John

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along. And that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. This week, Daniel in the lion's den. Nice. All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Grace. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here, and I'm so excited. I'm so thrilled once again to be able to be up here preaching in the book of Daniel. As I always do, I spend time, I read through or I listen to different sermons on the topic I'm going to talk about. I'll read, you know, parts of books, whatever. Whatever I can do to get a good solid wisdom and understanding of what's going on. And as I found one sermon, I took specific note of something that I thought was pretty cool. And the reason why I'm going to do it up there at the front is it's not directly about Daniel 6, but I think it does an awesome job of reminding us of what we talked about last week, while then connecting it to where we're going to go today with Daniel and the lion's den. John Piper started out his sermon in Daniel, referring to Daniel's name and talking about that in Hebrew, his name in Hebrew means essentially, God is my judge. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, not only because, hey, that's a great name. You know, if you're thinking, if you're having a baby, Daniel, God is my judge. Perfect. But it's pretty cool because when you look at the book of Daniel, as you sift through the stories we talked about last week, and when you get into this week and what we're talking about this week, what we see is, I mean, there's not a more aptly named character that I know of in the Bible, right? This is a guy, Piper puts it this way. He says that God is my judge, this name that has been given to Daniel, that this almost becomes like a creed or like a motto of how and where he lives his life. He says this comes out of the way that he ate. We think back to Daniel 1. Daniel comes over as a young, exiled man from Judah, and he says, hey, I'm not going to eat the food that you're giving me because I feel like that will be defiling myself and defiling my God, and I'm not going to do that. He stands in his faith. He says, hey, what matters is what God thinks about this, because God is my judge. And then he says, it comes out in the way that he interprets dreams. We go to Daniel 2, which we talked about as well. Not only Daniel 2, but Daniel's, both Daniel 4 and 5, which we're not going to talk about today, but in essence, Daniel goes to different kings and he interprets their dreams. And the way he interprets the dreams is, one, through the providence of God. We know it's his connection and his commitment to God that allows him the wisdom to interpret the dreams these kings are having. And the interpretations are all about, hey, basically, hey, you're the king for right now. The Lord has allowed you to have the power that you have, but the Lord is in sole control of that power. The Lord has every bit of power, and you're just a pawn in his system. And we see that played out in different ways. We see him bring people into power. We see him take power away. We see him give power back to kings. And we see him ultimately put people to death for disobeying and dishonoring him. He says, God is my judge, influences the way he writes the book. As we go through these first six chapters of Daniel, Daniel clearly chooses and picks to write about these six significant events because this is where he sees that God is most glorified. And so this is what he chooses to write about. And then as we transition into Daniel 6 and Daniel in the lion's den, we see that it comes out in the way that he prayed. And so we open up to page number 880, whoever wants to roll with us, but we open up to Daniel 6. And we open up to Daniel and the Lion's Den, which at its core is just one of your classic workplace disputes. You're in the office and your boss decides that he's going to elevate, he's going to promote someone to be now over you, and you don't think he should be there, or you don't think she should be there. You're not thrilled about the promotion that your boss made, and so, like you do, you go to your other people that you work with who also don't think that that person should have gotten that promotion, and you devise a scheme. And you devise a scheme that basically allows the boss to be tricked into throwing that person who got the promotion into a den of lions. We know it. It's the age-old story. But ultimately, I guess for those of us who maybe have not experienced this or maybe will find a couple different things that maybe these guys tried to do. Let's still go through it together. We jump in on Daniel 6, and basically, as these chapters have gone, we have seen how devoted and how committed to God Daniel has been throughout his life. God is my judge. That's Daniel. That is how he lives his life. And through that, the Lord has moved in Daniel, not only to provide him wisdom, but also because of his commitment, we see that his character is such that he is found completely and wholly trustworthy to every one of the kings that he serves under. And so as that continues to happen, what we know is that his character and his integrity come and is rooted in his commitment and his faith to God. But that doesn't really matter to the king. All that matters to the king is this man is trustworthy and I know I can continue to elevate him and he's going to continue to remain faithful to him. And we know that that comes from God, but ultimately, it just works out for Daniel. And so here we are in Daniel 6. Daniel is now on his third king. We talked about Nebuchadnezzar last week. In the middle of that, there is a pretty wild and awesome story about King Belshazzar. But King Belshazzar has died, Darius has taken over, and what Darius has recognized and realized, once more, like every other king, Daniel can be trusted, and I am going to trust him with much. There are 120 satraps, it says. There's basically, satraps are these people who are over different regions within the empire. And then above those satraps, there's three people that their goal and their role is to govern and to lead the people that are the different satraps. So they're the leaders of the leaders in essence. Well, Daniel was one of those three, and Darius has decided, Daniel is my guy. I'm going to continue to promote him. I'm going to continue to elevate him to prominence. He decides basically to say, hey, Daniel, I'm going to elevate you above those three, and you are now going to be basically my number two. You are going to govern all of my governors, and the only person that you bow down to, or the only person that you serve, and that you're not over and above, is myself. Well, like we just talked about, not everyone really liked that. There's a lot of satraps who are like, wait, what? What's this? This guy, this random exile from Judah who doesn't believe or look like, who doesn't like serve or bow down to any of our gods, now we have to bow down to him? That's not how I'm rolling. And so he does what we would, they do what we would all do in a similar scenario, and they start to devise a scheme. And I love the way that they devise their scheme because they go about looking into his personal life. And they're like, all right, well, time to become private investigators. We got to figure out the way that this man falls short. What can we hang him up on? What in his character can we find that's flawed that we can bring to the king to where the king will have to relieve him of these duties that we don't want him to have. And it's pretty cool what we see. We see, as they say in Daniel 6, I don't think this one's on the screen because I didn't put it up there. At this, the administrator and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his contact of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. Finally, these men said, we will never find any basis for charges against this man, Daniel, unless it has something to do with the law of God. So here we have these two sides of the same argument. We've got the king who recognizes and realizes that Daniel's faith and Daniel's commitment to God allows him to be completely trustworthy and completely good, and I can put whatever I want on him, and I know he's not going to turn around and stab me in the back. We recognize that he has character on this side. And then what these people who hate Daniel now realize is, oh, he is kind of exactly what the king is looking for. He is kind of exactly why the king is elevating him is for this very reason, that we can't find any fault to him. All of us know that's because of his commitment to God, man. He has godly character because he has remained committed to God throughout these 50 years or however long he has been in this kingdom. And so then they say, well, great. I know what we can get him on. His faith and commitment to God. If that's the backbone behind everything, what we know to be true is that this guy does not miss his times to pray. This guy is so committed to God that every single day he goes up to his room, he takes up to this window and he prays every day. He prays, he praises God, all this stuff. That's how we're gonna, that's how we going to set it up. And just real quick, imagine someone tries to take you down. They look into every single part of your life, and the only thing they know they can hang you up on is that you're too committed to God. That's pretty sweet. That's, I mean, oh, to have that much faith and that much character in our life. But nonetheless, they go to the king. Because how can you get the king to do something? You remind the king of how great and how powerful he is. They go to the king and they say, King Darius, you are so great. And because you are so great, you have to, you need to make a decree. Make a decree that no one can worship or bow down to any God or pray to any God or any person except you for 30 days. You deserve that kind of praise because you're awesome. And King's like, yeah, I am awesome. You are 100% right. We need this to happen. And so he makes a decree and he writes it into law. Not only that you have to do it, but he also writes in the consequence that if you don't do it, if you bow down and you worship or praise any other God or any other person, that you are to be thrown into the lion's den and executed. They got him now. And so comes one of my favorite written verses in all of the Bible. So let's read this one together. So comes verse 10 when our buddy Daniel finds out what just happened. Now, when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home in his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Perfect. Let's go to the window where people can see us. Three times a day, he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to any God in this 30 days, you'll be killed. You will be ripped apart by lions. And Daniel says, what should I do about this? I got to go pray to my God about this. And it's incredible. It's awesome. I love that it's, and why I say I love the way that it's written is because it seems instantaneous, right? It's like, oh shoot, this is bad. I got to go pray about this, which is great because it is exactly what he just read that he wasn't allowed to do. But all that Daniel knows is that regardless of circumstance, that what he must remain connected to is his God. And so he goes and two to three times a day, he prays to God and he gives thanks to his God. And then the kicker, just as he had always done. He doesn't start doing it. He doesn't do like Michael Scott does in the office where Pam finds out that he's dating her mom and he's like, oh, I'm going to date her even harder now. It's not like he's like, oh, I'm going to pray so much harder now. King, you're not even going to believe it. He doesn't change anything. He just remains connected daily to his God, spending time in prayer. Does he know that it is still defiant? Yeah. But it's not worth it to give it up for him because it's the most important thing in his life. And it has grounded him through every part of his life and it has brought him this far and he has faith that it's going to continue to bring him through. And so they got him. They go to the king. They say, king, please remind me, didn't you write this into law that people could only bow to you and praise you during this 30 days? And before they mentioned Daniel, who he loves, and he's about to elevate to prominence, even greater prominence, he says, yes, it's been written into law. I can't take it back. There's no way. It is law. That's what law stands for. And they said, well, do you remember that one exile from Judah? I think his name's Daniel. And like, by the way, how disrespectful is that? Like, hey, you know the guy who's maybe closest to you of anyone in this kingdom, the guy you're about to elevate to the number two, I'm going to refer to him as just this exile that like back like 50 some odd years ago was exiled to this place. It'd be like me like referring to Nate, our pastor, and being like, hey, you guys know Nate, right? The one that graduated from Toccoa Falls College? Like, you guys all know him as the pastor. We all know this guy, but it's like, I don't need to bring up some random fact from like 30 years ago. I don't know if it was 30 years ago. I just know he's older than I am. So he's older than I am, so it is what it is. But as disrespectful and as weird as it is, what we recognize and what we realize is their ultimate problem with Daniel is his race and his values. And I think even more than that, it frustrates them that clearly he's right about something. They're frustrated that he only worships this one God, but they're even more frustrated that for some reason his commitment to this God has allowed his character to be what it is. And Darius is upset about this. He's hurt, he's frustrated because he realizes, oh, I've been tricked. I've been had. And so we roll to verse 16. So the king gave the order and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lion's den. The king said to Daniel, may your God whom you serve continuously rescue you. He has to do it. He has to throw him in. I love that part at the end where it's clear that these people all know his commitment to God. And King Darius is kind of open to the fact that, hey, may this God that you serve so continuously, may he come through. I would love, I would love for you to be right about this. They cover it, so Daniel can't get out. King goes home. Can't sleep. He doesn't have any entertainment brought into him. He doesn't watch any TV, I guess, is what that means. He doesn't? Daniel answered, O king, live forever. My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt do it? This God that you serve and this God that I know you believe was protecting you, did he protect you? And Daniel's like, yeah, of course he did, man. So he's brought out. King says, get Daniel out of here. We threw him in. Lions weren't interested because the angels shut their mouths. In his fury, he throws all of the remaining satraps that tricked him into the same lion's den and they were killed, which is a pretty grisly detail in the story, but it is a detail nonetheless. And then we come to the culmination, starting in verse 25. It says, in his land, and he dec. He performs signs and wonders in the heaven and on the earth. He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions. He witnesses the glory of the God and not only does it change his life, but he makes a decree so that every single person in his entire nation can know how big, how great, how eternal, and how awesome this God is. Praise be to God for that. The synopsis of Daniel that we talked about at the beginning of last week was this, that the Lord is in complete control of everything. Praise be to this God that has, that certainly that saved Daniel, but saved Daniel for the purpose of bringing this glory to the king and to all of the people so that they will know forever the glory of God, that they can witness and understand how great he is, how powerful he is, and how good he is. That is just awesome. That is a great story. That is a story that probably most of us know and most of us have read and gone through because this is a heroic story. But even though and while it's a heroic story, I think while we certainly place God where he needs to be is like look at this God who wants to make sure that not only his people, but all people recognize and see and understand his power and his glory. I do think that sometimes we misinterpret and we misrepresent who Daniel is in this story. Because so many incredible heroic things happen, we forget and we miss that Daniel doesn't really do any big, significant, heroic action in this. Like next week, we're going to be talking about, who are we talking about next week? Samson. Thanks, Nate. Thanks, Toccoa Falls alum, Nate. Next week, we're talking about Samson. When the Lord's strength is in Samson, that dude's taking out armies on his own. That's not the same thing that Daniel does here. He doesn't start an uprising. He doesn't storm into the king's quarters and demand that he reverses the law or says the Lord is going to strike you down if you, whatever. He just stays committed to spending time with God, trusting fully that his commitment and his relationship with God will put him in places where he can make God's glory seen. And that's what happens, right? In the beginning, we see that he's being elevated to prominence because of his character and because of his integrity, his trustworthiness. We know very clearly that that comes from his connection and his relationship with God. He has godly character. He can't be brought down by these people because of his character that comes from his commitment to God. And when his faith is put to the test, because he was already committed to his God, nothing was going to change. And when the Lord finally did put Daniel front and center, Daniel comfortably knew and recognized the Lord has me here because he is going to glorify himself through me. A lot of big and incredible things happened, but the only role that Daniel played was simply staying connected and growing in his relationship with his father. And if I'm right about that, if I'm right, if I'm correct in my assumption, or if you listen to this story, if you read for yourself and you agree with me that, yeah, this is kind of weird. I've always considered Daniel in the lines in that Daniel's kind of the hero of it, but he's not really doing heroic things. He's just living a life connected to God. He just daily connects to God through prayer and through praise. then what I'd argue with you is that a faith like Daniel's is waiting for us, is waiting for you and waiting for me, on the other side of consistent discipline in our personal relationship with God. Because the other thing I find noteworthy that I think we forget, because we kind of lump in biblical characters as these men and women whose lives are completely and consistently committed solely to God. Now, this is true of Daniel, but he's not like Paul where he's traveling to churches and reading scripture and making sure he understands scripture and understands Christ well enough to be able to send it out to the nations. This is a guy who's in politics. This is a guy who's in politics in a land where no one believes what he believes. And so his connection to God is his personal connection to God. Now, do people recognize and know it? Yeah. That's why the people know that they could make him fall because, hey, he's going to stay committed to God. The king, this God that you consistently are committed to, did he save you? They know that he's characterized by his faith, but he doesn't go into work as a minister and spend eight hours a day reading scripture and praying. This is about people who go into work and live for God because they're committed to him in their spare and quiet moments. Daniel three times day, spends time in prayer. I imagine he wakes up, he starts his day off with prayer. He goes during lunch and spends time in prayer. Before he goes to bed, he prays. I don't know. But the point is not that his entire life, every second of every day is dedicated to prayer, dedicated to reading scripture. The point is that his consistent daily time, just spending some time with God, allowing the Lord to work in his heart, just in the spare time that he has, creating some time during the day to spend time with prayer, that that saturates everything else in his life. I think it's the same with us. I think all of us would agree that the things that we care about and the things that we pretty consistently do, it kind of shapes the things that we do. Like, this is a silly example, but bear with me. I'm a big Frisbee guy. I like Frisbee. I like playing Ultimate Frisbee. I was watching ultimate frisbee all weekend. And so while I'm preparing for my sermons, I'm throwing the frisbee up and down the hallway over there. But sometimes I'm not allowed to do frisbee. Sometimes I have to stand in Aaron's office and talk ministry with Aaron back here. And as Aaron can attest to you, when I talk to her, I throw a lot of backhands. I throw a lot of flicks. I throw in the occasional hammer. I do it all the time. It's dumb. It's silly. But it's because, like, even though I'm not actively doing this thing, it's still on my mind, right? And it's still, like, literally body want to like do it and play it and throw it. When I drive around, when I see trees in a line, I'm like, there's a disc golf hole. It's not actually a disc golf hole, but that's what I see. You know, I mean, some of you in here maybe were skateboarders. And when some people see stairs, like, oh, that would be sick to ollie off of. I was always one of those, hey, skating is cool, and I'm bad at it. So I was like, that would be a sick thing for other people to skate. We recognize and we see things through the lenses of what we care about and what we consistently do. How many of us in here are or have been married or have kids? You can raise your hand. Yeah, nice. Congratulations. Now, I might be wrong about this. I'm only engaged. But I'll be married one day, and I think that this will be true. Raise your hand again if your marriage, your relationship with your wife or your husband, your relationship to your kids, the love that you experience from these relationships, if they impact not only the times that you're spending with them, but they impact the way that you live every part of your life. Yeah, man. Because the thing that we care about and the things that we spend time doing, and when we get to experience this love that makes us better and changes our heart, that doesn't only change our heart, and that doesn't only impact the way that we live just when we're doing those things. But it's our consistent connection to those things that continue to allow us to live out that love that we experience with and from our wife, from our kids, from our husbands. And the same is so, so, so true in our faith. As we daily spend time in the Word, daily spend time reading Scripture, just when we wake up, we read some Scripture, We spend time praying. Or maybe before we go into a meeting, we stay a quick prayer. When we consistently come and we meet together on Sunday mornings, when you meet with your small group and you grow and you build each other up, when those things happen, it saturates every other part of our life. Like Daniel, our character grows. Our integrity is deeper and deeper rooted in the things of God, and people see and people notice. I think a lot of times we view faith and we want God to do these huge, incredible things in our life and we want Him to use us to glorify Him. And ultimately, I think what the Lord calls us to do is stay rooted and connected in Him. And when that's the case, nothing else can happen except for him being glorified in us. And that's why Jesus gives this call and why Jesus charges us in John 15. This one's going to be up on the screen. We're going to read verses 4 through 5 and verse 8 together. I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. This is to my Father's glory that you may bear fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. When we are in Christ, we are connected to Christ. He is the vine, we are the branches. And if we want to produce fruit, all it takes is being connected to the vine. And we let the vine be what the vine is. Someone who produces fruit and elevates the glory of God. And that's our goal. Our goal is to remain connected to Christ. Always. And ultimately, our goal is to be someone who's defined as Daniel is defined, not only by name, but by the way he lives, but someone who is defined by God is my judge. I will stay connected. I will remain in him. And he, through me, will produce fruit. And he, through me, will glorify himself and do incredible things. It's not just for the biblical heroes. It's for every single one of us. We all, as we give our hearts to Christ, as we all believe in his lordship and in his sacrifice to us and his resurrection for us, that connects us to the vine. And when we continue to remain connected, when we continue to grow closer and closer as we continue to grow in him, grow closer to God, recognize and understand and realize his love more and more, then so too do we produce fruit and we show that love and we serve people the way that we've been loved and the way that we've been served through Christ. To close, I found, I was reading this book. It's by Andrew Murray called Abiding in Christ. I had a hard time actually with this sermon for a while because I was so excited about so many things. Like I kept pulling at things and being like, oh, I love this, and I love this, and I love this. And ultimately, on Thursday, as I was preparing, I ended up just reading like five chapters of this book called Abiding in Christ. I think I say that mostly to say, like, you should read it. But this book called Abiding in Christ is a book that is solely written connecting us and trying to help us fully and rightly and completely understand those verses in John 15 of what it means to abide in Christ, what it means to remain in Christ, what it means that God is divine and that we are the branches, what it means that through God we are able to produce fruit. And in that book, he writes a prayer that I really liked. And so if you would, please bow with me and we're going to pray. And I'm going to read this prayer that he wrote because I think it's really beautiful. heartedly surrender to abide in you alone brings a joy that is unspeakable and full of glory. May all of us who have begun to taste the sweetness of this life yield ourselves to be witnesses of the grace and power of our Lord to keep us united in him. And may we seek by word and walk to win others to follow him, to follow you wholly. It is only in such fruit bearing that our own abiding can be maintained. Lord, let us produce fruit solely by just being connected to you every day. We love you. Amen.

