Living Water Church - Sermon Audio

What do you do when you feel stressed out, anxious, and overwhelmed? While our tendency is often to run from reality and check out, Psalm 55 shows us that true life is found as we run to God with our hard emotions.

In Daniel’s final vision, we see the end of exile for all of humanity. When God’s Kingdom comes down to heal this world, death is undone and all of God’s people rise to live with Him in a restored creation forever. This is the hope God’s people have to look forward to, and this is the hope that’s meant to help keep us walking during the darkest and most difficult days - when our identity as exiles in a broken world is more obvious than ever. Because knowing how it ends makes us unshakable in the present.

As Daniel learns the time of exile is coming to an end, he turns to God in confession. Through Daniel’s prayer, we learn that confession isn’t something to be avoided, its actually the path to redemption.

During a transition of power, God gives Daniel a vision that unmasks the true nature of reality. Above the chaos of this world, God’s Kingdom of beauty and justice reigns. And by grace, God is sovereignly at work to bring His Kingdom down to earth through Jesus, working all things - even suffering and pain - together toward the day when His people will rule and reign with Him in a restored creation forever.

Daniel 6 powerfully illustrates that even the most powerful man in the land is unable to save. Coming to the end of ourselves is the best thing for us because it forces us to trust in the one true God who does save!

As Christians, we love to talk about God’s love and grace, but often times we’re less eager to talk about His judgment. In the fall of the Kingdom of Babylon, we see that God’s judgment isn’t something to be embarrassed about - its actually good news for those suffering under injustice. Because God is a God of perfect judgment, we can take heart, knowing that life isn’t random or meaningless, but that all evil will be dealt with. And through Jesus, our lives become a modern writing on the wall, proclaiming the end of the Kingdom of Satan, Sin, and Death, and the dawning of a Kingdom of perfect justice that we get to experience by grace.

What’s your story? In Daniel chapter 4, King Nebuchadnezzar tells the story of how God has changed his life. As Nebuchadnezzar goes from a persecutor of God’s people to a preacher, we see in dramatic fashion that God can do anything and save anybody, and He does all of this by grace. As God’s people in exile, we want to learn to tell our stories in a way that reveals God as the hero, that we too might glorify Him and encourage others by how we share the testimony of our lives.

Everyone worships. The question is not if we will worship but what we will worship. In Daniel chapter 3, King Nebuchadnezzar tries to get Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to worship his idol, but they resist temptation - even to the point of death. However, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego aren’t the hero of this story. The hero is the God who delivers them from the fire, and it’s through seeing this God that we are filled with the faith that sees through the empty promises the idols of our day and are transformed to life-giving worship of God alone.

The gods of Babylon were said to be powerful, but uninvolved in the lives of mortals. As we see in Nebuchadnezzar’s unreasonable demands, this belief leads to a small life that can’t handle crisis. Through Daniel’s very different response to this crisis, we see that the God of the Bible is both all-powerful and intimately involved in the lives of His people. Knowing this God changes how we experience stress by inviting us into a bigger life in His Kingdom, under His grace, where nothing can shake us.

Before they would walk into a fiery furnace or stare down the jaws of a lion, God is first at work to help Daniel and his friends avoid two great temptations that come our way in exile: compromise and withdraw. In what might just be the most underrated miracle in the entire book, we see how God empowers faithfulness in the small things that leads to a faithful presence that impacts the culture around us.

God’s people are carried away into exile in a foreign land that seeks to shape them away from the God of the Bible. And yet what Daniel tells us is that God didn’t just allow this to happen, He sovereignly ordained it in order to refine the faith of His people and restore their purpose.

We all want to live fruitful lives that make an impact on the world around us, but often it can be difficult to get any traction in this. As Paul closes his letter to Titus, he shows that fruitful lives are the result of focusing on, soaking in, and daily enjoying the gospel.