Daniel 1 • Standing Your Ground

Listen to the audio version of this message with the player below.

Transcript

(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)

Church, I hope you grasp the words and the promises that we just sang:  "How He came to pay our ransom through the saving cross He bore; how He watches o'er His loved ones, those He died to call His own; how for them He's interceding, pleading now before the throne," that even now Jesus' blood pleads on our behalf, because where our sins runs deep, His grace runs deeper still.
And because of that, we can come and surrender and sing, "Spirit, lead me where my trust is without borders, because You are good and You are faithful."
Let's sing that in that promise, in that goodness together.
>>> Please sing with me.
>>> Jesus, we thank You that You are faithful to us.
We pray:  Lead us where our trust is without borders, because our faith is made stronger and our love for You grows when as we build towers of Babel against You, You break them down and enter Your Holy Spirit within us and build Your kingdom within us and advance Yourself through us.
So we praise You.
We pray:  Make our faith stronger.
Lead us by Your Holy Spirit's power and wisdom.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Amen.
>>> You may be seated.
>>> We being today in Daniel chapter 1.
Thanks to the great number of you, double what we expected, who came on Wednesday nights as we prepared to look at a prophetic book in the Bible, one of the great prophetic books, and we talked about biblical prophecy for a while, just beginning to understand some of its parameters, sometimes how thought has developed in this country.
But now we actually want to dive in to the great book of Daniel, a book that starts out talking about a people who do not perceive greatness at all; they perceive persecution, exile, and slavery.
Daniel, his friends, his family, his nation is under the judgment of God for rebellion.
But that is not the end of the story.
God has a plan for His people and He will reveal it here in the book of Daniel.
Let me ask that you stand as we'll read a portion of Daniel chapter 1.
I'll start at verse 8.
Already, the writer of Daniel has expressed that Daniel and his friends have been taken from the slave pits and put in the king's house to learn his ways and also to be fed his food.
And we'll see their response.
Verse 8, "But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's food, or with the wine that he drank.
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, and the chief of the eunuchs said to Daniel, 'I fear my lord the king, who assigned your food and your drink; for why should he see that you were in worse condition than the youths who are of your own age?
So you would endanger my head with the king.'
Then Daniel said to the steward whom the chief of the eunuchs had assigned over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, 'Test your servants for ten days; 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.'
So he listened to them in this matter, and tested them for ten days.
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.
So the steward took away their food and the wine they were to drink, and gave them vegetables.
As for these four youths, God gave them learning and skill in all literature and wisdom, and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams."
We'll stop there for now.
Let's pray together.
>>> Father, thank You for faithful young people who become models for the ages of what it meant to trust Your hand in a hard place.
In that, not only is Daniel a hero, but our great God is the hero who provided for those who so desperately needed His help, came to the rescue, preserved them, and blessed them that they might be a blessing.
Teach us what it means to be at home in Babylon but in Your hands at the same time.
This we ask in Jesus' name.
Amen.
>>> Please be seated.
Our nation's changing status with the communist nation of Cuba is resulting in lots of accounts of life under Castro and the dictatorship there, just one after another surfacing at this time.
One an older one that's being repeated is the account of Armando Valladares who was 23 when just as a young office worker he refused to put a placard on his desk that said, "I'm with Fidel."
And for that reason, he woke up one day in his parents' home with a machine gun pushing his head down into the pillow, an arrest, a trial.
And for the crime of not putting on his desk the sign that said, "I'm with Fidel," he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, along with many others who did not express adequate loyalty for Fidel.
And what resulted was ultimately 22 years of his confinement in prison, which he wrote about in the book "Against All Hope."
Ultimately, he was released because of international pressure upon Cuba to allow that release, but it was that horrible things having happened.
In the first year of his imprisonment with many other young people, executions happened every night in the prison to intimidate and to break the will of those who were there.
The things that were endured were so vile and despicable, we cannot even mention them here.
But in his book, Armando describes some of the things that were going on in his heart.
As he describes those 22 years before his release, he says this:  "For me it meant 8000 days of hunger, 8000 days of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement, 8000 days of proving I was still a human being, 8000 days of testing my faith, of fighting the hate of my atheist jailors who were trying to instill in me the same hatred with each thrust of their bayonets.
