Resolve_Renewed

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Dan Devries; Daniel 1 Resolve_Renewed

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You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. Good morning, everyone.
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It's nice to see you all. I'm Dan DeVries. I'm not Don Filsick's lead pastor, but at this point
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Don always says there's donuts in the back, but what he doesn't usually say is please leave some for the elders.
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So there's donuts in the back here. Restrooms are in the back through those doors.
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Just really feel free all through our morning if you need to get up for any reason. Just please feel free to do that.
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So hey, just real excited to be here talking with you all this morning, and I just want to welcome any of you who are visiting.
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It takes guts to come to a new church for the first time. So if that's you this morning, well done.
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I hope you have a great morning with us. I hope that you meet some folks and just have a good time.
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Now if you've been here, you know that we've been studying through the book of Romans.
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Romans is found in the New Testament. So I thought what we would do today and next week is make a little shift and spend some time in the
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Old Testament. So what I would like to do is introduce for you this morning the book of Daniel, and we're going to spend today and next
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Sunday looking through some of the first couple parts of the book of Daniel.
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So it's always important when you start a new book to just kind of understand some of the basics of what we're going to be talking about.
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So let me just give you a little bit of background. Some of you will know this already. First of all, who do you suppose authored the book of Daniel?
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Daniel. All right, so this is an easy one. So well done. Yes, Daniel authored the book of Daniel. Does anybody know roughly what time, how many years
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BC this book was written? This is where it gets tougher, right? So let me just give you a little context on how this book fits in with Old Testament history.
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So if you can think back to where, let's just say Jesus was born right here at zero, okay? If you go back 2 ,000 years roughly, give or take 100 years, right?
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This is the period of Abraham and the patriarchs, all right? About 2 ,000 years before Christ.
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You slide down to about 1 ,500 years BC, give or take 100 years, you have the whole
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Moses and the Exodus idea, right? Not idea, history. This is biblical history.
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You come on over to about 1 ,000 years before the time of Christ. This is what we refer to as the nation of Israel is united under the leadership of King David, right?
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So that's roughly about 1 ,000 BC. Daniel is right here at about 500
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BC, okay? And what's happened from 1 ,000 to 500 and really almost through all of Israel's history is just a series of unfaithful choices that finally culminate in about year 500.
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Well, first it was 700 for the nation of Israel and then Judah in around 500 goes into captivity, right?
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Daniel is written right here at the beginning of this period of captivity, so there's some high drama going on in the text here.
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Does that help? Does that make sense? That's context in terms of history, in terms of where this book fits in and how it fits in.
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Now the book itself is broken up into two parts. Chapter one through six is historical, right?
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So meaning we're just going to learn about what happened during this time. Chapter seven through 12 is called apocalyptic literature.
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Do you know what that means? That means Pastor Don will teach that part, okay? That's what that means.
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This is tough, Owen, but yeah, we can do it together, but it's apocalyptic literature. We won't get to that section of the book in our time here together.
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Now the theme of the book is the sovereignty of God, okay?
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And we're going to touch on that pretty heavily in our time this morning. The sovereignty of God.
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Is God in control? What is he doing? Do I trust him?
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How is he at work in the lives and in the worlds of nations, and how is he at work in my own life?
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All right, so with that going on, let's read chapter one, and then we're going to worship together. You ready to jump in? By the way,
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I didn't grab a page number out of the Bibles that are in front of you. If you don't have a Bible with you, you can pull one out.
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What do you got, Rach? 429 for the Bibles in the pew in front of you.
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If you'd like to follow along, if you have a device or whatever, your old Bible, please let's go for it. And what
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I'd like to do is read Daniel chapter one. You ready to go? All right, here we go. In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it.
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And the Lord gave... And I want you to... There's three phrases I'm going to have you repeat out loud with me because it points to the theme of this book, which is the sovereignty of God, and here's the first one.
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So on three, would you please say, and the Lord gave, one, two, three. And the Lord gave.
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That's the first. What I want you to see is how God is working all of this through.
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This is not primarily a book about Daniel. This is a book about what God is doing, okay?
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And the Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand and some of the vessels of the house of God.
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And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his God, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his God. And then the king commanded
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Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility, 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 them the literature and language of the
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Chaldeans. The king assigned them a daily portion of the food that the king ate and the wine that he drank.
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They were to be educated, these boys were, for three years. And at the end of that time, they were to stand before the king.
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Among these were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah of the tribe of Judah.
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And the chief of the eunuchs gave them names. Daniel, he called Belteshazzar.