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along. And that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. This week, Daniel in the lion's den. Nice. All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Grace. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here, and I'm so excited. I'm so thrilled once again to be able to be up here preaching in the book of Daniel. As I always do, I spend time, I read through or I listen to different sermons on the topic I'm going to talk about. I'll read, you know, parts of books, whatever. Whatever I can do to get a good solid wisdom and understanding of what's going on. And as I found one sermon, I took specific note of something that I thought was pretty cool. And the reason why I'm going to do it up there at the front is it's not directly about Daniel 6, but I think it does an awesome job of reminding us of what we talked about last week, while then connecting it to where we're going to go today with Daniel and the lion's den. John Piper started out his sermon in Daniel, referring to Daniel's name and talking about that in Hebrew, his name in Hebrew means essentially, God is my judge. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, not only because, hey, that's a great name. You know, if you're thinking, if you're having a baby, Daniel, God is my judge. Perfect. But it's pretty cool because when you look at the book of Daniel, as you sift through the stories we talked about last week, and when you get into this week and what we're talking about this week, what we see is, I mean, there's not a more aptly named character that I know of in the Bible, right? This is a guy, Piper puts it this way. He says that God is my judge, this name that has been given to Daniel, that this almost becomes like a creed or like a motto of how and where he lives his life. He says this comes out of the way that he ate. We think back to Daniel 1. Daniel comes over as a young, exiled man from Judah, and he says, hey, I'm not going to eat the food that you're giving me because I feel like that will be defiling myself and defiling my God, and I'm not going to do that. He stands in his faith. He says, hey, what matters is what God thinks about this, because God is my judge. And then he says, it comes out in the way that he interprets dreams. We go to Daniel 2, which we talked about as well. Not only Daniel 2, but Daniel's, both Daniel 4 and 5, which we're not going to talk about today, but in essence, Daniel goes to different kings and he interprets their dreams. And the way he interprets the dreams is, one, through the providence of God. We know it's his connection and his commitment to God that allows him the wisdom to interpret the dreams these kings are having. And the interpretations are all about, hey, basically, hey, you're the king for right now. The Lord has allowed you to have the power that you have, but the Lord is in sole control of that power. The Lord has every bit of power, and you're just a pawn in his system. And we see that played out in different ways. We see him bring people into power. We see him take power away. We see him give power back to kings. And we see him ultimately put people to death for disobeying and dishonoring him. He says, God is my judge, influences the way he writes the book. As we go through these first six chapters of Daniel, Daniel clearly chooses and picks to write about these six significant events because this is where he sees that God is most glorified. And so this is what he chooses to write about. And then as we transition into Daniel 6 and Daniel in the lion's den, we see that it comes out in the way that he prayed. And so we open up to page number 880, whoever wants to roll with us, but we open up to Daniel 6. And we open up to Daniel and the Lion's Den, which at its core is just one of your classic workplace disputes. You're in the office and your boss decides that he's going to elevate, he's going to promote someone to be now over you, and you don't think he should be there, or you don't think she should be there. You're not thrilled about the promotion that your boss made, and so, like you do, you go to your other people that you work with who also don't think that that person should have gotten that promotion, and you devise a scheme. And you devise a scheme that basically allows the boss to be tricked into throwing that person who got the promotion into a den of lions. We know it. It's the age-old story. But ultimately, I guess for those of us who maybe have not experienced this or maybe will find a couple different things that maybe these guys tried to do. Let's still go through it together. We jump in on Daniel 6, and basically, as these chapters have gone, we have seen how devoted and how committed to God Daniel has been throughout his life. God is my judge. That's Daniel. That is how he lives his life. And through that, the Lord has moved in Daniel, not only to provide him wisdom, but also because of his commitment, we see that his character is such that he is found completely and wholly trustworthy to every one of the kings that he serves under. And so as that continues to happen, what we know is that his character and his integrity come and is rooted in his commitment and his faith to God. But that doesn't really matter to the king. All that matters to the king is this man is trustworthy and I know I can continue to elevate him and he's going to continue to remain faithful to him. And we know that that comes from God, but ultimately, it just works out for Daniel. And so here we are in Daniel 6. Daniel is now on his third king. We talked about Nebuchadnezzar last week. In the middle of that, there is a pretty wild and awesome story about King Belshazzar. But King Belshazzar has died, Darius has taken over, and what Darius has recognized and realized, once more, like every other king, Daniel can be trusted, and I am going to trust him with much. There are 120 satraps, it says. There's basically, satraps are these people who are over different regions within the empire. And then above those satraps, there's three people that their goal and their role is to govern and to lead the people that are the different satraps. So they're the leaders of the leaders in essence. Well, Daniel was one of those three, and Darius has decided, Daniel is my guy. I'm going to continue to promote him. I'm going to continue to elevate him to prominence. He decides basically to say, hey, Daniel, I'm going to elevate you above those three, and you are now going to be basically my number two. You are going to govern all of my governors, and the only person that you bow down to, or the only person that you serve, and that you're not over and above, is myself. Well, like we just talked about, not everyone really liked that. There's a lot of satraps who are like, wait, what? What's this? This guy, this random exile from Judah who doesn't believe or look like, who doesn't like serve or bow down to any of our gods, now we have to bow down to him? That's not how I'm rolling. And so he does what we would, they do what we would all do in a similar scenario, and they start to devise a scheme. And I love the way that they devise their scheme because they go about looking into his personal life. And they're like, all right, well, time to become private investigators. We got to figure out the way that this man falls short. What can we hang him up on? What in his character can we find that's flawed that we can bring to the king to where the king will have to relieve him of these duties that we don't want him to have. And it's pretty cool what we see. We see, as they say in Daniel 6, I don't think this one's on the screen because I didn't put it up there. At this, the administrator and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his contact of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. Finally, these men said, we will never find any basis for charges against this man, Daniel, unless it has something to do with the law of God. So here we have these two sides of the same argument. We've got the king who recognizes and realizes that Daniel's faith and Daniel's commitment to God allows him to be completely trustworthy and completely good, and I can put whatever I want on him, and I know he's not going to turn around and stab me in the back. We recognize that he has character on this side. And then what these people who hate Daniel now realize is, oh, he is kind of exactly what the king is looking for. He is kind of exactly why the king is elevating him is for this very reason, that we can't find any fault to him. All of us know that's because of his commitment to God, man. He has godly character because he has remained committed to God throughout these 50 years or however long he has been in this kingdom. And so then they say, well, great. I know what we can get him on. His faith and commitment to God. If that's the backbone behind everything, what we know to be true is that this guy does not miss his times to pray. This guy is so committed to God that every single day he goes up to his room, he takes up to this window and he prays every day. He prays, he praises God, all this stuff. That's how we're gonna, that's how we going to set it up. And just real quick, imagine someone tries to take you down. They look into every single part of your life, and the only thing they know they can hang you up on is that you're too committed to God. That's pretty sweet. That's, I mean, oh, to have that much faith and that much character in our life. But nonetheless, they go to the king. Because how can you get the king to do something? You remind the king of how great and how powerful he is. They go to the king and they say, King Darius, you are so great. And because you are so great, you have to, you need to make a decree. Make a decree that no one can worship or bow down to any God or pray to any God or any person except you for 30 days. You deserve that kind of praise because you're awesome. And King's like, yeah, I am awesome. You are 100% right. We need this to happen. And so he makes a decree and he writes it into law. Not only that you have to do it, but he also writes in the consequence that if you don't do it, if you bow down and you worship or praise any other God or any other person, that you are to be thrown into the lion's den and executed. They got him now. And so comes one of my favorite written verses in all of the Bible. So let's read this one together. So comes verse 10 when our buddy Daniel finds out what just happened. Now, when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home in his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Perfect. Let's go to the window where people can see us. Three times a day, he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to any God in this 30 days, you'll be killed. You will be ripped apart by lions. And Daniel says, what should I do about this? I got to go pray to my God about this. And it's incredible. It's awesome. I love that it's, and why I say I love the way that it's written is because it seems instantaneous, right? It's like, oh shoot, this is bad. I got to go pray about this, which is great because it is exactly what he just read that he wasn't allowed to do. But all that Daniel knows is that regardless of circumstance, that what he must remain connected to is his God. And so he goes and two to three times a day, he prays to God and he gives thanks to his God. And then the kicker, just as he had always done. He doesn't start doing it. He doesn't do like Michael Scott does in the office where Pam finds out that he's dating her mom and he's like, oh, I'm going to date her even harder now. It's not like he's like, oh, I'm going to pray so much harder now. King, you're not even going to believe it. He doesn't change anything. He just remains connected daily to his God, spending time in prayer. Does he know that it is still defiant? Yeah. But it's not worth it to give it up for him because it's the most important thing in his life. And it has grounded him through every part of his life and it has brought him this far and he has faith that it's going to continue to bring him through. And so they got him. They go to the king. They say, king, please remind me, didn't you write this into law that people could only bow to you and praise you during this 30 days? And before they mentioned Daniel, who he loves, and he's about to elevate to prominence, even greater prominence, he says, yes, it's been written into law. I can't take it back. There's no way. It is law. That's what law stands for. And they said, well, do you remember that one exile from Judah? I think his name's Daniel. And like, by the way, how disrespectful is that? Like, hey, you know the guy who's maybe closest to you of anyone in this kingdom, the guy you're about to elevate to the number two, I'm going to refer to him as just this exile that like back like 50 some odd years ago was exiled to this place. It'd be like me like referring to Nate, our pastor, and being like, hey, you guys know Nate, right? The one that graduated from Toccoa Falls College? Like, you guys all know him as the pastor. We all know this guy, but it's like, I don't need to bring up some random fact from like 30 years ago. I don't know if it was 30 years ago. I just know he's older than I am. So he's older than I am, so it is what it is. But as disrespectful and as weird as it is, what we recognize and what we realize is their ultimate problem with Daniel is his race and his values. And I think even more than that, it frustrates them that clearly he's right about something. They're frustrated that he only worships this one God, but they're even more frustrated that for some reason his commitment to this God has allowed his character to be what it is. And Darius is upset about this. He's hurt, he's frustrated because he realizes, oh, I've been tricked. I've been had. And so we roll to verse 16. So the king gave the order and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lion's den. The king said to Daniel, may your God whom you serve continuously rescue you. He has to do it. He has to throw him in. I love that part at the end where it's clear that these people all know his commitment to God. And King Darius is kind of open to the fact that, hey, may this God that you serve so continuously, may he come through. I would love, I would love for you to be right about this. They cover it, so Daniel can't get out. King goes home. Can't sleep. He doesn't have any entertainment brought into him. He doesn't watch any TV, I guess, is what that means. He doesn't? Daniel answered, O king, live forever. My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt do it? This God that you serve and this God that I know you believe was protecting you, did he protect you? And Daniel's like, yeah, of course he did, man. So he's brought out. King says, get Daniel out of here. We threw him in. Lions weren't interested because the angels shut their mouths. In his fury, he throws all of the remaining satraps that tricked him into the same lion's den and they were killed, which is a pretty grisly detail in the story, but it is a detail nonetheless. And then we come to the culmination, starting in verse 25. It says, in his land, and he dec. He performs signs and wonders in the heaven and on the earth. He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions. He witnesses the glory of the God and not only does it change his life, but he makes a decree so that every single person in his entire nation can know how big, how great, how eternal, and how awesome this God is. Praise be to God for that. The synopsis of Daniel that we talked about at the beginning of last week was this, that the Lord is in complete control of everything. Praise be to this God that has, that certainly that saved Daniel, but saved Daniel for the purpose of bringing this glory to the king and to all of the people so that they will know forever the glory of God, that they can witness and understand how great he is, how powerful he is, and how good he is. That is just awesome. That is a great story. That is a story that probably most of us know and most of us have read and gone through because this is a heroic story. But even though and while it's a heroic story, I think while we certainly place God where he needs to be is like look at this God who wants to make sure that not only his people, but all people recognize and see and understand his power and his glory. I do think that sometimes we misinterpret and we misrepresent who Daniel is in this story. Because so many incredible heroic things happen, we forget and we miss that Daniel doesn't really do any big, significant, heroic action in this. Like next week, we're going to be talking about, who are we talking about next week? Samson. Thanks, Nate. Thanks, Toccoa Falls alum, Nate. Next week, we're talking about Samson. When the Lord's strength is in Samson, that dude's taking out armies on his own. That's not the same thing that Daniel does here. He doesn't start an uprising. He doesn't storm into the king's quarters and demand that he reverses the law or says the Lord is going to strike you down if you, whatever. He just stays committed to spending time with God, trusting fully that his commitment and his relationship with God will put him in places where he can make God's glory seen. And that's what happens, right? In the beginning, we see that he's being elevated to prominence because of his character and because of his integrity, his trustworthiness. We know very clearly that that comes from his connection and his relationship with God. He has godly character. He can't be brought down by these people because of his character that comes from his commitment to God. And when his faith is put to the test, because he was already committed to his God, nothing was going to change. And when the Lord finally did put Daniel front and center, Daniel comfortably knew and recognized the Lord has me here because he is going to glorify himself through me. A lot of big and incredible things happened, but the only role that Daniel played was simply staying connected and growing in his relationship with his father. And if I'm right about that, if I'm right, if I'm correct in my assumption, or if you listen to this story, if you read for yourself and you agree with me that, yeah, this is kind of weird. I've always considered Daniel in the lines in that Daniel's kind of the hero of it, but he's not really doing heroic things. He's just living a life connected to God. He just daily connects to God through prayer and through praise. then what I'd argue with you is that a faith like Daniel's is waiting for us, is waiting for you and waiting for me, on the other side of consistent discipline in our personal relationship with God. Because the other thing I find noteworthy that I think we forget, because we kind of lump in biblical characters as these men and women whose lives are completely and consistently committed solely to God. Now, this is true of Daniel, but he's not like Paul where he's traveling to churches and reading scripture and making sure he understands scripture and understands Christ well enough to be able to send it out to the nations. This is a guy who's in politics. This is a guy who's in politics in a land where no one believes what he believes. And so his connection to God is his personal connection to God. Now, do people recognize and know it? Yeah. That's why the people know that they could make him fall because, hey, he's going to stay committed to God. The king, this God that you consistently are committed to, did he save you? They know that he's characterized by his faith, but he doesn't go into work as a minister and spend eight hours a day reading scripture and praying. This is about people who go into work and live for God because they're committed to him in their spare and quiet moments. Daniel three times day, spends time in prayer. I imagine he wakes up, he starts his day off with prayer. He goes during lunch and spends time in prayer. Before he goes to bed, he prays. I don't know. But the point is not that his entire life, every second of every day is dedicated to prayer, dedicated to reading scripture. The point is that his consistent daily time, just spending some time with God, allowing the Lord to work in his heart, just in the spare time that he has, creating some time during the day to spend time with prayer, that that saturates everything else in his life. I think it's the same with us. I think all of us would agree that the things that we care about and the things that we pretty consistently do, it kind of shapes the things that we do. Like, this is a silly example, but bear with me. I'm a big Frisbee guy. I like Frisbee. I like playing Ultimate Frisbee. I was watching ultimate frisbee all weekend. And so while I'm preparing for my sermons, I'm throwing the frisbee up and down the hallway over there. But sometimes I'm not allowed to do frisbee. Sometimes I have to stand in Aaron's office and talk ministry with Aaron back here. And as Aaron can attest to you, when I talk to her, I throw a lot of backhands. I throw a lot of flicks. I throw in the occasional hammer. I do it all the time. It's dumb. It's silly. But it's because, like, even though I'm not actively doing this thing, it's still on my mind, right? And it's still, like, literally body want to like do it and play it and throw it. When I drive around, when I see trees in a line, I'm like, there's a disc golf hole. It's not actually a disc golf hole, but that's what I see. You know, I mean, some of you in here maybe were skateboarders. And when some people see stairs, like, oh, that would be sick to ollie off of. I was always one of those, hey, skating is cool, and I'm bad at it. So I was like, that would be a sick thing for other people to skate. We recognize and we see things through the lenses of what we care about and what we consistently do. How many of us in here are or have been married or have kids? You can raise your hand. Yeah, nice. Congratulations. Now, I might be wrong about this. I'm only engaged. But I'll be married one day, and I think that this will be true. Raise your hand again if your marriage, your relationship with your wife or your husband, your relationship to your kids, the love that you experience from these relationships, if they impact not only the times that you're spending with them, but they impact the way that you live every part of your life. Yeah, man. Because the thing that we care about and the things that we spend time doing, and when we get to experience this love that makes us better and changes our heart, that doesn't only change our heart, and that doesn't only impact the way that we live just when we're doing those things. But it's our consistent connection to those things that continue to allow us to live out that love that we experience with and from our wife, from our kids, from our husbands. And the same is so, so, so true in our faith. As we daily spend time in the Word, daily spend time reading Scripture, just when we wake up, we read some Scripture, We spend time praying. Or maybe before we go into a meeting, we stay a quick prayer. When we consistently come and we meet together on Sunday mornings, when you meet with your small group and you grow and you build each other up, when those things happen, it saturates every other part of our life. Like Daniel, our character grows. Our integrity is deeper and deeper rooted in the things of God, and people see and people notice. I think a lot of times we view faith and we want God to do these huge, incredible things in our life and we want Him to use us to glorify Him. And ultimately, I think what the Lord calls us to do is stay rooted and connected in Him. And when that's the case, nothing else can happen except for him being glorified in us. And that's why Jesus gives this call and why Jesus charges us in John 15. This one's going to be up on the screen. We're going to read verses 4 through 5 and verse 8 together. I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. This is to my Father's glory that you may bear fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. When we are in Christ, we are connected to Christ. He is the vine, we are the branches. And if we want to produce fruit, all it takes is being connected to the vine. And we let the vine be what the vine is. Someone who produces fruit and elevates the glory of God. And that's our goal. Our goal is to remain connected to Christ. Always. And ultimately, our goal is to be someone who's defined as Daniel is defined, not only by name, but by the way he lives, but someone who is defined by God is my judge. I will stay connected. I will remain in him. And he, through me, will produce fruit. And he, through me, will glorify himself and do incredible things. It's not just for the biblical heroes. It's for every single one of us. We all, as we give our hearts to Christ, as we all believe in his lordship and in his sacrifice to us and his resurrection for us, that connects us to the vine. And when we continue to remain connected, when we continue to grow closer and closer as we continue to grow in him, grow closer to God, recognize and understand and realize his love more and more, then so too do we produce fruit and we show that love and we serve people the way that we've been loved and the way that we've been served through Christ. To close, I found, I was reading this book. It's by Andrew Murray called Abiding in Christ. I had a hard time actually with this sermon for a while because I was so excited about so many things. Like I kept pulling at things and being like, oh, I love this, and I love this, and I love this. And ultimately, on Thursday, as I was preparing, I ended up just reading like five chapters of this book called Abiding in Christ. I think I say that mostly to say, like, you should read it. But this book called Abiding in Christ is a book that is solely written connecting us and trying to help us fully and rightly and completely understand those verses in John 15 of what it means to abide in Christ, what it means to remain in Christ, what it means that God is divine and that we are the branches, what it means that through God we are able to produce fruit. And in that book, he writes a prayer that I really liked. And so if you would, please bow with me and we're going to pray. And I'm going to read this prayer that he wrote because I think it's really beautiful. heartedly surrender to abide in you alone brings a joy that is unspeakable and full of glory. May all of us who have begun to taste the sweetness of this life yield ourselves to be witnesses of the grace and power of our Lord to keep us united in him. And may we seek by word and walk to win others to follow him, to follow you wholly. It is only in such fruit bearing that our own abiding can be maintained. Lord, let us produce fruit solely by just being connected to you every day. We love you. Amen.

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along. And that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. This week, Daniel in the lion's den. Nice. All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Grace. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here, and I'm so excited. I'm so thrilled once again to be able to be up here preaching in the book of Daniel. As I always do, I spend time, I read through or I listen to different sermons on the topic I'm going to talk about. I'll read, you know, parts of books, whatever. Whatever I can do to get a good solid wisdom and understanding of what's going on. And as I found one sermon, I took specific note of something that I thought was pretty cool. And the reason why I'm going to do it up there at the front is it's not directly about Daniel 6, but I think it does an awesome job of reminding us of what we talked about last week, while then connecting it to where we're going to go today with Daniel and the lion's den. John Piper started out his sermon in Daniel, referring to Daniel's name and talking about that in Hebrew, his name in Hebrew means essentially, God is my judge. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, not only because, hey, that's a great name. You know, if you're thinking, if you're having a baby, Daniel, God is my judge. Perfect. But it's pretty cool because when you look at the book of Daniel, as you sift through the stories we talked about last week, and when you get into this week and what we're talking about this week, what we see is, I mean, there's not a more aptly named character that I know of in the Bible, right? This is a guy, Piper puts it this way. He says that God is my judge, this name that has been given to Daniel, that this almost becomes like a creed or like a motto of how and where he lives his life. He says this comes out of the way that he ate. We think back to Daniel 1. Daniel comes over as a young, exiled man from Judah, and he says, hey, I'm not going to eat the food that you're giving me because I feel like that will be defiling myself and defiling my God, and I'm not going to do that. He stands in his faith. He says, hey, what matters is what God thinks about this, because God is my judge. And then he says, it comes out in the way that he interprets dreams. We go to Daniel 2, which we talked about as well. Not only Daniel 2, but Daniel's, both Daniel 4 and 5, which we're not going to talk about today, but in essence, Daniel goes to different kings and he interprets their dreams. And the way he interprets the dreams is, one, through the providence of God. We know it's his connection and his commitment to God that allows him the wisdom to interpret the dreams these kings are having. And the interpretations are all about, hey, basically, hey, you're the king for right now. The Lord has allowed you to have the power that you have, but the Lord is in sole control of that power. The Lord has every bit of power, and you're just a pawn in his system. And we see that played out in different ways. We see him bring people into power. We see him take power away. We see him give power back to kings. And we see him ultimately put people to death for disobeying and dishonoring him. He says, God is my judge, influences the way he writes the book. As we go through these first six chapters of Daniel, Daniel clearly chooses and picks to write about these six significant events because this is where he sees that God is most glorified. And so this is what he chooses to write about. And then as we transition into Daniel 6 and Daniel in the lion's den, we see that it comes out in the way that he prayed. And so we open up to page number 880, whoever wants to roll with us, but we open up to Daniel 6. And we open up to Daniel and the Lion's Den, which at its core is just one of your classic workplace disputes. You're in the office and your boss decides that he's going to elevate, he's going to promote someone to be now over you, and you don't think he should be there, or you don't think she should be there. You're not thrilled about the promotion that your boss made, and so, like you do, you go to your other people that you work with who also don't think that that person should have gotten that promotion, and you devise a scheme. And you devise a scheme that basically allows the boss to be tricked into throwing that person who got the promotion into a den of lions. We know it. It's the age-old story. But ultimately, I guess for those of us who maybe have not experienced this or maybe will find a couple different things that maybe these guys tried to do. Let's still go through it together. We jump in on Daniel 6, and basically, as these chapters have gone, we have seen how devoted and how committed to God Daniel has been throughout his life. God is my judge. That's Daniel. That is how he lives his life. And through that, the Lord has moved in Daniel, not only to provide him wisdom, but also because of his commitment, we see that his character is such that he is found completely and wholly trustworthy to every one of the kings that he serves under. And so as that continues to happen, what we know is that his character and his integrity come and is rooted in his commitment and his faith to God. But that doesn't really matter to the king. All that matters to the king is this man is trustworthy and I know I can continue to elevate him and he's going to continue to remain faithful to him. And we know that that comes from God, but ultimately, it just works out for Daniel. And so here we are in Daniel 6. Daniel is now on his third king. We talked about Nebuchadnezzar last week. In the middle of that, there is a pretty wild and awesome story about King Belshazzar. But King Belshazzar has died, Darius has taken over, and what Darius has recognized and realized, once more, like every other king, Daniel can be trusted, and I am going to trust him with much. There are 120 satraps, it says. There's basically, satraps are these people who are over different regions within the empire. And then above those satraps, there's three people that their goal and their role is to govern and to lead the people that are the different satraps. So they're the leaders of the leaders in essence. Well, Daniel was one of those three, and Darius has decided, Daniel is my guy. I'm going to continue to promote him. I'm going to continue to elevate him to prominence. He decides basically to say, hey, Daniel, I'm going to elevate you above those three, and you are now going to be basically my number two. You are going to govern all of my governors, and the only person that you bow down to, or the only person that you serve, and that you're not over and above, is myself. Well, like we just talked about, not everyone really liked that. There's a lot of satraps who are like, wait, what? What's this? This guy, this random exile from Judah who doesn't believe or look like, who doesn't like serve or bow down to any of our gods, now we have to bow down to him? That's not how I'm rolling. And so he does what we would, they do what we would all do in a similar scenario, and they start to devise a scheme. And I love the way that they devise their scheme because they go about looking into his personal life. And they're like, all right, well, time to become private investigators. We got to figure out the way that this man falls short. What can we hang him up on? What in his character can we find that's flawed that we can bring to the king to where the king will have to relieve him of these duties that we don't want him to have. And it's pretty cool what we see. We see, as they say in Daniel 6, I don't think this one's on the screen because I didn't put it up there. At this, the administrator and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his contact of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. Finally, these men said, we will never find any basis for charges against this man, Daniel, unless it has something to do with the law of God. So here we have these two sides of the same argument. We've got the king who recognizes and realizes that Daniel's faith and Daniel's commitment to God allows him to be completely trustworthy and completely good, and I can put whatever I want on him, and I know he's not going to turn around and stab me in the back. We recognize that he has character on this side. And then what these people who hate Daniel now realize is, oh, he is kind of exactly what the king is looking for. He is kind of exactly why the king is elevating him is for this very reason, that we can't find any fault to him. All of us know that's because of his commitment to God, man. He has godly character because he has remained committed to God throughout these 50 years or however long he has been in this kingdom. And so then they say, well, great. I know what we can get him on. His faith and commitment to God. If that's the backbone behind everything, what we know to be true is that this guy does not miss his times to pray. This guy is so committed to God that every single day he goes up to his room, he takes up to this window and he prays every day. He prays, he praises God, all this stuff. That's how we're gonna, that's how we going to set it up. And just real quick, imagine someone tries to take you down. They look into every single part of your life, and the only thing they know they can hang you up on is that you're too committed to God. That's pretty sweet. That's, I mean, oh, to have that much faith and that much character in our life. But nonetheless, they go to the king. Because how can you get the king to do something? You remind the king of how great and how powerful he is. They go to the king and they say, King Darius, you are so great. And because you are so great, you have to, you need to make a decree. Make a decree that no one can worship or bow down to any God or pray to any God or any person except you for 30 days. You deserve that kind of praise because you're awesome. And King's like, yeah, I am awesome. You are 100% right. We need this to happen. And so he makes a decree and he writes it into law. Not only that you have to do it, but he also writes in the consequence that if you don't do it, if you bow down and you worship or praise any other God or any other person, that you are to be thrown into the lion's den and executed. They got him now. And so comes one of my favorite written verses in all of the Bible. So let's read this one together. So comes verse 10 when our buddy Daniel finds out what just happened. Now, when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home in his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Perfect. Let's go to the window where people can see us. Three times a day, he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to any God in this 30 days, you'll be killed. You will be ripped apart by lions. And Daniel says, what should I do about this? I got to go pray to my God about this. And it's incredible. It's awesome. I love that it's, and why I say I love the way that it's written is because it seems instantaneous, right? It's like, oh shoot, this is bad. I got to go pray about this, which is great because it is exactly what he just read that he wasn't allowed to do. But all that Daniel knows is that regardless of circumstance, that what he must remain connected to is his God. And so he goes and two to three times a day, he prays to God and he gives thanks to his God. And then the kicker, just as he had always done. He doesn't start doing it. He doesn't do like Michael Scott does in the office where Pam finds out that he's dating her mom and he's like, oh, I'm going to date her even harder now. It's not like he's like, oh, I'm going to pray so much harder now. King, you're not even going to believe it. He doesn't change anything. He just remains connected daily to his God, spending time in prayer. Does he know that it is still defiant? Yeah. But it's not worth it to give it up for him because it's the most important thing in his life. And it has grounded him through every part of his life and it has brought him this far and he has faith that it's going to continue to bring him through. And so they got him. They go to the king. They say, king, please remind me, didn't you write this into law that people could only bow to you and praise you during this 30 days? And before they mentioned Daniel, who he loves, and he's about to elevate to prominence, even greater prominence, he says, yes, it's been written into law. I can't take it back. There's no way. It is law. That's what law stands for. And they said, well, do you remember that one exile from Judah? I think his name's Daniel. And like, by the way, how disrespectful is that? Like, hey, you know the guy who's maybe closest to you of anyone in this kingdom, the guy you're about to elevate to the number two, I'm going to refer to him as just this exile that like back like 50 some odd years ago was exiled to this place. It'd be like me like referring to Nate, our pastor, and being like, hey, you guys know Nate, right? The one that graduated from Toccoa Falls College? Like, you guys all know him as the pastor. We all know this guy, but it's like, I don't need to bring up some random fact from like 30 years ago. I don't know if it was 30 years ago. I just know he's older than I am. So he's older than I am, so it is what it is. But as disrespectful and as weird as it is, what we recognize and what we realize is their ultimate problem with Daniel is his race