Who Are You | Harmonious Unity - Daniel 3 | September 22

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Music.

Good morning. I don't know, most of you know me, but if you don't,

my name is James and I have a few grandkids here.

So I normally would ask you to stand for reading God's word,

but we're reading a whole story and I don't want you guys to get tired. So here we go.

This is about Nebuchadnezzar and it's found and the fiery furnace and it's found

in Daniel chapter three.

King Nebuchadnezzar made a gold statue, 90 feet tall and nine feet wide.

And he set it up on the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon.

Then he sent messages to the high officers, officials, governors,

advisors, treasurers, judges, magistrates, and all the provincial officials

to come to the dedication of the statue he had set up.

So all these officials came and stood before the statue King Nebuchadnezzar had set up.

Then a herald shouted out, people of all races and nations and languages,

listen to the king's command.

When you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harps,

pipes, and other musical instruments bowed to the ground to worship the king

Nebuchadnezzar's gold statue.

Anyone who refuses to obey will immediately be thrown into a blazing furnace.

So, at that sound of the musical instruments, all the people,

whatever their race, nation,

or language, bowed to the ground and worshipped the gold statue that King Nebuchadnezzar

had set up, but some of the astrologers went to the king and informed on the Jews.

They said to King Nebuchadnezzar, Long live the king!

You issued a decree to all the people to bow down and worship the gold statue,

and when they hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre,

harp, pipes, and other musical instruments, that decree also states that those

who refuse to obey must be thrown into a blazing furnace.

But there are some Jews, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, nice of them to name names, right?

That refuse to serve my gods or to worship the gold statue I have set up.

I will give you, oh, sorry, I jumped a little bit.

Whom you have put in charge of the province of Babylon, they pay no attention to you.

Your majesty, they refuse to serve your gods and do not worship the gold statue

you have set up. Then King Nebuchadnezzar flew into a rage and ordered that

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego be brought before him.

When they were brought in, Nebuchadnezzar said to them, Is it true,

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, that you refuse to serve my gods or worship

the gold statue that I have set up?

I will give you one more chance to bow down and worship the statue I have made

when you hear the sound of the musical instruments.

But if you refuse you will

be thrown immediately into a burning furnace and then

what god will be able to rescue you from my power

shadrach meshach and abednego replied oh nebuchadnezzar we do not need to defend

ourself before you if we are thrown into the blazing furnace the god whom we

serve is able to save us he will rescue us from your power your majesty but

even if he doesn't we want to make it clear to you, your majesty,

that we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you have set up.

Nebuchadnezzar was so furious with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that his

face became distorted with rage.

He commanded that the furnace be heated seven times hotter than usual.

Then he ordered some of the strongest men in his army to bind Shadrach,

Meshach, and Abednego and throw them into the blazing furnace.

So they tied them up and threw them into the furnace, fully dressed in their

pants, turbans, robes, and other garments.

And because the king in his anger had demanded such a hot fire in the furnace,

the flames killed the soldiers as they threw the three men in.

So Sadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, security tied, fell into the roaring flames.

But suddenly Nebuchadnezzar jumped up in amazement and exclaimed to his advisors,

didn't we tie up three men and throw them in the furnace?

Furnace yes your majesty we certainly did

they replied look Nebuchadnezzar shouted I

see four men unbound walking around in the fire unharmed and the fourth looks

like a god then Nebuchadnezzar came as close as he could to the door of the

flaming furnace and shouted Shadrach Meshach Abednego servants of the most high

god come out come here so Shadrach Meshach and Abednego stopped stepped out of the fire.

Then the high officers, officials, governors, advisors crowded around them and

saw that the fire had not touched them.

Not a hair on their heads was singed and their clothing was not scorched.

They didn't even smell of smoke.

Then Nebuchadnezzar said, praise to the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

He sent his angel to rescue his servants who trusted in him.

They defied the king's command and were willing to die rather than to serve

or worship any God except their own God.

Therefore, I make this decree.

If any people, whatever their race or nation or language, speak a word against

the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, they will be torn limb from limb

and their houses will be turned into heaps of rubble.

There is no other God who can rescue like this.

Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to even higher positions

in the province of Babylon. May God bless the reading of his word.

Amen. Let's open with a word of prayer. Father, your word is truth, and we want to know you.

Would our affections be turned towards you today, God? God, we pray for your

church across the world that's meeting right now.

God, in Boone, we pray for the churches in Boone that are meeting together,

that we, your body, would see you and worship you rightly.

Amen. Today, we get to continue this journey through Daniel.