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Hananiah, he called, and you recognize these names, some of you might, Shadrach. Mishael, he called Meshach. And Azariah, he called
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Abednego. But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's food or with the wine that he drank.
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Therefore, he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself. And God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs.
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There's number two. Did you see it? Let's say it, verse eight, first couple of verses. And God gave Daniel on three.
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One, two, three. God gave Daniel. God gave
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Daniel. It wasn't all about Daniel. Okay, this is what God did. He gave him favor and compassion in the sight of the eunuchs.
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And the chief of the eunuchs said to Daniel, I fear that the Lord, my king, who has signed your food and drink, for why should he see that you were in a worse condition than the youths who are of your own age?
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So you would endanger my head with the king. And then Daniel said to the steward whom the chief of the eunuchs had assigned over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, test your servants for 10 days.
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Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. 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.
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So he listened to them in this matter and tested them for 10 days. At the end of the 10 days, it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh.
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This is why I don't eat vegetables. You guys are McDonald's lovers or meat lovers.
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Here's a great verse to pull out of context to build your case. In this case, the vegetables made them fatter.
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So just saying. Made them fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king's food.
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So the steward took away their food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables. Pretty cool.
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As for these four youths, God gave them, and there's number three. So on three, would you please say
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God gave them? One, two, three. This is the third time in chapter one, we have seen that it is
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God who is behind it all. The sovereignty of God in absolute control over nations, over groups like these four, and over Daniel individually.
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And I would suggest the same applies for you and me. And Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams.
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And at the end of the time when the king had commanded that they should be brought in, the chief of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar and the king spoke with them.
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And among all of them, none was found like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Therefore, they stood before the king and in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them 10 times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom.
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And Daniel was there until the first year of King Cyrus. Let's pray. Father, we just want to begin our morning by thanking you.
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Thank you that we have your word. It teaches us, it speaks to our hearts. And God, as we dig into this first chapter later this morning,
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God, we just pray that your spirit would speak to our hearts through your word, which is living and active, and that we would apply the truths that are given here to our own lives.
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God, help us to come to you with a submission that recognizes your sovereignty in our lives.
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Whatever is going on right now, this morning, the good and the bad, the stuff that breaks our hearts, whatever it might be, the joy that we feel because we see your hand in our lives,
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God, we're all over the spectrum in this room. And so, God, no matter where we are,
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I pray that today, starting right now in worship, we would bring our hearts to you, the sovereign king over all the world and over our lives, that we would worship you, and that you would make us ready to hear what your word has to teach us today.
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It's a tall order, but it's not too tall for the sovereign king of the world. So we trust you in it. And we pray this in Jesus' name.
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Everybody said? Dave, thank you so much. What a great setup for our discussion.
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I really want to encourage you to keep your Bibles open to Daniel chapter one. I'm not going to be rereading a whole lot of that chapter that we just read earlier, but we're going to refer to it a lot.
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So I hope that you will just kind of keep that nearby. There's four paragraphs here, and I'm just going to put a quick slide up on the side that gives you just a quick outline of this chapter, at least the way we're going to put it together.
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And I want to start just with these first couple of verses and describe really the sad situation that the nation finds itself in.
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So if you'll notice as you review yourselves right now in verses one and two, you're going to see a lot of things going on right from the outset.
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There's an epic battle. I doesn't really describe it in those terms, but that's exactly what's happening.
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There's a battle between the nation of Judah and its king versus the nation of Babylon and its evil king,
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Nebuchadnezzar. We'll talk about him a little bit more. Nebuchadnezzar, by the way, is going to be at the center of a lot of drama in this book.
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And next week in particular, we're going to zero in on him a little bit more because there's a lot to learn from this character.
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But if you had to pick this nation over here with the
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God of the universe behind it versus this nation over here with King Nebuchadnezzar in term of an epic battle,
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I mean, who would you pick, right? I mean, you would think that it's a no -brainer. But if you pick
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Judah and the sovereign God, your bracket just got busted. You know what
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I'm saying? March Madness? That's a one versus a 16, right? I think we think with God on our side, how could things go wrong?
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But three of the most disturbing words right in here in chapter 1 verse 2 says, and the
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Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into the hand of King Nebuchadnezzar.
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The Lord gave him. The Lord just defeated, allowed defeat to come to his own people.
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Why? And as you're reading it, of course, I'm hoping that you're going, huh?
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And what do we do with this in terms of our own theology? How does it make you feel, right, that God just gave his people into the hands of another nation?
