Faith in the Fire with Ben Carruthers

Amen.

Thanks, Britain.

That was a long one.

So you guys go ahead and be seated.

Great job.

That was a long one and had a lot of fun names to pronounce.

He did great.

Thank you.

Well, good morning.

My name is Ben Carruthers.

I'm the director of Student and Family Ministry.

Happy Father's Day again to all of you, including my dad, Virgil, walking at home, watching at home.

Happy Father's Day.

You're a good one, pal.

Appreciate you.

So we are in our sermon series story context symbol.

And this morning's story is one of my all-time favorite.

But I was reminded this week that this story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, which I will refer to as Rakshak and Benny, because it just gets so much easier.

This is a story that many of us may know, we learned it in Bible school or saw the Veggie Tales story as a kid, but not everyone knows.

And so we are going to take some time to talk about this incredible story of faith, but then we're going to dive into the context because this is an incredible story about faith in the fire.

Faith in the midst of suffering.

But what's what makes it even more incredible is the context behind the story that we see.

And then symbol, and the symbol that we're talking about today is fire.

Fire is used through scripture for many different symbols and meanings: God, the Holy Spirit, but in this story it means suffering.

And suffering is universal.

This idea of suffering and pain in our lives, no one can escape it.

It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, black or white, man or woman, Packers fan, Vikings fan.

I mean, it doesn't matter, right?

Vikings fan probably understand more, suffering.

But you can't escape it.

It is universal and it looks differently.

And at the heart of this story, this is a story of faith through the fire.

Of what does it mean to suffer in our life and still not just maintain a relationship with God, but strengthen your relationship with God?

Suffering is universal, we all do.

And it looks different for many of us.

A lot of us have little kids in this place.

There's a lot of little kids out there in here suffering for you at this moment in your life, maybe having to endure the song Baby Shark over and over and over again, right?

I'm past that, praise God.

But that's a point of suffering.

For others of us, I'm I've been recently trying to watch what I eat and try to take better care of myself.

And my family knows this, but just the other day, my children and my wife decided to go to Dairy Queen and just shove this in my face, which was really encouraging.

Don't worry, I got myself a lovely snack as well.

This is delightful.

Yeah, yummy, good stuff.

Also, don't feel too horrible because my two older kids had to come with me this morning bright and early, and my car doesn't have air conditioning, so I had all the windows down and they were freezing.

And I said, hey, it's all about suffering today, so we're gonna suffer in the car ride together.

Suffering can look like this.

Maybe it's it's date night, it's it's Father's Day, it's date night.

That's not the suffering part, by the way.

It's date night and it's movie night for you guys, right?

And fear strikes into you men that realize you picked the movie last time, and that means it's her night to pick, and you are in two hours of Julia Roberts and Richard Gere for Pretty Woman.

It's a whole other lane of suffering.

By the way, my wife reminded me that I had never watched this movie with her, so guess what I'm doing for Father's Day?

Yeah.

Good times.

Suffering looks different for everyone.

Some of you are walking through suffering right now.

Suffering could look like losing a job and not know when the next one is coming.

Suffering could mean that you have a child no matter what age, and you just continue to watch them make poor choice after poor choice after poor choice, and you can't do anything about it.

Maybe you're walking alongside a loved one right now who's in their final days in this earth, getting ready to go meet and be with Jesus.

Suffering looks different for all of us.

But we all understand what it's like to be in the midst of suffering.

And the goal in this story today is for us to look at Rakshak and Benny in their life, and how could they, in the midst of the fire, looking at this fiery furnace that had just killed the two guards who were standing next to it because it was so hot, how could they stand there and say these words?

This is what they say.

They say, Nebuchadnezzar, our God can save us.

Our God will save us.

But even if he doesn't, we will not bow down to your idol.

How can we have faith like that?

How can we have faith through the fire and faith through the suffering?

That'll be our prayer this morning.

So if you will, will you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, Lord God, we do give you thanks and praise for an opportunity to dive into your word this morning and hear a story that many of us know or maybe hearing for the first time.

