. They could have been way north, northern Israel, and the Babylonians would not have taken them from there.
But he placed them where they were, and he placed them in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. And that wasn't just something he did for them. That's something that he has done for you.
Wherever you are, whatever workplace, God placed you there intentionally.
1 Peter chapter 3 talks about this with wives, that he says even your marital relationship, and certainly this would work if you're a kid, if you're a parent, if you're a grandparent, God has placed you intentionally where you are to reach your
family. 1 Peter 3 says, in the same way wives submit to your own, yourselves to your own husbands, so that even if some disobey the word, that is they don't believe in Jesus, they're not following him, they may be won over without a word by the way
their wives live when they observe your pure reverent lives. How you act as an ambassador in relation to your family can make a difference.
In Titus chapter 2, Paul writing to hear people that were not volunteer workmen, but slaves, even in their workplace, he says, you can be a light where you are.
He says, slaves are to submit to their masters and everything, and to be well pleasing, not talking back or stealing, but demonstrating utter faithfulness, so that they may adorn the teaching of God, our Savior, and everything.
If you say you are a Christian, how you live your life reflects on your God. Have you realized that your life has been orchestrated, so that you'd be where you are right now? Are you using your placement to share Jesus and to show God's light?
So first, we see that God has placed us in an ungodly culture, a culture that doesn't care about what God's word says, a culture that does not execute justice, a culture that does not care for those that are most in need.
And so we've got to be a light. We've got to be an embassy and an ambassador. We've got to care for people where we can.
We could bemoan everything outside of where we're at, but as for your circles, what are you doing? In your areas, what are you doing? Secondly, we must determine if the ungodly culture will be in us.
We can see how Daniel and his friends interacted with this in verses 8 through 16. Daniel determined that he would not defile himself with the king's food or with the wine he drank.
Here what Nebuchadnezzar was eating and drinking, what he was giving to all of the people, this was not kosher food.
This was not acceptable to the Jewish religion, where they followed what God had said in the Book of Leviticus, among other places of here's the food you do eat, here's the food you don't eat, you don't eat anything with blood in it.
So, you know, no medium rare pork chops or anything like that. You've got a whole different way as the people of God that you are to operate. And so Daniel determined beforehand, I'm not eating that.
I'm not getting drunk like everyone else is. One of the things that I hadn't necessarily noticed when I had read these passages growing up was that Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, they weren't the only ones from Judah that were there.
Like there was a whole group of these from the royal family and from the nobility. It was four of those people from that group that we read about.
Every single other person that was brought along, they're not mentioned as doing what Daniel and the others did here. Instead, their names have been forgotten to history because they had no care to follow the Lord.
The others determined that the ungodly culture, we're no longer in Jerusalem, there's no temple anymore, and so we can just do what we want, eat what we want, live however we want. But Daniel determined in his heart that he would not defile himself.
So he asked permission from the chief eunuch not to defile himself. God had granted Daniel kindness and compassion from the chief eunuch, yet he said to Daniel, I fear my Lord the king who assigned your food and drink.
What if he sees your faces looking thinner than the other young men your age? You would endanger my life with the king. This was a time period, long gone now, where if you were a little tubby, it was a good sign.
It was a sign that you could maybe last through some periods of famine. It was a time when it showed, okay, this is a smart person. They know where to find food.
They can get food. And so he says, if everyone else has got, you know, a little bit of a tummy on, a little fat in the face, Nebuchadnezzar is going to say, okay, wonderful. You're doing a great job with all of these.
They also didn't have like a, you're fired type thing back in ancient Babylon. It was you're dead. And so he says, if he sees that everyone except you guys looks good, I'm going to get killed.
I'm going to be beheaded. He says, so no, I'm not listening to your request. But then I love what Daniel does after this.
He doesn't just say like, oh man, that's tough. I wanted to obey and follow God, but I asked if I could and he wasn't really cool with it. Verse number 11.
So Daniel said to the guard whom the chief eunuch had assigned to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. He says, please test your servants for 10 days. They've got a three year long bachelor's degree that they're going through.
And he says, hey, test us out for 10 days. Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. I don't know about you guys.
I've lost about 30 ish pounds this year. I did not do so. If you're trying to get fat, you don't normally eat vegetables and water.
It's not normally how that happens. But here's what Daniel requests. This is really an asking for a miracle from God.
Of God, the culture around me, they want this. They have this expectation for my life, for how I operate, for what I eat and what I drink and how I live. But God, I want to follow you instead.
And so God, I'm asking that you would bless me. I don't have kind of the advantage that some of these others do in eating all of these fattening foods. Says God, will you make me fat on vegetables and water?
Some of you might commiserate with me and be like, yeah, even when I eat that, I'm getting fat. So he says, test us.
Verse number 13, then examine our appearance and the appearance of the young men who are eating the king's food and deal with your servants based on what you see. So he says, hey, let's do a trial period for 10 days. Test us out and see what happens.
Verse number 14, he agreed with them about this and tested them for 10 days. At the end of 10 days, they looked better and healthier than all the young men who were eating the king's food.