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Why would he do that? Why would he do that? How do I square up my understanding of the sovereignty of God with the fact that these sorts of things happen in Scripture, and it's happened right here in this verse?
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Doesn't he love his own people? Doesn't he take care of the people that he has set apart for himself?
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How do I explain this, right? I'm just going to suggest that whenever we come to some of these greater truths in the
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Scripture, and this is one of them, right, the sovereignty of God smacks right in the face of what we think logically should happen.
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I just want to suggest three quick things. Whenever you hit these big lessons of Scripture as you study on your own, one, tackle it with humility, okay?
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There's no quick, flippant, easy answers to trying to figure out the sovereignty of God, but I do believe
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God wants us to study it. So whenever you face some of these bigger issues in Scripture and how we're to wrap our brains around it, tackle it with humility.
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Don't just give it an easy answer, okay? And shame on me if this morning you walk out and somehow hear me saying, oh, you know,
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I'm sorry you're going through rough times, but the sovereignty of God, he's got it, see you later, good luck, right? We wouldn't do that to our best friend,
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I hope, and certainly don't do it to yourself with Scripture.
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So tackle these bigger issues with some humility. Second, always, always, always study context, okay?
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And so I want to talk a little bit about the context of what happened here. How did it come to this point?
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I'll just talk a little bit about it. And then thirdly, when you latch onto a lesson of Scripture, latch onto it, okay?
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So in this particular situation, I'm going to suggest to you that God is absolutely sovereign over nations.
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We just saw it in verse 2, all right? God gave this nation into the hand of Babylon.
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Now, if you think that this is like a just sort of God decided one day, study context.
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And let's just look real quickly, I'm just going to not have you turn anywhere, but there's a few things that have happened in Scripture prior to this that I think are interesting.
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One, years and years and years before, right? God sent
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Amos, a prophet, and Amos said, people, you're in trouble, right?
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You've disobeyed God. God's not happy. He sent me to get you back on track.
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Would you please, and this is from Amos, it says, seek me that you may live. And the people said, ain't going to happen,
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Amos. And off he went. And God sent Micah. And Micah said to the nation, hey, trouble is coming.
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You have neglected God. He specifically says, if you don't seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your
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God, you're in big trouble. And they said, Micah, maybe, but you can't make me.
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And so, goodbye, Micah. And then God sends Hosea, right, to the nation of Israel and to the nation of Judah.
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All of these prophets are going one summer to the other. Hosea says, trouble is coming.
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I'm warning you, you're not following your first love. It's a lot like marriage.
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God says, I'm the husband, you're the bride, and you're being unfaithful. And you're sleeping around town with other men.
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And this is the picture in the book of Hosea. God's a jealous husband going, please come back to me.
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And the people said, no way, Hosea. Right? Sorry.
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This is a little intense to start out, right? So, no way, Hosea. Not going to do it.
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Not going to listen. I'm going to flit about town and do what I want with whom
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I want. And God sends Jeremiah. And God sends
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Joel. And God sends all of these people, person after person, cautioning the people to come back to him, right?
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And they won't have it. So, unless you understand that context, this verse about how
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God just gave his people into the hands of the enemy is very disturbing. But when you understand the context, now you start to see a little more about God's heart, right?
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He's not unlike a loving parent who starts counting. You've done that, parents?
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I have, right? I've seen some of y 'all do it in the back of church. One, right?
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Two, you better get over here. I'm not kidding. Three, right? This is, we do this. Why? Well, because we love our kids.
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And we love our kids and we want them to get in line. But God just doesn't go, you know, one, two, three, time out, because that's about the extent of my patience sometimes with my kids.
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But no, God is long -suffering. He does his counting in terms of prophets and periods of time.
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One, there's Amos. Two, here comes Joel, right? Three, here comes
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Jeremiah. And person after person, God is sending, please. He is saying, please come back to me.
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Return to me. Do you remember what it was like when we were sinking as a nation?
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Then other nations feared you. And my name was being made great across the world.
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And people were coming and wanting to be a part of the action, right? Do you remember those days? And people said, yeah, but I don't care.
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I want to do what I want to do. And this is what's happening.
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And this is why in this point of history, in these first two verses, this is where we've gotten.
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What's the lesson? What's the point? God is absolutely sovereign over nations.
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Look at Psalm 2, okay? Look at our world today. Why do all these nations, right, plot and vein and all this stuff in Psalm 2?
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It's worth checking out on your own time. But God says, I don't know why they're like all, you know, frantic -y, because I got this.
