054. A Generation with Purpose

I hope you did your ‘homework’ and read through Daniel chapter 1 a couple of times through the week?  I had asked if you could think about that story and consider how we might fit into it today and so become better disciples for Jesus.

Daniel spent his entire adult life in Babylon in exile, captive by a foreign power. Daniel lived in a perverse and twisted culture. He was part of a system that was bigger than he was and it was committed to evil. How many of you say, “I think I live in that kind of world right now; it’s bigger than me and it’s going to keep grinding away, and at times I feel like I’m a stranger in a strange land”? That’s exactly how Daniel was. The world he lived in may have been bigger than he was, but it wasn’t bigger than the God he served.  And the twisted world we live in today is not bigger than that same great God that we serve.

So Daniel and his friends have been taken off into captivity.  Please turn to the story on page 1018, the book of Daniel and chapter one.  Page 1018, Daniel chapter 1 verses 1 to 4.    Daniel 1:1-4.  

V1 “In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it.

V2   And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the articles of the house of God, which he carried into the land of Shinar, to the house of his god; and he brought the articles into the treasure house of his god.

V3   Then the king instructed Ashpinaz, the master of his eunuchs, to bring some of the children of Israel and some of the kings descendents and some of the nobles,

V4  young men in whom there was no blemish, but good looking, gifted in all wisdom, possessing knowledge and quick to understand, who had the ability to serve in the king’s palace, and whom they might teach the language and literature of the Chaldeans.”

The king said I want the best and the brightest. How many know that’s always the strategy of the adversary, the enemy, always to take the best, the brightest? There is a generation that’s been carried off into captivity.

In his lifetime Daniel will outlive three kings. He’ll see three of the four kings he serves under make proclamations that the God of Israel is the God of the whole earth. In his day, Daniel will prophesy, he will be extraordinary in his service to his masters, and he will become the focal point of encouragement in a very difficult time in the captivity of Israel in Babylon.

This Bible teaching from Daniel chapter one has three distinct elements. 1.  It addresses young people. 

2.  It addresses those in the middle of their careers, who right now face the fires.  People who have already stepped into leadership. Will you lead on God’s terms? 

Finally, it addresses number 3, the third generation, the older people who are actively involved and more intensely entwined in the purpose of God than you may have any idea. -----

------   We thank and respect deeply those gallant men who liberated our nations from Nazi oppression.  On the beaches of Normandy began the undoing of the demonic hand that came upon the world through Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. These brave and gallant men landed in Normandy, and began to push out the adversary who overtook an entire continent with all of the brutality, the abomination, and the ghastly massacre that took place in the holocaust. These men are a generation to be honoured.

The enemy they faced that day was clear. This bad guy wore a black hat. Everybody knew who the bad guy was. The good guys were the underdogs. From across an ocean Britain mobilized the campaign that would liberate an entire continent. These guys were bad morally. They were enemies of the free people. They spoke another language. Their talk was hateful. Their actions were abominable, and it caused an entire generation to rise up and say, “We will resist this evil.” -----

Today friends, we live in a time where the evil is just as dangerous, just as hateful, just as deadly and just as morally corrupt as the generation who fought against evil back then.   Today the enemy doesn’t wear a black hat and doesn’t speak another language. This enemy looks like those who teach in our schools and lead in our government, who take their places in seats of authority. We don’t know when we click on the TV or radio whether we’re hearing a good guy or a bad guy. When we turn on the TV or go to a movie, we don’t know whether it’s trying to suck the soul out of our children—into the ooze of a cosmic conspiracy that seeks to grind away the souls of our young people and families.

Today the good guys don’t wear black hats. They don’t wear white hats. They look just like the culture around us, and that’s exactly the world Daniel was sucked into.  ------

Today we’re going to use the story of Daniel to explore the three phases of our own lives – the phase of youth, middle age, and our phase as seniors.  So here’s number 1.

Pp    1.     The young Daniel remained countercultural in his faith, appetites, and purposes.

The culture that young Daniel was cast into was so thoroughly polluted that God wanted to judge it. The king says, “Give us the best and the brightest, and we’ll train them. We’ll educate them. We’ll feed them the finest food.” Verse five: They’ll have the delicacies. They’ll drink the wine. They’ll have the privileges, and they’ll serve in the court of the king.

All of a sudden there’s a generation that says, This isn’t really all that bad. I mean, it was so bad at home in Jerusalem before we were taken into captivity by the enemy, that God said, “I won’t have anything to do with it.” It was as corrupt at home as it is here, so I opt for this because there’s a lot of privileges I can have here.

How many of the young people in our world are bound and confused and filled with unrest and a broken sense of purpose— how many of our young people say, “I don’t want to follow what I see at home. I might as well follow what I see in the world because it’s no worse and it offers a whole lot more privileges than I see in my home, a place loaded with divorce and compromise and confusion.”-------  The adversaries our great grandfathers fought were clear; the adversaries we face aren’t so clear, and they’re very compelling. -----  Daniel was trying to live in that kind of world.