I was fighting for 8000 days, so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8000 days fighting so that I would not be like them."
It's an amazing statement, that you can recognize you can be in a situation, in a Babylon, in a place where the very goal of your enemy is to make you like them.
And, of course, the reason that we have the book of Daniel in our bibles is we have a pagan king in pagan nation that is dealing with a young man and his friends and trying simply to make them like himself.
And it comes through such subtle, how do I say this, even gracious means.
Just have a meal.
It's nice.
It will taste good.
It will be pleasant.
This won't hurt you.
And the very intention is to wreak destruction and havoc and undo the faith of the people who were there.
We sometimes look at the book Daniel and we forget the purpose of Babylon, the place that he now lives in the exile and captivity of his people, and do not recognize the full scope of the Bible's intention to teach us about Babylon.
If you were listening closely to our Worship Director Kevin King's prayer, you recognize he mentioned the Bible's first expression of concern about Babylon, but it was not Babylon at the time:  It was the Tower of what?
Babel.
As in an ancient land on the plains of Shinar where Babylon is, people began to build a tower to God.
And we can just kind of laugh at primitive people and think, "How silly that they think that they can build a tower all the way to heaven.
Don't you know you need a rocket ship for that?"
[Laughter]
We miss the point.
Genesis 11 tells us the true purpose.
When they were building that tower, the people of the land of Shinar and the land of Babel said, "Let us make a name for ourselves.
Let us give ourselves glory.
Let us subjugate the people around us.
Our goal is to be like God in glory.
If we can show that we have power and authority, what we will ultimately do is we will declare we are the masters of our own fate.
We're in control of our lives.
Let's erect something that gives us the ability to have power over others and give all power to ourselves."
It is the old, old temptation.
After all, what did Satan say to Eve right at the beginning?
"God does not want you to eat of the forbidden fruit, because then you will be like God."
You'll be like Him.
You'll have equal authority, equal power.
You'll just be master of your own fate.
And the intent from the very beginning was to deceive about human ability, human power, and human glory.
It may sound a long way from us, but the ability to say, "You know, what you're really after in life is your own fame and your own glory."
I recognize how tempting it is.
I can remember, and I've told some of you this story before, of being in my senior year of college, having been a Christian a long time, but in that environment senior year kind of planning career and next steps, what would happen, was it grad school, was I going to go into a profession:  The things that weighed most upon my mind was, "How much money can I make?
And how big a name can I make for myself?"
Here I was right at the crux of life's decision and the values that I were considering were the old values:  What can you do for yourself; how can you be in charge of your life?
And in that moment, it was hard for me actually to think what other values are there?
Because there was a purpose in Babylon in the Bible, which was not only to deceive:  It is to enslave with the deception.
I mean, it's obvious when you get to the book of Daniel, right?
Nebuchadnezzar has gone.
He's been actually the instrument of the Lord's hand in the judgment upon the rebellious people of God.
But his very intention is to enslave the people.
But I want you to be carefully looking at what was the way that he was going to do that?
If you look in your bibles, Daniel chapter 1 and verse 2, "The Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into Nebuchadnezzar's hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God.
And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god."
What was the first step in Nebuchadnezzar's plan of enslaving the people of God?
It was to interrupt their worship, to separate them from their God, at least the worship of Him.
And right at the same moment that he's going to separate from them from worship, he's going to saturate them in his own ways and thought.
Verses 3 and 4, remember?
"The king commanded 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," for what purpose?
"To teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans."
Nebuchadnezzar's strategy, for those of you who are Star Trekkies, is the Borg Strategy:  You will be assimilated.
I am going to teach you the language and the literature of mine, to saturate you with it.
At the same time, I'm separating you from your worship.
It's something to think about.
How does that happen?
Because part of what we're being asked to do in this chapter is not just say, "It's interesting that Babylon was something way back there somewhere," but to actually recognize our own Babylon.
Babylon that we live in, when it starts becoming our home, is the place where we get separated from our worship and saturated in the world.
And it happens in so many ways in this assimilation process where we just kind of take in the food and the learning and the understanding that we don't even know it's going on.
Because we're starting school this year for so many different levels of young people, we recognize that one of the way that you saturate in the ways of the world is just with educational immersion, immersion in secular assumptions.
