“Under the Eye of God”

If you have your Bibles this morning, I'd like you to take them please and turn to the first chapter of Daniel.  If you would like to follow along in a pew Bible, you can find that on Page 737 in the blue Bible in the pew in front of you. That is Daniel Chapter 1.  This is the sermon I was supposed to preach last week and now it comes this week.  We just sat around and looked at each other last week in case you weren't here.  [Laughter]

Daniel Chapter 1, I'm going to begin reading at Verse 1 and you may follow along.  I'm going to read a good bit of the chapter to catch the story so I want you want to engage in God's Word because the life of Daniel is one of those that grabs us by the throat, looks us eyeball-to-eyeball and asks the questions, "How's your walk with God?  How's your faith in God?  What are you doing with your difficult circumstances?  Do you believe God is in control?"  All of these  things Daniel's story asks us, so let's begin Daniel Chapter 1, Verse 1:

"Daniel 1:1-21

    In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem, and besieged it. [2] And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God: which he brought them to the land of Shinar to the house of his god; and he placed the vessels into the treasury of his god.

    [3] And the king commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility [4] youths without blemish, of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding, learning and competent to stand in the king's palace, and to teach then the literature and language of the Chaldeans. [5] And the king assigned them a daily portion of the food that the king ate, and of the wine which he drank: they were to be educated for three years, and at the end they were to stand before the king. (It is always good to know who we stand before) [6] Now among these were, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, of the tribe of Judah: [7] the chief of the eunuchs gave names: Daniel he called Belteshazzar; Hananiah, he called Shadrach; Mishael he called Meshach; and to Azariah, he called Abed-nego.

    [8] But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the the king's food or with the wine that he drank: therefore he asked of the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself. [9] And God gave Daniel favour and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs. [10] And the chief of the eunuchs said unto Daniel, I fear my lord the king, who assigned your food and your drink: for why should he see that you are in worse condition than the youths who are of your own age? So you wound endanger my head with the king. [11] Then said Daniel to the Steward, whom the chief of the eunuchs had assigned over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, [12] Test your servants for ten days; let us be given vegetables to eat, and water to drink. [13] Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat of the king's food be observed by you and deal with your servants according to what you wee. [14] So he listened to them in this matter, and tested them ten days. [15] And at the end of ten days it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king's food. [16] So the steward took away their food, and the wine they were to drink; and gave them vegetables."

Today is a bit of an odd day that is the day in which we live. Things are just different and they change at a bit of a faster rate than we think, but one myth that I am surprised that is still alive is the remembrance of the good ol' days.  Would somebody please tell me when the good old days were?  Was it when you had to go use the bathroom in an outhouse in the middle of the night and didn't have running water? Were those the good ol' days? Were people, before our day that is so corrupt, were people better before our day?  Have you read your Bible lately?  That was a really long time ago and it doesn’t appear to me that people were any better then than they are now.  

I was talking to my dad about the good ol' days and he grew up in rural Hart County, Kentucky.  Hart County, Kentucky is still rural.  He said his neighbors down the street got drunk every weekend and shot at each other.  That's back when people were good!  Somebody in his family had a big flatbed truck and he would take it to Glasgow on weekends where you could buy legal liquor, and he said about ….oh 50% of them would be drunker than skunks riding back on the truck, the driver was afraid they'd fall off on the way back.  That was a good bunch of people back then in the good ol' days.

But we have some distinctions now.  We have two things that are a little bit different than that day, one is the multiplication of technology.  Have you got your iPhone yet?  Oh….did somebody in here raise their hand? You better run! [Laughter] The multiplication of technology that we have for adults, but especially young people Daniel's age provides mostly diversion.  Because, you see it is very obvious that society's morality has not kept up with the pace of technology, but when you have the deficit of experience that a teenager has and the advantage of high-level technology to which most of them understand how to use it far better than us, you have diversion.  You have exposure without experience, and so it just sucks us into a life of what I have is what makes me happy instead of what I produce brings pleasure to me and God, and this multiplication of technology is a diversion for the youth of our age because of the countless hours that they can spend thumbing their phones where they can type faster on their phones than I can on a full keyboard, doing IM-ing or Myspace, or Facebook on the computer, which is zero level productivity, but their lives are full of it and this is not a criticism of their culture,  we just have to wake up and realize that they are living with multiplication of technology that diverts their time and energy different than we grew up with.