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God is absolutely in control. He is sovereign over nations. And so when you remember what he's done here in these first two verses of this passage,
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I hope it gives you a context that even though God did this, he is loving. He's loving like a loving parent longing to see his kids, right?
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Come back to him. He is sovereign over nations. He's going to do whatever he has to do to get his people to understand that life with him is the only life that works.
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Second section of this chapter, we see this amazing setup by the king, right?
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So in verse three through seven, we're introduced to the other key characters here in this book.
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Daniel is introduced and his three buddies, and we all know him. If you have a church background, if you don't,
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I'm really happy and excited to introduce you to these three guys. We'll study them next week too. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, right?
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Remember those guys? There's going to be an awesome encounter between them and King Nebuchadnezzar next week, right?
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So this is going to be fun. And if you want to read ahead, please do. Chapter two and three are really worth the price of admission, you might say.
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But for right here, I want you to notice the setup, okay? Look at what the king is doing.
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Do you remember what I read earlier about how he's taken some of the nobility, some of the best of the best of the people of Judah, right?
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These are boys who were direct descendants of royalty, probably Hezekiah's relation all the way back to King David, right?
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These are the best of the best of the people. And he's taking them for three years, and he's feeding them his food.
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Do you remember what I read? And they changed their names from having a God ending to their name, as you know, all of them, notice, ended in EL, right?
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That's a reference to their connection to God, Israel's God, Judah's God. Gave them other crazy names connected to the gods of Babylon, right?
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And you say, well, isn't it nice of King Nebuchadnezzar? He didn't just come in and destroy and kill everybody.
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Well, how nice of him. He just took them all along over to his nation, and he put together a plan to just simply assimilate them into the lives of the
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Babylonians. I want to suggest to you, there's nothing more insidious than that. What is he really doing here?
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He is stripping the best people from their belief in God, trying to say, look, my
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God's more powerful, and seduce them by giving them the best of what's in front of them, right?
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Here's the best food I have. Here's the best teachers. You're going to school for three years.
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You're going to learn our ways, and I'm going to give you a job. I'm not like those nasty other kings out there who just kill people.
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And I'm going to suggest to you that's insidious, because what is going on here? This king is trying to destroy the nation by causing it to crumble from the inside out, right?
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Take away their belief in God, take away everything that they stand for, and come and do it my way.
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This is an assimilation plan, and it's evil. I want to just suggest to you quickly the lesson from this section right here is that Satan has assimilation plan for us.
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He does. He would love very much to see you leave behind, if you're in the position of having made a decision for Christ, and you're one of God's kids, he would love for you to leave behind the choices that you've made and start to do things his way.
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And if you're exploring who Jesus Christ is, and you don't have that relationship yet, he would be very happy to have you just stay in that position.
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Satan has an assimilation plan, and it's evil. I probably saw this best played out when
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I was a resident director on a college campus. I used to work on a college campus as a resident director, as I just mentioned, and it was a
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Christian college campus. And it's a lot like what happened right here, right? Three years of learning, people, you know,
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Daniel and his buddies, forcibly in this case, not so much in college choices, right, but were forcibly removed and put into this system.
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We have a choice to go to college, and I saw tons of Christian kids come to college for three years away from family, away from home, and watch the choices that they made when they came out from the protection of their family and wound up in another nation, and the choices that they made.
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It was fascinating. Some of those of you who may have worked with students in the past, you might have seen this play out too. So on this
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Christian college campus, I'll just summarize it with this one. It's not, these are not laughing matters at all, but sometimes you just go, it's amazing.
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Maybe it could be me too. But I remember going into a room late one night, seeing a kid passed out on the floor drunk behind his toilet.
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Don't know how exactly he, by the way, there's no drinking policies and all this stuff, right? Just passed out cold on the floor of his bathroom, and I just thought, buddy.
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And my heart just, oh my goodness, what are you doing? What's going on here, right?
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And how, you know, because I've heard it all as a resident director. You walk into a room, and it smells like pot, and they're not supposed to, first of all, it's illegal, and second of all, they're against the school rules and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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And it's like, what? There's no pot in here, dude. No, I don't know. I probably, you know, somebody else was smoking pot, and it made my clothes stink like it, but no,
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I'm not, you know, right? So, right? And then other kids, clearly have just come back from the bar, and, but I wasn't drinking.
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The person next to me spilled beer on me, right? I mean, I've, you know what I'm talking about? I've heard it all.
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I've heard it all. Nobody's guilty, ever, but every one of them fell into Satan's assimilation plan.