And so you recognize that more and more we are taught wherever you are simply a naturalistic, materialistic worldview.
Our total world is explained by time and chance, by science and math.
It's just material and mathematics and a little chemistry over time.
And the whole notion that there is a transcendent truth because there is a transcendent God who has worked above and beyond creation and establishing plans in the spiritual world as well as the created world for His people is just lost.
Even the notion that there would be a transcendent truth, not just an existential individual truth, you have your truth, I have my truth:  Anything that says there is a transcendent truth is considered not just irrelevant but ridiculous.
And you hear that day in and day out for year after year after year and you just kind of get saturated in it.
We not only get saturated by educational immersion but just by peer values.
And here we don't just have to talk about something that's happening in high school:  We recognize the peer pressures that come at every stage of life.
In the workplace, career and income can trump faith, family, and integrity.
Getting ahead somehow begins to take precedence, just, it's just year after year, promotion after promotion, a little more money after a little more money.
Getting ahead trumps getting along with God or sometimes even our own families.
And it happens so subtly, it happens in such an assimilation process of being a part of the company, being part of the business, being part of the profession, being part of the guild, that we don't even recognize it has happened.
We can get immersed in pop culture where music and movies teach us the main values are fame and flame out.
Just live for what you can while you can.
And if you think that doesn't touch you, recognize how all of us in our entertainment culture have forgotten to blush:  that we can watch "Modern Family" so often we don't even see cause to object anymore, that we can so often see things that just become a part of what everyone else is doing that we don't even consider the impact upon our hearts.
And what God is calling us to do through these young men in Babylon is simply open your eyes; recognize your Babylon.
It's the first step toward faithfulness.
Recognize it for what it is.
Its intention is to deceive, to enslave, but ultimately to destroy.
In the final chapters of the Bible we get the final mention of Babylon.
But it's the first time we actually get the full biblical title of Babylon.
The full biblical title of Babylon that occurs in Revelation 17 in verse 5, where it is identified as "Babylon the great, the mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth," which says that Babylon's intention was not merely to deceive or to enslave but to lure so as to destroy.
If love wins, that is very alluring.
But what is its ultimate purpose?
We think of a nation that has changed so much in its various views, but one of the more articulate spokesman of the consequences of what it means to abandon the values of scripture and get saturated in the values of the world is Robert Putnam in his book "Our Kids:  The American Dream in Crisis."
He writes what we all know.
"Premarital sex has lost its stigma as has having children outside of marriage.
A man facing his obligation to provide for children he has fathered is passe and the obligation passed on to single women.
Divorce, unmarried childbearing, and cohabitation are widespread, despite even the secular measurement of the consequences for families and children."
The first consequence he cites:  Persistent poverty.
Sixty years ago if you would say if a family, if a child is going to be raised in persistent poverty, it's almost always a reflection of either lower eduction or the low income of the family.
That now is passe.
The greatest indicator of whether or not a child will be raised in poverty is a single parent home, the single greatest indictor of whether a child would be raised in poverty.
Consequences upon children.
Domestic violence increasingly witnessed by the children of our culture.
Yet we know that a married women is, a married woman is three and a half times less likely to experience domestic violence than a woman who is either cohabitating, divorced, or simply seeking a dating life with sexual expression.
And yet at the same time that we say that, our own government statistics say that a stepfather or boyfriend is seven times more likely to molest or abuse the child of the woman that he is with.
The single greatest indicator today of whether or not a child will end up in prison is not race; it is not income; it is not education:  Even the presidential administration before us says the single greatest indicator of whether a child will go to prison is the absence of a father in the home.
Trumps all other measures.
In fact, it says it obliterates all other measures.
Not that they are irrelevant, but that is the dominant, so that President Obama himself says one of the greatest problems in our society is daddies not being daddies.
Why?
Because we live in Babylon.
Because it's a nation that recognizes, doesn't recognize right at this moment that the intention of living apart from God, of removing us from worship and saturating with the values of a popular pagan culture, of a business world that does not honor integrity, of an educational world that does not seek transcendent truth, is it will not just deceive or enslave:  It will ultimately destroy.
That's what Babylon does.
