SPEAKER_00: Please remain standing as we read our scripture here this morning.
SPEAKER_00: We're starting a new series in Daniel.
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna be in Daniel chapter 1 here this morning.
SPEAKER_00: If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab them.
SPEAKER_00: Turn to Daniel chapter 1.
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be a little bit of a longer passage, so please feel the freedom to sit down if you need to.
SPEAKER_00: If you're having trouble finding Daniel, you can open it up to Psalms and then move over to Proverbs.
SPEAKER_00: Then you got Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel.
SPEAKER_00: So let's read Daniel chapter 1, starting in verse 8 this morning.
SPEAKER_00: This is the word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's food or with the wine that he drank.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself.
SPEAKER_00: And God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs.
SPEAKER_00: And the chief of the eunuchs said to Daniel, I fear my lord the king, who assigned your food and your drink.
SPEAKER_00: For why should he see that you are in worse condition than the youths who are your own age?
SPEAKER_00: So you would endanger my head with the king.
SPEAKER_00: Then Daniel said to the steward, whom the chief of the eunuchs had assigned over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and his Azuri, Test your servants for ten days.
SPEAKER_00: Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink.
SPEAKER_00: Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat the king's food be observed by you, and deal with your servants according to what you see.
SPEAKER_00: So he listened to them in this matter, and tested them for ten days.
SPEAKER_00: And at the end of ten days it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in the flesh than all the youths who ate the king's food.
SPEAKER_00: So the stewards took away their food and their wine that they were to drink, and he gave them vegetables.
SPEAKER_00: As these four youths, God gave them learning and skill in all literature and all wisdom, and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams.
SPEAKER_00: And at the end of the time, when the king had commanded they should be brought in, the chief of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar, and the king spoke with them, and among all of them none was found like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore they stood before the king, and in the matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all of his kingdom.
SPEAKER_00: And Daniel was there until the first year of King Cyrus.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Father God, you are a good and gracious Father.
SPEAKER_00: Father, we come to you this morning through the finished work of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: By your spirit that you have poured out into us.
SPEAKER_00: You have sealed us by you.
SPEAKER_00: So God, we ask this morning that you would open up our ears, that we might hear from you through your word.
SPEAKER_00: God, we ask that you would open up our eyes, that we might see you better.
SPEAKER_00: God, illuminate our hearts and our minds, God, that we might know you better, that we might walk with you better.
SPEAKER_00: God, that we might worship you fully.
SPEAKER_00: God, we ask that you would just stir in our hearts in such a way that we would be captivated by who you are this morning.
SPEAKER_00: We pray all these things in the finished work of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe seated.
SPEAKER_01: On August the 6th, 1945, an Allied bomber dropped an atomic payload on Hiroshima, Japan.
SPEAKER_01: The fireball that ensued was more than 1,200 feet in diameter.
SPEAKER_01: It decimated everything that was in that was in its path.
SPEAKER_01: More than 150,000 souls were lost.
SPEAKER_01: The entire biological and man-made landscapes were basically wiped from the face of the earth.
SPEAKER_01: There was nothing left standing except for the ginkgo trees that were in Hiroshima.
SPEAKER_01: When the bomb was dropped, the ginkos were in full leaf.
SPEAKER_01: And in an instant, all of the leaves and the branches were incinerated.
SPEAKER_01: But the heart of the tree, the heart of the tree remained alive.
SPEAKER_01: That beneath the charred bark were living cells equipped to endure even the most catastrophic circumstances that could be experienced on earth.
SPEAKER_01: The scene that we find in the book of Daniel, chapter one, is very similar to what would have been seen that day in Hiroshima, Japan.
SPEAKER_01: God's people had been sieged by the Babylonians.
SPEAKER_01: And when Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem, they laid siege with a blockade that was so long and so intense that we know that mothers actually began to cannibalize their children in order to stay alive.
SPEAKER_01: The brightest of Judah's children were taken away from Jerusalem and paraded into Babylon where they were stripped of their heritage.
SPEAKER_01: And the attempt was to assimilate them into the Babylonian culture.
SPEAKER_01: But Jeremiah, who was a contemporary of Daniel, the books were written at the same time, the prophets prophesied at the same time.
SPEAKER_01: He tells us about a bomb-proof tree, like that ginkgo tree in Hiroshima in Daniel chapter 17.
SPEAKER_01: It's the passage I opened our service with.