But whatever, wherever we are in that first time or we grew up with this story, we pray for newness of life in it.

We pray that whatever we have learned in the past from it, Lord, that it may be made anew or there's something new that we can gain, some new wisdom in the lives of these three faithful young men.

Lord, it's a topic of suffering, and that's really hard.

Some people just heard that word this morning, suffering, and immediately brought pain.

Immediately brought a reminder of where they are right now.

So, Lord, I pray for us in this moment that we open up our hearts and our minds to be transformed by your word this morning.

It's in your name that we pray.

Amen.

So the first part of our sermon series is story.

So you heard the story read to you.

I'm gonna do a quick just a rehash of that, and then we're gonna dive into the context.

So these three guys, Rak, Shack, and Benny, are in Babylon.

Babylon is this massive kingdom, it is the kingdom of the day, it rules over almost everything, right?

Run by King Nebuchadnezzar.

And these three guys have kind of important roles in the government.

They almost have government roles.

They would know the king, the king would probably know them on some way.

They have a relationship with him.

Pretty important roles.

Nebuchadnezzar has a group of advisors who are in his ear constantly and say, listen, people in your kingdom are worshiping all these different gods.

You, king, are incredibly powerful and worthy of praise.

We think people should worship you or your idol.

Nebuchadnezzar is like, that's a great idea.

And so he builds this massive golden figure, this God that he wants everyone to bow down to.

He surrounds this image with this beautiful orchestra and musicians.

And every time that they play music, the whole kingdom has to bow.

If you can hear the music, that means you're an earshot of it.

You have to bow down and worship this God of Nebuchadnezzar.

Well, Rakshak and Beni, right, they're not true Babylonians.

They were, they're Hebrew people.

We'll talk about what that means in a little bit.

And they don't worship other gods, they worship the one true God of Abraham, of Moses, and they are faithful to them.

And the advisors know this.

And the advisors do not like Rakshak and Beni, and they want them to suffer.

They want them to go through the fire.

And so the band strikes up, the orchestra plays, and just picture this: a giant, giant gold statue, and hundreds of people, by the sound of music, bow down and start worshiping.

And out of those hundreds of people, three young men remain standing.

And these are young men, these aren't old wizards, these aren't older people who have had a long, long, long, long walk in their faith.

These are relatively young men, and they stand there.

And the advisors get Nebuchadnezzar to say, listen, these guys are blatantly disobeying you in your whole kingdom.

And Nebuchadnezzar is mad and upset.

So he says, Listen, guys, maybe you didn't hear the rules, maybe you missed it, but here it is again.

When my band plays, you bow down and worship.

So the band plays again, hundreds of people bow down, Rakshak, and Benny stand tall.

Nebuchadnezzar is furious.

He's talked to them, he's warned them, he says, That's it.

To the fiery furnace you go.

And so he turns up the heat so hard because he's so mad and so angry that the fire, the heat consumes, destroys those two guards who are standing outside.

They're gone, they're dead.

And they put Rak, Shack, and Benny in the fiery furnace.

And King Nebuchadnezzar is a little fuzzy on his math, and he turns to his counselors and says, Listen, how many guys we put in there?

Three.

He's like, Well, I count four.

Something's going on here.

And so they pull those three young men out.

The fourth person is gone, and not one part of their clothes is burned, their wraps are still there, they're not one hair on their head is burnt, they're completely safe.

And Nebuchadnezzar says this very prophetic statement, which we'll talk about at the end of this sermon.

He says, No other God saves like your God.

And there's this transformation that happens in his life and in the kingdom of Babylon because of these three young men's faith through the fire.

It's an incredible story, but the context makes it even more incredible.

Here's the context of it.

Because you ask, where'd these three guys come from?

What are they doing in Babylon?

Right?

If they're Hebrew, what are they doing there?

This is what happened.

About the 5th or 6th century, about 500, 600 years before Jesus, uh, Babylon, like I said, was the major empire, ruled over everything.