And for those of us who are heads of home, for those of us who recognize those dynamics, when you say, "If the strategy is not only to saturate with the culture but to separate from worship, what obligation should be upon us?"
We recognize, so many of us, that at the very time that our children are at key stages of life there are such pressures upon us to abandon regular worship in our churches.
It can be because of sports.
It can be because of our recreational culture.
It can be because of somebody needing a little extra income or even income for school.
And so at very critical times, we are at the very same moment separating them from worship and saturating them in the culture and wondering why there are negative results.
The Lord just speaks with great practicality here in the life of Daniel and his friends and reminds us:  You have to recognize your Babylon.
You don't close your eyes.
You stay alert, just like you do with an email; be careful about the attachments.
When you're in this world, be careful about the attachments that may be taking you down a path you never intended.
Now, I'm going to guess in this message I have said things that you would normally expect if you go to the first chapter of Daniel.
You expect me and it is actually my obligation to talk about the dangers of the Babylon's of our age or any age.
But having said that our first step toward faithfulness is to recognize our Babylon and its measures, the next thing that I need to say to you to be faithful in Babylon is not to waste it.
If God has called you to Babylon, do not waste your Babylon.
God has a purpose for His people even there.
I want to take you to a portion of scripture that you may not have been to before that relates particularly to this account in Daniel of the people of God in Babylon.
It's Jeremiah chapter 24.
Jeremiah chapter 24 and the Lord has put before Jeremiah an image of a fig basket with good and bad figs with an amazing message there.
Jeremiah chapter 24 and verse 4, Jeremiah 24 and verse 4, "Then the word of the Lord came to me," says Jeremiah:  "'Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel:  Like these good figs, so I will regard as good the exiles from Judah, whom I have sent away from this place to the land of the Chaldeans.
I will set my eyes on them for good; I will bring them back to this land.
I will build them up, and not tear them down; I will plant them, and not uproot them.
I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart.
But thus says the Lord:  Like the bad figs that are so bad they cannot be eaten, so I will treat Zedekiah the king of Judah, his officials, the remnant of Jerusalem who remain in this land, and those who dwell in the land of Egypt.'"
Here's an amazing thought.
God is, even as His hand of discipline upon His people in Babylon saying, "Now, you need to know something if you are in a Babylon at this moment:  The place of God's blessing is not in hiding in Israel.
The place of blessing is not fleeing to Egypt.
The place of blessing is actually in Babylon, where under the discipline, under the oppression, My people begin to live for Me.
Because as a consequence of their living for Me in this land of oppression and pressure and temptation, as they live for Me, they are actually developing a whole heart for the Lord."
It's not running into our holy huddles.
It's not just fleeing to the desert somewhere.
He is saying, "I expect you not to waste your Babylon.
If that's where you have been called, use it for God's purposes."
How do we do that?
How do we maintain our faithfulness in the land of Babylon, even if we are in an American Babylon?
The first answer is back there in Jeremiah, as Jeremiah speaks to those people who will be blessed in Babylon.
He says in Jeremiah 29 in verse 7, "Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."
We do something in this church that may surprise you at times.
Even as much as we may object at times to governmental policy, to a government official's particular stance, to what judge rulings there may be, we get down on our knees and we pray for those in authority over us.
We pray for Peoria.
We pray for the school system.
We pray that young people would be able to hear the gospel through those of you who minister boldly and wonderfully within our schools and the local community.
Why do we do that?
Because we are pray--, we are told to pray for the welfare of the city to which we are called, even if it's a city that we recognize has problems or a land that we recognize may be in opposition to God.
Because the land and the city and the community is not the ultimate power:  Our God is.
And so we pray that God would be at work and recognize if we are on our knees in Babylon, God is making our hearts fully attuned to Him.
And when our hearts are wholly after Him, we are actually accomplishing what God intends for that moment.
Armando Valladares, as he was in that prison camp under such persecution, said, "I sought God, but I never asked Him to get me out of there.
I didn't think that God should be used for that kind of request.
I only asked that He would allow me to resist, that He would give me faith and spiritual strength to bear up and for Him to accompany me regardless of what I had to go through."
It's the message we know over and over again:  If Christ is with us, we can face anything.