and his values. And I think even more than that, it frustrates them that clearly he's right about something. They're frustrated that he only worships this one God, but they're even more frustrated that for some reason his commitment to this God has allowed his character to be what it is. And Darius is upset about this. He's hurt, he's frustrated because he realizes, oh, I've been tricked. I've been had. And so we roll to verse 16. So the king gave the order and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lion's den. The king said to Daniel, may your God whom you serve continuously rescue you. He has to do it. He has to throw him in. I love that part at the end where it's clear that these people all know his commitment to God. And King Darius is kind of open to the fact that, hey, may this God that you serve so continuously, may he come through. I would love, I would love for you to be right about this. They cover it, so Daniel can't get out. King goes home. Can't sleep. He doesn't have any entertainment brought into him. He doesn't watch any TV, I guess, is what that means. He doesn't? Daniel answered, O king, live forever. My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt do it? This God that you serve and this God that I know you believe was protecting you, did he protect you? And Daniel's like, yeah, of course he did, man. So he's brought out. King says, get Daniel out of here. We threw him in. Lions weren't interested because the angels shut their mouths. In his fury, he throws all of the remaining satraps that tricked him into the same lion's den and they were killed, which is a pretty grisly detail in the story, but it is a detail nonetheless. And then we come to the culmination, starting in verse 25. It says, in his land, and he dec. He performs signs and wonders in the heaven and on the earth. He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions. He witnesses the glory of the God and not only does it change his life, but he makes a decree so that every single person in his entire nation can know how big, how great, how eternal, and how awesome this God is. Praise be to God for that. The synopsis of Daniel that we talked about at the beginning of last week was this, that the Lord is in complete control of everything. Praise be to this God that has, that certainly that saved Daniel, but saved Daniel for the purpose of bringing this glory to the king and to all of the people so that they will know forever the glory of God, that they can witness and understand how great he is, how powerful he is, and how good he is. That is just awesome. That is a great story. That is a story that probably most of us know and most of us have read and gone through because this is a heroic story. But even though and while it's a heroic story, I think while we certainly place God where he needs to be is like look at this God who wants to make sure that not only his people, but all people recognize and see and understand his power and his glory. I do think that sometimes we misinterpret and we misrepresent who Daniel is in this story. Because so many incredible heroic things happen, we forget and we miss that Daniel doesn't really do any big, significant, heroic action in this. Like next week, we're going to be talking about, who are we talking about next week? Samson. Thanks, Nate. Thanks, Toccoa Falls alum, Nate. Next week, we're talking about Samson. When the Lord's strength is in Samson, that dude's taking out armies on his own. That's not the same thing that Daniel does here. He doesn't start an uprising. He doesn't storm into the king's quarters and demand that he reverses the law or says the Lord is going to strike you down if you, whatever. He just stays committed to spending time with God, trusting fully that his commitment and his relationship with God will put him in places where he can make God's glory seen. And that's what happens, right? In the beginning, we see that he's being elevated to prominence because of his character and because of his integrity, his trustworthiness. We know very clearly that that comes from his connection and his relationship with God. He has godly character. He can't be brought down by these people because of his character that comes from his commitment to God. And when his faith is put to the test, because he was already committed to his God, nothing was going to change. And when the Lord finally did put Daniel front and center, Daniel comfortably knew and recognized the Lord has me here because he is going to glorify himself through me. A lot of big and incredible things happened, but the only role that Daniel played was simply staying connected and growing in his relationship with his father. And if I'm right about that, if I'm right, if I'm correct in my assumption, or if you listen to this story, if you read for yourself and you agree with me that, yeah, this is kind of weird. I've always considered Daniel in the lines in that Daniel's kind of the hero of it, but he's not really doing heroic things. He's just living a life connected to God. He just daily connects to God through prayer and through praise. then what I'd argue with you is that a faith like Daniel's is waiting for us, is waiting for you and waiting for me, on the other side of consistent discipline in our personal relationship with God. Because the other thing I find noteworthy that I think we forget, because we kind of lump in biblical characters as these men and women whose lives are completely and consistently committed solely to God. Now, this is true of Daniel, but he's not like Paul where he's traveling to churches and reading scripture and making sure he understands scripture and understands Christ well enough to be able to send it out to the nations. This is a guy who's in politics. This is a guy who's in politics in a land where no one believes what he believes. And so his connection to God is his personal connection to God. Now, do people recognize and know it? Yeah. That's why the people know that they could make him fall because, hey, he's going to stay committed to God. The king, this God that you consistently are committed to, did he save you? They know that he's characterized by his faith, but he doesn't go into work as a minister and spend eight hours a day reading scripture and praying. This is about people who go into work and live for God because they're committed to him in their spare and quiet moments. Daniel three times day, spends time in prayer. I imagine he wakes up, he starts his day off with prayer. He goes during lunch and spends time in prayer. Before he goes to bed, he prays. I don't know. But the point is not that his entire life, every second of every day is dedicated to prayer, dedicated to reading scripture. The point is that his consistent daily time, just spending some time with God, allowing the Lord to work in his heart, just in the spare time that he has, creating some time during the day to spend time with prayer, that that saturates everything else in his life. I think it's the same with us. I think all of us would agree that the things that we care about and the things that we pretty consistently do, it kind of shapes the things that we do. Like, this is a silly example, but bear with me. I'm a big Frisbee guy. I like Frisbee. I like playing Ultimate Frisbee. I was watching ultimate frisbee all weekend. And so while I'm preparing for my sermons, I'm throwing the frisbee up and down the hallway over there. But sometimes I'm not allowed to do frisbee. Sometimes I have to stand in Aaron's office and talk ministry with Aaron back here. And as Aaron can attest to you, when I talk to her, I throw a lot of backhands. I throw a lot of flicks. I throw in the occasional hammer. I do it all the time. It's dumb. It's silly. But it's because, like, even though I'm not actively doing this thing, it's still on my mind, right? And it's still, like, literally body want to like do it and play it and throw it. When I drive around, when I see trees in a line, I'm like, there's a disc golf hole. It's not actually a disc golf hole, but that's what I see. You know, I mean, some of you in here maybe were skateboarders. And when some people see stairs, like, oh, that would be sick to ollie off of. I was always one of those, hey, skating is cool, and I'm bad at it. So I was like, that would be a sick thing for other people to skate. We recognize and we see things through the lenses of what we care about and what we consistently do. How many of us in here are or have been married or have kids? You can raise your hand. Yeah, nice. Congratulations. Now, I might be wrong about this. I'm only engaged. But I'll be married one day, and I think that this will be true. Raise your hand again if your marriage, your relationship with your wife or your husband, your relationship to your kids, the love that you experience from these relationships, if they impact not only the times that you're spending with them, but they impact the way that you live every part of your life. Yeah, man. Because the thing that we care about and the things that we spend time doing, and when we get to experience this love that makes us better and changes our heart, that doesn't only change our heart, and that doesn't only impact the way that we live just when we're doing those things. But it's our consistent connection to those things that continue to allow us to live out that love that we experience with and from our wife, from our kids, from our husbands. And the same is so, so, so true in our faith. As we daily spend time in the Word, daily spend time reading Scripture, just when we wake up, we read some Scripture, We spend time praying. Or maybe before we go into a meeting, we stay a quick prayer. When we consistently come and we meet together on Sunday mornings, when you meet with your small group and you grow and you build each other up, when those things happen, it saturates every other part of our life. Like Daniel, our character grows. Our integrity is deeper and deeper rooted in the things of God, and people see and people notice. I think a lot of times we view faith and we want God to do these huge, incredible things in our life and we want Him to use us to glorify Him. And ultimately, I think what the Lord calls us to do is stay rooted and connected in Him. And when that's the case, nothing else can happen except for him being glorified in us. And that's why Jesus gives this call and why Jesus charges us in John 15. This one's going to be up on the screen. We're going to read verses 4 through 5 and verse 8 together. I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. This is to my Father's glory that you may bear fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. When we are in Christ, we are connected to Christ. He is the vine, we are the branches. And if we want to produce fruit, all it takes is being connected to the vine. And we let the vine be what the vine is. Someone who produces fruit and elevates the glory of God. And that's our goal. Our goal is to remain connected to Christ. Always. And ultimately, our goal is to be someone who's defined as Daniel is defined, not only by name, but by the way he lives, but someone who is defined by God is my judge. I will stay connected. I will remain in him. And he, through me, will produce fruit. And he, through me, will glorify himself and do incredible things. It's not just for the biblical heroes. It's for every single one of us. We all, as we give our hearts to Christ, as we all believe in his lordship and in his sacrifice to us and his resurrection for us, that connects us to the vine. And when we continue to remain connected, when we continue to grow closer and closer as we continue to grow in him, grow closer to God, recognize and understand and realize his love more and more, then so too do we produce fruit and we show that love and we serve people the way that we've been loved and the way that we've been served through Christ. To close, I found, I was reading this book. It's by Andrew Murray called Abiding in Christ. I had a hard time actually with this sermon for a while because I was so excited about so many things. Like I kept pulling at things and being like, oh, I love this, and I love this, and I love this. And ultimately, on Thursday, as I was preparing, I ended up just reading like five chapters of this book called Abiding in Christ. I think I say that mostly to say, like, you should read it. But this book called Abiding in Christ is a book that is solely written connecting us and trying to help us fully and rightly and completely understand those verses in John 15 of what it means to abide in Christ, what it means to remain in Christ, what it means that God is divine and that we are the branches, what it means that through God we are able to produce fruit. And in that book, he writes a prayer that I really liked. And so if you would, please bow with me and we're going to pray. And I'm going to read this prayer that he wrote because I think it's really beautiful. heartedly surrender to abide in you alone brings a joy that is unspeakable and full of glory. May all of us who have begun to taste the sweetness of this life yield ourselves to be witnesses of the grace and power of our Lord to keep us united in him. And may we seek by word and walk to win others to follow him, to follow you wholly. It is only in such fruit bearing that our own abiding can be maintained. Lord, let us produce fruit solely by just being connected to you every day. We love you. Amen.

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along. And that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. This week, Daniel in the lion's den. Nice. All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Grace. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here, and I'm so excited. I'm so thrilled once again to be able to be up here preaching in the book of Daniel. As I always do, I spend time, I read through or I listen to different sermons on the topic I'm going to talk about. I'll read, you know, parts of books, whatever. Whatever I can do to get a good solid wisdom and understanding of what's going on. And as I found one sermon, I took specific note of something that I thought was pretty cool. And the reason why I'm going to do it up there at the front is it's not directly about Daniel 6, but I think it does an awesome job of reminding us of what we talked about last week, while then connecting it to where we're going to go today with Daniel and the lion's den. John Piper started out his sermon in Daniel, referring to Daniel's name and talking about that in Hebrew, his name in Hebrew means essentially, God is my judge. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, not only because, hey, that's a great name. You know, if you're thinking, if you're having a baby, Daniel, God is my judge. Perfect. But it's pretty cool because when you look at the book of Daniel, as you sift through the stories we talked about last week, and when you get into this week and what we're talking about this week, what we see is, I mean, there's not a more aptly named character that I know of in the Bible, right? This is a guy, Piper puts it this way. He says that God is my judge, this name that has been given to Daniel, that this almost becomes like a creed or like a motto of how and where he lives his life. He says this comes out of the way that he ate. We think back to Daniel 1. Daniel comes over as a young, exiled man from Judah, and he says, hey, I'm not going to eat the food that you're giving me because I feel like that will be defiling myself and defiling my God, and I'm not going to do that. He stands in his faith. He says, hey, what matters is what God thinks about this, because God is my judge. And then he says, it comes out in the way that he interprets dreams. We go to Daniel 2, which we talked about as well. Not only Daniel 2, but Daniel's, both Daniel 4 and 5, which we're not going to talk about today, but in essence, Daniel goes to different kings and he interprets their dreams. And the way he interprets the dreams is, one, through the providence of God. We know it's his connection and his commitment to God that allows him the wisdom to interpret the dreams these kings are having. And the interpretations are all about, hey, basically, hey, you're the king for right now. The Lord has allowed you to have the power that you have, but the Lord is in sole control of that power. The Lord has every bit of power, and you're just a pawn in his system. And we see that played out in different ways. We see him bring people into power. We see him take power away. We see him give power back to kings. And we see him ultimately put people to death for disobeying and dishonoring him. He says, God is my judge, influences the way he writes the book. As we go through these first six chapters of Daniel, Daniel clearly chooses and picks to write about these six significant events because this is where he sees that God is most glorified. And so this is what he chooses to write about. And then as we transition into Daniel 6 and Daniel in the lion's den, we see that it comes out in the way that he prayed. And so we open up to page number 880, whoever wants to roll with us, but we open up to Daniel 6. And we open up to Daniel and the Lion's Den, which at its core is just one of your classic workplace disputes. You're in the office and your boss decides that he's going to elevate, he's going to promote someone to be now over you, and you don't think he should be there, or you don't think she should be there. You're not thrilled about the promotion that your boss made, and so, like you do, you go to your other people that you work with who also don't think that that person should have gotten that promotion, and you devise a scheme. And you devise a scheme that basically allows the boss to be tricked into throwing that person who got the promotion into a den of lions. We know it. It's the age-old story. But ultimately, I guess for those of us who maybe have not experienced this or maybe will find a couple different things that maybe these guys tried to do. Let's still go through it together. We jump in on Daniel 6, and basically, as these chapters have gone, we have seen how devoted and how committed to God Daniel has been throughout his life. God is my judge. That's Daniel. That is how he lives his life. And through that, the Lord has moved in Daniel, not only to provide him wisdom, but also because of his commitment, we see that his character is such that he is found completely and wholly trustworthy to every one of the kings that he serves under. And so as that continues to happen, what we know is that his character and his integrity come and is rooted in his commitment and his faith to God. But that doesn't really matter to the king. All that matters to the king is this man is trustworthy and I know I can continue to elevate him and he's going to continue to remain faithful to him. And we know that that comes from God, but ultimately, it just works out for Daniel. And so here we are in Daniel 6. Daniel is now on his third king. We talked about Nebuchadnezzar last week. In the middle of that, there is a pretty wild and awesome story about King Belshazzar. But King Belshazzar has died, Darius has taken over, and what Darius has recognized and realized, once more, like every other king, Daniel can be trusted, and I am going to trust him with much. There are 120 satraps, it says. There's basically, satraps are these people who are over different regions within the empire. And then above those satraps, there's three people that their goal and their role is to govern and to lead the people that are the different satraps. So they're the leaders of the leaders in essence. Well, Daniel was one of those three, and Darius has decided, Daniel is my guy. I'm going to continue to promote him. I'm going to continue to elevate him to prominence. He decides basically to say, hey, Daniel, I'm going to elevate you above those three, and you are now going to be basically my number two. You are going to govern all of my governors, and the only person that you bow down to, or the only person that you serve, and that you're not over and above, is myself. Well, like we just talked about, not everyone really liked that. There's a lot of satraps who are like, wait, what? What's this? This guy, this random exile from Judah who doesn't believe or look like, who doesn't like serve or bow down to any of our gods, now we have to bow down to him? That's not how I'm rolling. And so he does what we would, they do what we would all do in a similar scenario, and they start to devise a scheme. And I love the way that they devise their scheme because they go about looking into his personal life. And they're like, all right, well, time to become private investigators. We got to figure out the way that this man falls short. What can we hang him up on? What in his character can we find that's flawed that we can bring to the king to where the king will have to relieve him of these duties that we don't want him to have. And it's pretty cool what we see. We see, as they say in Daniel 6, I don't think this one's on the screen because I didn't put it up there. At this, the administrator and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his contact of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. Finally, these men said, we will never find any basis for charges against this man, Daniel, unless it has something to do with the law of God. So here we have these two sides of the same argument. We've got the king who recognizes and realizes that Daniel's faith and Daniel's commitment to God allows him to be completely trustworthy and completely good, and I can put whatever I want on him, and I know he's not going to turn around and stab me in the back. We recognize that he has character on this side. And then what these people who hate Daniel now realize is, oh, he is kind of exactly what the king is looking for. He is kind of exactly why the king is elevating him is for this very reason, that we can't find any fault to him. All of us know that's because of his commitment to God, man. He has godly character because he has remained committed to God throughout these 50 years or however long he has been in this kingdom. And so then they say, well, great. I know what we can get him on. His faith and commitment to God. If that's the backbone behind everything, what we know to be true is that this guy does not miss his times to pray. This guy is so committed to God that every single day he goes up to his room, he takes up to this window and he prays every day. He prays, he praises God, all this stuff. That's how we're gonna, that's how we going to set it up. And just real quick, imagine someone tries to take you down. They look into every single part of your life, and the only thing they know they can hang you up on is that you're too committed to God. That's pretty sweet. That's, I mean, oh, to have that much faith and that much character in our life. But nonetheless, they go to the king. Because how can you get the king to do something? You remind the king of how great and how powerful he is. They go to the king and they say, King Darius, you are so great. And because you are so great, you have to, you need to make a decree. Make a decree that no one can worship or bow down to any God or pray to any God or any person except you for 30 days. You deserve that kind of praise because you're awesome. And King's like, yeah, I am awesome. You are 100% right. We need this to happen. And so he makes a decree and he writes it into law. Not only that you have to do it, but he also writes in the consequence that if you don't do it, if you bow down and you worship or praise any other God or any other person, that you are to be thrown into the lion's den and executed. They got him now. And so comes one of my favorite written verses in all of the Bible. So let's read this one together. So comes verse 10 when our buddy Daniel finds out what just happened. Now, when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home in his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Perfect. Let's go to the window where people can see us. Three times a day, he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to any God in this 30 days, you'll be killed. You will be ripped apart by lions. And Daniel says, what should I do about this? I got to go pray to my God about this. And it's incredible. It's awesome. I love that it's, and why I say I love the way that it's written is because it seems instantaneous, right? It's like, oh shoot, this is bad. I got to go pray about this, which is great because it is exactly what he just read that he wasn't allowed to do. But all that Daniel knows is that regardless of circumstance, that what he must remain connected to is his God. And so he goes and two to three times a day, he prays to God and he gives thanks to his God. And then the kicker, just as he had always done. He doesn't start doing it. He doesn't do like Michael Scott does in the office where Pam finds out that he's dating her mom and he's like, oh, I'm going to date her even harder now. It's not like he's like, oh, I'm going to pray so much harder now. King, you're not even going to believe it. He doesn't change anything. He just remains connected daily to his God, spending time in prayer. Does he know that it is still defiant? Yeah. But it's not worth it to give it up for him because it's the most important thing in his life. And it has grounded him through every part of his life and it has brought him this far and he has faith that it's going to continue to bring him through. And so they got him. They go to the king. They say, king, please remind me, didn't you write this into law that people could only bow to you and praise you during this 30 days? And before they mentioned Daniel, who he loves, and he's about to elevate to prominence, even greater prominence, he says, yes, it's been written into law. I can't take it back. There's no way. It is law. That's what law stands for. And they said, well, do you remember that one exile from Judah? I think his name's Daniel. And like, by the way, how disrespectful is that? Like, hey, you know the guy who's maybe closest to you of anyone in this kingdom, the guy you're about to elevate to the number two, I'm going to refer to him as just this exile that like back like 50 some odd years ago was exiled to this place. It'd be like me like referring to Nate, our pastor, and being like, hey, you guys know Nate, right? The one that graduated from Toccoa Falls College? Like, you guys all know him as the pastor. We all know this guy, but it's like, I don't need to bring up some random fact from like 30 years ago. I don't know if it was 30 years ago. I just know he's older than I am. So he's older than I am, so it is what it is. But as disrespectful and as weird as it is, what we recognize and what we realize is their ultimate problem with Daniel is his race and his values. And I think even more than that, it frustrates them that clearly he's right about something. They're frustrated that he only worships this one God, but they're even more frustrated that for some reason his commitment to this God has allowed his character to be what it is. And Darius is upset about this. He's hurt, he's frustrated because he realizes, oh, I've been tricked. I've been had. And so we roll to verse 16. So the king gave the order and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lion's den. The king said to Daniel, may your God whom you serve continuously rescue you. He has to do it. He has to throw him in. I love that part at the end where it's clear that these people all know his commitment to God. And King Darius is kind of open to the fact that, hey, may this God that you serve so continuously, may he come through. I would love, I would love for you to be right about this. They cover it, so Daniel can't get out. King goes home. Can't sleep. He doesn't have any entertainment brought into him. He doesn't watch any TV, I guess, is what that means. He doesn't? Daniel answered, O king, live forever. My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt do it? This God that you serve and this God that I know you believe was protecting you, did he protect you? And Daniel's like, yeah, of course he did, man. So he's brought out. King says, get Daniel out of here. We threw him in. Lions weren't interested because the angels shut their mouths. In his fury, he throws all of the remaining satraps that tricked him into the same lion's den and they were killed, which is a pretty grisly detail in the story, but it is a detail nonetheless. And then we come to the culmination, starting in verse 25. It says, in his land, and he dec. He performs signs and wonders in the heaven and on the earth. He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions. He witnesses the glory of the God and not only does it change his life, but he makes a decree so that every single person in his entire nation can know how big, how great, how eternal, and how awesome this God is. Praise be to God for that. The synopsis of Daniel that we talked about at the beginning of last week was this, that the Lord is in complete control of everything. Praise be to this God that has, that certainly that saved Daniel, but saved Daniel for the purpose of bringing this glory to the king and to all of the people so that they will know forever the glory of God, that they can witness and understand how great he is, how powerful he is, and how good he is. That is just awesome. That is a great story. That is a story that probably most of us know and most of us have read and gone through because this is a heroic story. But even though and while it's a heroic story, I think while we certainly place God where he needs to be is like look at this God who wants to make sure that not only his people, but all people recognize and see and understand his power and his glory. I do think that sometimes we misinterpret and we misrepresent who Daniel is in this story. Because so many incredible heroic things happen, we forget and we miss that Daniel doesn't really do any big, significant, heroic action in this. Like next week, we're going to be talking about, who are we talking about next week? Samson. Thanks, Nate. Thanks, Toccoa Falls alum, Nate. Next week, we're talking about Samson. When the Lord's strength is in Samson, that dude's taking out armies on his own. That's not the same thing that Daniel does here. He doesn't start an uprising. He doesn't storm into the king's quarters and demand that he reverses the law or says the Lord is going to strike you down if you, whatever. He just stays committed to spending time with God, trusting fully that his commitment and his relationship with God will put him in places where he can make God's glory seen. And that's what happens, right? In the beginning, we see that he's being elevated to prominence because of his character and because of his integrity, his trustworthiness. We know very clearly that that comes from his connection and his relationship with God. He has godly character. He can't be brought down by these people because of his character that comes from his commitment to God. And when his faith is put to the test, because he was already committed to his God, nothing was going to change. And when the Lord finally did put Daniel front and center, Daniel comfortably knew and recognized the Lord has me here because he is going to glorify himself through me. A lot of big and incredible things happened, but the only role that Daniel played was simply staying connected and growing in his relationship with his father. And if I'm right about that, if I'm right, if I'm correct in my assumption, or if you listen to this story, if you read for yourself and you agree with me that, yeah, this is kind of weird. I've always considered Daniel in the lines in that Daniel's kind of the hero of it, but he's not really doing heroic things. He's just living a life connected to God. He just daily connects to God through prayer and through praise. then what I'd argue with you is that a faith like Daniel's is waiting for us, is waiting for you and waiting for me, on the other side of consistent discipline in our personal relationship with God. Because the other thing I find noteworthy that I think we forget, because we kind of lump in biblical characters as these men and women whose lives are completely and consistently committed solely to God. Now, this is true of Daniel, but he's not like Paul where he's traveling to churches and reading scripture and making sure he understands scripture and understands Christ well enough to be able to send it out to the nations. This is a guy who's in politics. This is a guy who's in politics in a land where no one believes what he believes. And so his connection to God is his personal connection to God. Now, do people recognize and know it? Yeah. That's why the people know that they could make him fall because, hey, he's going to stay committed to God. The king, this God that you consistently are committed to, did he save you? They know that he's characterized by his faith, but he doesn't go into work as a minister and spend eight hours a day reading scripture and praying. This is about people who go into work and live for God because they're committed to him in their spare and quiet moments. Daniel three times day, spends time in prayer. I imagine he wakes up, he starts his day off with prayer. He goes during lunch and spends time in prayer. Before he goes to bed, he prays. I don't know. But the point is not that his entire life, every second of every day is dedicated to prayer, dedicated to reading scripture. The point is that his consistent daily time, just spending some time with God, allowing the Lord to work in his heart, just in the spare time that he has, creating some time during the day to spend time with prayer, that that saturates everything else in his life. I think it's the same with us. I think all of us would agree that the things that we care about and the things that we pretty consistently do, it kind of shapes the things that we do. Like, this is a silly example, but bear with me. I'm a big Frisbee guy. I like Frisbee. I like playing Ultimate Frisbee. I was watching ultimate frisbee all weekend. And so while I'm preparing for my sermons, I'm throwing the frisbee up and down the hallway over there. But sometimes I'm not allowed to do frisbee. Sometimes I have to stand in Aaron's office and talk ministry with Aaron back here. And as Aaron can attest to you, when I talk to her, I throw a lot of backhands. I throw a lot of flicks. I throw in the occasional hammer. I do it all the time. It's dumb. It's silly. But it's because, like, even though I'm not actively doing this thing, it's still on my mind, right? And it's still, like, literally body want to like do it and play it and throw it. When I drive around, when I see trees in a line, I'm like, there's a disc golf hole. It's not actually a disc golf hole, but that's what I see. You know, I mean, some of you in here maybe were skateboarders. And when some people see stairs, like, oh, that would be sick to ollie off of. I was always one of those, hey, skating is cool, and I'm bad at it. So I was like, that would be a sick thing for other people to skate. We recognize and we see things through the lenses of what we care about and what we consistently do. How many of us in here are or have been married or have kids? You can raise your hand. Yeah, nice. Congratulations. Now, I might be wrong about this. I'm only engaged. But I'll be married one day, and I think that this will be true. Raise your hand again if your marriage, your relationship with your wife or your husband, your relationship to your kids, the love that you experience from these relationships, if they impact not only the times that you're spending with them, but they impact the way that you live every part of your life. Yeah, man. Because the thing that we care about and the things that we spend time doing, and when we get to experience this love that makes us better and changes our heart, that doesn't only change our heart, and that doesn't only impact the way that we live just when we're doing those things. But it's our consistent connection to those things that continue to allow us to live out that love that we experience with and from our wife, from our kids, from our husbands. And the same is so, so, so true in our faith. As we daily spend time in the Word, daily spend time reading Scripture, just when we wake up, we read some Scripture, We spend time praying. Or maybe before we go into a meeting, we stay a quick prayer. When we consistently come and we meet together on Sunday mornings, when you meet with your small group and you grow and you build each other up, when those things happen, it saturates every other part of our life. Like Daniel, our character grows. Our integrity is deeper and deeper rooted in the things of God, and people see and people notice. I think a lot of times we view faith and we want God to do these huge, incredible things in our life and we want Him to use us to glorify Him. And ultimately, I think what the Lord calls us to do is stay rooted and connected in Him. And when that's the case, nothing else can happen except for him being glorified in us. And that's why Jesus gives this call and why Jesus charges us in John 15. This one's going to be up on the screen. We're going to read verses 4 through 5 and verse 8 together. I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. This is to my Father's glory that you may bear fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. When we are in Christ, we are connected to Christ. He is the vine, we are the branches. And if we want to produce fruit, all it takes is being connected to the vine. And we let the vine be what the vine is. Someone who produces fruit and elevates the glory of God. And that's our goal. Our goal is to remain connected to Christ. Always. And ultimately, our goal is to be someone who's defined as Daniel is defined, not only by name, but by the way he lives, but someone who is defined by God is my judge. I will stay connected. I will remain in him. And he, through me, will produce fruit. And he, through me, will glorify himself and do incredible things. It's not just for the biblical heroes. It's for every single one of us. We all, as we give our hearts to Christ, as we all believe in his lordship and in his sacrifice to us and his resurrection for us, that connects us to the vine. And when we continue to remain connected, when we continue to grow closer and closer as we continue to grow in him, grow closer to God, recognize and understand and realize his love more and more, then so too do we produce fruit and we show that love and we serve people the way that we've been loved and the way that we've been served through Christ. To close, I found, I was reading this book. It's by Andrew Murray called Abiding in Christ. I had a hard time actually with this sermon for a while because I was so excited about so many things. Like I kept pulling at things and being like, oh, I love this, and I love this, and I love this. And ultimately, on Thursday, as I was preparing, I ended up just reading like five chapters of this book called Abiding in Christ. I think I say that mostly to say, like, you should read it. But this book called Abiding in Christ is a book that is solely written connecting us and trying to help us fully and rightly and completely understand those verses in John 15 of what it means to abide in Christ, what it means to remain in Christ, what it means that God is divine and that we are the branches, what it means that through God we are able to produce fruit. And in that book, he writes a prayer that I really liked. And so if you would, please bow with me and we're going to pray. And I'm going to read this prayer that he wrote because I think it's really beautiful. heartedly surrender to abide in you alone brings a joy that is unspeakable and full of glory. May all of us who have begun to taste the sweetness of this life yield ourselves to be witnesses of the grace and power of our Lord to keep us united in him. And may we seek by word and walk to win others to follow him, to follow you wholly. It is only in such fruit bearing that our own abiding can be maintained. Lord, let us produce fruit solely by just being connected to you every day. We love you. Amen.