SPEAKER_01: He talks about a tree that is planted by streams of water, so that even though it is in the wilderness, and even though it is dry and desolate, and even though it is an arid land, even though it is a land of exile, that tree is planted by streams of water, and so it is able to flourish and thrive and actually even bear fruit.
SPEAKER_01: It's a tree that can flourish even though it's living in Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: See, that's the vision that God had for his people.
SPEAKER_01: That's the vision that God still has for his people.
SPEAKER_01: That even if we're living in Babylon, even if we're living in the wilderness, even if we're living in an increasingly secular age, that as the people of God, we could be like those ginkgo trees, that we could be the trees that are planted by streams of water, able to flourish, though we live in the wilderness.
SPEAKER_01: Dads, that's the vision that you have for your families, too, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: That's the vision that you have for yourself.
SPEAKER_01: That's the vision that you have for your church, that's the vision that you have for your community, that your children, that your family, that your own integrity would be bomb-proof, planted by a stream of water.
SPEAKER_01: Well, this morning, that's what we're gonna ask is how is it that we can live a bomb-proof life as the people of God?
SPEAKER_01: First, I want you to see is that you have to give your life.
SPEAKER_01: You have to give your life to the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: You know, wedding vows are really a declaration of decisive love.
SPEAKER_01: It is the decision that you're going to take yourself off the market and close down all of your options.
SPEAKER_01: You're not gonna keep your options open for anyone else.
SPEAKER_01: It's the decision that whether it is in prosperity or in adversity or in sickness or in health, that you have cast your lot with that person, and that person is gonna be your person until the very end.
SPEAKER_01: I think that's why so often God compares the relationship that he has with his people to the relationships of husbands and wives.
SPEAKER_01: God's love toward us is a decisive love.
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't love you because you bring a lot to the table.
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't love you because of your productivity, God doesn't love you even because of your morality.
SPEAKER_01: God loves you because God has chosen to love you.
SPEAKER_01: He loves you according to his sovereign grace.
SPEAKER_01: It is a decisive love.
SPEAKER_01: And his expectation is that because we have received such great love from him, and he has offered this covenant to us, that we would reciprocate that with an equally decisive love.
SPEAKER_01: That we would take ourselves off the market and that we would decide that no matter the circumstances, no matter what we endure, that we have cast our lots to be with the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: See, a bomb proof life requires a bomb-proof love.
SPEAKER_01: One that's decisive and committed.
SPEAKER_01: So to live a bomb proof life in this way, in the way that Jeremiah 17 envisions all of us living in Babylon, we have to answer two questions.
SPEAKER_01: The first question that we have to answer is who will get your heart?
SPEAKER_01: Who will get your heart?
SPEAKER_01: The word youth is used five times in chapter one.
SPEAKER_01: It has a pretty wide semantic range that often the Hebrew word it can mean adolescent, but overwhelmingly, almost entirely, whenever it's used in the Bible, it's used to refer to a child.
SPEAKER_01: And this is the word that's used to refer to Daniel and to his three friends.
SPEAKER_01: And I bring that up because what I see in Daniel is what I pray that I'll see in my own children.
SPEAKER_01: It's what I pray that I'll see in them.
SPEAKER_01: We see that Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself.
SPEAKER_01: That is, he resolved even as a child that he was gonna live his life unto the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: He decided, even as a child, to resolve means that he he fixed his heart on God.
SPEAKER_01: It means he fixed his heart on a certain direction, he determined the direction that he was gonna go, and he was not gonna turn to the right or to the left.
SPEAKER_01: He was never going to waver from it.
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you think about that this Father's Day.
SPEAKER_01: That long before Daniel stood before the king of Babylon, he had already learned from his father how to stand before the God of God and the kings of kings, the king of kings.
SPEAKER_01: That he had already learned what it meant from his parents as a child to live resolutely as though unto the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: You know, dads, the the greatest gift that you can give to your children is not material.
SPEAKER_01: It's not your f it's not your finances, it's not uh the opportunities that you can present to them.
SPEAKER_01: All of those things are good.
SPEAKER_01: All of those things are right.
SPEAKER_01: But the greatest gift that you can give to them is the ability and the resolution in their own spirits to live for the Lord, even though they're living in Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: Because Babylon's gonna make offers to them, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: Babylon's gonna make offers to our children, and the offers of Babylon are awfully enticing and awfully attractive.
SPEAKER_01: So we have to make sure that they know the one who is actually worthy of their hearts.