In different situations there are different enemies.  They may look different.  But the enemy is always the devil. ------   Friends, it’s always the devil—whether the devil looks like Adolf Hitler or someone in a suit and tie proclaiming another gospel in a biology class at a university, or somebody on the TV who’s pumping a gospel that says, “you do whatever you want whenever you want and it feels really good while you’re doing it.”

The enemies set against us are profound, and God is calling us to be like Jesus, to be counter-cultural people.

Notice what culture Daniel is sucked into. It’s the same culture that our television sets can too easily suck us into if we watch it.  It says, feed them things that will help them grow into a taste for things of the world. Change their identity. -----   Look what takes place.  Verse seven says, “They gave them new names. The original names these young men were born with were Daniel and Hananiah and Mishael and Azariah.” Each was named after one aspect of the God they served. 

Pp    Daniel, the judge of God.   Azariah, God has helped.   Mishael, Who is the Lord? There is none like the Lord.   And Hananiah— God has favoured. 

Each one had a name with a touch of the Almighty upon it, and the world immediately wants to say, Look, if you’re going to play this game, we have to alter your ID. We want you to identify with the things of the world around you. Each one gets a new name.  -----   Friends, the world wants to give you and me a new name, a new identity.  Will we get sucked in or will we stand up and be counted for God? -------

------    A new dimension of identity overtakes them, but it is never accepted by this group of four young men. They said, “My identity is going to be in my faith in the God that I serve.” As soon as it’s in anything else, the world begins to win. ------  Where do you want your identity to be?

There’s a new generation of young people whose appetites have been determined by the world around them—wine and delicacies—there it is in verse five. We lose our taste for the things of God and blur our senses with the wine of the world. We’re overpowered by a narcotic effect that dulls our resistance to the rewards of privilege of our society and the power and status that comes with it. Every young person needs to learn that it is the desire of the adversary Satan, to pound in and through you the taste of this world.

There needs to be an appetite determined among us that is according to our convictions. Daniel said, “I don’t want your food, and I don’t want your wine.” He wouldn’t drink it; he wouldn’t eat it. In fact, he goes to the steward who oversees them and says, “Look, we’ll do our own thing. We’ll eat the way we eat.” They selected a simple diet, nothing at all like the world around them. It says they grew stronger and more complete in their physical appearance.

How many of our young people who have feasted at the world’s table are emaciated or obese? It’s not just fat. It’s a thickness of skull—there is no longer much ability to reason, to say, “this is right and that is wrong.” There’s a dullness that comes to the thought process and a shriveling up of our souls.  The only thing they want is the continual empty influence of the world around them. There comes a point where the Lord says, “I want to seize your appetites and turn them to the things of the Lord.”   -------

-----  I want to challenge young people. You are more loved than you can possibly know. -----  Keep eating the way you’re eating, keep feasting at the table of the world, and you’ll starve to death. We’ve got an entire culture of people who are starving to death—eating more calories than they’ve ever eaten before in their lives, but those calories have no substance. They take you down to death!  They have no vitamin value, and if that’s true of the physical dimension, how much more true it is in the spiritual dimension?

Notice Daniel’s response. Verse eight: “Daniel purposed in his heart.” ---- His life was spared on three different occasions. The king received a prophecy and he said, “None of my advisors know what this dream is about. So I’m going to kill them all. What good are they?” Daniel steps forward and says, “I’ll interpret the dream. I know what it is. The living God has revealed it to me.” His life is spared, and those of his companions, because they didn’t allow the appetites of the world and the blurring influence to hamper their judgment and ability to discern what God was saying to them.

On another occasion Daniel’s three young Hebrew friends are thrown into the fire, and it’s because of their commitment to be the people of God that they were not consumed by that fire.  Delphine spoke about that some weeks ago in the message ‘Fourth Man in the Furnace.’

Later on Daniel is thrown into the lion’s den. Three different times Daniel escaped death because he purposed in his heart to be the Lord’s person. As a result of that, he was able to resist whatever assault came against him.

That’s true for us today too. There are arrows sent against the souls of every one of us. Our identity is found in faith, our appetites are shaped by conviction, and our training has been set for a purpose. Daniel purposed in his heart, ‘I am not training for the world’s systems. I am training to be a child of God.’ Daniel set himself with that purpose, and God  said “You are Mine.  I’ll work with you;  I’ll help you.” -----

Well, that’s one generation.

 Now comes the second phase of Daniel’s life, and it’s the phase that every  person has got to go through.  And we all go through it as a ‘loser’, or a ‘winner’.