And there's a second thing that was started, that hadn't reached the depths of our culture in the good ol' days [whatever that means] and that is the deconstruction of truth, which provides not diversion but confusion.   Your children deal with making decisions that were sociological givens when we grew up, certain rights and wrongs, certain issues.  Of course, we had our gross mistakes, too.  Many of our children are colorblind when it comes to the skin of people, but if you are as old as I am or any older, you didn't grow up in a time when we were colorblind.  I have been interestingly watching all the issues with the federal ruling on busing in Jefferson County and Seattle, Washington, because it was my senior year that federally enforced busing started in Jefferson County.  That, of course, was the second impetus for growth in this county; I-71 and busing; the white flight.  White people left Louisville, came out and moved to Oldham County because they didn't want their white children going to school with black children.

I went to school at Fairdale.  Fairdale is the redneck capital of the world!  [Laughter]  There were 3000 kids in my school, 7^th-12^th grade; there were 3 black kids.  It was the only black family in our community, and saying we were rednecks is a joke, but it is very true if you know anything about that particular area of the south end.  We were blue collar, low income and proud of being rednecks.  As a matter of fact, the whole county liked to call us "The Fairdale Farmers" even though we were the Fairdale Bulldogs.  We made national TV that day because all of the football players wore shirts that were alike and we met all these black kids that came out to this strange place they had never seen before to show them how to navigate our school and get to their classes.  We were on national TV for doing that.  At the end of week we were on national TV for all the fights we had at school.  I never played a safe football game my senior year in high school.  When we played Pleasure Ridge Park we had to leave the school, the bus driving over curbs and across the back of the lot with our helmets on and our heads between our knees, afraid the bus would get bricked and rocked, if not worse.  And actually why I've told you all that I really do not know other than the fact that surely we have made some gains in how we see our fellowman and woman who happen to be of a different skin color than we are.  I never thought busing was the answer, however, but we sure did need to grow up.

But we live in a day of deconstruction of truth. It is hard for our kids, this doesn’t make sense to some of our minds, but it is hard for our kids to know what truth is because truth in the world's mind doesn’t even exist.  It is only this idea of what is true for me is true for me and what is true for you is true for you.  Gravity is true for all of us, my friend.  You might not think it is but if you go climb on a building and jump off, you're going to hurt when you hit the bottom. It's true that we have gravity.  But let me give you a clearer example of how destruction of truth breeds conviction.  The Thursday issue of the Courier-Journal looked like this; this is the Health and Fitness Section, and I saw a neat thing on the front that just grabbed my attention that says, "Love Helps; A Close Romantic Relationship Is Beneficial to Your Physical Health." And I started reading this little column:  7 Ways Relationships Can Give You a Longer Life. Well, that's two very important things, relationships and a longer life, and this looked to be talking about marriage so I started reading them. Let me read them to you and you tell me what's wrong with this list?

·                     Happily married couples suffer half the illnesses and spend half as much time in the hospital as a single person.  (Kinda makes you want to get married)

·                     Human touch decreases stress.

·                     Sex with a steady partner a couple of times a week boosts the immune system by releasing lymphocyte white cells which fight infection. (I wonder if God knew that all along, what do you think?) [Laughter]

·                     In good marriages, blood pressure decreases when spouses are together. (Now I probably should have underlined good; That's GOOD marriages blood pressure; I don’t know what that says if your spouse walks in the room and your blood pressure goes up, though) [Laughter] It could be good or bad.

·                     Interpersonal relationships make people less vulnerable to anxiety and depression.

·                     For gay men, being in a stable relationship reduces the risk of exposure to HIV.  (Pastor throws the paper over his shoulder)

Where did that come from?  Where in the world did that come from? We're talking about heterosexual relationships, how good that is for you and just because of the deconstruction of truth, all at once we throw in this nonsensical idea… that's not raving against gays, my friend, that has nothing to do with them.  It has to do with sociological thinking and the deconstruction of truth.  It didn't fit in that category.  Any, excuse my language, idiot, knows that 2 men who stick together have a less chance of getting HIV than a man who is promiscuous with other men. That's a practical fact, that's not a relational fact!   So your kids have trouble knowing what's true.  That's a little bitty example of how confused their minds are.