SPEAKER_01: This is the conclusion that Daniel arrives at.
SPEAKER_01: Deal Moody was uh a man who only had a fifth grade education.
SPEAKER_01: He moved uh in the late 20s to uh Chicago, where he'd hoped that he could become a wealthy business merchant, even in spite of his lack of education.
SPEAKER_01: But he had found the Lord and he loved the Lord and he endeavored to live to the Lord, and so he served in his church, but he was so insecure about his lack of education that he would only teach children because he believed that he only had something to offer to them.
SPEAKER_01: That is, until he was 30 years old and he heard a man by the name of Henry Varner preach.
SPEAKER_01: And in that sermon, Henry Varner said this he said, The world has yet to see what God can do through a man who is totally yielded to him.
SPEAKER_01: Moody was captivated and inspired, even convicted.
SPEAKER_01: And so he wrote this that day in his journal.
SPEAKER_01: He said, By the grace of God, I will be that man.
SPEAKER_01: Dio Moody would go on to preach to stadiums with tens of thousands of people in attendance.
SPEAKER_01: Thousands of people would come to faith under his ministry.
SPEAKER_01: He would actually found a school and be an influence among the intellectuals in places even like Cambridge in Oxford with nothing more than a fifth grade education.
SPEAKER_01: This morning I want to ask you the same question that Daniel answered.
SPEAKER_01: The same question that D.L.
SPEAKER_01: Moody answered, and the same question that all of our children are going to answer.
SPEAKER_01: Who will get your heart?
SPEAKER_01: Will you resolve this day that the Lord Jesus will get all of your life and all of your heart for the rest of your life?
SPEAKER_01: No matter how young you are, you know what Daniel shows us?
SPEAKER_01: Daniel shows us you're not too young to resolve to live into the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: No matter how old you are, you know what DL Moody shows us?
SPEAKER_01: DL Moody shows us it's not too late for you to live unto the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: No, resolve this day that you will live every day by the grace of God for the glory of God in the wisdom of God.
SPEAKER_01: And when you answer that question and it leads you to the Lord, it leads you to the second question.
SPEAKER_01: Now, where will you draw the line?
SPEAKER_01: Where will you draw the line?
SPEAKER_01: One of the primary roles of fathers in the home is to establish the boundaries of the home.
SPEAKER_01: Every family has lines.
SPEAKER_01: The question just becomes: where do those lines come from?
SPEAKER_01: Do you get the lines that you inherit from Babylon, or do you draw the lines that the Lord would have you to draw?
SPEAKER_01: Daniel decided that God would have his heart at a young age and that Babylon never would.
SPEAKER_01: We know that the Jews took what they ate very, very seriously.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, what they ate was actually a way in which they communicated the decisive love that they had for their God.
SPEAKER_01: It was an offering of worship.
SPEAKER_01: And so they're now, these uh young Jewish children brought into Babylon are being offered the very best food in all the world.
SPEAKER_01: They are being offered to eat from the table of King Nebuchadnezzar.
SPEAKER_01: It would have been delectable, delightful, enticing, appetizing, all of those things, right?
SPEAKER_01: Daniel decides, for whatever reason, that he can't eat the food without defiling himself.
SPEAKER_01: It's likely that these foods had been offered to Babylonian gods and he understood that the consumption of this food was the conflation of worship.
SPEAKER_01: And so what he decides?
SPEAKER_01: He decides that he's gonna draw a line.
SPEAKER_01: He's gonna draw a line.
SPEAKER_01: He will deny himself the pleasures and the excesses of Babylon because his stomach and his pleasure will not be his top priority.
SPEAKER_01: He's gonna live unto the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: He's gonna live resolved unto the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Danny Aiken, he puts it this way: he says, Daniel was forced into Babylon, but he would not let Babylon into him.
SPEAKER_01: You see, it's one thing to live in the world, it's quite another thing for the world to live in you.
SPEAKER_01: And if we want to impact our culture, if we want to impact our families, if we want to design bomb-proof families and a bomb-proof church and a bomb-proof life, then we have to learn how to draw some lines.
SPEAKER_01: Now, when we're talking about drawing lines, what we're not talking about is out of a spirit of legalism that's meant to show how good or how impressive you are.
SPEAKER_01: What we're talking about drawing lines is we're talking about sacrificing some things so that the world can see that I don't live for the American dream.