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It is awfully hard to take a stand for Christ, and go out into the world, where everybody out there, right, is doing it a different way.
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And then on top of it, the temptation, when things don't go my way, to start to question the beliefs that I made back there.
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Does that make sense? And so, the temptation becomes very, very real. Satan has an assimilation plan.
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He wants to take you out of that context, and he wants you involved in his plan.
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Look like everybody else around you. Do the things that everybody else is doing right in front of you, okay?
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This is his plan. Now, the next section of this chapter, verses 8 through 16, we're going to see another conflict.
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Although this one is not played out on a national level, this one now gets played out person to person.
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In 8 through 16, we see Daniel now face this plan of Nebuchadnezzar to destroy his people, and what he does about it.
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And I'm going to suggest he is one of the finest examples of what it means to stand up in the face of opposition, and I just bet you there's some things we can learn from him.
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All right, so we've seen, you know, the sad start in our lesson there. We've seen this sinful setup that Nebuchadnezzar has put in place to destroy the people, and now we're going to see what
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Daniel's resolve has to do with the whole thing, and I'm going to suggest this is the solution for any kind of temptation that comes your way this week.
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There's a three -part solution in this next paragraph that helps us know what to do when we become aware that Satan is trying to assimilate us towards his side of the equation.
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Does that make sense? All right, so here's the three things. First, and I'm going to suggest these are,
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I love these three words, the next three words in verse 8. It says, but Daniel resolved.
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Okay, Nebuchadnezzar set up the plan, but Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's food or drink the wine that he drank.
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Therefore, he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself, and God gave
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Daniel favor. Okay, a couple things about verses 8 and 9. Daniel resolved. This is a cool word.
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I'm not a scholar by any stretch, but this word resolve in Hebrew indicates a heart choice, not a quick decision.
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Okay, there's a resolution that he made. Other translations do it just a little bit differently, but it's like he set his mind to it, but not just the mind, the mind connected to the heart.
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Okay, he determined in his heart, other translations would say. Right, he made a decision deep down in the gut of who he was that he is not going to buy into the assimilation plan.
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Right, I'm not going to buy into the lies. I'm not going to compromise. Right, he made a resolution, and that is step one to any temptation we face.
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Resolve in your heart ahead of time not to defile yourself. You're going, how did that happen for Daniel?
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Well, the temptation to defile himself came in the form of food and drink, and the problem with this is you might know that God's people had been given some pretty specific commands in the
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Old Testament about what they could eat and drink. Right, and one of the key things was do not, you know, do not eat anything or drink anything that's been sacrificed to idols, and most commentators think that's exactly what all this food is.
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It's stuff that has been dedicated to their gods, and now they're going to give it to these guys, and they're going no way.
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Doesn't seem like a big deal, but they thought it was a big deal. Satan's trying to serve up little delicacies that don't look like much, but they interpreted it to be an assault on their character.
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Right, and so often if we don't have resolve to live our life
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God's way, Satan can serve up little compromises that don't look like much, but they're a big deal.
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They're little delicacies. I think this is fascinating. Just a couple little verses you might want to jot down to look up later.
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Psalm 141 .4 says this, Do not let my heart incline to any evil, to busy myself with wicked deeds, in company with men who work iniquity, and let me not eat of their delicacies.
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Isn't that interesting? Proverbs 23 .3, when you sit down to eat with the ruler, observe carefully what is before you.
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Now listen, Daniel knew these verses. He's after Solomon, and probably the writing in a lot of these
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Proverbs. Okay, he's after the Psalms. He probably knew these
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Psalms, and he saw his situation with this food that was being put in front of him, and his thought probably went back to scriptures like these, where God said,
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Remember, this is not a little thing that you're being tempted to do. All right, so Proverbs 23 .3,
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when you sit down to eat with a ruler, observe carefully what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite.
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Do not desire the delicacies, for they are deceptive food. Isn't that fascinating?
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This is a big deal, and Daniel knew it, because it starts with food, and then it's the next thing, and you and I know that when we give in to sin the first time, it's easier to do it the next time, and then after the next time, to make another compromise, and pretty soon, we have just veered off pretty far from the track of where God wants us to be, right?
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But Daniel resolved this was not going to happen. I'm going to take some liberties here, but I think this is maybe what happened.
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I don't know, but I can just imagine Daniel and his buddies on the road from their hometown.
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They just got defeated, and they're being carted off to Babylon. Can you imagine the conversations they must have had?