So the guard continued to remove their food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables.
Here, Daniel determined, everyone around me, all of these other people, from the king down to all of these other captive advisers and counselors to Nebuchadnezzar, everyone's eating the same food, everyone's drinking the same things, but I am not
going to because I love the Lord. And though it says in verse 8 that Daniel determined in his heart not to defile himself, that also spread out to Hananiah, Michelle, and Azariah, that his faith influenced those around him, so that that ungodly
culture that wasn't in Daniel also wasn't in these other young men. I want us to see from this first, that obedience begins on the inside, with your mind, your will, and your emotions.
If you wait to determine to follow God until the moment of decision or temptation, it will be too late.
If you determine beforehand to say the kind word, to turn down the immoral offer, to defuse the gossip, what you think about will determine what you do. What you choose to do and to say will determine what you do.
And what you emotionally connect with will determine what you do. We can see this in Joshua 24, where Joshua tells the children of Israel, choose for yourselves today. Which will you worship?
The gods your ancestors worship beyond the Euphrates River, or the gods of the Amorites and whose land you're living? As for me and my family, we will worship the Lord.
Joshua said, before the idols were even there, or even a temptation is really says, choose today who you're going to serve with your life. Proverbs 4 and verse 26 says, carefully consider the path for your feet, and all your ways will be established.
Determine your direction and you'll end up where you're going. Proverbs 23 and verse 7 says, as a person calculates in their soul, so they are.
Your prior decisions and intentions, before you get to the moment of deciding, okay, will I let the ungodly culture be out there, or is it going to be in me? Determine now for the temptations and difficulties that you'll be going through.
Determine now to follow the Lord. In 1st Peter 3, 15, Peter tells us the same thing. In your hearts, regard Christ the Lord as holy, ready at any time to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.
Are you determining now, in your mind, in your will, in your emotions, no matter what this person says, no matter what my boss says, no matter what the culture or the news says, I'm doing what's right.
I am advocating for the Lord, just as Daniel and his friends did. Secondly, a biblical counterculture is done in a godly manner. Here, Daniel doesn't, like, you know, fist bite the people that are trying to bring him pork chops.
He does so first by asking the chief eunuch, hey, you know, we're Jews, we don't do this. I know all of these other ones are, but we follow the Lord, we believe in him. And so we don't want to, we don't want to defile ourselves in this way.
When he went, I would, but I'm way too scared of the king. Then Daniel took it to, okay, guard that's actually bringing me the food. Can you help me out?
Here it is done in a manner that is not done through violence or coercion or insult. It is done in a godly manner.
We can see this in 1 Peter chapter 2, which says, conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, the unsaved world around you, so that when they slander you as evildoers, when people talk bad about you because you're a Christian, they will observe
your good works and will glorify God on the day that he visits. How you operate in opposition to our culture will determine whether people glorify God or if they go, oh, you can't trust or believe those Christians because look how they act, look what
they say, look what they do. They say this, but they're hypocrites. Let us be faithful in following and operating a biblical counterculture in a godly manner. Jesus gave us this example in 1 Peter 2 and verses 20 through 23.
He says, when you do what is good and you suffer, if you endure it, this brings favor with God. For you were called to this because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps.
He did not commit sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth. When he was insulted, he did not insult in return. When he suffered, he didn't threaten, but entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.
We mentioned this last week in the class on our Basic Beliefs, that Paul, both in Philippi with the Philippian rulers who had gone against Roman law in beating and imprisoning Paul in Silas, he let them know, hey, that wasn't according to the law.
And it meant that then because they had followed the law, because they had suffered unjustly, it gave them more time and more opportunity to be able to meet with the early Philippian church after the Philippian rulers went, oh no, we really messed
up. We could be in danger because we did this to them. Why don't you guys just like shuffle out of town? And Paul says, no, you guys did wrong.
And we're going to take a little bit of time and hang out with the church some more and teach them a little bit more about Jesus. We see Paul also doing this with the Sanhedrin, that he was treated unjustly. He responded to them.
One of the times when the high priest told them to slap Paul, Paul insulted the high priest and they said, you can't insult the high priest. He's a holy person.
And he goes, my bad guys didn't realize it was the whole high priest because it's written, thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of thy people. And so Paul realized what God's word said about government.
You can look at the life of David where David, even though he was being hunted by Saul, and Saul tried to kill him on multiple occasions, when David had the opportunity to take out Saul, he intentionally chose not to do it because he said, I can't
touch the Lord's anointed. That God put him there and God will remove him in his perfect time. That we are to do our counterculture in a godly manner.
You can look at even early in church history, those that were gladly martyred by Rome in the centuries after Christ, that they were happy to give their life for the one who had given his life for them.
And certainly here in America today, we don't interact with that same thing.
And we undergo any small amount of persecution and we go like, this is world ending versus you had people in the third and fourth centuries that were instructed to go out and walk on to ice in lakes and ponds, and then just freeze and die overnight
out on those. And they were happy to give their lives for the sake of Christ, because they were operating in a biblical countercultural way. They were not worshiping the false gods.