Now I need to do an illustration and I need some help.  Now, you guys are young and I expect you to move fast when I make this request, all right?  I want all the 14-year-old young men in this church to come join me on the platform.  Come on!  I really mean that.  I'm not giving away anything free, so don't expect anything.  [Laughter]  Come on 14-year-olds, just join me right up here.  There we go!  Now, this pit we're going to turn into a wrestling pit!  [Laughter] and the first one of you that can take me down, you get to preach the sermon!  [Laughter]

Now I want you to take a look at this bunch of fine-looking young boys.   Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were that age when they were taken 900 miles from home, thrown into a pagan godless or many-god culture, away from their parents, away from their preacher, away from their schools and they were taught the literature, language, religion, you name it, of the pagan Babylonians.  Thank you, men, appreciate your help!  [Applause]

Now, let's walk through a few things from Daniel 1.  We are going to talk about an unchanging God in a changing life.  Daniel lived in a culture that drastically changed, not just around him, but he was moved to a new culture.  The theme of the Book of Daniel is the sovereignty of God over all things.  I don't know what happened to Daniel as a 14-year-old boy who grew up in Jerusalem with his three buddies, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, but he was a unique young man.  He grew up in a land of half-hearted faith in an Almighty God.  He grew up in land of hypocrites, liars, immoral religious people, lying priests and just a handful of truth-telling prophets.  I have to wonder if Daniel didn't happen to hear Jeremiah preach because they were a bit of contemporaries, Jeremiah just ahead of him a little bit, and he for one believed Jeremiah.  He took in what Jeremiah was saying about the coming judgment and everybody else was wanting to slap Jeremiah in prison and spit on the man, and say, "What are you doing? You always prophesy bad things; we don't want to hear you talk.  Tell us something good." But, Daniel, evidently either believed him or had some great, great parents.

What we learn from Daniel is that he lived in God's light, the light of God being over all his circumstances and he saw that God's light pierced through the darkness of an unwanted move, an unwanted school, and unwanted friends.  Now this wasn't because his parents moved.  This was because some pagan king came over his land and took over, but if you will notice in the first verses of Daniel, it says, in verse 1, it says,

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem, and besieged it. 

So right now it looks like this is a battle between men.  It's never just a battle between men.  There is this intertwining, this seamlessly woven thing between the works of God and works of man; that we can never understand life if we don't see it from the perspective of God.  Verse 2 tells us the secret:

          " And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God."

It was God that let Nebuchadnezzar take over.  It was God that let Nebuchadnezzar's evil men penetrate the House of Worship, take some of the golden vessels that belonged only in the place of Jehovah's worship and put them in the house of his pagan god.  Daniel called it the land of Shinar.  That was a sarcastic, not sarcastic, that was a divine pun, an archaism calling Babylon what she used to be, so Daniel is telling his audience, "I went to a place that was fully and wholly anti god."  It was a place where evil was at home and that's where God took me.  It was only an answer in response to what God has said he was going to do to his people.  Daniel just didn't know it was going to happen to him personally.  He faced severe challenges, both spiritually and sociologically.  Look what happened to him.  They were selected out of the youths that were without blemish, of the noble family, suitable for learning, and they were taught the literature (in Verse 4) and the language of the Chaldeans.

We find out later through terminology and issues they had to deal with, more than likely they were taught the religion of the Chaldeans also.  Everything Daniel knew about God was gone.  Their names were even changed; you saw that down there in about verse 7 I think.  Daniel's name was changed to Belteshazzar.  That one word was a prayer to one of their pagan gods; it said "Protect his life."  He was named after a pagan god and a prayer to him to ask this nonexistent pagan god to protect his life, that was the Babylonian name he was given.   Hananiah was called "Shadrach".  That was, command of Aku, the moon god.  And then you get to his buddy, Misheal was called  "Meshach."  It is a strange name; it meant "Who is what Aku is," and I think that was a play off his Hebrew name that I think is "Who is what God is."  Their names are given to praise these pagan gods.  It's a radical change.  Abednego was given to the second highest god in the pantheon of Babylonian gods, Nebo. 

Do you think it was disruptive to their little 14-year-old systems?  I think it had to be.  One of the things that went through my mind is, I wonder if I have parented Anthony as a young Christian boy so well that he could have survived this kind of thing?  Well that question needs to be asked by all of us because this is the world they are growing up in, no sense of truth, no sense of God, technology that moves so fast their minds can't settle and think, and Daniel did something out of the core of his being there is one little word, look at verse 8:

          "But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's food."