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What the heck just happened? Can you believe we lost the battle? And then they would probably remember that Hezekiah just, you know,
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Isaiah spoke to Hezekiah just not that much, literally years ago, and said it was going to happen.
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I think I've got that verse. I wanted to read it to you. Here it is. This is 2 Kings 20. This is just years before, literally years before, not long years, short years.
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Isaiah said to Hezekiah, hear the word of the Lord. This is the last prophet sent. Behold, the days are coming when all that is in your house and that which your fathers have stored up till this day shall be carried off to Babylon.
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Couldn't be more specific, right? Couldn't have been played out any more perfect to what the prophecy was.
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Nothing shall be left, says the Lord, and some of your own sons who will come from you, whom you will father, shall be taken away and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.
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It was God's final word. And they didn't listen.
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And the prophecy came true. And I can just imagine Daniel and his buddies walking on down to Babylon going, oh my goodness, we're headed to the...
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I mean, we know what's going to happen. We're going to head to the palace of the king of... I wonder if they wonder, are they going to make us eunuchs?
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Right? Oh my goodness. Are they going to make us eunuchs when we get there?
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Because they knew this prophecy. How do you feel walking down the road? Would you be tempted to say,
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God, where are you? But they resolved.
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Somewhere on the road, I believe, from there to here, or even if it was on this spot, whatever the case, they made a decision before the temptations were put in front of them.
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They made a decision. They were not going to defile themselves. They weren't going to do it.
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And there is power in resolve. I want to suggest three things for you when we're fighting temptation, when we're put in a setup that's sinful, when we see ourselves at that point of giving in, first this, have you made resolve?
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Okay, a resolve is a powerful thing. When you decide ahead of time with God's help that I'm not going to do something, or I'm going to do something, whatever the case may be, right?
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Whether it's I'm going to obedient to God's word, or whether it's I'm not going to do something, he says not to do. Trachan, right?
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You can go either way on this. Resolve covers both worlds, okay? But when you make a resolve with God before the darkness comes, before the difficulties hit, before the surprises, you know, find themselves at your doorstep, right?
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When you've made that resolve first, you've heard it said, right? Don't doubt in the light.
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No, don't doubt in the dark what you've known to be true in the light.
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Make sense? Make the decision today to receive. You say, Dad, it's too late.
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I've already screwed up. I'm already neck deep in. Well, is
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God powerful over nations or not? Is God powerful over your life and my life or not?
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And if he is, then resolve today. Renew your resolve today and decide that whatever compromise has been made, you will not continue on that path, that you will get back to where you need to be with him.
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Resolve. And notice this, second part that we can do to help us with temptation.
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I love what Daniel did. Notice the progression in verses eight and nine here. First, it talks about how he made a resolution, and then he immediately comes up with a plan.
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Did you catch the plan? I'm not going to go through it, but we read it. Hey, do this. Test us.
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Test us with vegetables. What did that do for him? Well, I'll tell you what it did for him. Well, first of all, here's the point.
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Take action. Resolve and then take action. What step has to be done to remove temptation from you?
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Because that's a net effect of what happened in this situation. Daniel had resolve, and then he took action.
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He came up with the plan. The plan involved not doing what he knew he shouldn't do, which is eat that food and drink that wine, right?
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Dedicated to other gods and stuff like that. Or maybe it was pork, right? Who knows what it was, but he knew it would have defiled him.
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It was sin for him to do it. I'm not doing it, so I'm going to make a plan. I'm going to do something. I'm going to take action.
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I'm not just going to let it happen to me. He took action. He came up with this plan.
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You know what the net effect of the plan was? It worked. God blessed it. Second, it took the temptation and just put it out of the room.
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Because if every single day the food was right smack dab in front of him,
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I wonder if over time that wouldn't just beat somebody down. And I had resolve here, but oh my goodness, there's the chocolate again.
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No. And then the next day, there it is right in front of me again. And then the next day, and then pretty soon, bam, he grabs the chocolate.
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Have we ever done that? I have, and so have you. But the plan is if we resolve first and then we do something about it, the point is how can
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I tackle the thing that's tempting me and put that thing out of my sight, out of the way, and that is exactly what happened in this story.
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It ends with, okay, you win. You guys are fat or eating vegetables. Off with the good food and off with the wine.
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You'll never see it again. Bingo. Exactly what Daniel wanted. He knew his own flesh.
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He was smart enough to know if I allow them to put that stuff in front of me every single day, God, I don't want to wear down.
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And so he took action and he did something about it. Does that make sense? I love that.