And what I begin to recognize in you, if I go with my Savior into Babylon, my own heart becomes melded, welded, set on Him.
And that is His very purpose at times for us to be faithful in Babylon so that we would have gospel dependence on the God who is our hope and believe and see He is more powerful than anything in the world because we are seeking Him and seeing His hand.
Even at the same time as we are praying, what else is He calling us to do?
We maintain our purity as well as our prayers.
Not a mystery to you.
Daniel and his friends resolve not to defile themselves by eating the king's food.
Now, what was wrong with the food?
Too many calories?
No, probably not the reason.
Possibly been sacrificed to idols and so recognizing Levitical Law, Daniel and his friends did not want to eat the meat sacrificed to idols.
But it never says that.
It may have been that Daniel and his friends who are so smart recognized the path of assimilation:  We will get dependent on this nice food, of the pleasures of Babylon.
It may simply be that Daniel says, "Wait a second:  My people are mainly working in the slave pits.
What right have I to be eating the king's food while my people are under such oppression."
The reality is, though, we don't know why Daniel did not eat the food.
We're pretty sure it's not because his mother said, "Vegetables are good for you."
[Laughter]
Something else is going on.
He believed he would defile himself for the eating of the food.
And what we are being taught is that principle of the gospel that's repeated in the book of James:  "For him that knows to do good and does it not, to him it is evil."
Sometimes what we do as believers is we look at the sin or the practices or the habits of our peers and we say, "It doesn't seem to bother them and so I guess it's okay for me."
But what the Bible is calling us to do is say, "No, for you, if you know it's not right for you, then do not indulge it.
For him that knows to do good and does it not, to him it is evil."
For Daniel and his friends, they made a commitment to purity.
We will stand for the things of the Lord and that in itself is intended to be a powerful instrument in the hand of God.
Pray and live a life of pure commitment to God.
Armando was not a believer when he first went to that Cuban prison.
But he began to notice something in the lives of certain young people as they were put before the execution squads.
He noticed that there were certain ones who even at the moment of execution would look at the guns of the soldiers that were about to execute them, and they would cry at the top of their lungs in defiance, "Viva Cristo Rey!
Long live King Jesus!"
And he knew there was something in their hearts, something in their being that he did not possess.
He did not fully understand it for a while.
But there was another prisoner that lasted a lot longer.
He was a prisoner that other prisoners in that concentration camp called Brother of Faith.
"When a prisoner fell behind in the mango field or stone quarry," Armando later wrote, "Brother of Faith would help him catch up.
When the guards beat Brother of Faith for doing so, he would look the guard in the eye and say, 'May God forgive you.'
He would in the afternoons in the prison yard when everybody else was trying to recuperate, tie a burlap bag around his waist and wash the clothes of prisoners too sick and foul to wash their own.
He would rouse fellow prisoners once a week, some who had lost hope in living, and he would speak to them on their beds and say, 'Get up, you lion cub.
God is calling you to worship.'
And he would stand on an old fish crate and speak the gospel with a fashioned wooden cross decrepit behind him.
And when they stood him on that fish crate to exterminate him, he said to his executioners, 'May God forgive you because you do not know what you do.'"
And it changed Armando.
He knew something was not right in him.
The title of his book, "Against All Hope," is taken from Romans 4:16 where the apostle Paul talks about those "who against all hope, hope."
How does that happen?
It was a hope in Christ that Armando found because Brother of Faith lived in prayer and fidelity before God in his awful Babylon.
He was willing to be an example for God.
Armando describes his last image of him, "A skeletal figure of a man, wasted by hunger, blazing blue eyes, and a heart overflowing with love as he faced his executioners."
Incredible and yet it is being, if you will, at home in Babylon, at home with the Lord and recognizing that by prayer and purity before God and in standing for Him as a friend to God and for others God is giving power.
I don't want to miss the obvious.
I hope you don't either.
What does it mean to stand faithful in Babylon?
It means not only to pray.
It means not only to maintain your purity.
It means among other things to maintain your Christian friendships.
Did you catch that?
Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego:  They're hanging together in here.
And I think what God is calling us as we live in an American Babylon, whether it's the campus or it's the company or it's the company you keep, to recognize one of our paths of strength is just Christian friendships.