SPEAKER_01: I don't live, live for the pleasures and appetites of my stomach, I don't live for myself at all.
SPEAKER_01: I live not because I am good in drawing lines, but because Jesus is good and I want that to be clear, I want that to be evident.
SPEAKER_01: No, no person, and this is D.
SPEAKER_01: L.
SPEAKER_01: Moody's story, no person ever lives and gives their heart to the Lord and then lives to regret it.
SPEAKER_01: This morning, who has your heart?
SPEAKER_01: Who has your heart?
SPEAKER_01: The second part of a bomb-proof life that I want us to see this morning is that God gives you favor.
SPEAKER_01: God gives you favor.
SPEAKER_01: You give your life to him, and in return, what does he give to you?
SPEAKER_01: He gives to you his favor, his grace, right?
SPEAKER_01: In the spring of 2007, um, I was preparing to marry this beautiful little brunette girl, right?
SPEAKER_01: And the months were impending and it was coming up pretty quickly, and I started to realize that my$125 a week salary as a part-time youth minister and my little fun job at the hiking store in my college town wasn't exactly enough to be able to provide for this new family that I was hoping to start.
SPEAKER_01: And so I began to panic.
SPEAKER_01: And in that time, the first Baptist Church of Talladega decided they would call me out of the blue and that they would offer to me a full-time salary to be able to go and be their minister of youth and recreation.
SPEAKER_01: And to be honest with you, it wasn't a great fit.
SPEAKER_01: I was a little bit too rabbit town.
SPEAKER_01: They were a little bit too First Baptist Church.
SPEAKER_01: You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_01: And so it was a rocky, rocky, rocky 11 months that I was there.
SPEAKER_01: And I was only there 11 months before the Lord called me away.
SPEAKER_01: And you know, for a long time I wrestled with wondering if I had missed God's will.
SPEAKER_01: For a long time, I wondered if I had panicked and I had just jumped at an opportunity to be able to try to make what I thought I needed to make to be able to provide for my family.
SPEAKER_01: Until a couple of years ago.
SPEAKER_01: A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity, the pastor that I served under at First Baptist Church, he's now serving at another church, and he called me one day and he's like, hey, Cody, I'm doing this missions event.
SPEAKER_01: I would love for you to come and preach it.
SPEAKER_01: And I got to go and preach for the pastor I'd served under at the beginning of my ministry.
SPEAKER_01: And I realized in that full circle moment that when I went to the First Baptist Church of Talladega, what happened is God put a man in my life that was going to be an encouragement to me through the entirety of my ministry.
SPEAKER_01: Not only did God put a man in my life that was gonna be an encouragement to me through the entirety of my ministry, but he put a man in my life that showed me the importance and the value of administration in ministry.
SPEAKER_01: I'd never thought of that before or seen that before, but he was a great administrator.
SPEAKER_01: And not only did God put an encourager in my life that taught me the value of administration in ministry, but he also taught me that I needed to be able to think about my faith for myself.
SPEAKER_01: He allowed me to be challenged in some ways that I needed to be challenged.
SPEAKER_01: He allowed me to develop some muscles that I needed to develop.
SPEAKER_01: He allowed me to fail in some ways that my pride needed for me to fail.
SPEAKER_01: What I've come to realize is that God did have me there.
SPEAKER_01: And that God was positioning me and preparing for me 21 years ago at the first Baptist Church of Talladega to be the pastor of the Orchard Church in 2026.
SPEAKER_01: See, circumstances with God are very often not as they appear.
SPEAKER_01: That He uses the worst in our lives, doesn't he?
SPEAKER_01: He uses the worst in our lives.
SPEAKER_01: There's an interpretive key to the book of Daniel that is often mixed, missed, that helps you to make sense of everything else that takes place in the book.
SPEAKER_01: It's found in Jeremiah 24.
SPEAKER_01: I mentioned earlier that Jeremiah and uh Daniel are contemporaries.
SPEAKER_01: So they're they're riding about the same time in uh the Lord's people's lives.
SPEAKER_01: And what we find in Daniel, in Jeremiah chapter 24, was what God was actually doing in exile.
SPEAKER_01: See, what was actually happening is that Babylon was actually fulfilling two roles in the work of God.
SPEAKER_01: Babylon was, on one hand, the judgment of God against the sins of his people, and Babylon was, on the other hand, the preservation and salvation and deliverance that God was going to use for the remnant among his people.
SPEAKER_01: Now that might sound strange, right?