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I love that. This isn't just, oh, give me resolve to just, you know, God handle everything. No, it's,
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God's going, have resolve and then take action to remove temptation from you.
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Are we doing that, friends? Am I? I remember, I remember years ago when I was struggling, years ago,
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I wrote a little, I'm not a poet, okay, but I journaled some once and I remember writing a little poem.
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Sorry, keep it in a room. Just keep it in a room. You can't, right? But I remember writing this. I wrote,
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I wrote, it seems I skirt sin's chasm deep, just wondering if I'll fall.
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The consequences I may reap don't register at all. I was just willing at that point in my life to just walk the edge, just kind of see how close
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I can get to compromise and sin because it's kind of fun, but I don't want to fall.
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But if I do, like if I fall, what does that mean? Who gets hurt?
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How much does God get dishonored, right? And I wasn't thinking square in that season of my life.
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We're all susceptible to that. Daniel knew he was susceptible to that. And that's why
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I think him and his buddies on the road said, you know what, we're going to hold strong.
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Let's do it together. No matter what they throw at us, if they even make us eunuchs, we are not going to stop following the
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God of the nations, right? I love that. So those three things about temptation,
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I haven't told you the third, but remember the first two? Resolve to not sin. Take action to get sin out of the forefront and behind you, right?
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You put up the safeguards on your internet. You take a different way to work if you go past temptation every day.
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You stop talking to that girl who's attractive and it might lead you to a place to dishonor your marriage.
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You see what I'm saying? You take the step to do whatever is necessary to stay pure.
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And you know what else he did? The third thing that helps us fight temptation? He had good friends, didn't he?
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He chose three winners. We're going to talk about him next week. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
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Love these guys. And when you can bind your life close with a few other people who are going to, you're going to then face those trials together.
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And somehow God knows there is incredible strength in that. So it's the power of resolve, the power of taking immediate action, and the power of choosing right friends.
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You say, Dan, I don't need friends. You're wrong. You're wrong.
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You need to be in a group. You need people reflecting the truth back to you.
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You need to share what God's doing in your life. I like what Oswald Chambers says. Here's what he says.
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Beware of isolation. Beware of the idea that you have to develop a holy life alone.
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It is impossible to develop a holy life alone. You will develop into an oddity and a peculiarism.
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I love that. Isn't that crazy? Into something utterly unlike what
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God wants you to be. The only way to develop spiritually is to go into the society of God's own children.
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Scripture always says it better, right? 1 Corinthians 15 .33 says, don't be misled. Bad company corrupts good character.
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And there are so many verses about friends that stick closer than a brother. And remember that your brothers and sisters throughout the world are suffering along with you.
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And there's so much in Scripture that says, go through it with friends. And then finally,
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I just want to wrap up with just a couple of comments on the last little section of the section there. You know, the result of the test that Daniel put in front was
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God blessed it. Sovereignty over nations. But God gave
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Daniel favor. And God gave blessing in this last section, you'll see it in verse 17 or 18 right in there, that God gave these boys favor.
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So you can't get away with that God's just sovereign over nations and doesn't care about me. I'm a little blip on the screen, and God doesn't care.
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He cares. He knew Daniel by name. And he knew those boys. And his sovereignty in this very dark time and very difficult situation revolved right around the choices they were making in that moment.
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And God saw it. And God really cared about it. And God blessed and protected them in that in that hard time, right?
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God's sovereignty applies to you and me, not just to the nations, to the nations, but to you, and to me.
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And so what do you hear him saying to you today, I want to kind of close with you thinking along these lines, okay, the sovereignty of God, because he works this big plan, right?
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And because it impacts me as well. Is it something that you can trust?
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And if his sovereignty has led you to difficult places, what are you doing with that today? And I'm going to suggest that when you resolve and you go through it with some friends, and you make some decisions along the way that it's going to help you.
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But what are you hearing him say to you today? I know it's tough getting old, maybe he's saying.
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And you don't like what's happening with your body and things are wearing down and getting sicker for those of us who are over 50, right?
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But I'm going to be with you. Even though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, right, that Psalm 23 thing,
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God says, I'll be with you. Hey, Mom, I know how hard it is, right, to raise those kids all on your own behind closed doors, and it is so hard, and it can feel like a dark place, but I'm with you.
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Are you hearing that even though there's challenges there, that God's there too? Hey, I know it's tough losing your job.
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I see your tough marriage. I know what's going on.
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You've been brought to some dark places, but take heart, have resolve, trust me.