And I rejoice in what is happening in this church as so many of the men's fellowship groups are forming, as we have the radical mentoring and the Man in the Mirror ministries, as we have the men's fellowship that's forming, as we follow in some ways the train of the women who are in the M.O.P.S. ministries, in the quilting group.
I wish you were with me with the women's quilting this last week as they gave quilts to the mission family that we are sending off, quilts that had Bible verses, where as the kids pull their covers over them at night they can read of the faithfulness of God as they are in a far country.
And I think:  These women are supporting by friendship children of another generation.
Those of you who are on campus, I think:  The value of Campus Outreach and Intervarsity and Crusade and the vision pathways that you are linking together.
It is such a biblical thing to do.
To say, "I don't have to stand alone.
In fact, I'm not supposed to stand alone.
By being supported and supporting others, community groups, Bible studies, Sunday School classes, choir, I don't know, but to say part of the plan of God of our prayers and our purity is maintaining Christian friendships:  We need them and they need us.
And it's what we recognize was part of the strength of God's people in Babylon.
You're not meant to go it alone.
And ultimately that message of not going it alone is what Daniel recognizes as he not only recognizes Babylon and doesn't waste it but expects God to show up in it.
Did you catch it?
I slowed down when I read some of the phrases like in verse 2.
"And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand."
There was the past work.
God was working before they got to Babylon.
God did it.
Verse 9, "And God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs."
Even in the moment of testing, God is there.
And then verse 17:  "As for these youths, God gave them learning and skill in all literature and wisdom, and dad had, Daniel had understanding of dreams and visions."
Daniel's going to see thousands of years into the future.
God is at work in the past; God is at work in the present; and God is at work in the future.
What Daniel did even in Babylon is he expected God to be there.
What's the greatest evidence of that in all the Bible?
The soldiers gather around the Savior.
His disciples have turned away.
Evil seems to have its day.
Even the sky turns dark.
But God was there for you and for me.
It is the great message of the scriptures that our God is with us to do His work, even in the Babylon.
Why would you pray?
Why would you stay pure?
Why would you be the friend of those who need you?
Because you expect God to show up.
And it's what the Bible is teaching us to believe:  that He is there for us and with us even in the darkest moments.
I think one of the darkest moments for my family is when my son went to a Babylon Haiti some years ago after a natural disaster and went to a nation of such hurt and corruption and in going there, what he experienced was not just the ability to help people but the contraction of an infectious disease that triggered the Crohn's disease in his body that will be with him the rest of his life.
And I must tell you, when our family began to wrestle with that reality of the darkness in his life, we hurt.
We as parents began to wonder, "Were we right to let him go?"
And we praised God for a Christian physician who worked with our son and when he heard us say, "Maybe we shouldn't have let him go," he said, "Don't you hear that, Jordan.
The Lord called you to those people and He had a purpose for your life.
And He was with you then and He will be with you now."
And so a few years later when my son, Jordan, went with his sister and his brother to Honduras after another hurricane, we have a picture of the three of them gathered, working on various projects.
But the last picture in our family album is of that same son, Jordan, sitting on the steps of a terrible hut with his Spanish New Testament open and a little girl with a red bow in her hair looking on.
And she received Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior for eternity in that moment.
He believed even in the worst of places God was going to show up and God did for eternity.
God calls us to believe that even if we are to be in Babylon He's going to show up.
So live for Him.
And His power will work in our behalf for the glory of the Savior.
We are called even in Babylon to believe God's going to show up.
Let's pray.
>>> Father, we pray with the belief that you who call us to sa--, to serve You sometimes in pleasant lands and sometimes in hard places are there.
And You showed us that because You were with our Savior at the hardest time the whole world has ever experienced.
And You still send Him into hearts for eternal purposes.
Help us to remember that.
Some of us are in deep Babylon right now.
And we've not examined our principles, our priorities, or our practices.
Help us to recognize the Babylon, what its real purpose is, and to believe that You can bless us even there as we will live for You, pray to You, seek to help others in the time because the profound truth that we know is that You will show up there.
Thank You, Father.
Be with us.
Give us strength for Your purposes.
Give us the Savior to inspire us through it all.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
>>> Amen.
Let us stand and sing to our faithful, solid Rock.

---