They were not doing everything that the people around them were telling them to do. They operated in a different way, but their lives gave glory to Christ.
And centuries later, we're still looking back and seeing what pastors and fellow Christians wrote about those people and how their actions resulted in salvation and in God being exalted that people notice there's something just drastically different
about the Christians from every other group. They're not fighting against us like this group or that group or this group of people. They are praying for us. When we have sick people, they're the ones that are caring for us.
When disease and death comes, they are the ones that are caring for us. Are you operating in a Biblical counterculture? Then lastly here, God's ways will always be superior to this world's.
That as we can see that the young men in verse 15 were better and healthier than all the young men who were eating the king's food. When we follow the Lord, there is great blessing and joy that God's way truly is best.
The ones that ought to be the most genuinely happy and joyful and generous and loving and forgiving ought to be the people of God because we are proving with our lives that the Lord's way is best.
The problem today is not that we live in an ungodly world, but that ungodliness lives in us. Today, will you determine to follow Jesus no matter what anyone else does?
You might spark a few other people to join you in the cause, even as Daniel did with his friends. And then lastly today, you can show God's wisdom to your culture. We can see this in verses 17 through 21.
Daniel 1, 17, God gave these four young men knowledge and understanding in every kind of literature and wisdom. Some of you kids might be praying for some of that this week with school.
Give me knowledge and understanding in every kind of literature and wisdom. Daniel also understood visions and dreams of every kind. This was a miracle from the Lord.
At the end of time, of the time that the king had said to present them, the chief eunuch presented them to Nebuchadnezzar. The king interviewed them and among all of them, no one was found equal to Daniel, Hananiah, Michael, and Azariah.
So they began to attend the king. In every matter of wisdom and understanding that the king consulted them about, he found them 10 times better than all the magicians and mediums in his entire kingdom.
Daniel remained there until the first year of King Cyrus. This is a little peek ahead in the book. King Cyrus was not a Babylonian king.
The kingdom of the Medo-Persians that destroyed or supplanted Babylon, that was what King Cyrus was from. That Daniel served in multiple different courts for multiple different kings over the course of decades.
How can we show God's wisdom to our culture? Shortly, first we can show others that God's people value all truth as from him.
Christianity is the religion of enlightenment, of revealed verified truths, that a real person named Jesus Christ of Nazareth really was the son of God. He came, lived a perfect, sinless life. He really did die on a cross.
He was buried and he rose from the dead three days later and ascended into heaven. We should never be those that hate learning or the growth of the intellect. Anything that is true is true because God declared it.
And so we should have a love for every single truth because it comes from God. Second Peter 1 and verse 5 says, make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge. Part of the way that we worship God is with our mind.
Do you value learning, reading, listening to teaching from God's word? And do you value learning how the world works? Christians shouldn't be the stupidest people around.
We should be the people most interested in growing in our knowledge. Secondly, we can show others that God's people value their work as for Him. They're with Daniel, Hananiah, Michelle, and Azariah, being 10 times better than any of the others.
That they actually put the work in. They gave the good advice. Those that know and love God should work harder, more ethically, with less complaining, and with more joy than anyone else.
Colossians chapter 3 says, whatever you do, do it from the heart, as something done for the Lord and not for people, knowing that you will receive the reward of an inheritance from the Lord. You serve the Lord Christ.
In 1 Corinthians 10, so whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God. Give no offense to Jews or Greeks or the Church of God, just as I also try to please everyone and everything.
Not seeking my own benefit, but the benefit of many so that they may be saved. As we live our lives working as hard as we can to be those 10 times better than our coworkers or our neighbors or whatever.
As we work, we work not to bring attention to ourselves, but so that we would bring attention to the fact that we serve a glorious God who's worthy of our best efforts, and that as we lift him up, then people would be drawn to him.
How does your work ethic reflect on your beliefs? Would your boss or coworkers be drawn to Christ or repulsed from him based on how you work? And lastly today, show others that God's people know their real home.
Here Daniel could work and serve in Judah, where he learned God's law that stuck with him for 70-plus years. He could work and serve in Babylon, and he could work and serve in Medo-Persia.
This world's kingdoms and systems and political parties, they come and they go, but our home is in heaven. Philippians chapter 3 says, our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly wait for a savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.
There's the old hymn, this world is not my home, I'm just to pass them through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from heaven's open door, and I can't feel at home in this world anymore.
Today is your life leading others to believe in and follow Jesus. Got limited amounts of words, limited amounts of things you can post about online is what you're saying, what you're posting, what you're reading. Is it drawing people to Jesus?
Today, will you live this week like God has placed you in your neighborhood, your family, your workplace, or your school? Will you intentionally live like a citizen of heaven this week, even if it means you stick out?
Will you show those around you that God knows what's best for us by following him today? Today, do you know this God and Savior Jesus that I'm talking about? If not, please talk to me after.
We'll grab a coffee or a meal this week and talk about the most important truth that God wants you to know. Today, will you determine to trust and obey God regardless of the culture around you?