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I'm walking with you there. I'm not just a God of the nations, but I am. Don't ever forget it, right?
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I am a God, but I'm your God too. You need some friends.
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You need to step out and get in a group. What is God whispering to you today? To those boys who took that stand, it says he blessed them and gave them 10 times better than, you know, the people.
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He just blessed them, and their counsel to the king is going to set up some real drama in the next couple chapters, but those boys,
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God blessed them for making those kind of thoughts. Now, is it because their resolve is so much better than yours?
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If you're going, man, I can't do that. I'm going to suggest it's not about them being great at all.
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They just remember something that maybe over time you and I tend to forget a little bit, and I'm not so sure they didn't have struggles in their own.
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You know they did, but what happens to us when we get in difficult times is we just start allowing these little lies to sneak in.
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A lot of us are going through the church, you know, lies men believe, lies women believe in those studies across our church, and these little lies can get in there, right?
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That tend to cause us to start not trusting just a little bit, and that's
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Satan's way to just a little bit pull you away. I remember once going to the
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Chicago Museum, and I think it's the Chicago Museum, there's this painting called
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Sunday in the Park. Anybody familiar with that one? I looked it up, and I already can't remember who painted it.
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I can't remember, but it's a very famous painting. You can look this up in Wikipedia and blah, blah, blah, and you'll have it all there, but it's an impressionistic painting.
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You know what an impressionistic painting is? It's not like real lines and stuff like I would like.
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It's impressionistic. The whole painting is huge. It's like, you know, 30 feet across and 40 feet down, and the whole thing is made of dots, dots of paint, right?
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And I think I actually, as I was thinking about this, I think it's actually in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
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I'm not recommending the movie, but I want to say it's there, and here's the point. When you walk up this close to that painting, you see the dots, and they make absolutely no sense.
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As you back up, you just go, oh, okay, those dots make up a person.
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I see that, but it's a person out of context, and then you back up.
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Oh, that's a person. I think that's a park, and then you back up, and pretty soon you see the whole thing, and you go, that's unbelievable.
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That is beautiful, and friends, I'm just going to suggest this is so much of what our lives are like.
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We forget the context. We get caught up in our dots, and it doesn't make sense in the context of the bigger picture of what
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God is doing in the nations, and what he's doing to bring glory to his name, and I can't make sense of it, and it's a dark time, and God, where are you?
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And all I see is dots in front of me, and taken out of context, those dots, they don't make sense, and I'm not here suggesting today that I can help you make sense out of the difficulties you're facing.
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All I can tell you is I would encourage you to have resolve that there is a bigger picture going on that the story isn't yet finished, and as you gain perspective over time, the deep dark places that God has led you and will lead you on purpose in the future somehow are going to make sense, and you might not even get an answer in this lifetime, but this is the beauty of knowing who
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Jesus Christ is as your Savior, and that's, you're going to have that context in heaven.
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You'll see it. You'll see it, and I'm just encouraging you, how can
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I step back with God's grace and God's help and rest in his sovereignty that he's putting together something that's going to turn out to be beautiful no matter how difficult it is today?
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Resolve, take action, walk through it with the right people, ask for his perspective, and I hope that just a little bit this week, you'll get some encouragement if you need it, right, along the way.
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We're going to come to communion, and I think it's so beautiful in the context of this passage, because in communion, you know what we see?
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We see the resolve of Jesus who, when everything seemed to be going wrong, said,
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God, not my will be done, but your will be done, and as you think about the sacrifice he made, right, so that we could be with him and that God would have glory, it's just beautiful, and my prayer is that as you take communion today, you will wrestle with him a little bit and ask him to give you the resolve of his son, right, who, when things were so tough in the garden of Gethsemane, when he was tempted to give it in, right, oh,
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Lord, if you can take this cup from me, but not my will, your will be done.
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Let's pray. Oh, Lord, we just thank you for your word.
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We know it's alive, and it speaks to us, and you planned it that way.
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You didn't leave us here alone. You've given us your spirit to walk through life with, and I pray if there's someone here this morning who does not have your spirit,
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God, that they would take whatever challenges, whatever roadblocks are in the way that would prevent them from surrendering their life to you, that you would take away the roadblocks and invite them into your family, not into a life of ease.
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None of us have it. All of us wrestle and struggle.
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Life is not an easy thing, but with you, God, you help give us perspective, strengthen our resolve, even in this time, as we reflect on what you did for us at the cross.
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Thank you for your love, and, God, we worship you, sovereign over nations, and sovereign over our lives.