SPEAKER_01: But Jeremiah says in chapter 24, I'd love for you to read it for yourselves.
SPEAKER_01: He says that there were two groups of people in Judah at the time.
SPEAKER_01: He says, one group of people were the bad figs.
SPEAKER_01: He uses a comparison of figs.
SPEAKER_01: They were the bad figs.
SPEAKER_01: These were those who had remained in Jerusalem, these those that perhaps had even fled into Egypt, and God's wrath and judgment was going to fall apart, fall upon them for not believing in the Lord and not being devoted to the Lord and being distracted by all of the idols that were in Judah at the time.
SPEAKER_01: He said, but but there were good figs.
SPEAKER_01: This is the remnant, this is the true believers among Israel, those that are truly God's people.
SPEAKER_01: They were there and they remained in Israel, and the good figs were actually going to be delivered before the siege would be laid to Jerusalem, before the blockade would take place, they would be escorted out of Jerusalem and taken into Babylon, where they would be preserved.
SPEAKER_01: And so in Jeremiah 24, 7, talking about this remnant, God says, I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they shall be my people, decisive, and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole hearts.
SPEAKER_01: Do you hear the refrain of the Bible echoing again?
SPEAKER_01: Think about it.
SPEAKER_01: Here, what we have is the instrument of judgment, Babylon, also simultaneously being the instrument of deliverance offered by God.
SPEAKER_01: Does that not sing of the cross?
SPEAKER_01: What is the cross?
SPEAKER_01: The cross is the instrument of judgment, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: There on the cross, the Son of God will be crucified, and there upon the cross, the full and unmitigated cup of God's wrath will be flipped upside down on him so that he will say, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
SPEAKER_01: But the cross is not just an instrument of judgment, is it?
SPEAKER_01: Because Jesus hung on the cross until he said, It is finished, the cross is the same place that is our place of deliverance.
SPEAKER_01: It is an instrument of judgment, and it is an instrument of deliverance.
SPEAKER_01: And this is how God works.
SPEAKER_01: See, this isn't a story primarily about how good and resolute and tough and awesome Daniel is.
SPEAKER_01: This is a story about how good and resolute and glorious his God is.
SPEAKER_01: Daniel says in chapter one, gave the word.
SPEAKER_01: He says, God gave three times.
SPEAKER_01: Once in verse 2, here in verse 9.
SPEAKER_01: We'll see it again in a minute in verse 17.
SPEAKER_01: And the point is that God is sovereignly overseeing everything that's happening, and he's moving it toward his good purposes.
SPEAKER_01: Not only did God give him something, but God gave him favor.
SPEAKER_01: That's where I get the word.
SPEAKER_01: Now, favor is the translation of a group of a Hebrew word, Hesed.
SPEAKER_01: And you'll find Hesed throughout the Old Testament, but it's hard to pick up on it because it's very often translated into a large variety, a large range of English words, because we don't have an English equivalency to the word Hesed.
SPEAKER_01: So here, Hesed is translated as favor.
SPEAKER_01: In other places, it's translated as a steadfast love.
SPEAKER_01: In other places, Still, in books like Ruth, it's translated as the loving kindness of God.
SPEAKER_01: In other places, it's translated as the loyal love of God.
SPEAKER_01: It's the word that God uses to describe the covenant that he has with his people.
SPEAKER_01: And it's a it's a word that describes not just a love that's known about, but a love that's received.
SPEAKER_01: Not just a love that's spoken, but a love that's enjoyed.
SPEAKER_01: Not just a principle or a precept or something that lives in the ethereal or the abstract, but something that's experienced in the person, something that's known.
SPEAKER_01: And so here is he's saying, You have my love.
SPEAKER_01: It's a picture here of sovereign grace.
SPEAKER_01: That God has a plan, and that plan will not be stopped.
SPEAKER_01: And so he gives us a heart.
SPEAKER_01: And this is how, this is the point of Jeremiah chapter 24 that's being fulfilled here in Daniel chapter 1.
SPEAKER_01: We're seeing in Daniel that God has given to him favor, God has given to him the covenant, God has given to him the heart, so that now he will have a heart.
SPEAKER_01: I will be your God and you will be my people.
SPEAKER_01: And what it's a reminder to us of is that God can take the worst moment of your life and he can make it the first line of your testimony.
SPEAKER_01: You think Daniel wanted to be in Babylon?