And we're continuing this idea of identity. And today, we are talking about identity in worship.

Identity in worship. And so there's a movie, a Soviet era 1979 film called The

Stalker. Has anybody seen The Stalker?

1979 Soviet era film? Yeah, it's a wild film.

Feel free to watch it if you'd like, but you will feel like you are seasonally depressed in Russia.

But it follows these it's a sci-fi film that

follows these three men as they travel through the zone

and the zone is this ethereal place

but it's filmed in like a natural setting so it's it feels like you're just

walking through the woods but you understand that these three men is the movie

unfolds they're moving towards what's called the room and along the way one

of the gentlemen says this line, he says,

how do I know what I truly want?

I say, I want to be a vegetarian, but my stomach hungers for a juicy steak.

And you're like, okay, that's kind of a weird one-off sentence.

But then you realize that this room that they're moving towards,

it's actually the place where one's deepest desires are realized.

And these three men, they get to the threshold of the room and I'm going to spoil the movie.

So sorry about that. As they get to the threshold told of this room,

none of the men decide they want to go in.

They're either too afraid of what their deepest desires might be,

or they realize that they don't actually want what they most deeply desire.

And so why do I share this odd sepia-toned Soviet era film?

Because it's a long drawn out cultural experience that touches on the core of what worship is.

Martin Luther says, whatever your heart clings to and confides in,

that really is your God. And what is Daniel 3 about?

Daniel 3 is about worship.

And so I want to open up as we kind of look at the beginning of Daniel 3 and see what is happening.

It starts in media res as a literature analyst would say, they'd say this story,

it has no conjunctive adverb.

There's no like, nonetheless, Nebuchadnezzar, or even still,

or then Nebuchadnezzar, it just kind of starts at the beginning of chapter three.

And it seems like we're starting in the middle of things. And in a sense, we are, right?

Nebuchadnezzar had just had this dream about an image and this idol or this statue.

And then he immediately begins to make that statue. This statue is a bunch of different metals.

He made his one metal. What metal was that? That was gold, right? The gold of the head.

And so we're not sure exactly what this statue would have looked like,

but we know what Nebuchadnezzar was trying to do.

He was trying to create a national religion that united his kingdom.

And I think this story in Daniel three, it actually has a lot of,

it has a myriad of different biblical stories that it plays off of,

but we're going to look at one.

So if you have your Bibles, if you would open to Genesis 11,

we're going to read that together.

This is what Genesis 11 says. We're going to start in verse one.

Now the whole earth had one language and one speech,

and it came to pass as they journeyed from the East, that they found a plane

in the land of Shinar and they dwelt there and they said to one another, come,

let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.

They had brick for stone and they had asphalt for mortar. And they said,

come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens.

Let us make a name for ourselves.

Lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.

But Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built.

And Yahweh said, indeed, it's funny right there. He had to come down to see the tower, right?

That's Hebrew humor for you. The tower was so small that God had to come down to see it.

And Yahweh said, indeed, the people are one and they all have one language.

And this is what they will begin to do. Now, nothing that they purpose to do

will be withheld from them.

Come, let us go down there and confuse

their language that they might not understand one another's speech.

So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth and

they cease building that city.

Therefore, its name is called Babel because Yahweh confused the language of all the earth.

And from there, the Lord scattered them over the face of all the earth.

So, this story, this Genesis 11 is a proto-Babylon.

Babylon is the empire from which the modern, in Daniel's sense,

but ancient in our sense, modern empire of Babylon comes together.

And when I, for years and years, I always thought this story was unique,

this Tower of Babel, because I thought unity would be a good thing.

I thought that a humanity shaped by one goal would be a good thing,

a thing that God would like, a thing that he would say, this is good.

I like this. They're working together.

But there's a Jewish scholar named Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, and he kind of changed

the way that I view this story.

And so, what he actually articulates is that this is the Hebrew Bible's polemic,

their argument against empire.

This idea in verse 1 that the whole earth had one language, he articulates that

that isn't a natural form of language unity, but an enforced and imperial unity of language, right?

We know that at the beginning of the 20th century or throughout the 20th century,

we have the imperialism that most of Africa was speaking either English or French, right?

It's you impose these languages on the peoples that you conquer.

And so, he articulates that Genesis 11 is this idea of empire.

And then he continues that idea with this tower that they built.

And I actually have an image of the tower here.

It's likely riffing off of these Babylonian ziggurats, these man-made mountains.

And you can see here, that's about 30 cubits high, which is the same as the

icon in Daniel three, interestingly.

So it's about a hundred, a hundred feet tall.