That's a bit of an odd word, that word resolve.  I don't know if it is in italics, it is not even in italics in your Bible, I don't think, but it's one word that represents four little Hebrew words.  It's a phrase we can't translate, and it deals with this kind of attitude.  It deals with the idea of being set on something; of keeping something safe, in a safe state.  It also has the idea of an extension, of the reaching towards a goal.  So you've got a state that you want to keep as well as reach a goal with it.  Then it has the word heart in it; the source of our inner life, so this thing you want to keep is deep within your life and it is in reference to a definite person.  This is Daniel making a resolute decision that he would not defile himself with the king's food.  What Daniel just didn't like it? No, this is not a picky teenage eater.  He knew that the wine that came and the meat that came, one of two things was the problem.  One was the meat may have been improper for a Jewish boy to eat; it could have been horse meat, it could have been pork, OR, and more likely, it was used in some kind of pagan ceremonial use prior to him eating it and he was not about to identify in any way with the religion he was learning.  He said, "No."

You and I, adults and teenagers alike are going to have to learn to have resolve, but we're going to have to learn to have resolve like Daniel did.  Read further at what he did.  We jump into the middle of verse 8; he had made his resolve, and it says:

[8] But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the the king's food or with the wine that he drank: therefore he asked of the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself.

That was a step of faith.  Sometimes today we Christians without faith begin to demand our rights.  We go to the Courthouse or the Senator's office and we begin to stomp around because somebody has offended our Christian rights.  You need to understand something.  You're Christian rights only exist under the sovereignty of God.  No government is here to protect your Christian rights because no government can save you.  Now, don't get me wrong about ours.  We ought to count our blessings every single day that God has allowed us to live in this country.  We have the best place in the world to live because we still have the greatest Christian freedom of anybody in the world.  By the way, which puts a huge responsibility on our shoulders of taking this free faith that we have and taking it to more difficult places, like modern day Babylon, Iraq.  Wow!  I'd like to be a missionary there!

But look how Daniel did it. He didn't stomp his foot and gripe and cry.  He did learn, however, the second thing we look at today, not only do we need to learn to depend on this sovereign unchanging God in a changing life, we need to realize that believing in him brings battles.  Daniel did not stomp his feet and demand something.  The first thing he did is he asked his superior, the top superior above Daniel, and the Bible says God gave Daniel favor and compassion in his sight.  Daniel was dependent upon God, and this man was too fearful to grant it, and without subverting him, Daniel went to the one immediately in supervision over him and asked him and came up with this creative idea, just give us a 10-day test.  I'm not going to step outside of your authority, I want you to make the decision, but you please make it, give us this chance please.  That was gutsy!  But it brought new battles.  Let's look at the battles it brings.

Believing brings battles:

·                     For Daniel and his buddies it brought the battle of pride. 

You see, they were gifted young people.  They were gifted before they came.  Their intelligence, capability and looks stood out so much that this guy could just walk into Jerusalem, pick them out and put them in the school.  Now, when you battle with pride, you battle with the issue that what you have, you forget that God gave it to you in the first place and that leads to arrogance.  All that we have is given to us by God and believing puts us down in the proper sense so God can be raised up because the bigger God is, the smaller everything else is, but the smaller God is, the bigger ourselves and everything around us grows.

·                     And, for kids like Daniel there was the battle with praise.

Now hear me closely on this.  Daniel was more than likely rather handsome; at least there was something attractive about his appearance because it says he was without blemish.  That means he didn't have acne!  I don’t know if it meant that or not.  He was a good looking kid and he was talented, and he had a high socioeconomic standing because he was of the noble and royal family and he had to deal with praise.  Have you ever noticed how many of our best children suffer the most because they can't deal with pride or praise?  We exalt them because of how they look or how they can perform and we teach them by that, that they must have people's approval to find out that they are worth anything, so they then move on through their lives judging their value  by how people like the way they look or like the way they perform, and I know no quicker path to failure.

Daniel somehow got around the battle with pride, he humbled himself before God and he humbled himself before his supervisors.  He got around the battle of the praise of other people, growing up in Jerusalem, and even here when he was granted favor, when he was asked and given praise for how he could interpret dreams, he said, "No man can interpret dreams; only God alone can do that."