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along. And that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. This week, Daniel in the lion's den. Nice. All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Grace. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here, and I'm so excited. I'm so thrilled once again to be able to be up here preaching in the book of Daniel. As I always do, I spend time, I read through or I listen to different sermons on the topic I'm going to talk about. I'll read, you know, parts of books, whatever. Whatever I can do to get a good solid wisdom and understanding of what's going on. And as I found one sermon, I took specific note of something that I thought was pretty cool. And the reason why I'm going to do it up there at the front is it's not directly about Daniel 6, but I think it does an awesome job of reminding us of what we talked about last week, while then connecting it to where we're going to go today with Daniel and the lion's den. John Piper started out his sermon in Daniel, referring to Daniel's name and talking about that in Hebrew, his name in Hebrew means essentially, God is my judge. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, not only because, hey, that's a great name. You know, if you're thinking, if you're having a baby, Daniel, God is my judge. Perfect. But it's pretty cool because when you look at the book of Daniel, as you sift through the stories we talked about last week, and when you get into this week and what we're talking about this week, what we see is, I mean, there's not a more aptly named character that I know of in the Bible, right? This is a guy, Piper puts it this way. He says that God is my judge, this name that has been given to Daniel, that this almost becomes like a creed or like a motto of how and where he lives his life. He says this comes out of the way that he ate. We think back to Daniel 1. Daniel comes over as a young, exiled man from Judah, and he says, hey, I'm not going to eat the food that you're giving me because I feel like that will be defiling myself and defiling my God, and I'm not going to do that. He stands in his faith. He says, hey, what matters is what God thinks about this, because God is my judge. And then he says, it comes out in the way that he interprets dreams. We go to Daniel 2, which we talked about as well. Not only Daniel 2, but Daniel's, both Daniel 4 and 5, which we're not going to talk about today, but in essence, Daniel goes to different kings and he interprets their dreams. And the way he interprets the dreams is, one, through the providence of God. We know it's his connection and his commitment to God that allows him the wisdom to interpret the dreams these kings are having. And the interpretations are all about, hey, basically, hey, you're the king for right now. The Lord has allowed you to have the power that you have, but the Lord is in sole control of that power. The Lord has every bit of power, and you're just a pawn in his system. And we see that played out in different ways. We see him bring people into power. We see him take power away. We see him give power back to kings. And we see him ultimately put people to death for disobeying and dishonoring him. He says, God is my judge, influences the way he writes the book. As we go through these first six chapters of Daniel, Daniel clearly chooses and picks to write about these six significant events because this is where he sees that God is most glorified. And so this is what he chooses to write about. And then as we transition into Daniel 6 and Daniel in the lion's den, we see that it comes out in the way that he prayed. And so we open up to page number 880, whoever wants to roll with us, but we open up to Daniel 6. And we open up to Daniel and the Lion's Den, which at its core is just one of your classic workplace disputes. You're in the office and your boss decides that he's going to elevate, he's going to promote someone to be now over you, and you don't think he should be there, or you don't think she should be there. You're not thrilled about the promotion that your boss made, and so, like you do, you go to your other people that you work with who also don't think that that person should have gotten that promotion, and you devise a scheme. And you devise a scheme that basically allows the boss to be tricked into throwing that person who got the promotion into a den of lions. We know it. It's the age-old story. But ultimately, I guess for those of us who maybe have not experienced this or maybe will find a couple different things that maybe these guys tried to do. Let's still go through it together. We jump in on Daniel 6, and basically, as these chapters have gone, we have seen how devoted and how committed to God Daniel has been throughout his life. God is my judge. That's Daniel. That is how he lives his life. And through that, the Lord has moved in Daniel, not only to provide him wisdom, but also because of his commitment, we see that his character is such that he is found completely and wholly trustworthy to every one of the kings that he serves under. And so as that continues to happen, what we know is that his character and his integrity come and is rooted in his commitment and his faith to God. But that doesn't really matter to the king. All that matters to the king is this man is trustworthy and I know I can continue to elevate him and he's going to continue to remain faithful to him. And we know that that comes from God, but ultimately, it just works out for Daniel. And so here we are in Daniel 6. Daniel is now on his third king. We talked about Nebuchadnezzar last week. In the middle of that, there is a pretty wild and awesome story about King Belshazzar. But King Belshazzar has died, Darius has taken over, and what Darius has recognized and realized, once more, like every other king, Daniel can be trusted, and I am going to trust him with much. There are 120 satraps, it says. There's basically, satraps are these people who are over different regions within the empire. And then above those satraps, there's three people that their goal and their role is to govern and to lead the people that are the different satraps. So they're the leaders of the leaders in essence. Well, Daniel was one of those three, and Darius has decided, Daniel is my guy. I'm going to continue to promote him. I'm going to continue to elevate him to prominence. He decides basically to say, hey, Daniel, I'm going to elevate you above those three, and you are now going to be basically my number two. You are going to govern all of my governors, and the only person that you bow down to, or the only person that you serve, and that you're not over and above, is myself. Well, like we just talked about, not everyone really liked that. There's a lot of satraps who are like, wait, what? What's this? This guy, this random exile from Judah who doesn't believe or look like, who doesn't like serve or bow down to any of our gods, now we have to bow down to him? That's not how I'm rolling. And so he does what we would, they do what we would all do in a similar scenario, and they start to devise a scheme. And I love the way that they devise their scheme because they go about looking into his personal life. And they're like, all right, well, time to become private investigators. We got to figure out the way that this man falls short. What can we hang him up on? What in his character can we find that's flawed that we can bring to the king to where the king will have to relieve him of these duties that we don't want him to have. And it's pretty cool what we see. We see, as they say in Daniel 6, I don't think this one's on the screen because I didn't put it up there. At this, the administrator and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his contact of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. Finally, these men said, we will never find any basis for charges against this man, Daniel, unless it has something to do with the law of God. So here we have these two sides of the same argument. We've got the king who recognizes and realizes that Daniel's faith and Daniel's commitment to God allows him to be completely trustworthy and completely good, and I can put whatever I want on him, and I know he's not going to turn around and stab me in the back. We recognize that he has character on this side. And then what these people who hate Daniel now realize is, oh, he is kind of exactly what the king is looking for. He is kind of exactly why the king is elevating him is for this very reason, that we can't find any fault to him. All of us know that's because of his commitment to God, man. He has godly character because he has remained committed to God throughout these 50 years or however long he has been in this kingdom. And so then they say, well, great. I know what we can get him on. His faith and commitment to God. If that's the backbone behind everything, what we know to be true is that this guy does not miss his times to pray. This guy is so committed to God that every single day he goes up to his room, he takes up to this window and he prays every day. He prays, he praises God, all this stuff. That's how we're gonna, that's how we going to set it up. And just real quick, imagine someone tries to take you down. They look into every single part of your life, and the only thing they know they can hang you up on is that you're too committed to God. That's pretty sweet. That's, I mean, oh, to have that much faith and that much character in our life. But nonetheless, they go to the king. Because how can you get the king to do something? You remind the king of how great and how powerful he is. They go to the king and they say, King Darius, you are so great. And because you are so great, you have to, you need to make a decree. Make a decree that no one can worship or bow down to any God or pray to any God or any person except you for 30 days. You deserve that kind of praise because you're awesome. And King's like, yeah, I am awesome. You are 100% right. We need this to happen. And so he makes a decree and he writes it into law. Not only that you have to do it, but he also writes in the consequence that if you don't do it, if you bow down and you worship or praise any other God or any other person, that you are to be thrown into the lion's den and executed. They got him now. And so comes one of my favorite written verses in all of the Bible. So let's read this one together. So comes verse 10 when our buddy Daniel finds out what just happened. Now, when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home in his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Perfect. Let's go to the window where people can see us. Three times a day, he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to any God in this 30 days, you'll be killed. You will be ripped apart by lions. And Daniel says, what should I do about this? I got to go pray to my God about this. And it's incredible. It's awesome. I love that it's, and why I say I love the way that it's written is because it seems instantaneous, right? It's like, oh shoot, this is bad. I got to go pray about this, which is great because it is exactly what he just read that he wasn't allowed to do. But all that Daniel knows is that regardless of circumstance, that what he must remain connected to is his God. And so he goes and two to three times a day, he prays to God and he gives thanks to his God. And then the kicker, just as he had always done. He doesn't start doing it. He doesn't do like Michael Scott does in the office where Pam finds out that he's dating her mom and he's like, oh, I'm going to date her even harder now. It's not like he's like, oh, I'm going to pray so much harder now. King, you're not even going to believe it. He doesn't change anything. He just remains connected daily to his God, spending time in prayer. Does he know that it is still defiant? Yeah. But it's not worth it to give it up for him because it's the most important thing in his life. And it has grounded him through every part of his life and it has brought him this far and he has faith that it's going to continue to bring him through. And so they got him. They go to the king. They say, king, please remind me, didn't you write this into law that people could only bow to you and praise you during this 30 days? And before they mentioned Daniel, who he loves, and he's about to elevate to prominence, even greater prominence, he says, yes, it's been written into law. I can't take it back. There's no way. It is law. That's what law stands for. And they said, well, do you remember that one exile from Judah? I think his name's Daniel. And like, by the way, how disrespectful is that? Like, hey, you know the guy who's maybe closest to you of anyone in this kingdom, the guy you're about to elevate to the number two, I'm going to refer to him as just this exile that like back like 50 some odd years ago was exiled to this place. It'd be like me like referring to Nate, our pastor, and being like, hey, you guys know Nate, right? The one that graduated from Toccoa Falls College? Like, you guys all know him as the pastor. We all know this guy, but it's like, I don't need to bring up some random fact from like 30 years ago. I don't know if it was 30 years ago. I just know he's older than I am. So he's older than I am, so it is what it is. But as disrespectful and as weird as it is, what we recognize and what we realize is their ultimate problem with Daniel is his race and his values. And I think even more than that, it frustrates them that clearly he's right about something. They're frustrated that he only worships this one God, but they're even more frustrated that for some reason his commitment to this God has allowed his character to be what it is. And Darius is upset about this. He's hurt, he's frustrated because he realizes, oh, I've been tricked. I've been had. And so we roll to verse 16. So the king gave the order and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lion's den. The king said to Daniel, may your God whom you serve continuously rescue you. He has to do it. He has to throw him in. I love that part at the end where it's clear that these people all know his commitment to God. And King Darius is kind of open to the fact that, hey, may this God that you serve so continuously, may he come through. I would love, I would love for you to be right about this. They cover it, so Daniel can't get out. King goes home. Can't sleep. He doesn't have any entertainment brought into him. He doesn't watch any TV, I guess, is what that means. He doesn't? Daniel answered, O king, live forever. My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt do it? This God that you serve and this God that I know you believe was protecting you, did he protect you? And Daniel's like, yeah, of course he did, man. So he's brought out. King says, get Daniel out of here. We threw him in. Lions weren't interested because the angels shut their mouths. In his fury, he throws all of the remaining satraps that tricked him into the same lion's den and they were killed, which is a pretty grisly detail in the story, but it is a detail nonetheless. And then we come to the culmination, starting in verse 25. It says, in his land, and he dec. He performs signs and wonders in the heaven and on the earth. He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions. He witnesses the glory of the God and not only does it change his life, but he makes a decree so that every single person in his entire nation can know how big, how great, how eternal, and how awesome this God is. Praise be to God for that. The synopsis of Daniel that we talked about at the beginning of last week was this, that the Lord is in complete control of everything. Praise be to this God that has, that certainly that saved Daniel, but saved Daniel for the purpose of bringing this glory to the king and to all of the people so that they will know forever the glory of God, that they can witness and understand how great he is, how powerful he is, and how good he is. That is just awesome. That is a great story. That is a story that probably most of us know and most of us have read and gone through because this is a heroic story. But even though and while it's a heroic story, I think while we certainly place God where he needs to be is like look at this God who wants to make sure that not only his people, but all people recognize and see and understand his power and his glory. I do think that sometimes we misinterpret and we misrepresent who Daniel is in this story. Because so many incredible heroic things happen, we forget and we miss that Daniel doesn't really do any big, significant, heroic action in this. Like next week, we're going to be talking about, who are we talking about next week? Samson. Thanks, Nate. Thanks, Toccoa Falls alum, Nate. Next week, we're talking about Samson. When the Lord's strength is in Samson, that dude's taking out armies on his own. That's not the same thing that Daniel does here. He doesn't start an uprising. He doesn't storm into the king's quarters and demand that he reverses the law or says the Lord is going to strike you down if you, whatever. He just stays committed to spending time with God, trusting fully that his commitment and his relationship with God will put him in places where he can make God's glory seen. And that's what happens, right? In the beginning, we see that he's being elevated to prominence because of his character and because of his integrity, his trustworthiness. We know very clearly that that comes from his connection and his relationship with God. He has godly character. He can't be brought down by these people because of his character that comes from his commitment to God. And when his faith is put to the test, because he was already committed to his God, nothing was going to change. And when the Lord finally did put Daniel front and center, Daniel comfortably knew and recognized the Lord has me here because he is going to glorify himself through me. A lot of big and incredible things happened, but the only role that Daniel played was simply staying connected and growing in his relationship with his father. And if I'm right about that, if I'm right, if I'm correct in my assumption, or if you listen to this story, if you read for yourself and you agree with me that, yeah, this is kind of weird. I've always considered Daniel in the lines in that Daniel's kind of the hero of it, but he's not really doing heroic things. He's just living a life connected to God. He just daily connects to God through prayer and through praise. then what I'd argue with you is that a faith like Daniel's is waiting for us, is waiting for you and waiting for me, on the other side of consistent discipline in our personal relationship with God. Because the other thing I find noteworthy that I think we forget, because we kind of lump in biblical characters as these men and women whose lives are completely and consistently committed solely to God. Now, this is true of Daniel, but he's not like Paul where he's traveling to churches and reading scripture and making sure he understands scripture and understands Christ well enough to be able to send it out to the nations. This is a guy who's in politics. This is a guy who's in politics in a land where no one believes what he believes. And so his connection to God is his personal connection to God. Now, do people recognize and know it? Yeah. That's why the people know that they could make him fall because, hey, he's going to stay committed to God. The king, this God that you consistently are committed to, did he save you? They know that he's characterized by his faith, but he doesn't go into work as a minister and spend eight hours a day reading scripture and praying. This is about people who go into work and live for God because they're committed to him in their spare and quiet moments. Daniel three times day, spends time in prayer. I imagine he wakes up, he starts his day off with prayer. He goes during lunch and spends time in prayer. Before he goes to bed, he prays. I don't know. But the point is not that his entire life, every second of every day is dedicated to prayer, dedicated to reading scripture. The point is that his consistent daily time, just spending some time with God, allowing the Lord to work in his heart, just in the spare time that he has, creating some time during the day to spend time with prayer, that that saturates everything else in his life. I think it's the same with us. I think all of us would agree that the things that we care about and the things that we pretty consistently do, it kind of shapes the things that we do. Like, this is a silly example, but bear with me. I'm a big Frisbee guy. I like Frisbee. I like playing Ultimate Frisbee. I was watching ultimate frisbee all weekend. And so while I'm preparing for my sermons, I'm throwing the frisbee up and down the hallway over there. But sometimes I'm not allowed to do frisbee. Sometimes I have to stand in Aaron's office and talk ministry with Aaron back here. And as Aaron can attest to you, when I talk to her, I throw a lot of backhands. I throw a lot of flicks. I throw in the occasional hammer. I do it all the time. It's dumb. It's silly. But it's because, like, even though I'm not actively doing this thing, it's still on my mind, right? And it's still, like, literally body want to like do it and play it and throw it. When I drive around, when I see trees in a line, I'm like, there's a disc golf hole. It's not actually a disc golf hole, but that's what I see. You know, I mean, some of you in here maybe were skateboarders. And when some people see stairs, like, oh, that would be sick to ollie off of. I was always one of those, hey, skating is cool, and I'm bad at it. So I was like, that would be a sick thing for other people to skate. We recognize and we see things through the lenses of what we care about and what we consistently do. How many of us in here are or have been married or have kids? You can raise your hand. Yeah, nice. Congratulations. Now, I might be wrong about this. I'm only engaged. But I'll be married one day, and I think that this will be true. Raise your hand again if your marriage, your relationship with your wife or your husband, your relationship to your kids, the love that you experience from these relationships, if they impact not only the times that you're spending with them, but they impact the way that you live every part of your life. Yeah, man. Because the thing that we care about and the things that we spend time doing, and when we get to experience this love that makes us better and changes our heart, that doesn't only change our heart, and that doesn't only impact the way that we live just when we're doing those things. But it's our consistent connection to those things that continue to allow us to live out that love that we experience with and from our wife, from our kids, from our husbands. And the same is so, so, so true in our faith. As we daily spend time in the Word, daily spend time reading Scripture, just when we wake up, we read some Scripture, We spend time praying. Or maybe before we go into a meeting, we stay a quick prayer. When we consistently come and we meet together on Sunday mornings, when you meet with your small group and you grow and you build each other up, when those things happen, it saturates every other part of our life. Like Daniel, our character grows. Our integrity is deeper and deeper rooted in the things of God, and people see and people notice. I think a lot of times we view faith and we want God to do these huge, incredible things in our life and we want Him to use us to glorify Him. And ultimately, I think what the Lord calls us to do is stay rooted and connected in Him. And when that's the case, nothing else can happen except for him being glorified in us. And that's why Jesus gives this call and why Jesus charges us in John 15. This one's going to be up on the screen. We're going to read verses 4 through 5 and verse 8 together. I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. This is to my Father's glory that you may bear fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. When we are in Christ, we are connected to Christ. He is the vine, we are the branches. And if we want to produce fruit, all it takes is being connected to the vine. And we let the vine be what the vine is. Someone who produces fruit and elevates the glory of God. And that's our goal. Our goal is to remain connected to Christ. Always. And ultimately, our goal is to be someone who's defined as Daniel is defined, not only by name, but by the way he lives, but someone who is defined by God is my judge. I will stay connected. I will remain in him. And he, through me, will produce fruit. And he, through me, will glorify himself and do incredible things. It's not just for the biblical heroes. It's for every single one of us. We all, as we give our hearts to Christ, as we all believe in his lordship and in his sacrifice to us and his resurrection for us, that connects us to the vine. And when we continue to remain connected, when we continue to grow closer and closer as we continue to grow in him, grow closer to God, recognize and understand and realize his love more and more, then so too do we produce fruit and we show that love and we serve people the way that we've been loved and the way that we've been served through Christ. To close, I found, I was reading this book. It's by Andrew Murray called Abiding in Christ. I had a hard time actually with this sermon for a while because I was so excited about so many things. Like I kept pulling at things and being like, oh, I love this, and I love this, and I love this. And ultimately, on Thursday, as I was preparing, I ended up just reading like five chapters of this book called Abiding in Christ. I think I say that mostly to say, like, you should read it. But this book called Abiding in Christ is a book that is solely written connecting us and trying to help us fully and rightly and completely understand those verses in John 15 of what it means to abide in Christ, what it means to remain in Christ, what it means that God is divine and that we are the branches, what it means that through God we are able to produce fruit. And in that book, he writes a prayer that I really liked. And so if you would, please bow with me and we're going to pray. And I'm going to read this prayer that he wrote because I think it's really beautiful. heartedly surrender to abide in you alone brings a joy that is unspeakable and full of glory. May all of us who have begun to taste the sweetness of this life yield ourselves to be witnesses of the grace and power of our Lord to keep us united in him. And may we seek by word and walk to win others to follow him, to follow you wholly. It is only in such fruit bearing that our own abiding can be maintained. Lord, let us produce fruit solely by just being connected to you every day. We love you. Amen.