And this is, this is what it would, this is like a rendition of it.

This top here. Oh, sorry.

This top here is actually a temple. It's a place of worship.

And so these towers are not just skyscrapers, right?

I like remember going to New York city and thinking, Oh, this is evil because

they built towers into the sky, but that's not what it's about.

It's about creating a place of worship around which the empire that enforces

a language forces conformity around religion.

And so perhaps one of our first ideas that we can be thinking of,

one of our first observations is that empires seek forced conformity. And how do we see that?

We see in Daniel 3 or in the whole of Daniel, these exiles, they come to the

empire of Babylon and they're forced to speak the same language,

read the same literature, wear the clothes and eat the same food and have the same religion.

And there's only two places where Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and Daniel

disagree or say, we're going to not observe that.

It's the king's food and with worship.

But there's this idea of empire that's spread throughout Daniel 3 and Genesis 11.

And if Genesis 11 is a polemic against empire, then why would that be?

What about the kingdom of God is different? And so, I think we could say that

empires seek to force conformity. They seek to force conformity around a set

of non-essential things that they use to create a false sense of unity.

If that's what the kingdoms of the earth are like, what would the kingdom of heaven be?

The kingdoms of heaven or the kingdom of heaven is about harmonious unity.

And we see that actually laid out in Revelation chapter seven.

If you want to turn with me, Revelation chapter seven, you see in verse nine, the writer says.

After these things, I looked and behold a great multitude, which no one could

number of all nations, tribes,

peoples, and tongues standing before the throne and before the lamb clothed

with right rope and palm branches and their hands crying out with a loud voice

saying, salvation belongs to God who sits on the throne and to the lamb.

So if empires seek this forced conformity, the kingdom of heaven fosters this

diverse unity, this harmonious unity.

Scholars talk about how languages, they actually shape worldviews.

And so when we see heaven and we see this plurality of languages,

we actually are seeing people centered around the Lamb of God with a plurality

of worldviews, all speaking in their tongue, worshiping God.

And it's not a forced conformity that says you must have this language and you

must have this certain set of ritual expectations, but it's this unity around the Lamb of God.

And so what is harmony? It's two distinct and different entities,

two or more distinct and different entities actually working together to create

beauty and melody and meaning.

And so there's a show in Broadway show that used to be in New York called Amazing

Grace. And it was the story of John Newton.

And he was a slave trader who actually was sold into slavery.

And then he He became a Christian while in slavery and wrote the hymn Amazing Grace.

So this show, this Broadway play follows it. And the play ends with them singing Amazing Grace.

And I want us to listen to this rendition of Amazing Grace and hear how it starts in a solitary voice.

And then you'll hear voices layered on.

And then you'll actually, there's a part of the song. So don't be alarmed.

It'll like switch to kind of an African style music to talk about that part

of his or reference that part of his life.

And then it'll, where we'll end is with everybody singing together about being

before the throne of God.

And so I want to play this that we might have a, an experience of harmony of

what the kingdom of God is like through, through a musical encounter.

So if you want to play that, the way the show ends right there is the whole

audience actually stands up and sings amazing grace in the middle of New York city.

It's, it's so moving. You have the full weight of the meaning of that song,

that idea that when we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun,

we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first began.

When I say that and you're like, oh yeah, that's cool. But when they sing it

with their like harmonies and their, the fullness of their spirits invested

in it, there's something that moves in us and moves over us. And so that.

My encouragement to us is how do we, as the kingdom of God, foster that harmonious unity?

And so we all, we believe that we live in Babylon, or if you don't believe that,

we can talk about it after.

And I would argue that we live in Babylon and we live in Babylon's.

We live in empires that seek forced conformity.

There are easy others for us

to identify. Maybe some of us, it'd be easy for us to say, well, the U.S.

Government, that's an empire, or the right or the left or this organization or that corporation.

And I think all of those are true, right? I think we can see empires in all

of those places, but I think there's also more hidden or covert or insidious

Babylons that we create.

I think we can create Babylons in our friend groups, in our families, or even in our churches.

When we elevate non-essential attributes, when we require people to look a certain

way or talk a certain way or have certain non-essential habits,

we are creating Babylons that are seeking forced conformity instead of fostering harmonious unity.

And what's the issue with this if we're actually doing good?

Let's say there are good things that we're creating that we're elevating to the place of essential.

Well, I think what happens when we do that, when we create these false empires,

it can destroy the value or tarnish the value of the essentials.

So let's say we have in a church, church, I don't know, X, or we can say mountainside,

I don't know, but a good Christian does A, B and C, let's say A is they love

God, B is they have a certain evangelistic text.