·                     Then he had to battle with the battle of plenty.

If they would have had iPhones in that day, Daniel would have had one.  Why? Because now he was a king's subject.  They were given the king's wine and the king's food.  He is 900 miles from home.  Who back home is going to know if I follow the dietary laws or not? Who could care less if that's been sacrificed to an idol demon or whatever? He said, you know, I'm here, I'm captive, I deserve this.  This will be good, I can be satisfied in that.  But his belief said, "No God is my satisfaction, God is the one who gives me grace.  I don't deserve that, it's a free gift, so I'm going to beat the battle of plenty.

We do live in the day when our happiness is directly related to what we have and you take it away, our happiness goes, but God can't be taken away.

·                     There's the battle of compromise.

Compromise would have been easy, wouldn't it?  Can you imagine how different they looked than all the other captive youths when 4 of them said, "No, give me vegetables."  By the way, vegetable means "that which grows from seed." So it was vegetables, grains and fruit.  But, can you imagine when they all sat down at the same table, and you got a big T-bone, glass of wine, and over here on Daniel's plate you've got a carrot and water.  Do you think the other guys looked at him?

Do you like being looked at because you're different?

Daniel knew he lived in the light of God and the only eyes he cared about pleasing were the eyes of God, and he lived, though in captivity, in great freedom.  He was not held captive by the thoughts of other people.

·                     And I think one other appropriate battle he had to fight and win as a teenager was the battle with sarcasm.

Where was he?  He was captive.  He wasn't where he wanted to be.  He should have smarted off to all the students in his class, he should have smarted off to his teacher, he had every reason in the world to be sarcastic.  He was under Jehovah God, the God of all Gods.  These stupid pagans.  These foolish cultural practices they have.  But we find Daniel to be very mannerly because he was under God and secure.

Teenagers, students, I simply want to say this to you: If the Lord Jesus Christ is not the largest thing in your life, things will grow out of proportion and you will begin to love or lust for that which cannot satisfy the need of your heart.  And the further you get from having taste buds for God, the more you will gorge yourself on the white bread of the world and the less satisfaction you will have and the more you will seek it.  We talked about repentance last week.  Repentance is a sweet word.  That's when you turn away from those false things that say they can satisfy and they can't, and you turn away to a God who became man and died for your sins and rose from the dead to prove he could do it and says "I love you with an everlasting love."  And you can be a Daniel.  We'll talk about that in our closing minutes in just a bit.

But, we're not just talking about teenagers, we're talking about parents.  Because the more I work through this, the more insights begin to pop to the top for me as a parent.  Let's talk about a few. 

You saw the boys up here; 14.  You know by the time a child is 14, you've given them about everything you can give them, it's just repeating what you've already taught them by that age.  Many things have been formulated in their minds and hearts. But what about us parents?  What came out to me, and these are not directly, I can't point to verses, but I can point to context and show you where these insights came from.

    1. The first thing that came to mind after weighing out and looking and walking through this chapter of Daniel is, as we bring this issue of Daniel over into our day, I think one of the struggles Christian parents have is fearing the worlds corruption more than we fear God.  How would we get that?  Daniel was transported 900 miles from home.  Everything he knew about God was gone; the Torah, his parents, the Temple, the    prophets, and he was plopped down right here in the middle of a foreign pagan culture, and his soul thrived.  His faith in God bloomed and blossomed because the biggest thing in his mind was God.  We continue   the process of jerking our children out of the world because we're afraid of the world's corruption or we parent in a way that all we give them is warnings about what you shouldn't do, what you shouldn't do, what you shouldn't do, and all these evil influences of the world.  We're going to confuse their minds about God.  They're going to begin thinking, "Oh, poor God."  He can't do anything.  They're going to think there must be more value in the world than there is in God.  So, it's not that we need to keep them from things, it's that we need to give them something, it's Someone, it's the Lord Jesus Christ by our lips and our lives.  If they see   us fearful, they need to see us fearing God in the right way, finding that we see all of life under the eye of God, so that we can stand before the eyes of men.