SPEAKER_01: You think he wanted to be marched away from his mom and dad and his all the things that he knew and loved?
SPEAKER_01: It was the worst moment of his life, and yet it would become the first line of his testimony.
SPEAKER_01: That God can take your miscarriages and he can turn those into a calling.
SPEAKER_01: God can take the divorce that you regret and the divorce that you never wanted, and he can use that to cultivate in you a humility and an empathy that wouldn't have been there otherwise.
SPEAKER_01: That God can take the disability and use it as a ministry.
SPEAKER_01: God can take your disappointment and create contentment.
SPEAKER_01: The worst, the worst happens to us sometimes.
SPEAKER_01: The worst in life happens to us sometimes.
SPEAKER_01: And we as Christians have no responsibility to take what is bad and to call it good as though it's not actually bad.
SPEAKER_01: No, the worst happens and it's bad and it's hard, and we would wish it would be any other way.
SPEAKER_01: But the confidence that we have is that we receive and walk in the favor and steadfast love of the Lord and that he will sustain it and ultimately, as hard as it is, that he's gonna move it toward his good purposes.
SPEAKER_01: Toward his good purposes.
SPEAKER_01: But God doesn't just use the worst, he uses the ordinary, doesn't he?
SPEAKER_01: He uses the ordinary.
SPEAKER_01: What's remarkable about this story is how splendidly unremarkable it actually is.
SPEAKER_01: That we're seeing how God often moves people into the places that he intends for them to be, to do the things that he intends for them to do.
SPEAKER_01: And here he's not exactly using burning bushes and talking donkeys, is he?
SPEAKER_01: Now, sometimes God does that.
SPEAKER_01: God's able to do that.
SPEAKER_01: He can intervene in any miraculous way that he chooses.
SPEAKER_01: But most of the time, this isn't how he works.
SPEAKER_01: Think about how what he uses here in Daniel's life.
SPEAKER_01: He uses a compassionate eunuch and good, wholesome vegetables, right?
SPEAKER_01: But he uses them in a really striking way.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: Babylon, not exactly known in all the world history for all of their compassion, okay?
SPEAKER_01: They were ruthless people.
SPEAKER_01: And it was a ruthless culture.
SPEAKER_01: That's why they were so effective at conquering all the other people around them.
SPEAKER_01: But who did Daniel run into?
SPEAKER_01: He just happened to run into the only compassionate, uh, the only compassionate uh eunuch found anywhere in Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: Do you think that's a change?
SPEAKER_01: Do you think that's by chance?
SPEAKER_01: It's favor.
SPEAKER_01: Now let's think about vegetables.
SPEAKER_01: Vegetables, not exactly famous for making you fat, are they?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you probably don't get the love handles from the okra, right?
SPEAKER_01: But what about Daniel?
SPEAKER_01: This plumps Daniel right up.
SPEAKER_01: It says that he is fatter in flesh than all the other youths, and all he's eating is a vegetarian diet.
SPEAKER_01: Listen, church, don't you think so lowly of God that you believe that he is only in the extraordinary?
SPEAKER_01: No, that's too low a view of God's sovereignty.
SPEAKER_01: God is in every tiny, mundane, ordinary detail of your life, and every tiny, mundane, ordinary detail of your life is the thread with which he is weaving together his sovereign tapestry.
SPEAKER_01: No, God primarily works through the ordinary means of providence.
SPEAKER_01: He takes a young, naive, ready-to-get-married man, and he puts him at the first Baptist church because he is taking him to the orchard church in a path that he cannot predict.
SPEAKER_01: And he's doing the same thing in your life.
SPEAKER_01: This is how God works in us, what he has for us.
SPEAKER_01: No, don't just look for God in the miraculous.
SPEAKER_01: No, read his word every day.
SPEAKER_01: And keep his word every day.
SPEAKER_01: And then just keep going to school.
SPEAKER_01: Do the next faithful thing.
SPEAKER_01: Keep going to school, keep going to college, keep going to work every day, keep coming home to your wife every day, keep coming home to your husband every day, keep doing the ordinary things.
SPEAKER_01: But what's gonna happen is the experiences that you have and the training that you receive and all of the knowledge that you accumulate over time.
SPEAKER_01: It is the Lord working in miraculous and sovereign ways to prepare you for the things that you can't see coming around the bin.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is preparing you in his sovereign will for what he has for you and what he intends to do with you.