Pp  2.     Three middle-aged contemporaries of Daniel remained unbowed in the face of crisis and compromise.

Turn with me to chapter three of Daniel where these three Hebrew men are in trouble. They’d been around awhile. They are under Nebuchadnezzar’s rule. Nebuchadnezzar said, ‘everybody who’s in my world, bow down to this image’.

The three Hebrew men won’t bow down. Azariah, Mishael, and Hananiah won’t bow down. They said, “We belong to God, not to you. You can make any idol you want.  Everybody else can bow down but we refuse to bow down.”   It was a call to compromise.   And the same call goes out to you and me.  ----   These men were well along in their careers. These men were in service to the king. They had positions of responsibility. The call was to compromise. Can you imagine? They’re succeeding in Babylon;  they shouldn’t rock the boat. They have earned their place. You just get along with the society around

you.   Don’t make waves—you don’t have that long to go. You’ve got another 10 or 15 years, and you can retire. All of a sudden the pressures come on a little more strongly. ----- To the young generation, the appeal is to their senses and appetites. In this generation, the appeal is to security and our sense of status. We won’t rock this boat, because if you rock the boat, you lose it all.   “I’ve got a little bit of seniority, and I don’t want to put my retirement on the line!” 

Our great God is drawing us out of the comfort zone, where security has become an idol.  The Lord says, “I’m going to allow you to face a fire hotter than you can imagine because I want to demonstrate myself to be stronger than you could ever imagine.”    You can be delivered from the assault against your soul. You’ve got to decide if you’re going to live for Jesus or you’re going to live for the world around you—if you’re going to opt for false safety, or move on the call that God’s put on your life.

The three Hebrew men are brought before Nebuchadnezzar. He said, “Look, when the bell rings, you do what I say. Fall down and worship.” They say no! The bell rings, and they don’t fall down. They tie them up hand and foot. They stoke the fires of the furnace, and they throw all three of them in. Others die from the heat as they try to stuff them into that furnace. ----

Security may not be a sin, but it may bind you up.   What might be our idols?  Idols may be our comforts, our successes, our privileges.   Friends, they’re not worth us compromising our integrity, our future, or our life.  Don’t worship that idol.  Don’t let yourself in for the disappointment of what those compromises mean. Don’t worry about the fire! 

James 1 and verse 2 says,….   

Pp    James 1:2     “Think it not strange, brethren, concerning the fiery trials that come against you.” 

The Scriptures warn us that trials are on the way, and the Lord is here to deliver his people out of them.

They stoked the fires, and God’s people were bound up by the systems of the world around them. They were helpless to resist. In their hearts they said, no way will we obey, but they were bound up and thrown into the fire, and then a remarkable miracle took place.    ----   I want to ask the question, What bondage of the world can hold us when the fire we’re going through has Jesus walking with us in the midst of it? They’ve stoked the fires, and these followers were not worried about it. They just go through it. When you go through those fires, and when you come out, you’re not bound up any more.  God caused the ropes that the world used to try to bind them to burn away.

By the way, I’ve watched people in their secure middle years pick fights that God wasn’t in. I’ve watched them have a go at their employers for no good reason. They’ve got a self-righteous idea about the way life ought to be, and they think standing up for Jesus means spitting in the face of authority. Standing up for Jesus is never spitting in the face of authority.

Standing up for Jesus is to love and serve people in the midst of their confusion and be a blessing to them.

How many have ever heard that we are to love our enemies? Who said it? Jesus said it. We think we get some supernatural right from God because we’re smarter and better than anybody else to walk with an absence of humility and a sense of Holy Spirit authority to trample on people we don’t like. All of a sudden we recognize we get thrown in the fire because of that, and the bonds that bind us up aren’t the bonds of the world around us. It’s the bond of our pride, and pride goes before a fall and it always burns us. There are people who pick fights with their employers when they have no reason to. There are times to stand, but there is no time to live as an embittered angry employee who doesn’t produce maximum effort every day they go to the job. -------------

One day I might speak on that subject.  I think I’d title it, “Christian on the Job – Working Hard or Hardly Working?”     - Good question!

Our testimony, our witness, is wrapped around our productivity. Sometimes we wonder why we’ve never led anyone to Jesus Christ.  Maybe it’s because we stink as an employee. We steal our employer’s money because we don’t give a genuine eight hours work for the money we are given. Nobody stands up and says, “You are the best employee I’ve ever had.” I’ve got news for us. If we’re the best employee with the best attitude, the world will stand up and say, “Who are you and who is your God?”

Look at Daniel 3:25. While they were in the fire, Nebuchadnezzar says, “Look! I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire; and they are not hurt, and the form of the fourth one is like the Son of God.” Jesus walks through the fire with the three Hebrew men, and He’ll walk through with us, and everything changes.