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along. And that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. This week, Daniel in the lion's den. Nice. All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Grace. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here, and I'm so excited. I'm so thrilled once again to be able to be up here preaching in the book of Daniel. As I always do, I spend time, I read through or I listen to different sermons on the topic I'm going to talk about. I'll read, you know, parts of books, whatever. Whatever I can do to get a good solid wisdom and understanding of what's going on. And as I found one sermon, I took specific note of something that I thought was pretty cool. And the reason why I'm going to do it up there at the front is it's not directly about Daniel 6, but I think it does an awesome job of reminding us of what we talked about last week, while then connecting it to where we're going to go today with Daniel and the lion's den. John Piper started out his sermon in Daniel, referring to Daniel's name and talking about that in Hebrew, his name in Hebrew means essentially, God is my judge. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, not only because, hey, that's a great name. You know, if you're thinking, if you're having a baby, Daniel, God is my judge. Perfect. But it's pretty cool because when you look at the book of Daniel, as you sift through the stories we talked about last week, and when you get into this week and what we're talking about this week, what we see is, I mean, there's not a more aptly named character that I know of in the Bible, right? This is a guy, Piper puts it this way. He says that God is my judge, this name that has been given to Daniel, that this almost becomes like a creed or like a motto of how and where he lives his life. He says this comes out of the way that he ate. We think back to Daniel 1. Daniel comes over as a young, exiled man from Judah, and he says, hey, I'm not going to eat the food that you're giving me because I feel like that will be defiling myself and defiling my God, and I'm not going to do that. He stands in his faith. He says, hey, what matters is what God thinks about this, because God is my judge. And then he says, it comes out in the way that he interprets dreams. We go to Daniel 2, which we talked about as well. Not only Daniel 2, but Daniel's, both Daniel 4 and 5, which we're not going to talk about today, but in essence, Daniel goes to different kings and he interprets their dreams. And the way he interprets the dreams is, one, through the providence of God. We know it's his connection and his commitment to God that allows him the wisdom to interpret the dreams these kings are having. And the interpretations are all about, hey, basically, hey, you're the king for right now. The Lord has allowed you to have the power that you have, but the Lord is in sole control of that power. The Lord has every bit of power, and you're just a pawn in his system. And we see that played out in different ways. We see him bring people into power. We see him take power away. We see him give power back to kings. And we see him ultimately put people to death for disobeying and dishonoring him. He says, God is my judge, influences the way he writes the book. As we go through these first six chapters of Daniel, Daniel clearly chooses and picks to write about these six significant events because this is where he sees that God is most glorified. And so this is what he chooses to write about. And then as we transition into Daniel 6 and Daniel in the lion's den, we see that it comes out in the way that he prayed. And so we open up to page number 880, whoever wants to roll with us, but we open up to Daniel 6. And we open up to Daniel and the Lion's Den, which at its core is just one of your classic workplace disputes. You're in the office and your boss decides that he's going to elevate, he's going to promote someone to be now over you, and you don't think he should be there, or you don't think she should be there. You're not thrilled about the promotion that your boss made, and so, like you do, you go to your other people that you work with who also don't think that that person should have gotten that promotion, and you devise a scheme. And you devise a scheme that basically allows the boss to be tricked into throwing that person who got the promotion into a den of lions. We know it. It's the age-old story. But ultimately, I guess for those of us who maybe have not experienced this or maybe will find a couple different things that maybe these guys tried to do. Let's still go through it together. We jump in on Daniel 6, and basically, as these chapters have gone, we have seen how devoted and how committed to God Daniel has been throughout his life. God is my judge. That's Daniel. That is how he lives his life. And through that, the Lord has moved in Daniel, not only to provide him wisdom, but also because of his commitment, we see that his character is such that he is found completely and wholly trustworthy to every one of the kings that he serves under. And so as that continues to happen, what we know is that his character and his integrity come and is rooted in his commitment and his faith to God. But that doesn't really matter to the king. All that matters to the king is this man is trustworthy and I know I can continue to elevate him and he's going to continue to remain faithful to him. And we know that that comes from God, but ultimately, it just works out for Daniel. And so here we are in Daniel 6. Daniel is now on his third king. We talked about Nebuchadnezzar last week. In the middle of that, there is a pretty wild and awesome story about King Belshazzar. But King Belshazzar has died, Darius has taken over, and what Darius has recognized and realized, once more, like every other king, Daniel can be trusted, and I am going to trust him with much. There are 120 satraps, it says. There's basically, satraps are these people who are over different regions within the empire. And then above those satraps, there's three people that their goal and their role is to govern and to lead the people that are the different satraps. So they're the leaders of the leaders in essence. Well, Daniel was one of those three, and Darius has decided, Daniel is my guy. I'm going to continue to promote him. I'm going to continue to elevate him to prominence. He decides basically to say, hey, Daniel, I'm going to elevate you above those three, and you are now going to be basically my number two. You are going to govern all of my governors, and the only person that you bow down to, or the only person that you serve, and that you're not over and above, is myself. Well, like we just talked about, not everyone really liked that. There's a lot of satraps who are like, wait, what? What's this? This guy, this random exile from Judah who doesn't believe or look like, who doesn't like serve or bow down to any of our gods, now we have to bow down to him? That's not how I'm rolling. And so he does what we would, they do what we would all do in a similar scenario, and they start to devise a scheme. And I love the way that they devise their scheme because they go about looking into his personal life. And they're like, all right, well, time to become private investigators. We got to figure out the way that this man falls short. What can we hang him up on? What in his character can we find that's flawed that we can bring to the king to where the king will have to relieve him of these duties that we don't want him to have. And it's pretty cool what we see. We see, as they say in Daniel 6, I don't think this one's on the screen because I didn't put it up there. At this, the administrator and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his contact of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. Finally, these men said, we will never find any basis for charges against this man, Daniel, unless it has something to do with the law of God. So here we have these two sides of the same argument. We've got the king who recognizes and realizes that Daniel's faith and Daniel's commitment to God allows him to be completely trustworthy and completely good, and I can put whatever I want on him, and I know he's not going to turn around and stab me in the back. We recognize that he has character on this side. And then what these people who hate Daniel now realize is, oh, he is kind of exactly what the king is looking for. He is kind of exactly why the king is elevating him is for this very reason, that we can't find any fault to him. All of us know that's because of his commitment to God, man. He has godly character because he has remained committed to God throughout these 50 years or however long he has been in this kingdom. And so then they say, well, great. I know what we can get him on. His faith and commitment to God. If that's the backbone behind everything, what we know to be true is that this guy does not miss his times to pray. This guy is so committed to God that every single day he goes up to his room, he takes up to this window and he prays every day. He prays, he praises God, all this stuff. That's how we're gonna, that's how we going to set it up. And just real quick, imagine someone tries to take you down. They look into every single part of your life, and the only thing they know they can hang you up on is that you're too committed to God. That's pretty sweet. That's, I mean, oh, to have that much faith and that much character in our life. But nonetheless, they go to the king. Because how can you get the king to do something? You remind the king of how great and how powerful he is. They go to the king and they say, King Darius, you are so great. And because you are so great, you have to, you need to make a decree. Make a decree that no one can worship or bow down to any God or pray to any God or any person except you for 30 days. You deserve that kind of praise because you're awesome. And King's like, yeah, I am awesome. You are 100% right. We need this to happen. And so he makes a decree and he writes it into law. Not only that you have to do it, but he also writes in the consequence that if you don't do it, if you bow down and you worship or praise any other God or any other person, that you are to be thrown into the lion's den and executed. They got him now. And so comes one of my favorite written verses in all of the Bible. So let's read this one together. So comes verse 10 when our buddy Daniel finds out what just happened. Now, when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home in his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Perfect. Let's go to the window where people can see us. Three times a day, he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to any God in this 30 days, you'll be killed. You will be ripped apart by lions. And Daniel says, what should I do about this? I got to go pray to my God about this. And it's incredible. It's awesome. I love that it's, and why I say I love the way that it's written is because it seems instantaneous, right? It's like, oh shoot, this is bad. I got to go pray about this, which is great because it is exactly what he just read that he wasn't allowed to do. But all that Daniel knows is that regardless of circumstance, that what he must remain connected to is his God. And so he goes and two to three times a day, he prays to God and he gives thanks to his God. And then the kicker, just as he had always done. He doesn't start doing it. He doesn't do like Michael Scott does in the office where Pam finds out that he's dating her mom and he's like, oh, I'm going to date her even harder now. It's not like he's like, oh, I'm going to pray so much harder now. King, you're not even going to believe it. He doesn't change anything. He just remains connected daily to his God, spending time in prayer. Does he know that it is still defiant? Yeah. But it's not worth it to give it up for him because it's the most important thing in his life. And it has grounded him through every part of his life and it has brought him this far and he has faith that it's going to continue to bring him through. And so they got him. They go to the king. They say, king, please remind me, didn't you write this into law that people could only bow to you and praise you during this 30 days? And before they mentioned Daniel, who he loves, and he's about to elevate to prominence, even greater prominence, he says, yes, it's been written into law. I can't take it back. There's no way. It is law. That's what law stands for. And they said, well, do you remember that one exile from Judah? I think his name's Daniel. And like, by the way, how disrespectful is that? Like, hey, you know the guy who's maybe closest to you of anyone in this kingdom, the guy you're about to elevate to the number two, I'm going to refer to him as just this exile that like back like 50 some odd years ago was exiled to this place. It'd be like me like referring to Nate, our pastor, and being like, hey, you guys know Nate, right? The one that graduated from Toccoa Falls College? Like, you guys all know him as the pastor. We all know this guy, but it's like, I don't need to bring up some random fact from like 30 years ago. I don't know if it was 30 years ago. I just know he's older than I am. So he's older than I am, so it is what it is. But as disrespectful and as weird as it is, what we recognize and what we realize is their ultimate problem with Daniel is his race and his values. And I think even more than that, it frustrates them that clearly he's right about something. They're frustrated that he only worships this one God, but they're even more frustrated that for some reason his commitment to this God has allowed his character to be what it is. And Darius is upset about this. He's hurt, he's frustrated because he realizes, oh, I've been tricked. I've been had. And so we roll to verse 16. So the king gave the order and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lion's den. The king said to Daniel, may your God whom you serve continuously rescue you. He has to do it. He has to throw him in. I love that part at the end where it's clear that these people all know his commitment to God. And King Darius is kind of open to the fact that, hey, may this God that you serve so continuously, may he come through. I would love, I would love for you to be right about this. They cover it, so Daniel can't get out. King goes home. Can't sleep. He doesn't have any entertainment brought into him. He doesn't watch any TV, I guess, is what that means. He doesn't? Daniel answered, O king, live forever. My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt do it? This God that you serve and this God that I know you believe was protecting you, did he protect you? And Daniel's like, yeah, of course he did, man. So he's brought out. King says, get Daniel out of here. We threw him in. Lions weren't interested because the angels shut their mouths. In his fury, he throws all of the remaining satraps that tricked him into the same lion's den and they were killed, which is a pretty grisly detail in the story, but it is a detail nonetheless. And then we come to the culmination, starting in verse 25. It says, in his land, and he dec. He performs signs and wonders in the heaven and on the earth. He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions. He witnesses the glory of the God and not only does it change his life, but he makes a decree so that every single person in his entire nation can know how big, how great, how eternal, and how awesome this God is. Praise be to God for that. The synopsis of Daniel that we talked about at the beginning of last week was this, that the Lord is in complete control of everything. Praise be to this God that has, that certainly that saved Daniel, but saved Daniel for the purpose of bringing this glory to the king and to all of the people so that they will know forever the glory of God, that they can witness and understand how great he is, how powerful he is, and how good he is. That is just awesome. That is a great story. That is a story that probably most of us know and most of us have read and gone through because this is a heroic story. But even though and while it's a heroic story, I think while we certainly place God where he needs to be is like look at this God who wants to make sure that not only his people, but all people recognize and see and understand his power and his glory. I do think that sometimes we misinterpret and we misrepresent who Daniel is in this story. Because so many incredible heroic things happen, we forget and we miss that Daniel doesn't really do any big, significant, heroic action in this. Like next week, we're going to be talking about, who are we talking about next week? Samson. Thanks, Nate. Thanks, Toccoa Falls alum, Nate. Next week, we're talking about Samson. When the Lord's strength is in Samson, that dude's taking out armies on his own. That's not the same thing that Daniel does here. He doesn't start an uprising. He doesn't storm into the king's quarters and demand that he reverses the law or says the Lord is going to strike you down if you, whatever. He just stays committed to spending time with God, trusting fully that his commitment and his relationship with God will put him in places where he can make God's glory seen. And that's what happens, right? In the beginning, we see that he's being elevated to prominence because of his character and because of his integrity, his trustworthiness. We know very clearly that that comes from his connection and his relationship with God. He has godly character. He can't be brought down by these people because of his character that comes from his commitment to God. And when his faith is put to the test, because he was already committed to his God, nothing was going to change. And when the Lord finally did put Daniel front and center, Daniel comfortably knew and recognized the Lord has me here because he is going to glorify himself through me. A lot of big and incredible things happened, but the only role that Daniel played was simply staying connected and growing in his relationship with his father. And if I'm right about that, if I'm right, if I'm correct in my assumption, or if you listen to this story, if you read for yourself and you agree with me that, yeah, this is kind of weird. I've always considered Daniel in the lines in that Daniel's kind of the hero of it, but he's not really doing heroic things. He's just living a life connected to God. He just daily connects to God through prayer and through praise. then what I'd argue with you is that a faith like Daniel's is waiting for us, is waiting for you and waiting for me, on the other side of consistent discipline in our personal relationship with God. Because the other thing I find noteworthy that I think we forget, because we kind of lump in biblical characters as these men and women whose lives are completely and consistently committed solely to God. Now, this is true of Daniel, but he's not like Paul where he's traveling to churches and reading scripture and making sure he understands scripture and understands Christ well enough to be able to send it out to the nations. This is a guy who's in politics. This is a guy who's in politics in a land where no one believes what he believes. And so his connection to God is his personal connection to God. Now, do people recognize and know it? Yeah. That's why the people know that they could make him fall because, hey, he's going to stay committed to God. The king, this God that you consistently are committed to, did he save you? They know that he's characterized by his faith, but he doesn't go into work as a minister and spend eight hours a day reading scripture and praying. This is about people who go into work and live for God because they're committed to him in their spare and quiet moments. Daniel three times day, spends time in prayer. I imagine he wakes up, he starts his day off with prayer. He goes during lunch and spends time in prayer. Before he goes to bed, he prays. I don't know. But the point is not that his entire life, every second of every day is dedicated to prayer, dedicated to reading scripture. The point is that his consistent daily time, just spending some time with God, allowing the Lord to work in his heart, just in the spare time that he has, creating some time during the day to spend time with prayer, that that saturates everything else in his life. I think it's the same with us. I think all of us would agree that the things that we care about and the things that we pretty consistently do, it kind of shapes the things that we do. Like, this is a silly example, but bear with me. I'm a big Frisbee guy. I like Frisbee. I like playing Ultimate Frisbee. I was watching ultimate frisbee all weekend. And so while I'm preparing for my sermons, I'm throwing the frisbee up and down the hallway over there. But sometimes I'm not allowed to do frisbee. Sometimes I have to stand in Aaron's office and talk ministry with Aaron back here. And as Aaron can attest to you, when I talk to her, I throw a lot of backhands. I throw a lot of flicks. I throw in the occasional hammer. I do it all the time. It's dumb. It's silly. But it's because, like, even though I'm not actively doing this thing, it's still on my mind, right? And it's still, like, literally body want to like do it and play it and throw it. When I drive around, when I see trees in a line, I'm like, there's a disc golf hole. It's not actually a disc golf hole, but that's what I see. You know, I mean, some of you in here maybe were skateboarders. And when some people see stairs, like, oh, that would be sick to ollie off of. I was always one of those, hey, skating is cool, and I'm bad at it. So I was like, that would be a sick thing for other people to skate. We recognize and we see things through the lenses of what we care about and what we consistently do. How many of us in here are or have been married or have kids? You can raise your hand. Yeah, nice. Congratulations. Now, I might be wrong about this. I'm only engaged. But I'll be married one day, and I think that this will be true. Raise your hand again if your marriage, your relationship with your wife or your husband, your relationship to your kids, the love that you experience from these relationships, if they impact not only the times that you're spending with them, but they impact the way that you live every part of your life. Yeah, man. Because the thing that we care about and the things that we spend time doing, and when we get to experience this love that makes us better and changes our heart, that doesn't only change our heart, and that doesn't only impact the way that we live just when we're doing those things. But it's our consistent connection to those things that continue to allow us to live out that love that we experience with and from our wife, from our kids, from our husbands. And the same is so, so, so true in our faith. As we daily spend time in the Word, daily spend time reading Scripture, just when we wake up, we read some Scripture, We spend time praying. Or maybe before we go into a meeting, we stay a quick prayer. When we consistently come and we meet together on Sunday mornings, when you meet with your small group and you grow and you build each other up, when those things happen, it saturates every other part of our life. Like Daniel, our character grows. Our integrity is deeper and deeper rooted in the things of God, and people see and people notice. I think a lot of times we view faith and we want God to do these huge, incredible things in our life and we want Him to use us to glorify Him. And ultimately, I think what the Lord calls us to do is stay rooted and connected in Him. And when that's the case, nothing else can happen except for him being glorified in us. And that's why Jesus gives this call and why Jesus charges us in John 15. This one's going to be up on the screen. We're going to read verses 4 through 5 and verse 8 together. I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. This is to my Father's glory that you may bear fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. When we are in Christ, we are connected to Christ. He is the vine, we are the branches. And if we want to produce fruit, all it takes is being connected to the vine. And we let the vine be what the vine is. Someone who produces fruit and elevates the glory of God. And that's our goal. Our goal is to remain connected to Christ. Always. And ultimately, our goal is to be someone who's defined as Daniel is defined, not only by name, but by the way he lives, but someone who is defined by God is my judge. I will stay connected. I will remain in him. And he, through me, will produce fruit. And he, through me, will glorify himself and do incredible things. It's not just for the biblical heroes. It's for every single one of us. We all, as we give our hearts to Christ, as we all believe in his lordship and in his sacrifice to us and his resurrection for us, that connects us to the vine. And when we continue to remain connected, when we continue to grow closer and closer as we continue to grow in him, grow closer to God, recognize and understand and realize his love more and more, then so too do we produce fruit and we show that love and we serve people the way that we've been loved and the way that we've been served through Christ. To close, I found, I was reading this book. It's by Andrew Murray called Abiding in Christ. I had a hard time actually with this sermon for a while because I was so excited about so many things. Like I kept pulling at things and being like, oh, I love this, and I love this, and I love this. And ultimately, on Thursday, as I was preparing, I ended up just reading like five chapters of this book called Abiding in Christ. I think I say that mostly to say, like, you should read it. But this book called Abiding in Christ is a book that is solely written connecting us and trying to help us fully and rightly and completely understand those verses in John 15 of what it means to abide in Christ, what it means to remain in Christ, what it means that God is divine and that we are the branches, what it means that through God we are able to produce fruit. And in that book, he writes a prayer that I really liked. And so if you would, please bow with me and we're going to pray. And I'm going to read this prayer that he wrote because I think it's really beautiful. heartedly surrender to abide in you alone brings a joy that is unspeakable and full of glory. May all of us who have begun to taste the sweetness of this life yield ourselves to be witnesses of the grace and power of our Lord to keep us united in him. And may we seek by word and walk to win others to follow him, to follow you wholly. It is only in such fruit bearing that our own abiding can be maintained. Lord, let us produce fruit solely by just being connected to you every day. We love you. Amen.