SPEAKER_01: No, you give your life to God, and God will give you all the favor that you need and all the wisdom that you need to be able to walk accordingly, and that's the final point.
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't just give you favor, God, in his favor, gives you wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that I admire most about military families is their adaptability.
SPEAKER_01: You can take a military family and you can place them almost anywhere, and they can just thrive and flourish.
SPEAKER_01: They learn the skill of being able to build community quickly and being able to put down roots quickly and develop friendships really quickly.
SPEAKER_01: And so you can place them wherever, and typically they're gonna be okay.
SPEAKER_01: And what we're learning from Daniel and from his friends here in Babylon is that this is really a picture of who the people of God are supposed to be.
SPEAKER_01: We're supposed to be the kinds of people that basically you can put just about anywhere and we're able to flourish because there's no place that we can go where the Lord is not already there.
SPEAKER_01: That walking with God with you in wisdom and security makes you adaptable to any circumstances in life.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, uh, if we didn't, I don't have it here, but we read it earlier in chapter 1, verse 21, it says that Daniel is brought into Babylon as a child, and Daniel actually ends up outliving both King Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon itself.
SPEAKER_01: He outlasts all of them.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: Because he is walking in the favor and the wisdom of God.
SPEAKER_01: No, we shouldn't be scared and nervous about sending our children into a secular world with dangerous ideologies and antagonistic professors.
SPEAKER_01: No, that's unrealistic.
SPEAKER_01: That's a fear that'll paralyze you.
SPEAKER_01: We shouldn't be fearful of that.
SPEAKER_01: What we should be afraid of is sending our children out into Babylon without God given wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: They need wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: Dad, your primary responsibility is to not to keep your Babylon from ever touching your children.
SPEAKER_01: That's not real.
SPEAKER_01: The goal is not to raise children who never encounter Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: The goal is to raise children who know how to live in Babylon without ever becoming Babylonians.
SPEAKER_01: That's what we see here in Daniel.
SPEAKER_01: That they need to know when and how to resist.
SPEAKER_01: When and how to resist.
SPEAKER_01: It's interesting that the third I gave, remember I told you there's two, there's three God gaves.
SPEAKER_01: The third God gave there in verse 17 is talking about learning and skill in literature, wisdom, and then he had the ability to interpret dreams and visions.
SPEAKER_01: Your child may not have that particular one, but we can see the development of wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: This is the summary of wisdom, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: That God gave these four young men the skills and the insights that they were going to need to be able to navigate an unexpected and difficult life living in Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: And I want you to think about how we see this wisdom played out in Daniel's life.
SPEAKER_01: He recognizes that eating the food is a line that he cannot cross.
SPEAKER_01: But the picture here is not Daniel becoming a fundamentalist preacher with a red face wagging his finger, yelling at how evil Babylon is.
SPEAKER_01: That's not what he does, is it?
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't show any hostility at all.
SPEAKER_01: He shows winsomeness, he responds with respect.
SPEAKER_01: It actually says that what he does is he goes and he asks them.
SPEAKER_01: He asks the units.
SPEAKER_01: See there in verse 8.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, he asked the chief of the units.
SPEAKER_01: He's not yelling, he's not being hostile, he's not being difficult to deal with.
SPEAKER_01: He's asking politely and respectfully.
SPEAKER_01: And what we see is that when the servant, the eunuch, comes and he's pretty apprehensive, and it makes sense that he would be apprehensive.
SPEAKER_01: He could die for doing what he was about to do for Daniel, he's pretty nervous.
SPEAKER_01: What does Daniel say?
SPEAKER_01: He said, here's what we ought to do.
SPEAKER_01: I tell you what, why don't we just test it?
SPEAKER_01: Let's just test it out.
SPEAKER_01: Like, let's just give this a test run.
SPEAKER_01: All right?
SPEAKER_01: Ten days.
SPEAKER_01: If I drop one pound in ten days, I'm switching to the king's food.
SPEAKER_01: Like, let's just give this a go.
SPEAKER_01: This is remarkable winsomeness, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: This is great wisdom that we're seeing demonstrated.
SPEAKER_01: This is skill in actual living in the midst of Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: Church, if we want to be an agent of change in our day, we need to be less known for our anger and bitterness and more known for our respect and wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: That we are sheep among wolves.
SPEAKER_01: We are lights in the midst of darkness.
SPEAKER_01: We are carriers of good news, and the good news ought to sound good.
SPEAKER_01: It ought to sound good.