2. It appears to me that Daniel was far safer in Babylon than his hypocritical home.  Jerusalem was about to be wiped out, destroyed by the judging hand of God.  He had warned them and warned them and warned them.  These are the people who had all of the oracles, the Words of God.  They knew how to obey and they kept playing, as the Bible would say, "the whore."  Finding their hearts satisfied on other things.  God was going to destroy it.  He was already on his way, so I thought about that, and I thought about our teenagers who are growing up in homes with parents who are half-hearted Christians, whose lifestyle is something on Sunday that it's not any other time of the week, and if you want to confuse your children that's the fastest way to confuse them.  Don't be a hypocrite; live what you tell them.  They will do what you do, not what you say.  A hypocritical Christian home is probably the most dangerous place for a Christian kid to grow up.
3. This one may be a little more encouraging:  God can do for our children what we cannot do.  Daniel was away from home.  By the way, you do realize that this trip was probably at least a 3-month trip to go 900 miles.  There were no cell phones, no telegraphs, no telephones, no airplanes, no cars, barely even roads, so the thought of Daniel even seeing home again, it was history the minute the caravan rolled out of Jerusalem.  So what did his parents do?  Somebody in his life was godly.  Somebody poured into this kid's heart to shape it and form it, so at 14, he would have the guts to look at the king's chief of the eunuchs and say, "I don't want to eat that food, would you please give me another diet?"   God can do for our children what we cannot do.  In Verse 9, we see that God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs. Can you give your children passion in the face of anyone?  Not from their heart, you might bribe them, but that would never pay off.  Not only that, but, as for these four youths (in verse 17) God gave them learning and skill in all literature and wisdom.  Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams.  That was a gift of God.  I cannot give my children that, but I sure can ask my heavenly Father to give them his gifts.  I know one thing I certainly can't do.  I couldn't protect any of my children from a burning fiery furnace, but God can.  I can't protect any of my children from the mouths of raging and roaring lions, but God did Daniel.  So, where is our faith?  Let's give them God and turn them loose and believe that God is big enough to shape, transform and change their hearts, but you have to give them God in your actions, not simply in your words, and we close.

We need to live under God's eyes because God is God, He is sovereign, so that we can then live before man's eyes. This is a great thing about Daniel.  Daniel was so captivated by God, he was set free to live for God anywhere in the world, before anybody.  He went to a pagan school and learned their literature and their language and their religious lore.  His heart was untainted by that.  God's Spirit was strong with Daniel.  We learn from this that constants in God's presence equals confidences in man's presence. Daniel was unafraid or unashamed to stand before the king.  He wanted to please God, he was disinterested in pleasing people and therefore, he had a confidence nobody else had.  If you'll read through his book, you'll find that confidence became very visible. 

There is a sidelight in the book; it's actually not a sidelight, it is the reason for all the Book of Daniel.  As God's people, we must never forget God's warnings and judgment.   Now, talk about an age of truth, that is just thrown as far away from us as we can, but the whole reason Daniel was in Babylon was because of the sins of God's people.  He warned them and he warned them and he warned them and they wouldn't change their ways, and God warns us and warns us and warns us, and we continue on the same path and one day He's going say, "That's it, I'm done with you."

Third, you in essence, every one of you in this room, teenager or senior adult are a Daniel.  What will your story be?  There was nothing unique about Daniel in actuality.  But Daniel served a unique God.  It's a funny thing about the way Daniel wrote his book. When he referred to Jehovah God, he most of the time referred to him as The God; he put the definite article in front of it so we would know that he was referring to a God that was above all other gods.  Is that what God is to you?  Is He above all other things?  Is He the satisfier of your soul?  Because if he's not, then other things can creep in.  Now, don't get me wrong, God uses things and relationships in this world to bring measures of satisfaction to us, as long as they play second fiddle to Him.  But somebody, God himself, decided that the story of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego needed to be told.  He may not write about your story, but He has intended that you tell one and that you chiefly tell it to your children so they can tell it to their children and they can tell it to their children.  Daniel, because of his resolution, developed two strong streams of influence.  First was to the captive people of God.  They were there; they needed someone to show them that Jehovah was still in control and he gave them Daniel to look to as an avenue to look to God.  The second influence for God's people was for us!  In our day, this book is written so we can look at that and say, "I can live as a Holy Spirit-filled, polite, resolving Christian to the honor of God today!"  The second major influence was to the world.  By Daniel's chosen lifestyle before God, he influenced four pagan kings for the glory of God! 

Who's writing your story and what will it be?  Let's pray together.