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along. And that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. This week, Daniel in the lion's den. Nice. All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Grace. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here, and I'm so excited. I'm so thrilled once again to be able to be up here preaching in the book of Daniel. As I always do, I spend time, I read through or I listen to different sermons on the topic I'm going to talk about. I'll read, you know, parts of books, whatever. Whatever I can do to get a good solid wisdom and understanding of what's going on. And as I found one sermon, I took specific note of something that I thought was pretty cool. And the reason why I'm going to do it up there at the front is it's not directly about Daniel 6, but I think it does an awesome job of reminding us of what we talked about last week, while then connecting it to where we're going to go today with Daniel and the lion's den. John Piper started out his sermon in Daniel, referring to Daniel's name and talking about that in Hebrew, his name in Hebrew means essentially, God is my judge. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, not only because, hey, that's a great name. You know, if you're thinking, if you're having a baby, Daniel, God is my judge. Perfect. But it's pretty cool because when you look at the book of Daniel, as you sift through the stories we talked about last week, and when you get into this week and what we're talking about this week, what we see is, I mean, there's not a more aptly named character that I know of in the Bible, right? This is a guy, Piper puts it this way. He says that God is my judge, this name that has been given to Daniel, that this almost becomes like a creed or like a motto of how and where he lives his life. He says this comes out of the way that he ate. We think back to Daniel 1. Daniel comes over as a young, exiled man from Judah, and he says, hey, I'm not going to eat the food that you're giving me because I feel like that will be defiling myself and defiling my God, and I'm not going to do that. He stands in his faith. He says, hey, what matters is what God thinks about this, because God is my judge. And then he says, it comes out in the way that he interprets dreams. We go to Daniel 2, which we talked about as well. Not only Daniel 2, but Daniel's, both Daniel 4 and 5, which we're not going to talk about today, but in essence, Daniel goes to different kings and he interprets their dreams. And the way he interprets the dreams is, one, through the providence of God. We know it's his connection and his commitment to God that allows him the wisdom to interpret the dreams these kings are having. And the interpretations are all about, hey, basically, hey, you're the king for right now. The Lord has allowed you to have the power that you have, but the Lord is in sole control of that power. The Lord has every bit of power, and you're just a pawn in his system. And we see that played out in different ways. We see him bring people into power. We see him take power away. We see him give power back to kings. And we see him ultimately put people to death for disobeying and dishonoring him. He says, God is my judge, influences the way he writes the book. As we go through these first six chapters of Daniel, Daniel clearly chooses and picks to write about these six significant events because this is where he sees that God is most glorified. And so this is what he chooses to write about. And then as we transition into Daniel 6 and Daniel in the lion's den, we see that it comes out in the way that he prayed. And so we open up to page number 880, whoever wants to roll with us, but we open up to Daniel 6. And we open up to Daniel and the Lion's Den, which at its core is just one of your classic workplace disputes. You're in the office and your boss decides that he's going to elevate, he's going to promote someone to be now over you, and you don't think he should be there, or you don't think she should be there. You're not thrilled about the promotion that your boss made, and so, like you do, you go to your other people that you work with who also don't think that that person should have gotten that promotion, and you devise a scheme. And you devise a scheme that basically allows the boss to be tricked into throwing that person who got the promotion into a den of lions. We know it. It's the age-old story. But ultimately, I guess for those of us who maybe have not experienced this or maybe will find a couple different things that maybe these guys tried to do. Let's still go through it together. We jump in on Daniel 6, and basically, as these chapters have gone, we have seen how devoted and how committed to God Daniel has been throughout his life. God is my judge. That's Daniel. That is how he lives his life. And through that, the Lord has moved in Daniel, not only to provide him wisdom, but also because of his commitment, we see that his character is such that he is found completely and wholly trustworthy to every one of the kings that he serves under. And so as that continues to happen, what we know is that his character and his integrity come and is rooted in his commitment and his faith to God. But that doesn't really matter to the king. All that matters to the king is this man is trustworthy and I know I can continue to elevate him and he's going to continue to remain faithful to him. And we know that that comes from God, but ultimately, it just works out for Daniel. And so here we are in Daniel 6. Daniel is now on his third king. We talked about Nebuchadnezzar last week. In the middle of that, there is a pretty wild and awesome story about King Belshazzar. But King Belshazzar has died, Darius has taken over, and what Darius has recognized and realized, once more, like every other king, Daniel can be trusted, and I am going to trust him with much. There are 120 satraps, it says. There's basically, satraps are these people who are over different regions within the empire. And then above those satraps, there's three people that their goal and their role is to govern and to lead the people that are the different satraps. So they're the leaders of the leaders in essence. Well, Daniel was one of those three, and Darius has decided, Daniel is my guy. I'm going to continue to promote him. I'm going to continue to elevate him to prominence. He decides basically to say, hey, Daniel, I'm going to elevate you above those three, and you are now going to be basically my number two. You are going to govern all of my governors, and the only person that you bow down to, or the only person that you serve, and that you're not over and above, is myself. Well, like we just talked about, not everyone really liked that. There's a lot of satraps who are like, wait, what? What's this? This guy, this random exile from Judah who doesn't believe or look like, who doesn't like serve or bow down to any of our gods, now we have to bow down to him? That's not how I'm rolling. And so he does what we would, they do what we would all do in a similar scenario, and they start to devise a scheme. And I love the way that they devise their scheme because they go about looking into his personal life. And they're like, all right, well, time to become private investigators. We got to figure out the way that this man falls short. What can we hang him up on? What in his character can we find that's flawed that we can bring to the king to where the king will have to relieve him of these duties that we don't want him to have. And it's pretty cool what we see. We see, as they say in Daniel 6, I don't think this one's on the screen because I didn't put it up there. At this, the administrator and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his contact of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. Finally, these men said, we will never find any basis for charges against this man, Daniel, unless it has something to do with the law of God. So here we have these two sides of the same argument. We've got the king who recognizes and realizes that Daniel's faith and Daniel's commitment to God allows him to be completely trustworthy and completely good, and I can put whatever I want on him, and I know he's not going to turn around and stab me in the back. We recognize that he has character on this side. And then what these people who hate Daniel now realize is, oh, he is kind of exactly what the king is looking for. He is kind of exactly why the king is elevating him is for this very reason, that we can't find any fault to him. All of us know that's because of his commitment to God, man. He has godly character because he has remained committed to God throughout these 50 years or however long he has been in this kingdom. And so then they say, well, great. I know what we can get him on. His faith and commitment to God. If that's the backbone behind everything, what we know to be true is that this guy does not miss his times to pray. This guy is so committed to God that every single day he goes up to his room, he takes up to this window and he prays every day. He prays, he praises God, all this stuff. That's how we're gonna, that's how we going to set it up. And just real quick, imagine someone tries to take you down. They look into every single part of your life, and the only thing they know they can hang you up on is that you're too committed to God. That's pretty sweet. That's, I mean, oh, to have that much faith and that much character in our life. But nonetheless, they go to the king. Because how can you get the king to do something? You remind the king of how great and how powerful he is. They go to the king and they say, King Darius, you are so great. And because you are so great, you have to, you need to make a decree. Make a decree that no one can worship or bow down to any God or pray to any God or any person except you for 30 days. You deserve that kind of praise because you're awesome. And King's like, yeah, I am awesome. You are 100% right. We need this to happen. And so he makes a decree and he writes it into law. Not only that you have to do it, but he also writes in the consequence that if you don't do it, if you bow down and you worship or praise any other God or any other person, that you are to be thrown into the lion's den and executed. They got him now. And so comes one of my favorite written verses in all of the Bible. So let's read this one together. So comes verse 10 when our buddy Daniel finds out what just happened. Now, when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home in his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Perfect. Let's go to the window where people can see us. Three times a day, he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to any God in this 30 days, you'll be killed. You will be ripped apart by lions. And Daniel says, what should I do about this? I got to go pray to my God about this. And it's incredible. It's awesome. I love that it's, and why I say I love the way that it's written is because it seems instantaneous, right? It's like, oh shoot, this is bad. I got to go pray about this, which is great because it is exactly what he just read that he wasn't allowed to do. But all that Daniel knows is that regardless of circumstance, that what he must remain connected to is his God. And so he goes and two to three times a day, he prays to God and he gives thanks to his God. And then the kicker, just as he had always done. He doesn't start doing it. He doesn't do like Michael Scott does in the office where Pam finds out that he's dating her mom and he's like, oh, I'm going to date her even harder now. It's not like he's like, oh, I'm going to pray so much harder now. King, you're not even going to believe it. He doesn't change anything. He just remains connected daily to his God, spending time in prayer. Does he know that it is still defiant? Yeah. But it's not worth it to give it up for him because it's the most important thing in his life. And it has grounded him through every part of his life and it has brought him this far and he has faith that it's going to continue to bring him through. And so they got him. They go to the king. They say, king, please remind me, didn't you write this into law that people could only bow to you and praise you during this 30 days? And before they mentioned Daniel, who he loves, and he's about to elevate to prominence, even greater prominence, he says, yes, it's been written into law. I can't take it back. There's no way. It is law. That's what law stands for. And they said, well, do you remember that one exile from Judah? I think his name's Daniel. And like, by the way, how disrespectful is that? Like, hey, you know the guy who's maybe closest to you of anyone in this kingdom, the guy you're about to elevate to the number two, I'm going to refer to him as just this exile that like back like 50 some odd years ago was exiled to this place. It'd be like me like referring to Nate, our pastor, and being like, hey, you guys know Nate, right? The one that graduated from Toccoa Falls College? Like, you guys all know him as the pastor. We all know this guy, but it's like, I don't need to bring up some random fact from like 30 years ago. I don't know if it was 30 years ago. I just know he's older than I am. So he's older than I am, so it is what it is. But as disrespectful and as weird as it is, what we recognize and what we realize is their ultimate problem with Daniel is his race and his values. And I think even more than that, it frustrates them that clearly he's right about something. They're frustrated that he only worships this one God, but they're even more frustrated that for some reason his commitment to this God has allowed his character to be what it is. And Darius is upset about this. He's hurt, he's frustrated because he realizes, oh, I've been tricked. I've been had. And so we roll to verse 16. So the king gave the order and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lion's den. The king said to Daniel, may your God whom you serve continuously rescue you. He has to do it. He has to throw him in. I love that part at the end where it's clear that these people all know his commitment to God. And King Darius is kind of open to the fact that, hey, may this God that you serve so continuously, may he come through. I would love, I would love for you to be right about this. They cover it, so Daniel can't get out. King goes home. Can't sleep. He doesn't have any entertainment brought into him. He doesn't watch any TV, I guess, is what that means. He doesn't? Daniel answered, O king, live forever. My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt do it? This God that you serve and this God that I know you believe was protecting you, did he protect you? And Daniel's like, yeah, of course he did, man. So he's brought out. King says, get Daniel out of here. We threw him in. Lions weren't interested because the angels shut their mouths. In his fury, he throws all of the remaining satraps that tricked him into the same lion's den and they were killed, which is a pretty grisly detail in the story, but it is a detail nonetheless. And then we come to the culmination, starting in verse 25. It says, in his land, and he dec. He performs signs and wonders in the heaven and on the earth. He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions. He witnesses the glory of the God and not only does it change his life, but he makes a decree so that every single person in his entire nation can know how big, how great, how eternal, and how awesome this God is. Praise be to God for that. The synopsis of Daniel that we talked about at the beginning of last week was this, that the Lord is in complete control of everything. Praise be to this God that has, that certainly that saved Daniel, but saved Daniel for the purpose of bringing this glory to the king and to all of the people so that they will know forever the glory of God, that they can witness and understand how great he is, how powerful he is, and how good he is. That is just awesome. That is a great story. That is a story that probably most of us know and most of us have read and gone through because this is a heroic story. But even though and while it's a heroic story, I think while we certainly place God where he needs to be is like look at this God who wants to make sure that not only his people, but all people recognize and see and understand his power and his glory. I do think that sometimes we misinterpret and we misrepresent who Daniel is in this story. Because so many incredible heroic things happen, we forget and we miss that Daniel doesn't really do any big, significant, heroic action in this. Like next week, we're going to be talking about, who are we talking about next week? Samson. Thanks, Nate. Thanks, Toccoa Falls alum, Nate. Next week, we're talking about Samson. When the Lord's strength is in Samson, that dude's taking out armies on his own. That's not the same thing that Daniel does here. He doesn't start an uprising. He doesn't storm into the king's quarters and demand that he reverses the law or says the Lord is going to strike you down if you, whatever. He just stays committed to spending time with God, trusting fully that his commitment and his relationship with God will put him in places where he can make God's glory seen. And that's what happens, right? In the beginning, we see that he's being elevated to prominence because of his character and because of his integrity, his trustworthiness. We know very clearly that that comes from his connection and his relationship with God. He has godly character. He can't be brought down by these people because of his character that comes from his commitment to God. And when his faith is put to the test, because he was already committed to his God, nothing was going to change. And when the Lord finally did put Daniel front and center, Daniel comfortably knew and recognized the Lord has me here because he is going to glorify himself through me. A lot of big and incredible things happened, but the only role that Daniel played was simply staying connected and growing in his relationship with his father. And if I'm right about that, if I'm right, if I'm correct in my assumption, or if you listen to this story, if you read for yourself and you agree with me that, yeah, this is kind of weird. I've always considered Daniel in the lines in that Daniel's kind of the hero of it, but he's not really doing heroic things. He's just living a life connected to God. He just daily connects to God through prayer and through praise. then what I'd argue with you is that a faith like Daniel's is waiting for us, is waiting for you and waiting for me, on the other side of consistent discipline in our personal relationship with God. Because the other thing I find noteworthy that I think we forget, because we kind of lump in biblical characters as these men and women whose lives are completely and consistently committed solely to God. Now, this is true of Daniel, but he's not like Paul where he's traveling to churches and reading scripture and making sure he understands scripture and understands Christ well enough to be able to send it out to the nations. This is a guy who's in politics. This is a guy who's in politics in a land where no one believes what he believes. And so his connection to God is his personal connection to God. Now, do people recognize and know it? Yeah. That's why the people know that they could make him fall because, hey, he's going to stay committed to God. The king, this God that you consistently are committed to, did he save you? They know that he's characterized by his faith, but he doesn't go into work as a minister and spend eight hours a day reading scripture and praying. This is about people who go into work and live for God because they're committed to him in their spare and quiet moments. Daniel three times day, spends time in prayer. I imagine he wakes up, he starts his day off with prayer. He goes during lunch and spends time in prayer. Before he goes to bed, he prays. I don't know. But the point is not that his entire life, every second of every day is dedicated to prayer, dedicated to reading scripture. The point is that his consistent daily time, just spending some time with God, allowing the Lord to work in his heart, just in the spare time that he has, creating some time during the day to spend time with prayer, that that saturates everything else in his life. I think it's the same with us. I think all of us would agree that the things that we care about and the things that we pretty consistently do, it kind of shapes the things that we do. Like, this is a silly example, but bear with me. I'm a big Frisbee guy. I like Frisbee. I like playing Ultimate Frisbee. I was watching ultimate frisbee all weekend. And so while I'm preparing for my sermons, I'm throwing the frisbee up and down the hallway over there. But sometimes I'm not allowed to do frisbee. Sometimes I have to stand in Aaron's office and talk ministry with Aaron back here. And as Aaron can attest to you, when I talk to her, I throw a lot of backhands. I throw a lot of flicks. I throw in the occasional hammer. I do it all the time. It's dumb. It's silly. But it's because, like, even though I'm not actively doing this thing, it's still on my mind, right? And it's still, like, literally body want to like do it and play it and throw it. When I drive around, when I see trees in a line, I'm like, there's a disc golf hole. It's not actually a disc golf hole, but that's what I see. You know, I mean, some of you in here maybe were skateboarders. And when some people see stairs, like, oh, that would be sick to ollie off of. I was always one of those, hey, skating is cool, and I'm bad at it. So I was like, that would be a sick thing for other people to skate. We recognize and we see things through the lenses of what we care about and what we consistently do. How many of us in here are or have been married or have kids? You can raise your hand. Yeah, nice. Congratulations. Now, I might be wrong about this. I'm only engaged. But I'll be married one day, and I think that this will be true. Raise your hand again if your marriage, your relationship with your wife or your husband, your relationship to your kids, the love that you experience from these relationships, if they impact not only the times that you're spending with them, but they impact the way that you live every part of your life. Yeah, man. Because the thing that we care about and the things that we spend time doing, and when we get to experience this love that makes us better and changes our heart, that doesn't only change our heart, and that doesn't only impact the way that we live just when we're doing those things. But it's our consistent connection to those things that continue to allow us to live out that love that we experience with and from our wife, from our kids, from our husbands. And the same is so, so, so true in our faith. As we daily spend time in the Word, daily spend time reading Scripture, just when we wake up, we read some Scripture, We spend time praying. Or maybe before we go into a meeting, we stay a quick prayer. When we consistently come and we meet together on Sunday mornings, when you meet with your small group and you grow and you build each other up, when those things happen, it saturates every other part of our life. Like Daniel, our character grows. Our integrity is deeper and deeper rooted in the things of God, and people see and people notice. I think a lot of times we view faith and we want God to do these huge, incredible things in our life and we want Him to use us to glorify Him. And ultimately, I think what the Lord calls us to do is stay rooted and connected in Him. And when that's the case, nothing else can happen except for him being glorified in us. And that's why Jesus gives this call and why Jesus charges us in John 15. This one's going to be up on the screen. We're going to read verses 4 through 5 and verse 8 together. I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. This is to my Father's glory that you may bear fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. When we are in Christ, we are connected to Christ. He is the vine, we are the branches. And if we want to produce fruit, all it takes is being connected to the vine. And we let the vine be what the vine is. Someone who produces fruit and elevates the glory of God. And that's our goal. Our goal is to remain connected to Christ. Always. And ultimately, our goal is to be someone who's defined as Daniel is defined, not only by name, but by the way he lives, but someone who is defined by God is my judge. I will stay connected. I will remain in him. And he, through me, will produce fruit. And he, through me, will glorify himself and do incredible things. It's not just for the biblical heroes. It's for every single one of us. We all, as we give our hearts to Christ, as we all believe in his lordship and in his sacrifice to us and his resurrection for us, that connects us to the vine. And when we continue to remain connected, when we continue to grow closer and closer as we continue to grow in him, grow closer to God, recognize and understand and realize his love more and more, then so too do we produce fruit and we show that love and we serve people the way that we've been loved and the way that we've been served through Christ. To close, I found, I was reading this book. It's by Andrew Murray called Abiding in Christ. I had a hard time actually with this sermon for a while because I was so excited about so many things. Like I kept pulling at things and being like, oh, I love this, and I love this, and I love this. And ultimately, on Thursday, as I was preparing, I ended up just reading like five chapters of this book called Abiding in Christ. I think I say that mostly to say, like, you should read it. But this book called Abiding in Christ is a book that is solely written connecting us and trying to help us fully and rightly and completely understand those verses in John 15 of what it means to abide in Christ, what it means to remain in Christ, what it means that God is divine and that we are the branches, what it means that through God we are able to produce fruit. And in that book, he writes a prayer that I really liked. And so if you would, please bow with me and we're going to pray. And I'm going to read this prayer that he wrote because I think it's really beautiful. heartedly surrender to abide in you alone brings a joy that is unspeakable and full of glory. May all of us who have begun to taste the sweetness of this life yield ourselves to be witnesses of the grace and power of our Lord to keep us united in him. And may we seek by word and walk to win others to follow him, to follow you wholly. It is only in such fruit bearing that our own abiding can be maintained. Lord, let us produce fruit solely by just being connected to you every day. We love you. Amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's so good to see you. Thanks again so much for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. It's such a blessing when you are. Last week we wrapped up a series in a prayer out of Ephesians that we're making the prayer for 2024. And next week we're going to launch into what's going to be our spring series. It's going to carry us to Easter called Final Thoughts. It's going to be a look at what's called the Upper Room Discourse found in the second half of John chapter 13 all the way through John chapter 17. And you'll not be surprised to know that I'm excited to go through that series with you guys. I've been doing a lot of reading and studying there and I'm'm looking forward to sharing that with you. Right here this morning, we're taking a break between series to do an update Sunday. As many of you know, hopefully all of you know, we're in the midst of a campaign to build a permanent home for grace. We do not own this space, believe it or not, as nice as it is. It's not ours. But it is our goal and our hope and our belief that God wants us to have a permanent home. So we have four acres right around the corner on Litchford on which we intend to build about a 16,000 square foot building that's out there. You can take a look at it if you want. We believe it's God's desire for us to take steps of faith to be able to build on that land and move into a permanent home from which we will minister to serve the community and hopefully draw closer to God together. And I'm going to give you an update on where we stand with that at the end of the service today, because of course I'm going to wait to the end of the service. In the meantime, I also wanted to take this morning in the sermon to talk to you about the subject of giving, which I'm sure is very exciting for everyone. Yes, no one wakes up excited to hear a sermon on giving. As a matter of fact, we kind of cringe at the idea of the sermons on giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey, man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving, and we think that's an important thing to teach the people of God about. So we need to try to work that in. And I knew that they were right, but I haven't done a sermon on giving, I think in three or four years. As a matter of fact, the last sermon at Grace that was done on the idea of giving, tithing, stewardship, generosity, whatever you want to call it, was done by Doug Bergeson, one of our elders. And one of the reasons I've waited so long to preach one on giving is because his was so good, I wanted you to forget it before I had to preach one and you compared it. But like I said, it's been three or four years since I've done a sermon on giving. And it's not for the reason that you probably think it is. It's not because I don't, I'm shy about the topic. It's not because I don't want to put in front of you things that scripture says about it. As a matter of fact, my thought in leading you guys, and I've tried to lead this way since I was hired in 2017, is to be of the mindset that this room is full of, for the most part, smart adults. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people for the most part. And I need to lead you in that way. So it's not that I'm shy about giving in its relationship with the church. You all know that if you don't give to grace, then grace doesn't exist. That's how it works. You guys are aware of real life. You know that if you're a partner of grace, we need you to give to grace. That's not a secret. Now, there's misconceptions about giving sometimes, and so we may not know all the details. And when I say that, I remember back at my previous church called Greystone, we had a couple of guys who were general contractors, and they, for a while, were helping us with some of our facilities. And so we were walking through the auditorium one day, two of the general contractors and me and the executive pastor, and they looked at us and they said, so how do you guys, like, get paid? And we said, you know, the church allots us a salary. And they go, but do you, like, do you make money on commission? And we said, what? And they go, like, if you invite a family and they start to give to the church, do you get a cut of that? And I said, no, but I'm going to do that at my next church. But I'll never forget it because I thought it was funny. We laughed. No, that's not how it works. It's a set salary, yada, yada, yada. So I know that not everybody understands all the mechanics, but you know the bottom line that if you don't give to the church, the church doesn't exist. That's just how it goes. So we don't need to be shy about that. And I would say two things. One, if this is your first time with us, this is not a typical Sunday, an update Sunday, and me talking like this is. But me talking about this, it's a special, specific Sunday. And two, if it's a turnoff to you that I'm talking about giving in the church, I don't know how to give you a longer break. You're just going to be mad at me. But we need to talk about giving. And the reason that it's been a while since I've used Sunday morning to focus on it is this. I think of Sundays, and there's more ways to think about them than this, but rudimentarily, I think of Sundays as either strategic Sundays or spiritual Sundays. Spiritual Sundays push the needle forward spiritually. They challenge us. They encourage us. They inspire us. They draw us closer to God. We leave here desiring God more. We leave here desiring to know Jesus more deeply. We leave here with hopefully our roots deepened a little bit. And spiritual Sundays are what I want to do every Sunday. You guys will remember, I'm not sure if it was last fall or fall before last, when we said, hey, we're not doing announcements anymore. And some of y'all made fun of me. And then we didn't start doing announcements again. We just started taking some time to tell you what was going on in the church. But the reason we did that is because we felt, Aaron and I did, that they disrupted the spiritual flow of what was happening in the service. And we didn't want to keep doing that. We wanted the service to be spiritual in nature and spiritual in focus, and for you guys to leave focusing on that, we didn't want to denigrate it with bringing it down to this practical level, but we had to accept and acknowledge that the Sunday morning time has to do some things for the church body that can't all be 100% spiritual all the time. And so we've accepted that and we've reinstalled announcements and that's fine. But in that ethos is a desire for every Sunday morning to be a spiritual encounter for you with your creator so you leave here feeling a little bit closer to him and more desirous of him than you did when you entered. So there's spiritual Sundays, but then there's also strategic Sundays. Strategic Sundays are Sundays that are necessary to inform you guys, to direct us, to point us to a place, to bring you along, and it's something that's needed in the life of the church at the time. And that's how I've kind of thought about giving sermons. Is that from time to time it's necessary to talk about giving because we need you guys to give so that we can do God's will. Because giving allows us to go and to serve God. Giving allows us to go and to build God's kingdom. Giving allows us to accomplish spiritual things. But as this sermon was coming up, and I was kind of wrapping my head around what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, it was really impressed upon me that I was very wrong in the way that I thought about the approach to those Sundays. And I wasn't wrong intentionally. I never made a conscious decision to relegate giving as a strategic topic rather than a spiritual one. I just somehow did it, thinking if we focus on spiritual things, that the other behaviors and practices will follow that are necessary. So let's just keep having spiritual Sundays. And how I've shortchanged you guys is by failing to realize that a Sunday spent talking about giving is very much a spiritual Sunday. Giving is a spiritually impactful act. And in fact, I would say the spiritual value of giving is diminished when we regard it as a means to an end. Giving doesn't allow us to serve God. It is serving God. Giving doesn't enable us to do God's will. It is God's will. Giving doesn't make spiritual things possible. It is a spiritual thing. It is what's best for us. It is what's good for us. God desires us to grow in our capacity to give. It is a spiritual discipline that is just as important as any other spiritual discipline. I said it this way. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. And that word repent there there I kind of labored over what to put there just consider it a placeholder for any spiritual discipline on which we would all agree We need to pursue post salvation Once you accept Christ as your Savior once you confess with your mouth and believe with your heart that he is who he says he is He did what he said he did and he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do We would all agree that there's a series of spiritual disciplines that we need to into our life. We need to learn to forgive. We need to learn to pray. We need to learn to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and be students of scripture. We need to learn how to show mercy, how to show grace, how to be kind. And we need to learn to be generous and to give. It's so on par with the other spiritual disciplines that in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 6, my men's group pointed out to me this week, Jesus puts giving on a spiritual plane with prayer and fasting, saying it is just as important for his people to give as it is for them to learn to pray, as it is for them to learn to forgive, as it is for them to learn to repent. So the act of giving is a spiritual act. It progresses us in our faith. The act of giving moves us closer to God. It deepens our desire for him. And we'll see in a minute that it grows our gratitude for Him. So really, it's to my detriment and yours that I don't talk about it more often. Because it's a spiritual act that makes our lives richer and brings us closer to the Father when we do it. Now there's any number of places I can go in the New Testament to show you how it's a spiritual act and what its benefits are for us. Why? Because when I say it's a spiritual act, in part what I mean is it's what's best for us. God tells us it's what's best for us, which seems counterintuitive because we kind of have a mindset in life that we're supposed to get all we can, can't all we get, and sit on our can, right? Like that's what we're supposed to do. We get everything we can, we keep it, and then we let it grow. That's what we do. So it seems counterintuitive that the best thing for us would be to have a mindset to begin to give part of that away. And yet God says it is best for us. God says he makes it very clear he wants us to be generous people. So I want to talk to you about two reasons, two things that it does for us when we give, two ways that it's spiritually impactful. There are myriad more, but these are the two that we have time to focus on this morning. I would first take your attention to Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. You're going to see verse 21 on the screen, but I'm actually going to read a little bit prior to that, beginning in verse 19. Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourself treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal. Listen, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. That is such a concept. Such a rich verse. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. In my men's group on Tuesday morning, we're going through the book of Matthew, and we arrived at chapters 6 and 7 on Tuesday. And there is so much to talk about that as I was reading for the morning, I thought we probably should have only read one chapter because there's just so much detail here. And despite there being so many things to discuss, we spent the entire discussion in this verse. What does that mean and how do we live that out? Where your treasure is there, your heart will be also. I've heard since I was a little kid, show me your calendar and your checkbook, and I can tell you what you care about. And it's absolutely true. And so what we see from this idea of where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, is that our passion goes with our giving. Our passion follows our giving. I think sometimes we wait to be passionate about something, and then we expect our giving to follow that passion. No, our passion will go where our giving goes, wherever our treasures are, wherever we spend our time and our talents and our treasures, our passion will follow that. And here's how I know that that's true experientially. A few years ago, Lily, she just turned eight, so she was four or five. She was on a four and five-year-old soccer team, and I agreed to coach it, which was an egregious error that I will never make again. I hated almost literally every second of it. We had several kids from the church also on that team, and so my small group would basically sit on the sidelines with their Yetis in their lawn chairs laughing at me as I screamed at their child to please pay attention to the game. Just literally laughing out loud at me the entire time. I hated it so much. I'll never do that again. If John asks me to coach his team when he's five, I'm going to tell him to kick rocks. So Lily, last spring, had her first soccer season in like real soccer. It was YMCA soccer. It like counted. They don't keep score yet, but I do. And she did okay. The coach was this lady named Heidi, and I really developed a respect for Heidi. She did an excellent job with the girls. I thought she approached practice in a really respectable way. And then she had an assistant coach named Jamie, who's just a really nice, friendly guy. I loved his demeanor with the girls. And so at the end of the season, I stayed out of it. I kind of would help Coach Lily a little bit and holler at her to get in the right spot. But that was it. But at the end of the season, Heidi and Jamie came to me. And Heidi said, you know, she had two daughters on the team. She was like, my oldest daughter is going to be playing at a different level now. I can't coach two teams. Jamie's going to be the head coach. Can you be his assistant coach so our girls can continue to play together? And I said, okay, I've got a couple caveats. Because she started talking about, we'll give you access to the portal. And I was like, I don't want access to any portals. I don't want any login information. I don't want to go to a single website. I'm not doing that. She's like, we'll send you the spreadsheet for playing time. You will not. I will not open it. You figure that out. It doesn't take two people to figure out how to make 10 girls play the same amount of time. All right? You do that. If you make me do it, I'll just sit lily. I'm not even going to think about it. And I'm like, I'm not. Like, I'll be at practice. I don't care what we do at practice. Don't ask for my input. So I'm just there for the name, okay, just to get our girls to play together. I'll play along. That's how I approach the season. But every Wednesday, Heidi and Jamie start texting. What do you think the girls need to work on tonight? And darn it if I didn't have some thoughts. And then we'd go, and the girls are running drills, and I'm like, ah, you're doing this wrong. So I'm going over there to help them. And then on Saturday, I can't help but interject a little bit. I'm telling you, by the end of the season, by the end of the season, Jen will attest to this, I'm on the sideline. You can hear my voice over the whole field the duration of the game, hollering at our girls to get into position and to move up and to push back and to attack and to yada, yada, yada. Like, I'm all in. When there's a timeout, I'm running out on the field, and I'm high-fiving the little girls. I love those little girls. Whenever they would do something great, like new, like, oh, look at that. She had a flash of this is really great. I would always turn and find Mom and Dad and celebrate that with them. By the end of the season, I loved them. I loved coaching. I was texting Jamie and Heidi during the day with jokes and thoughts. And at the end, they're like, can you help us next season? Yes, I'm all in. I can't wait. I thought about how excited I am for soccer season the other day, right? And it's because, I don't think it's because I'm like sports dad. I don't really care if Lily plays or not. It's because it was fun. It was fun to get to know the girls and to celebrate with them and to get to know the families. Like it was a good time. My passion followed my time. My passion followed my giving. Jen and I give to some nonprofits. I get a lot of emails, updates, nonprofits. I don't read hardly any of them. But if I give, I read. Not because I want to see what my money's doing, because it's not a lot. The answer is not much, buddy. But because I'm genuinely interested in those ministries and I want to know what's happening and I want to know that they're thriving. When we give of our time and our talents and our treasures to the things of God, our heart for the things of God grows. If you want more passion for the church, if you want more passion for the things of God, for organizations that are building God's kingdom, give to those things. And our passion will go with our giving. The other thing we see that I would highlight in the New Testament is in 2 Corinthians 9. On the screen you'll see verses 11 through 12, but I'm going to keep reading because I think the verses that follow that are really interesting as well. Verse 11. Listen. Verse 15, this is amazing. You know what that indescribable gift is? The opportunity to be generous. Thanks be to God for the indescribable gift of the invitation into generosity. That's a remarkable statement. Now, a little context around that passage, that group of verses. The church in Jerusalem was struggling financially. Jerusalem was stricken with poverty. And so the church in Jerusalem had great needs and needs in the community around it and not the means to care for them. So in Paul's missionary journeys around Asia Minor, he takes up love offerings to be taken back to Jerusalem on their behalf. And so in this passage, he's petitioning the church in Corinth family and use it for somebody else that needs it. And you'll experience the gratitude that happens when we're invited into giving. And that gratitude will be multiplied by the recipient who will then turn in praise to your God for providing them what they needed. That's why it's an indescribable gift when we give out of our wealth, out of our extra, out of our surplus. It makes us more grateful for what we have and for what God has invited us into, and it doubles when the recipients get it and they turn in praise to our God as well. This is why I say that not only does our passion go with our giving, but our gratitude grows with our giving. Our gratitude for what we have, for the opportunities that we've been given. It grows with our giving. The more, as it would seem in these verses, the more we give, the more we experience of this indescribable gift, the more we experience of what it, the goodness of what it is to be a conduit of God's generosity to others. He's been generous to you, not so that you might hoard it, but so that you might direct it into different places. And listen, he doesn't need, listen to this, this is super important. He doesn't need to give you money so that you'll give money to the other things. He can find ways to get it directly to them. But what he's doing by funneling it through you is inviting you into the process of generosity that you might be blessed. It's an indescribable gift. And I love the way it starts out. He has made us rich that we might give. And I don't think that everybody in the room is rich. And I don't even have a good working definition of that. If we wanted to compare us to the average family in Honduras, we're all rich. If we want to compare us to the average family in Manhattan, we're not. So it's a sliding scale and I'm not here to define it. But what I do know is some of us have the means to give and that we should do it. Some of us might not feel like we have the means to give. Things might be tight, but we should still give. So I can say this with no hesitation, with no qualification. If you are a believer, it is God's will that you would be someone who would give. If you are a believer, then a step of obedience that God calls you to take unequivocally is to be a person or a family that gives of your time, talents, and treasures. That's without question. We are certain that God wants us to give. And again, he wants us to give because our passion goes with our giving and our gratitude grows with our giving. He wants us to give for our sake. In light of that, the reality that God calls us all to be people who give generously. I would say a couple things about what that means and the reality of that. The first thing I would say is this, and it's so important to me that I wanted to put it on the screen so that you could read it with me and we could be certain that it was covered. The New Testament does not mandate giving 10% or giving to our local church. So I'm aware that any time I preach a sermon on giving, it can be viewed as and is unavoidably in a yucky way self-serving. I get that. Which is why I have never once preached to you at Grace or to anyone to grace. I'm trying to get you, if you do not have a habit of it already, to experience the goodness and the indescribable gift of giving. Because when we give, it grows us in our spirit. It brings us closer to the Father. It helps us know Jesus more. We find him in his service. I ardently believe that giving is what's best for you. So I'm pleading with you to give, but I'm not asking you to give to grace. The other thing is, I'm not asking you to give 10%. 10% is an Old Testament number. It's not a New Testament number. We can find nothing in the New Testament that compels us to give 10%. That's where we get the word tithe. And that's why we try not to use tithe around here because we don't believe that that's a New Testament thing. We would tell you, and most people I know who have a good theology of giving would say that 10% is a good starting point. But sometimes we really can't afford 10%. Give 5%. Some of us have been giving, and I say this delicately, we've been giving 10% for years comfortably. It's time to pray about ramping that up. 12, 12 and a half percent, 15%, 20%, whatever it might be. But here's the other thing I would say is that when we see giving show up in the New Testament, it's almost always like it was in Corinthians, to give to the poor, to give to the needy, to give to those in need, to the have-nots. It's almost always in reference to giving to those who have less than you. That's where we see it in the New Testament, and that's why I'm certain that we need to be giving. Now, here's what I would say about grace, just to be honest and transparent about this as well. I would genuinely hope that if you partner with grace, and for those unfamiliar with our terminology at grace, we have partners, we don't have members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. So if you're a partner of Grace, we hope that you would partner with us financially. And the way that I would say it is, if you have been touched by what happens here, if your marriage and your family is made stronger, if your faith is made deeper by what's happened at Grace, then we hope that you would consider partnering with us financially. And I would also tell you, because giving is about giving to those that have less than us, 10% of everything that is given here to the general budget goes to ministries happening outside the walls of Grace, and that is how you can actively participate in giving to those who are in need. And I will also tell you this. We would love to see, just because it's indicative of health, we would love to see our top-line budget number grow, to have more money received this year than we received last year. And the reason that the elders, when I say we, I mean the elders, the finance committee, and the mission committee want to see that number grow. And we want to see it grow not so that we can redo the sanctuary. That's just putting makeup on a pig. That's not even worth it. We don't have computers that we want to buy or new speakers. We don't want to give extravagant raises to anyone but me. We don't have any other things that we want to do. And obviously I'm just kidding about that. We want to see that 10% that we give away grow to 15 and 20 and 30 and 40% of our budget. We want to collectively be conduits of grace. We spend the same amount in virtually every ministry that we have since I got here because we want that number to grow so that the percentage of what we give away can grow. That's the heart of the elders and of the finance committee. So I hope that you would consider partnering us in that way, but I will not tell you that you have a biblical mandate to do so. My heart for you, quite simply, is that you would see giving as a spiritual exercise. And if your family is not one that gives, it's okay. We want to invite you to start doing that. If there's other people or institutions building God's kingdom outside the walls of grace and you're passionate about them and you're compelled to give, start there. Give to them. Give to where your heart leads you to give. Be prayerful before God and ask him where he would have you funnel his resources. And do it. And watch your passion go with that gift. And watch your gratitude grow with that gift. But step into that. If you are someone who's been giving comfortably at a certain rate for years, prayerfully consider if you're married with your spouse, where God might have you direct more. And in that way, we can be obedient to this biblical command to give, and we can grow in our wisdom and in grace and in our faith deeper roots in Christ as we learn this new spiritual discipline of giving. I'm going to pray, and then I'm going to update you on where we're at with the building campaign. Father, thank you for the indescribable gift of providing us with resources that we might be used to funnel those to others. God, I pray that you would make us conduits of grace. Lord, for all of us, I pray that we might consider what you would have us do in light of this. Who and to what and to where you would have us give? Give us courage and faith that you will provide for us what we need. And God, for those that take steps to begin giving for the first time, I pray that they would see very quickly their passion grow towards your things, your heart, your places, and that they would see their gratitude grow as well. Lord, we ask all these things in your son's name. Amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's so good to see you. Thanks again so much for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. It's such a blessing when you are. Last week we wrapped up a series in a prayer out of Ephesians that we're making the prayer for 2024. And next week we're going to launch into what's going to be our spring series. It's going to carry us to Easter called Final Thoughts. It's going to be a look at what's called the Upper Room Discourse found in the second half of John chapter 13 all the way through John chapter 17. And you'll not be surprised to know that I'm excited to go through that series with you guys. I've been doing a lot of reading and studying there and I'm'm looking forward to sharing that with you. Right here this morning, we're taking a break between series to do an update Sunday. As many of you know, hopefully all of you know, we're in the midst of a campaign to build a permanent home for grace. We do not own this space, believe it or not, as nice as it is. It's not ours. But it is our goal and our hope and our belief that God wants us to have a permanent home. So we have four acres right around the corner on Litchford on which we intend to build about a 16,000 square foot building that's out there. You can take a look at it if you want. We believe it's God's desire for us to take steps of faith to be able to build on that land and move into a permanent home from which we will minister to serve the community and hopefully draw closer to God together. And I'm going to give you an update on where we stand with that at the end of the service today, because of course I'm going to wait to the end of the service. In the meantime, I also wanted to take this morning in the sermon to talk to you about the subject of giving, which I'm sure is very exciting for everyone. Yes, no one wakes up excited to hear a sermon on giving. As a matter of fact, we kind of cringe at the idea of the sermons on giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey, man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving, and we think that's an important thing to teach the people of God about. So we need to try to work that in. And I knew that they were right, but I haven't done a sermon on giving, I think in three or four years. As a matter of fact, the last sermon at Grace that was done on the idea of giving, tithing, stewardship, generosity, whatever you want to call it, was done by Doug Bergeson, one of our elders. And one of the reasons I've waited so long to preach one on giving is because his was so good, I wanted you to forget it before I had to preach one and you compared it. But like I said, it's been three or four years since I've done a sermon on giving. And it's not for the reason that you probably think it is. It's not because I don't, I'm shy about the topic. It's not because I don't want to put in front of you things that scripture says about it. As a matter of fact, my thought in leading you guys, and I've tried to lead this way since I was hired in 2017, is to be of the mindset that this room is full of, for the most part, smart adults. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people for the most part. And I need to lead you in that way. So it's not that I'm shy about giving in its relationship with the church. You all know that if you don't give to grace, then grace doesn't exist. That's how it works. You guys are aware of real life. You know that if you're a partner of grace, we need you to give to grace. That's not a secret. Now, there's misconceptions about giving sometimes, and so we may not know all the details. And when I say that, I remember back at my previous church called Greystone, we had a couple of guys who were general contractors, and they, for a while, were helping us with some of our facilities. And so we were walking through the auditorium one day, two of the general contractors and me and the executive pastor, and they looked at us and they said, so how do you guys, like, get paid? And we said, you know, the church allots us a salary. And they go, but do you, like, do you make money on commission? And we said, what? And they go, like, if you invite a family and they start to give to the church, do you get a cut of that? And I said, no, but I'm going to do that at my next church. But I'll never forget it because I thought it was funny. We laughed. No, that's not how it works. It's a set salary, yada, yada, yada. So I know that not everybody understands all the mechanics, but you know the bottom line that if you don't give to the church, the church doesn't exist. That's just how it goes. So we don't need to be shy about that. And I would say two things. One, if this is your first time with us, this is not a typical Sunday, an update Sunday, and me talking like this is. But me talking about this, it's a special, specific Sunday. And two, if it's a turnoff to you that I'm talking about giving in the church, I don't know how to give you a longer break. You're just going to be mad at me. But we need to talk about giving. And the reason that it's been a while since I've used Sunday morning to focus on it is this. I think of Sundays, and there's more ways to think about them than this, but rudimentarily, I think of Sundays as either strategic Sundays or spiritual Sundays. Spiritual Sundays push the needle forward spiritually. They challenge us. They encourage us. They inspire us. They draw us closer to God. We leave here desiring God more. We leave here desiring to know Jesus more deeply. We leave here with hopefully our roots deepened a little bit. And spiritual Sundays are what I want to do every Sunday. You guys will remember, I'm not sure if it was last fall or fall before last, when we said, hey, we're not doing announcements anymore. And some of y'all made fun of me. And then we didn't start doing announcements again. We just started taking some time to tell you what was going on in the church. But the reason we did that is because we felt, Aaron and I did, that they disrupted the spiritual flow of what was happening in the service. And we didn't want to keep doing that. We wanted the service to be spiritual in nature and spiritual in focus, and for you guys to leave focusing on that, we didn't want to denigrate it with bringing it down to this practical level, but we had to accept and acknowledge that the Sunday morning time has to do some things for the church body that can't all be 100% spiritual all the time. And so we've accepted that and we've reinstalled announcements and that's fine. But in that ethos is a desire for every Sunday morning to be a spiritual encounter for you with your creator so you leave here feeling a little bit closer to him and more desirous of him than you did when you entered. So there's spiritual Sundays, but then there's also strategic Sundays. Strategic Sundays are Sundays that are necessary to inform you guys, to direct us, to point us to a place, to bring you along, and it's something that's needed in the life of the church at the time. And that's how I've kind of thought about giving sermons. Is that from time to time it's necessary to talk about giving because we need you guys to give so that we can do God's will. Because giving allows us to go and to serve God. Giving allows us to go and to build God's kingdom. Giving allows us to accomplish spiritual things. But as this sermon was coming up, and I was kind of wrapping my head around what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, it was really impressed upon me that I was very wrong in the way that I thought about the approach to those Sundays. And I wasn't wrong intentionally. I never made a conscious decision to relegate giving as a strategic topic rather than a spiritual one. I just somehow did it, thinking if we focus on spiritual things, that the other behaviors and practices will follow that are necessary. So let's just keep having spiritual Sundays. And how I've shortchanged you guys is by failing to realize that a Sunday spent talking about giving is very much a spiritual Sunday. Giving is a spiritually impactful act. And in fact, I would say the spiritual value of giving is diminished when we regard it as a means to an end. Giving doesn't allow us to serve God. It is serving God. Giving doesn't enable us to do God's will. It is God's will. Giving doesn't make spiritual things possible. It is a spiritual thing. It is what's best for us. It is what's good for us. God desires us to grow in our capacity to give. It is a spiritual discipline that is just as important as any other spiritual discipline. I said it this way. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. And that word repent there there I kind of labored over what to put there just consider it a placeholder for any spiritual discipline on which we would all agree We need to pursue post salvation Once you accept Christ as your Savior once you confess with your mouth and believe with your heart that he is who he says he is He did what he said he did and he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do We would all agree that there's a series of spiritual disciplines that we need to into our life. We need to learn to forgive. We need to learn to pray. We need to learn to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and be students of scripture. We need to learn how to show mercy, how to show grace, how to be kind. And we need to learn to be generous and to give. It's so on par with the other spiritual disciplines that in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 6, my men's group pointed out to me this week, Jesus puts giving on a spiritual plane with prayer and fasting, saying it is just as important for his people to give as it is for them to learn to pray, as it is for them to learn to forgive, as it is for them to learn to repent. So the act of giving is a spiritual act. It progresses us in our faith. The act of giving moves us closer to God. It deepens our desire for him. And we'll see in a minute that it grows our gratitude for Him. So really, it's to my detriment and yours that I don't talk about it more often. Because it's a spiritual act that makes our lives richer and brings us closer to the Father when we do it. Now there's any number of places I can go in the New Testament to show you how it's a spiritual act and what its benefits are for us. Why? Because when I say it's a spiritual act, in part what I mean is it's what's best for us. God tells us it's what's best for us, which seems counterintuitive because we kind of have a mindset in life that we're supposed to get all we can, can't all we get, and sit on our can, right? Like that's what we're supposed to do. We get everything we can, we keep it, and then we let it grow. That's what we do. So it seems counterintuitive that the best thing for us would be to have a mindset to begin to give part of that away. And yet God says it is best for us. God says he makes it very clear he wants us to be generous people. So I want to talk to you about two reasons, two things that it does for us when we give, two ways that it's spiritually impactful. There are myriad more, but these are the two that we have time to focus on this morning. I would first take your attention to Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. You're going to see verse 21 on the screen, but I'm actually going to read a little bit prior to that, beginning in verse 19. Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourself treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal. Listen, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. That is such a concept. Such a rich verse. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. In my men's group on Tuesday morning, we're going through the book of Matthew, and we arrived at chapters 6 and 7 on Tuesday. And there is so much to talk about that as I was reading for the morning, I thought we probably should have only read one chapter because there's just so much detail here. And despite there being so many things to discuss, we spent the entire discussion in this verse. What does that mean and how do we live that out? Where your treasure is there, your heart will be also. I've heard since I was a little kid, show me your calendar and your checkbook, and I can tell you what you care about. And it's absolutely true. And so what we see from this idea of where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, is that our passion goes with our giving. Our passion follows our giving. I think sometimes we wait to be passionate about something, and then we expect our giving to follow that passion. No, our passion will go where our giving goes, wherever our treasures are, wherever we spend our time and our talents and our treasures, our passion will follow that. And here's how I know that that's true experientially. A few years ago, Lily, she just turned eight, so she was four or five. She was on a four and five-year-old soccer team, and I agreed to coach it, which was an egregious error that I will never make again. I hated almost literally every second of it. We had several kids from the church also on that team, and so my small group would basically sit on the sidelines with their Yetis in their lawn chairs laughing at me as I screamed at their child to please pay attention to the game. Just literally laughing out loud at me the entire time. I hated it so much. I'll never do that again. If John asks me to coach his team when he's five, I'm going to tell him to kick rocks. So Lily, last spring, had her first soccer season in like real soccer. It was YMCA soccer. It like counted. They don't keep score yet, but I do. And she did okay. The coach was this lady named Heidi, and I really developed a respect for Heidi. She did an excellent job with the girls. I thought she approached practice in a really respectable way. And then she had an assistant coach named Jamie, who's just a really nice, friendly guy. I loved his demeanor with the girls. And so at the end of the season, I stayed out of it. I kind of would help Coach Lily a little bit and holler at her to get in the right spot. But that was it. But at the end of the season, Heidi and Jamie came to me. And Heidi said, you know, she had two daughters on the team. She was like, my oldest daughter is going to be playing at a different level now. I can't coach two teams. Jamie's going to be the head coach. Can you be his assistant coach so our girls can continue to play together? And I said, okay, I've got a couple caveats. Because she started talking about, we'll give you access to the portal. And I was like, I don't want access to any portals. I don't want any login information. I don't want to go to a single website. I'm not doing that. She's like, we'll send you the spreadsheet for playing time. You will not. I will not open it. You figure that out. It doesn't take two people to figure out how to make 10 girls play the same amount of time. All right? You do that. If you make me do it, I'll just sit lily. I'm not even going to think about it. And I'm like, I'm not. Like, I'll be at practice. I don't care what we do at practice. Don't ask for my input. So I'm just there for the name, okay, just to get our girls to play together. I'll play along. That's how I approach the season. But every Wednesday, Heidi and Jamie start texting. What do you think the girls need to work on tonight? And darn it if I didn't have some thoughts. And then we'd go, and the girls are running drills, and I'm like, ah, you're doing this wrong. So I'm going over there to help them. And then on Saturday, I can't help but interject a little bit. I'm telling you, by the end of the season, by the end of the season, Jen will attest to this, I'm on the sideline. You can hear my voice over the whole field the duration of the game, hollering at our girls to get into position and to move up and to push back and to attack and to yada, yada, yada. Like, I'm all in. When there's a timeout, I'm running out on the field, and I'm high-fiving the little girls. I love those little girls. Whenever they would do something great, like new, like, oh, look at that. She had a flash of this is really great. I would always turn and find Mom and Dad and celebrate that with them. By the end of the season, I loved them. I loved coaching. I was texting Jamie and Heidi during the day with jokes and thoughts. And at the end, they're like, can you help us next season? Yes, I'm all in. I can't wait. I thought about how excited I am for soccer season the other day, right? And it's because, I don't think it's because I'm like sports dad. I don't really care if Lily plays or not. It's because it was fun. It was fun to get to know the girls and to celebrate with them and to get to know the families. Like it was a good time. My passion followed my time. My passion followed my giving. Jen and I give to some nonprofits. I get a lot of emails, updates, nonprofits. I don't read hardly any of them. But if I give, I read. Not because I want to see what my money's doing, because it's not a lot. The answer is not much, buddy. But because I'm genuinely interested in those ministries and I want to know what's happening and I want to know that they're thriving. When we give of our time and our talents and our treasures to the things of God, our heart for the things of God grows. If you want more passion for the church, if you want more passion for the things of God, for organizations that are building God's kingdom, give to those things. And our passion will go with our giving. The other thing we see that I would highlight in the New Testament is in 2 Corinthians 9. On the screen you'll see verses 11 through 12, but I'm going to keep reading because I think the verses that follow that are really interesting as well. Verse 11. Listen. Verse 15, this is amazing. You know what that indescribable gift is? The opportunity to be generous. Thanks be to God for the indescribable gift of the invitation into generosity. That's a remarkable statement. Now, a little context around that passage, that group of verses. The church in Jerusalem was struggling financially. Jerusalem was stricken with poverty. And so the church in Jerusalem had great needs and needs in the community around it and not the means to care for them. So in Paul's missionary journeys around Asia Minor, he takes up love offerings to be taken back to Jerusalem on their behalf. And so in this passage, he's petitioning the church in Corinth family and use it for somebody else that needs it. And you'll experience the gratitude that happens when we're invited into giving. And that gratitude will be multiplied by the recipient who will then turn in praise to your God for providing them what they needed. That's why it's an indescribable gift when we give out of our wealth, out of our extra, out of our surplus. It makes us more grateful for what we have and for what God has invited us into, and it doubles when the recipients get it and they turn in praise to our God as well. This is why I say that not only does our passion go with our giving, but our gratitude grows with our giving. Our gratitude for what we have, for the opportunities that we've been given. It grows with our giving. The more, as it would seem in these verses, the more we give, the more we experience of this indescribable gift, the more we experience of what it, the goodness of what it is to be a conduit of God's generosity to others. He's been generous to you, not so that you might hoard it, but so that you might direct it into different places. And listen, he doesn't need, listen to this, this is super important. He doesn't need to give you money so that you'll give money to the other things. He can find ways to get it directly to them. But what he's doing by funneling it through you is inviting you into the process of generosity that you might be blessed. It's an indescribable gift. And I love the way it starts out. He has made us rich that we might give. And I don't think that everybody in the room is rich. And I don't even have a good working definition of that. If we wanted to compare us to the average family in Honduras, we're all rich. If we want to compare us to the average family in Manhattan, we're not. So it's a sliding scale and I'm not here to define it. But what I do know is some of us have the means to give and that we should do it. Some of us might not feel like we have the means to give. Things might be tight, but we should still give. So I can say this with no hesitation, with no qualification. If you are a believer, it is God's will that you would be someone who would give. If you are a believer, then a step of obedience that God calls you to take unequivocally is to be a person or a family that gives of your time, talents, and treasures. That's without question. We are certain that God wants us to give. And again, he wants us to give because our passion goes with our giving and our gratitude grows with our giving. He wants us to give for our sake. In light of that, the reality that God calls us all to be people who give generously. I would say a couple things about what that means and the reality of that. The first thing I would say is this, and it's so important to me that I wanted to put it on the screen so that you could read it with me and we could be certain that it was covered. The New Testament does not mandate giving 10% or giving to our local church. So I'm aware that any time I preach a sermon on giving, it can be viewed as and is unavoidably in a yucky way self-serving. I get that. Which is why I have never once preached to you at Grace or to anyone to grace. I'm trying to get you, if you do not have a habit of it already, to experience the goodness and the indescribable gift of giving. Because when we give, it grows us in our spirit. It brings us closer to the Father. It helps us know Jesus more. We find him in his service. I ardently believe that giving is what's best for you. So I'm pleading with you to give, but I'm not asking you to give to grace. The other thing is, I'm not asking you to give 10%. 