SPEAKER_01: We ought to look like we have been impacted by good news.
SPEAKER_01: Our hope is not contingent on the economy.
SPEAKER_01: Our hope is not contingent upon the election.
SPEAKER_01: Our hope is not contingent upon the Congress.
SPEAKER_01: Our hope is not contingent upon the president.
SPEAKER_01: Our hope is not contingent upon our circumstances at all.
SPEAKER_01: Our hope is contingent upon our God.
SPEAKER_01: So why are we angry?
SPEAKER_01: Why are we angry?
SPEAKER_01: Because his love toward us is steadfast.
SPEAKER_01: So we don't have to be harsh.
SPEAKER_01: There are times in which we have to draw lines and we have to resist.
SPEAKER_01: There are times in which we have to say, I cannot go the way of the culture, I cannot agree with the way of the government, but we do it respectfully, wisely, winsomely, because we are people of grace with good news.
SPEAKER_01: No, we have to know when and how to resist.
SPEAKER_01: And we have to know when and how to comply.
SPEAKER_01: It's interesting, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: That Daniel resisted the food, but he doesn't resist the education, and he doesn't resist the opportunity for a diplomatic assignment within Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: So he knows when to resist, but he also knows when it's right and wise and acceptable for him as a person of God to comply with what he has the opportunity to do.
SPEAKER_01: So wisdom is recognizing how to adapt to the culture without assimilating or capitulating to it.
SPEAKER_01: It's learning the skill of how to live in the world without being of the world, how to be in Babylon without Babylon being in you.
SPEAKER_01: So Daniel and his friends, I think what they do is they give us a wise and balanced way that we can live in our own secular Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: That they are gracious but unflinching.
SPEAKER_01: They are active but not assimilated.
SPEAKER_01: They are firm, but they are not hostile.
SPEAKER_01: That Daniel uses his influence in Babylon, but he never confuses Babylon as being the source of his hope.
SPEAKER_01: And that's where we need some wisdom, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: See, for some of us, we see the darkness and the poison and all the toxicity in our culture and certainly all of the stuff that we see in politics.
SPEAKER_01: And our impulse is to withdraw and insulate, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: To withdraw from the world, insulate, and just say, I must I can't even sweat all that stuff.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not worried about all that, right?
SPEAKER_01: Then there are others of us that swing the pendulum the exact opposite way.
SPEAKER_01: We see all the darkness, all the bad, and we find ourselves being overwhelmed by it and stressed out by it and anxious by it.
SPEAKER_01: And we tend not to insulate and withdraw, but to obsess and get angry, right?
SPEAKER_01: What we're seeing here is that as people of God, we thread the needle.
SPEAKER_01: We're engaged in the world, we're a part of the world, we're trying to improve the world, we're trying to reach the world, we're trying to bear witness to the world.
SPEAKER_01: The people of God are trying to be a blessing, even here in Babylon, but we don't obsess over it.
SPEAKER_01: We are angry about it.
SPEAKER_01: We're living uprightly, wisely.
SPEAKER_01: So we serve where we can and resist where we must, and keep our hope anchored in the sovereignty of God every single step of the way.
SPEAKER_01: So, how do you build a bomb-proof life?
SPEAKER_01: You give your life to God, you trust in the favor of God, and you walk in the wisdom of God.
SPEAKER_01: And the only reason that any of that is possible is because one greater than Daniel has come, the one that Daniel was pointing us to.
SPEAKER_01: That Jesus Himself, as the greater and truer Daniel, has entered into our exile so that he can bring us home.
SPEAKER_01: And how did he do that?
SPEAKER_01: He did that by living his own bomb-proof life.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus lived solely devoted to the Lord, he resisted the temptations in the wilderness.
SPEAKER_01: He walked in the wisdom and all the things that he did as a man radically abandoned to the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And then when the full atomic blast of God's judgment was leveled upon him on the cross, he walked in perfect wisdom, even though everything appeared as though it was dead.
SPEAKER_01: On the third day, the life came up from the roots.
SPEAKER_01: There was a tree planted by streams of water that the wilderness was not able to overcome.
SPEAKER_01: So plant your life there.
SPEAKER_01: Fathers, plant your families there.
SPEAKER_01: Children, plant your future there.
SPEAKER_01: Church, plant your hope there.
SPEAKER_01: Because the life rooted in Christ, it may be scorched by Babylon, but it cannot be destroyed.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray to the Lord together.