There’s a generation of people who even call themselves Christians, but who have chosen security first, and God second.  God says, “I want to use you in the marketplace.  Will you let Me?”   --- 

-----  Finally, the example of Daniel as a disciple of God in his later years helps us too on our journey.

Pp     3.    The senior Daniel remained an encourager and influencer to the coming  generations.

I want to talk now to the last generation of people, our seniors.  It could be you, your parents, your grandparents.  Your influence over time only increases. You can see your influence over generations. Daniel was carried away as a young man.   Some of the scholars believe he was 16, a teenager.  He was in captivity for 70 years, because he will live to the day Cyrus sends the people back to Israel. Cyrus sends them back with a decree that says, “The God of heaven has spoken to me that I should build a temple for the Lord.”   Daniel saw that happen in his day. 

Now Daniel knew quite a lot about fiery trials.  He was thrown into the lions den.

He was the best advisor the king had, but he had been set up. Just as the three Hebrew men had before, Daniel also had won over the test of idolatry. As a result, he is standing for his God in the lion’s den. The king is beside himself.  The king loved his loyal worker.  It says the king stayed up all night. He couldn’t sleep because Daniel was in the lion’s den. The king was set up by his crooked advisors who had made a plan to kill Daniel.

The next morning the king comes to Daniel and says, “Was your God able to save you?” Daniel’s response is classic.  He says, “My king, yes. He shut the mouth of the lion. I’m just fine.”  ------ By that afternoon everyone who’d accused Daniel was thrown in the lion’s den; every one of them was killed—their families, too, by the way.   It’s a brutal statement. 

Now look at Daniel 6:25. Daniel sees this in his lifetime. It’s a new king, by the way. It’s Darius, not 

Nebuchadnezzar.

Nebuchadnezzar has got old and died.  He and his family don’t exist anymore. The Babylonians were conquered by Medo-Persia and Darius becomes the king.    Now it’s another generation.

Daniel stands out as such a profound leader in his day. Darius makes a decree following the incident in the lion’s den.  It says in Daniel 6:25, “Then King Darius wrote:    To all peoples, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth: Peace be multiplied to you. I make a decree that in every dominion of my kingdom men must tremble and fear before the God of Daniel.   For He is the living God, and steadfast forever; His kingdom is the one which shall not be destroyed, and His dominion shall endure to the end. He delivers and rescues, and He works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth, who has delivered Daniel from the power of the lions.”

We’re not through yet. Daniel never goes back to Jerusalem. He was carried out as a young man, and now Cyrus is the new king, and Daniel is an old man, probably close to 90 years old, if not older.   Cyrus has equipped the returning group.    The Book of Ezra tells the story of those who left Babylon and returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the city and temple to establish a place in Jerusalem for worship of the living God. This was according to the prophecy of Jeremiah who said, “You will be in captivity for 70 years.” Then he said, “You’ll go back to Jerusalem and build homes. You’ll make a living. You’ll care for what takes place there, and you will see over the flow of the generations the faithfulness of the living God.”  

Come to page 905, Jeremiah chapter 29.  ---  Page 905, Jeremiah 29 and verse 11….

Jeremiah 29:11: “‘For I know the thoughts that I think toward you,’ says the Lord, ‘thoughts of peace and not evil, to give you a future and a hope.”   

Just before that, verse 10 says, “For thus says the Lord:  ‘After 70 years are completed at Babylon I will visit you and perform My good word toward you, and cause you to return to this place (that’s Jerusalem).’”

The only ones who will ever see it through the 70 years are those who stand fast.  You know friends, it doesn’t mean life was ever easy. It doesn’t mean the fires didn’t get hot. It didn’t mean the lions didn’t have real teeth. It didn’t mean there weren’t awful ruling over us. It didn’t mean we weren’t in captivity. It didn’t mean there wasn’t bondage all around us. But it did mean this: none of those things matter when God is on the throne of our hearts and lives. There’s a generation that stands up and says, “I know I have seen the faithfulness of God.” -----

I say to the seniors, would you help another generation see the faithfulness with their own eyes in their own time of life? Would you help lead and serve and pray for them?  ----  “I’m pretty old,” you say. -----   You know, the children in our community and in our church don’t care how old you are. They just care how much you love them. You have so much to offer them. You’ve seen the faithfulness of God—and in the midst of the faithlessness of parents who are not raising them, of money that’s tight for struggling families, of a culture that keeps crowding them out—the living God wants you to crowd on in because you’ve got more to offer than you ever dreamed. There’s a promise. You’re not through yet. -----

Pp   1 young,2middle aged,3older

-------      So, young people, middle aged people, and older people ---- if we don’t stand strong for Jesus, we’ll lead those around us down to death.  But if we do stand strong for Jesus, our family and friends and others in our community will take notice, and maybe follow us through the pearly gates into eternal life. ------

Please stand with me as we pray.