And what they would do is they would go to a land and conquer it, and then they would take its best and brightest people, its young men, its young women, people of power, people of influence, and they would take them out of their homeland and bring them to Babylon and assimilate them into their culture.

So Rakshak and Beni were around for this, and they saw their temple in Jerusalem be destroyed.

They witnessed all of their holy artifacts being taken out of their holy place, brought to Babylon, brought to the enemy.

They had to leave their country and leave their families to go and get an education in Babylon, work for the government, work for the people who destroyed their home and their land.

And on top of that, their real names were not Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Those are their Babylonian names.

Their Hebrew names, their given names at birth were Hananiah, Mishiael, and Azariah.

These young men had everything taken away from them, including who they were, including their name, and brought to the enemy's territory to grow and to have a job in their government, in their system.

Babylon did this to eventually wipe out all other nations.

That was their plan.

You see, this is a really important piece of the context of the story because we see this and we see three young men of great faith to stand up and say, My God can, my God will, but if he doesn't, we will still have faith.

But this whole story of suffering leading up to that is incredibly important.

Because it shows us that these young men had gone through these horrible experiences, these fires of faith, and not allowed the fire to consume them, but allowed it to refine their faith, to become stronger in their relationship with God, to become stronger in their faith.

That's what's so impressive of this story.

And so the question for us is how can we be a church?

How can we be a people of faith like that, that through the fires, through the suffering of our own lives, can stand up and say, My God will, my God can, but even if he doesn't, I will still be faithful to him.

And in this story, I think there's a few things that we see in these young men's lives that can help us with that.

The first is this they never stand alone.

They never stand alone.

What it must have felt like to stand with hundreds of people bowing and to have you and your two buddies standing strong with you.

They never stood alone.

Now, this concept is kind of beyond us in our culture today because it's all about the individual today.

We can do this, it's on my shoulders.

I, as an individual, can conquer these things.

This whole concept of group or community is lost on us.

Even in the young.

He loves it, he's pretty good at it.

And uh two weeks ago, we had a game where the offense was five yards from getting a touchdown.

Okay, five yards, and in flag football, it's you know, it's not the pros, all right?

It's you know, kid gets the ball, they run, everyone's kind of looking at the sky.

It's pretty fun to watch.

But five yards is not hard to get.

And so we need to stop him, though.

We're winning, they get this touchdown, they win.

My son Arlo's on defense.

And they say hut, they hug the ball, they give the ball to the kid, and Arlo, man, runs and tracks him down and pulls the flag.

He's like, Way to go, buddy.

But now they're like two yards away from the touchdown.

They get the ball again.

They yell, hutt, runner gets the ball.

Arlo runs down, pulls the kid's flag.

All right, buddy, way to go.

They're at one yard from the touchdown.

This is pretty much a gimme at this point, right?

They say, Hutt, the runner gets the ball, Arlo charges, pulls the flag.

He stopped him.

We win the game.

Incredible.

I was super proud of him.

Way to go, buddy.

We're walking off the field, and Arlo is gifted with the Caruthers' voice, which is very loud and everyone can hear and counties away.

And as we're walking off, and I'm a coach, and so we're around all the parents, the team that we just played, their parents are around.

Arlo puts his hands up in the air and goes, I totally won the game for us, dad.

What?

Arlo just quiet.

I pulled all the flags, dad.

It was all me.

I'm like, no, right?

So I use my voice to make sure parents knew that I was a good parent.

Said, no, that's wrong, Arlo, right?

But I told them, I said, listen, pal, you were able to pull all three of those flags because your team was on the other side of the field, making that kid run right into you.

If your teammates weren't there, they would have scored a touchdown immediately.

But it's because you weren't standing alone.

It's because you were on a team that you were able to do that.

You take your team out of that, you lose every time.

You see, Rakshak and Benny didn't stand alone.

They stood together.