10% is an Old Testament number. It's not a New Testament number. We can find nothing in the New Testament that compels us to give 10%. That's where we get the word tithe. And that's why we try not to use tithe around here because we don't believe that that's a New Testament thing. We would tell you, and most people I know who have a good theology of giving would say that 10% is a good starting point. But sometimes we really can't afford 10%. Give 5%. Some of us have been giving, and I say this delicately, we've been giving 10% for years comfortably. It's time to pray about ramping that up. 12, 12 and a half percent, 15%, 20%, whatever it might be. But here's the other thing I would say is that when we see giving show up in the New Testament, it's almost always like it was in Corinthians, to give to the poor, to give to the needy, to give to those in need, to the have-nots. It's almost always in reference to giving to those who have less than you. That's where we see it in the New Testament, and that's why I'm certain that we need to be giving. Now, here's what I would say about grace, just to be honest and transparent about this as well. I would genuinely hope that if you partner with grace, and for those unfamiliar with our terminology at grace, we have partners, we don't have members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. So if you're a partner of Grace, we hope that you would partner with us financially. And the way that I would say it is, if you have been touched by what happens here, if your marriage and your family is made stronger, if your faith is made deeper by what's happened at Grace, then we hope that you would consider partnering with us financially. And I would also tell you, because giving is about giving to those that have less than us, 10% of everything that is given here to the general budget goes to ministries happening outside the walls of Grace, and that is how you can actively participate in giving to those who are in need. And I will also tell you this. We would love to see, just because it's indicative of health, we would love to see our top-line budget number grow, to have more money received this year than we received last year. And the reason that the elders, when I say we, I mean the elders, the finance committee, and the mission committee want to see that number grow. And we want to see it grow not so that we can redo the sanctuary. That's just putting makeup on a pig. That's not even worth it. We don't have computers that we want to buy or new speakers. We don't want to give extravagant raises to anyone but me. We don't have any other things that we want to do. And obviously I'm just kidding about that. We want to see that 10% that we give away grow to 15 and 20 and 30 and 40% of our budget. We want to collectively be conduits of grace. We spend the same amount in virtually every ministry that we have since I got here because we want that number to grow so that the percentage of what we give away can grow. That's the heart of the elders and of the finance committee. So I hope that you would consider partnering us in that way, but I will not tell you that you have a biblical mandate to do so. My heart for you, quite simply, is that you would see giving as a spiritual exercise. And if your family is not one that gives, it's okay. We want to invite you to start doing that. If there's other people or institutions building God's kingdom outside the walls of grace and you're passionate about them and you're compelled to give, start there. Give to them. Give to where your heart leads you to give. Be prayerful before God and ask him where he would have you funnel his resources. And do it. And watch your passion go with that gift. And watch your gratitude grow with that gift. But step into that. If you are someone who's been giving comfortably at a certain rate for years, prayerfully consider if you're married with your spouse, where God might have you direct more. And in that way, we can be obedient to this biblical command to give, and we can grow in our wisdom and in grace and in our faith deeper roots in Christ as we learn this new spiritual discipline of giving. I'm going to pray, and then I'm going to update you on where we're at with the building campaign. Father, thank you for the indescribable gift of providing us with resources that we might be used to funnel those to others. God, I pray that you would make us conduits of grace. Lord, for all of us, I pray that we might consider what you would have us do in light of this. Who and to what and to where you would have us give? Give us courage and faith that you will provide for us what we need. And God, for those that take steps to begin giving for the first time, I pray that they would see very quickly their passion grow towards your things, your heart, your places, and that they would see their gratitude grow as well. Lord, we ask all these things in your son's name. Amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's so good to see you. Thanks again so much for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. It's such a blessing when you are. Last week we wrapped up a series in a prayer out of Ephesians that we're making the prayer for 2024. And next week we're going to launch into what's going to be our spring series. It's going to carry us to Easter called Final Thoughts. It's going to be a look at what's called the Upper Room Discourse found in the second half of John chapter 13 all the way through John chapter 17. And you'll not be surprised to know that I'm excited to go through that series with you guys. I've been doing a lot of reading and studying there and I'm'm looking forward to sharing that with you. Right here this morning, we're taking a break between series to do an update Sunday. As many of you know, hopefully all of you know, we're in the midst of a campaign to build a permanent home for grace. We do not own this space, believe it or not, as nice as it is. It's not ours. But it is our goal and our hope and our belief that God wants us to have a permanent home. So we have four acres right around the corner on Litchford on which we intend to build about a 16,000 square foot building that's out there. You can take a look at it if you want. We believe it's God's desire for us to take steps of faith to be able to build on that land and move into a permanent home from which we will minister to serve the community and hopefully draw closer to God together. And I'm going to give you an update on where we stand with that at the end of the service today, because of course I'm going to wait to the end of the service. In the meantime, I also wanted to take this morning in the sermon to talk to you about the subject of giving, which I'm sure is very exciting for everyone. Yes, no one wakes up excited to hear a sermon on giving. As a matter of fact, we kind of cringe at the idea of the sermons on giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey, man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving, and we think that's an important thing to teach the people of God about. So we need to try to work that in. And I knew that they were right, but I haven't done a sermon on giving, I think in three or four years. As a matter of fact, the last sermon at Grace that was done on the idea of giving, tithing, stewardship, generosity, whatever you want to call it, was done by Doug Bergeson, one of our elders. And one of the reasons I've waited so long to preach one on giving is because his was so good, I wanted you to forget it before I had to preach one and you compared it. But like I said, it's been three or four years since I've done a sermon on giving. And it's not for the reason that you probably think it is. It's not because I don't, I'm shy about the topic. It's not because I don't want to put in front of you things that scripture says about it. As a matter of fact, my thought in leading you guys, and I've tried to lead this way since I was hired in 2017, is to be of the mindset that this room is full of, for the most part, smart adults. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people for the most part. And I need to lead you in that way. So it's not that I'm shy about giving in its relationship with the church. You all know that if you don't give to grace, then grace doesn't exist. That's how it works. You guys are aware of real life. You know that if you're a partner of grace, we need you to give to grace. That's not a secret. Now, there's misconceptions about giving sometimes, and so we may not know all the details. And when I say that, I remember back at my previous church called Greystone, we had a couple of guys who were general contractors, and they, for a while, were helping us with some of our facilities. And so we were walking through the auditorium one day, two of the general contractors and me and the executive pastor, and they looked at us and they said, so how do you guys, like, get paid? And we said, you know, the church allots us a salary. And they go, but do you, like, do you make money on commission? And we said, what? And they go, like, if you invite a family and they start to give to the church, do you get a cut of that? And I said, no, but I'm going to do that at my next church. But I'll never forget it because I thought it was funny. We laughed. No, that's not how it works. It's a set salary, yada, yada, yada. So I know that not everybody understands all the mechanics, but you know the bottom line that if you don't give to the church, the church doesn't exist. That's just how it goes. So we don't need to be shy about that. And I would say two things. One, if this is your first time with us, this is not a typical Sunday, an update Sunday, and me talking like this is. But me talking about this, it's a special, specific Sunday. And two, if it's a turnoff to you that I'm talking about giving in the church, I don't know how to give you a longer break. You're just going to be mad at me. But we need to talk about giving. And the reason that it's been a while since I've used Sunday morning to focus on it is this. I think of Sundays, and there's more ways to think about them than this, but rudimentarily, I think of Sundays as either strategic Sundays or spiritual Sundays. Spiritual Sundays push the needle forward spiritually. They challenge us. They encourage us. They inspire us. They draw us closer to God. We leave here desiring God more. We leave here desiring to know Jesus more deeply. We leave here with hopefully our roots deepened a little bit. And spiritual Sundays are what I want to do every Sunday. You guys will remember, I'm not sure if it was last fall or fall before last, when we said, hey, we're not doing announcements anymore. And some of y'all made fun of me. And then we didn't start doing announcements again. We just started taking some time to tell you what was going on in the church. But the reason we did that is because we felt, Aaron and I did, that they disrupted the spiritual flow of what was happening in the service. And we didn't want to keep doing that. We wanted the service to be spiritual in nature and spiritual in focus, and for you guys to leave focusing on that, we didn't want to denigrate it with bringing it down to this practical level, but we had to accept and acknowledge that the Sunday morning time has to do some things for the church body that can't all be 100% spiritual all the time. And so we've accepted that and we've reinstalled announcements and that's fine. But in that ethos is a desire for every Sunday morning to be a spiritual encounter for you with your creator so you leave here feeling a little bit closer to him and more desirous of him than you did when you entered. So there's spiritual Sundays, but then there's also strategic Sundays. Strategic Sundays are Sundays that are necessary to inform you guys, to direct us, to point us to a place, to bring you along, and it's something that's needed in the life of the church at the time. And that's how I've kind of thought about giving sermons. Is that from time to time it's necessary to talk about giving because we need you guys to give so that we can do God's will. Because giving allows us to go and to serve God. Giving allows us to go and to build God's kingdom. Giving allows us to accomplish spiritual things. But as this sermon was coming up, and I was kind of wrapping my head around what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, it was really impressed upon me that I was very wrong in the way that I thought about the approach to those Sundays. And I wasn't wrong intentionally. I never made a conscious decision to relegate giving as a strategic topic rather than a spiritual one. I just somehow did it, thinking if we focus on spiritual things, that the other behaviors and practices will follow that are necessary. So let's just keep having spiritual Sundays. And how I've shortchanged you guys is by failing to realize that a Sunday spent talking about giving is very much a spiritual Sunday. Giving is a spiritually impactful act. And in fact, I would say the spiritual value of giving is diminished when we regard it as a means to an end. Giving doesn't allow us to serve God. It is serving God. Giving doesn't enable us to do God's will. It is God's will. Giving doesn't make spiritual things possible. It is a spiritual thing. It is what's best for us. It is what's good for us. God desires us to grow in our capacity to give. It is a spiritual discipline that is just as important as any other spiritual discipline. I said it this way. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. And that word repent there there I kind of labored over what to put there just consider it a placeholder for any spiritual discipline on which we would all agree We need to pursue post salvation Once you accept Christ as your Savior once you confess with your mouth and believe with your heart that he is who he says he is He did what he said he did and he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do We would all agree that there's a series of spiritual disciplines that we need to into our life. We need to learn to forgive. We need to learn to pray. We need to learn to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and be students of scripture. We need to learn how to show mercy, how to show grace, how to be kind. And we need to learn to be generous and to give. It's so on par with the other spiritual disciplines that in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 6, my men's group pointed out to me this week, Jesus puts giving on a spiritual plane with prayer and fasting, saying it is just as important for his people to give as it is for them to learn to pray, as it is for them to learn to forgive, as it is for them to learn to repent. So the act of giving is a spiritual act. It progresses us in our faith. The act of giving moves us closer to God. It deepens our desire for him. And we'll see in a minute that it grows our gratitude for Him. So really, it's to my detriment and yours that I don't talk about it more often. Because it's a spiritual act that makes our lives richer and brings us closer to the Father when we do it. Now there's any number of places I can go in the New Testament to show you how it's a spiritual act and what its benefits are for us. Why? Because when I say it's a spiritual act, in part what I mean is it's what's best for us. God tells us it's what's best for us, which seems counterintuitive because we kind of have a mindset in life that we're supposed to get all we can, can't all we get, and sit on our can, right? Like that's what we're supposed to do. We get everything we can, we keep it, and then we let it grow. That's what we do. So it seems counterintuitive that the best thing for us would be to have a mindset to begin to give part of that away. And yet God says it is best for us. God says he makes it very clear he wants us to be generous people. So I want to talk to you about two reasons, two things that it does for us when we give, two ways that it's spiritually impactful. There are myriad more, but these are the two that we have time to focus on this morning. I would first take your attention to Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. You're going to see verse 21 on the screen, but I'm actually going to read a little bit prior to that, beginning in verse 19. Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourself treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal. Listen, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. That is such a concept. Such a rich verse. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. In my men's group on Tuesday morning, we're going through the book of Matthew, and we arrived at chapters 6 and 7 on Tuesday. And there is so much to talk about that as I was reading for the morning, I thought we probably should have only read one chapter because there's just so much detail here. And despite there being so many things to discuss, we spent the entire discussion in this verse. What does that mean and how do we live that out? Where your treasure is there, your heart will be also. I've heard since I was a little kid, show me your calendar and your checkbook, and I can tell you what you care about. And it's absolutely true. And so what we see from this idea of where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, is that our passion goes with our giving. Our passion follows our giving. I think sometimes we wait to be passionate about something, and then we expect our giving to follow that passion. No, our passion will go where our giving goes, wherever our treasures are, wherever we spend our time and our talents and our treasures, our passion will follow that. And here's how I know that that's true experientially. A few years ago, Lily, she just turned eight, so she was four or five. She was on a four and five-year-old soccer team, and I agreed to coach it, which was an egregious error that I will never make again. I hated almost literally every second of it. We had several kids from the church also on that team, and so my small group would basically sit on the sidelines with their Yetis in their lawn chairs laughing at me as I screamed at their child to please pay attention to the game. Just literally laughing out loud at me the entire time. I hated it so much. I'll never do that again. If John asks me to coach his team when he's five, I'm going to tell him to kick rocks. So Lily, last spring, had her first soccer season in like real soccer. It was YMCA soccer. It like counted. They don't keep score yet, but I do. And she did okay. The coach was this lady named Heidi, and I really developed a respect for Heidi. She did an excellent job with the girls. I thought she approached practice in a really respectable way. And then she had an assistant coach named Jamie, who's just a really nice, friendly guy. I loved his demeanor with the girls. And so at the end of the season, I stayed out of it. I kind of would help Coach Lily a little bit and holler at her to get in the right spot. But that was it. But at the end of the season, Heidi and Jamie came to me. And Heidi said, you know, she had two daughters on the team. She was like, my oldest daughter is going to be playing at a different level now. I can't coach two teams. Jamie's going to be the head coach. Can you be his assistant coach so our girls can continue to play together? And I said, okay, I've got a couple caveats. Because she started talking about, we'll give you access to the portal. And I was like, I don't want access to any portals. I don't want any login information. I don't want to go to a single website. I'm not doing that. She's like, we'll send you the spreadsheet for playing time. You will not. I will not open it. You figure that out. It doesn't take two people to figure out how to make 10 girls play the same amount of time. All right? You do that. If you make me do it, I'll just sit lily. I'm not even going to think about it. And I'm like, I'm not. Like, I'll be at practice. I don't care what we do at practice. Don't ask for my input. So I'm just there for the name, okay, just to get our girls to play together. I'll play along. That's how I approach the season. But every Wednesday, Heidi and Jamie start texting. What do you think the girls need to work on tonight? And darn it if I didn't have some thoughts. And then we'd go, and the girls are running drills, and I'm like, ah, you're doing this wrong. So I'm going over there to help them. And then on Saturday, I can't help but interject a little bit. I'm telling you, by the end of the season, by the end of the season, Jen will attest to this, I'm on the sideline. You can hear my voice over the whole field the duration of the game, hollering at our girls to get into position and to move up and to push back and to attack and to yada, yada, yada. Like, I'm all in. When there's a timeout, I'm running out on the field, and I'm high-fiving the little girls. I love those little girls. Whenever they would do something great, like new, like, oh, look at that. She had a flash of this is really great. I would always turn and find Mom and Dad and celebrate that with them. By the end of the season, I loved them. I loved coaching. I was texting Jamie and Heidi during the day with jokes and thoughts. And at the end, they're like, can you help us next season? Yes, I'm all in. I can't wait. I thought about how excited I am for soccer season the other day, right? And it's because, I don't think it's because I'm like sports dad. I don't really care if Lily plays or not. It's because it was fun. It was fun to get to know the girls and to celebrate with them and to get to know the families. Like it was a good time. My passion followed my time. My passion followed my giving. Jen and I give to some nonprofits. I get a lot of emails, updates, nonprofits. I don't read hardly any of them. But if I give, I read. Not because I want to see what my money's doing, because it's not a lot. The answer is not much, buddy. But because I'm genuinely interested in those ministries and I want to know what's happening and I want to know that they're thriving. When we give of our time and our talents and our treasures to the things of God, our heart for the things of God grows. If you want more passion for the church, if you want more passion for the things of God, for organizations that are building God's kingdom, give to those things. And our passion will go with our giving. The other thing we see that I would highlight in the New Testament is in 2 Corinthians 9. On the screen you'll see verses 11 through 12, but I'm going to keep reading because I think the verses that follow that are really interesting as well. Verse 11. Listen. Verse 15, this is amazing. You know what that indescribable gift is? The opportunity to be generous. Thanks be to God for the indescribable gift of the invitation into generosity. That's a remarkable statement. Now, a little context around that passage, that group of verses. The church in Jerusalem was struggling financially. Jerusalem was stricken with poverty. And so the church in Jerusalem had great needs and needs in the community around it and not the means to care for them. So in Paul's missionary journeys around Asia Minor, he takes up love offerings to be taken back to Jerusalem on their behalf. And so in this passage, he's petitioning the church in Corinth family and use it for somebody else that needs it. And you'll experience the gratitude that happens when we're invited into giving. And that gratitude will be multiplied by the recipient who will then turn in praise to your God for providing them what they needed. That's why it's an indescribable gift when we give out of our wealth, out of our extra, out of our surplus. It makes us more grateful for what we have and for what God has invited us into, and it doubles when the recipients get it and they turn in praise to our God as well. This is why I say that not only does our passion go with our giving, but our gratitude grows with our giving. Our gratitude for what we have, for the opportunities that we've been given. It grows with our giving. The more, as it would seem in these verses, the more we give, the more we experience of this indescribable gift, the more we experience of what it, the goodness of what it is to be a conduit of God's generosity to others. He's been generous to you, not so that you might hoard it, but so that you might direct it into different places. And listen, he doesn't need, listen to this, this is super important. He doesn't need to give you money so that you'll give money to the other things. He can find ways to get it directly to them. But what he's doing by funneling it through you is inviting you into the process of generosity that you might be blessed. It's an indescribable gift. And I love the way it starts out. He has made us rich that we might give. And I don't think that everybody in the room is rich. And I don't even have a good working definition of that. If we wanted to compare us to the average family in Honduras, we're all rich. If we want to compare us to the average family in Manhattan, we're not. So it's a sliding scale and I'm not here to define it. But what I do know is some of us have the means to give and that we should do it. Some of us might not feel like we have the means to give. Things might be tight, but we should still give. So I can say this with no hesitation, with no qualification. If you are a believer, it is God's will that you would be someone who would give. If you are a believer, then a step of obedience that God calls you to take unequivocally is to be a person or a family that gives of your time, talents, and treasures. That's without question. We are certain that God wants us to give. And again, he wants us to give because our passion goes with our giving and our gratitude grows with our giving. He wants us to give for our sake. In light of that, the reality that God calls us all to be people who give generously. I would say a couple things about what that means and the reality of that. The first thing I would say is this, and it's so important to me that I wanted to put it on the screen so that you could read it with me and we could be certain that it was covered. The New Testament does not mandate giving 10% or giving to our local church. So I'm aware that any time I preach a sermon on giving, it can be viewed as and is unavoidably in a yucky way self-serving. I get that. Which is why I have never once preached to you at Grace or to anyone to grace. I'm trying to get you, if you do not have a habit of it already, to experience the goodness and the indescribable gift of giving. Because when we give, it grows us in our spirit. It brings us closer to the Father. It helps us know Jesus more. We find him in his service. I ardently believe that giving is what's best for you. So I'm pleading with you to give, but I'm not asking you to give to grace. The other thing is, I'm not asking you to give 10%. 10% is an Old Testament number. It's not a New Testament number. We can find nothing in the New Testament that compels us to give 10%. That's where we get the word tithe. And that's why we try not to use tithe around here because we don't believe that that's a New Testament thing. We would tell you, and most people I know who have a good theology of giving would say that 10% is a good starting point. But sometimes we really can't afford 10%. Give 5%. Some of us have been giving, and I say this delicately, we've been giving 10% for years comfortably. It's time to pray about ramping that up. 12, 12 and a half percent, 15%, 20%, whatever it might be. But here's the other thing I would say is that when we see giving show up in the New Testament, it's almost always like it was in Corinthians, to give to the poor, to give to the needy, to give to those in need, to the have-nots. It's almost always in reference to giving to those who have less than you. That's where we see it in the New Testament, and that's why I'm certain that we need to be giving. Now, here's what I would say about grace, just to be honest and transparent about this as well. I would genuinely hope that if you partner with grace, and for those unfamiliar with our terminology at grace, we have partners, we don't have members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. So if you're a partner of Grace, we hope that you would partner with us financially. And the way that I would say it is, if you have been touched by what happens here, if your marriage and your family is made stronger, if your faith is made deeper by what's happened at Grace, then we hope that you would consider partnering with us financially. And I would also tell you, because giving is about giving to those that have less than us, 10% of everything that is given here to the general budget goes to ministries happening outside the walls of Grace, and that is how you can actively participate in giving to those who are in need. And I will also tell you this. We would love to see, just because it's indicative of health, we would love to see our top-line budget number grow, to have more money received this year than we received last year. And the reason that the elders, when I say we, I mean the elders, the finance committee, and the mission committee want to see that number grow. And we want to see it grow not so that we can redo the sanctuary. That's just putting makeup on a pig. That's not even worth it. We don't have computers that we want to buy or new speakers. We don't want to give extravagant raises to anyone but me. We don't have any other things that we want to do. And obviously I'm just kidding about that. We want to see that 10% that we give away grow to 15 and 20 and 30 and 40% of our budget. We want to collectively be conduits of grace. We spend the same amount in virtually every ministry that we have since I got here because we want that number to grow so that the percentage of what we give away can grow. That's the heart of the elders and of the finance committee. So I hope that you would consider partnering us in that way, but I will not tell you that you have a biblical mandate to do so. My heart for you, quite simply, is that you would see giving as a spiritual exercise. And if your family is not one that gives, it's okay. We want to invite you to start doing that. If there's other people or institutions building God's kingdom outside the walls of grace and you're passionate about them and you're compelled to give, start there. Give to them. Give to where your heart leads you to give. Be prayerful before God and ask him where he would have you funnel his resources. And do it. And watch your passion go with that gift. And watch your gratitude grow with that gift. But step into that. If you are someone who's been giving comfortably at a certain rate for years, prayerfully consider if you're married with your spouse, where God might have you direct more. And in that way, we can be obedient to this biblical command to give, and we can grow in our wisdom and in grace and in our faith deeper roots in Christ as we learn this new spiritual discipline of giving. I'm going to pray, and then I'm going to update you on where we're at with the building campaign. Father, thank you for the indescribable gift of providing us with resources that we might be used to funnel those to others. God, I pray that you would make us conduits of grace. Lord, for all of us, I pray that we might consider what you would have us do in light of this. Who and to what and to where you would have us give? Give us courage and faith that you will provide for us what we need. And God, for those that take steps to begin giving for the first time, I pray that they would see very quickly their passion grow towards your things, your heart, your places, and that they would see their gratitude grow as well. Lord, we ask all these things in your son's name. Amen.