There is something incredibly beautiful when we come together as a community of believers and stand together and say, listen, fires of life are gonna get you, and it's gonna hurt, and it's gonna be painful, and there will be suffering, and you might feel like you not you might not have the faith to get through it.

And when you feel like that, then lean on us.

That's what we're here for.

But sometimes we get this idea that no, we can do it ourselves.

We don't need to bring other people into our pain and our suffering.

We don't need to let them know how we feel.

I'm the worst at this.

And my wife knows that I come home from a long week at school or work, and I come in the door and say, Hey, how you doing?

I'm like, I'm good.

And she's like, Stop lying.

She knows immediately.

I'll come in from playing some ball or whatever, and my knee's a little banged up, and she's like, How's your how is your knee?

I'm like, Oh, my knee's good.

She's like, Stop lying.

Stop thinking we can do it all by ourselves.

She's here, she's there to help, she's there to be that shoulder.

Because we're meant to be in community, we're meant to be lift up by one another.

When the fires get too hot in our lives, we are here.

Do something really incredibly awkward for me.

Look to your left and your right.

There you go.

That was really cool up here to watch all the heads go.

Those are the people who are in the fire with you.

Those are the people when you feel weak that you lean on.

Those are the people that when the fire is too hot, we come alongside and we help and we lift you up.

Because here's the thing, Central.

If we don't do it in this building, we're not gonna do it outside.

If we don't lift each other up and help each other when we're in the fire, when we're suffering, what God calls us to do outside of these walls isn't gonna happen.

We walk through the fires together.

We do not stand alone.

Now, all of a sudden, in this fire with Arachak and Benny, this fourth person appears.

God, an angel, the son of man.

Different translations say different things.

You see, we not only walk through the fire together, but we're in the fire with God.

God is with us in the suffering, no matter how long it takes.

Now that's incredibly hard to hear.

Because what if you're like, man, I've been walking through my suffering for two years and it's not getting better.

And to hear that God's been with me for those two years, that doesn't make me love God.

That doesn't make me want to run to Him.

He is there walking with you in your suffering.

And this is what sets it apart from every other faith is that the God in the fire with you understands your suffering.

The God in the fire with you knows what it's like to suffer.

If you are going through suffering, a fire right now, you are in good company.

Because the God of this universe, Jesus Christ, knows what it's like to suffer.

In Luke 22, 44, it's one of my favorite parts of the Passion story, in Luke 22, 44, we see that Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane praying, moments before he's arrested, moments before he goes to the cross.

And what's interesting is in the book, it's this is written only in the book of Luke, this piece, and Luke, his job, he was a doctor, he was a physician.

And so why that's interesting is because he writes that when Jesus was praying, he was filled with so much suffering, so much agony and pain, that he cried tears of blood.

It's only written in Luke's gospel, the doctor, the physician, where there's an actual thing called hematodrosis.

Now, I am not a doctor, so I probably botched that, okay?

But there's something called hematodrosis where the body is so filled with pain, so filled with agony, that it needs to find a release, and the blood vessels around the eyes will basically burst, and your tear ducts will be filled with blood.

And it'll look like you're crying tears of blood.

And in the moments before his crucifixion, Jesus is filled with more suffering and agony than any one of us will ever know.

This is the God that's in the fire with you.

Whether it's a day, a two, a year, two years, whatever the fire that you're walking through, this is the God who walks through it with us.

That's the peace that brings the peace.

You see, it's not a peace that we find where, man, I've done all the right things in my life.

I've read the Bible, I've gone to Sunday school, I do everything I'm supposed to do.

Why am I suffering like this?

Jesus Christ lived a perfect life, made no mistakes, and he suffered.

Suffering is universal.

We can't escape it.

It's a piece of our lives.

But when we go through it, we don't go through it alone.

We go through it as a community and we stand together and we walk through that fire with Jesus Christ, who knew suffering far more than we do.

And here's the piece that we see with Rakh Shak and Benny.

You see, they did that from the moment that Babylon came and conquered their home and took away their holy artifacts, took them to a foreign land, gave them a new name.

Suffering after suffering, fire after fire.

The fire can do two things: it can destroy you or it can refine you.

Those struggles in your life, those sufferings in your life can either destroy you or they can refine you.

They can bring you to a place like it did with them in Daniel chapter 3, verse 17.

Daniel 3:17

It'll be on the screen.

This is what they say.

I've been saying it all morning, but this is what they say.

This was their response.

If we are thrown into the fire, our God, whom we serve, is able to save us from it.

And he will save us from your hand, O King.

But even if he does not, we want you to know, O King, that we will not serve your gods or worship the object of gold that you have set up.

That fire after fire after fire, having victory over these suffering moments, has brought them to this point where they can stand and proclaim that.

My God can, my God will, and even if he doesn't, Nebuchadnezzar, we are not afraid because death is not the end for us.

Death is a brand new beginning.

But those small fires shaped them, refined them, and brought them to this point.

Sometimes suffering is just a moment.

We're learning to ride a bike without training wheels in my house.

I'm not, I'm past it.

My younger sons are.

And if you were to ask them right now, if Arlo or Ezzy were here, and if you looked in the eye and said, hey, are you gonna learn to ride your bike today without training wheels?

They'd look at you and say, Nope, it's too hard, I'm gonna use them forever.

Because in the moment, they can't see themselves conquering it.

In the moment, this is the amount of suffering, and there is no way out.

It's a moment, but we move past it.

When I was in first grade, which was a long time ago, if you can't tell, I did not want to go to school.

I didn't, I didn't want to go to school, I wanted to stay home all day, and I'd walk to the bus stop, and my buddy Scott Wick was there, and I said, Listen, Scott, today I'm not going.

When the bus came I'm gonna run and hide behind that bush, right?

I was a lot smaller and the bush was a lot bigger back then.

And I'm gonna hide when the bus comes, don't tell him I'm there.

The bus comes, Scott's getting on the bus and he rats on me, and the bus driver comes out and gets me behind the bush and brings me in the bus.

Scott Wick, if you're watching, I haven't forgot, man.

But it was a moment of suffering.

A moment.

That's what suffering is, and sometimes those moments last a long time.

This is what I'd like you to do.

We're gonna wrap up in just a second.

I'd like you to close your eyes just for a couple seconds.

And I want you to go back and I want you to think about the suffering in your life.

Go back two weeks.

Go back a month.

A year.

Two, three years.

Childhood.

Think of those moments in pain and suffering in your life.

Open your eyes.

You survived.

You're here.

Because suffering is a moment in time, and it's a moment that you don't stand alone.

It's a moment that you walk through it with other people and we allow it to refine us and make us stronger.

And here's the thing: you've made it past those moments of suffering, not because anything you do, because you're in the fire with the God, the Creator, who loves you, who gives you that strength to say, this is not gonna be it.

This is horrible.

I'm in the fire now, but this is not the end.

And he gives you the strength and he refines your relationship.

And you overcome.

And you too can stand in the face of the furnace and say, My God can.

My God will.

But even if he doesn't, he is my God.

I'm gonna close with this, and it's the very last piece of the scripture where Nebuchadnezzar says something so prophetic, and he doesn't even realize it.

He is changed.

King Nebuchadnezzar is changed.

The kingdom is changed because of these young men's faith in God.

He says, No God saves like their God.

And he couldn't be more right.

No God anywhere in this world, no fake idol, no nothing besides our God stands in the fire with you, knows what it's like to go through the fire, and changes you.

You see, when we have that kind of faith, the faith that says, My God can, my God will, but even if he doesn't, you are transformed, but the people in the world around you are transformed.

Because they see that type of faith and it doesn't make sense.

That type of faith can only come from one true God, a God who knows what it's like to walk through the fire.

So, people of Central, let's be people who stand with each other in the fire.

Let us be people who allow God to refine us and make us stronger through that fire.

And let us be a church, a congregation, a people that make a difference in the lives of those around us.

Amen.