And C is they have a good sourdough starter, right? Their family has a good

sourdough starter and that's what makes them a good Christian,

a good member of our church.

Well, when B and C, when having a certain evangelistic technique and having

a sourdough starter are realized as fraudulent essentials, then someone might

be inclined to say, well, is the essential thing even essential?

And it creates this confusion.

And so when we create empires, we actually are creating confusion and creating

false gods for ourselves.

And so if we have that tendency, if one, we live in Babylon's and we need to

figure out how to not, how to be like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,

who don't bend the knee to the gods of Babylon, but then we also can create

our own gods of Babylon. What are we to do about it?

Well, I'm glad you asked because that's what the next part of the story is about in Daniel three.

Three, these three Jewish exiles, they live in Babylon and they're C and seemingly

recently in Daniel two, they were just promoted because Daniel,

if you ever want to know what a good colleague is, look at Daniel.

When he gets promoted, he says, Hey, how about my guys over there? Right?

That's a good colleague, but they just get promoted.

And then they, they have to figure out what are they going to do in empire.

And what's interesting is when I think of empires after that last sentence that

we just said about, we can be creating empires and we need to figure out how

to be subversive, I would think, well, stay the heck out of Dodge.

Don't have anything to do with an empire.

But as exiles, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and Daniel, they offer a different perspective.

They actually learn the language, they wear the clothes, they study the literature,

and they work for the government.

So, completely staying outside of it isn't, one, isn't necessarily possible,

and two, isn't what this story necessarily encourages.

But up to this point, all that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,

and Daniel have done differently in the empire is eat the king's food.

But here in Daniel 3, the temperature gets turned up.

Yeah, I get it. I don't try it a little too hard, but.

When confronted with the gods of Babylon, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego,

they refuse to bend the knee.

They subvert the kingdom of Babylon.

And they shirk their positions of power, these newly attained positions of power.

And this is fascinating and it's so like Christ.

If I were in their shoes, I might have the tendency to say, if I was in a corporation

that said, if you want to be a good corporate man, you'll do these three things

and your work will become your God.

I might say, well, I was just promoted to a position of power and I think I

could actually do good here.

So maybe I'll bend the knee here and I'll just so I can like maybe affect good

later, or maybe I just, because I crave power.

But these three men, they don't do that. They like Christ.

They do not grasp after their power. They give it up knowing that worship of

Yahweh is so far supreme to any position that it would be worth giving up anything to have that.

And this is where that first movie, The Stalker, that Soviet film comes back up.

The three men, their deepest desires were not for power. They weren't for comfort.

They weren't for safety and they weren't even for their own lives.

Their deepest desires, if they would have stepped into that room,

their deepest desires would have been that the God of Abraham,

Isaac, and Jacob would have been glorified.

We see in their response after they get sold out by their friends,

as James highlighted, or their colleagues, they say.

Oh, Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this way.

If this is the case, our God, whom we serve, was able to deliver us from the

burning and fiery furnace.

He will deliver us from your hand. But if not, let it be known,

O king, that we still will not serve your gods.

They know that their God can save them, but they're not dependent upon the immediate

saving from their immediate persecution.

Persecution these three men are so confident in the

glory and person and character of god that

they're willing to lay everything on the lines for

it and so this leads us to to a great question are we like shadrach meshach

and abednego is our deepest desire the glory of god or are there other counterfeit

gods that we might have elevated and in tim keller killer's book counterfeit

gods he He identifies three cultural,

we could think of gods of our own Babylon, and he identifies power,

sex, and money as the big three.

And as he's writing, he treats it with greater care and riffs off of Augustine,

who says that when we worship anything other than God as ultimate,

we are creating counterfeit gods.

Idolatry is not always bowing down to an icon or an idol. cradle,

it can be having disordered priorities.

And C.S. Lewis, he explores this theme beautifully in his book,

The Great Divorce. And I highly recommend it.

Our small group knows that I really have enjoyed this book this year.

It's compact. It really packs a punch, but it's a metaphysical journey to the

outskirts of heaven where people are confronted with their counterfeit gods.

One man, he made his theology as God and C.S.

Lewis says this, you are so concerned with spreading dreading Christianity that

you don't care a sting for Christ.

Another man made lust his God. A wife made her husband her God.

But I think the most chilling encounter that we have as we are reading this

book is when a mother makes her son her God.

Her mother love, which she claims is the purest virtue, has actually become a vice.

It's a false religion for her. And after a long conversation,

C.S. Lewis concludes that story with this.

He says, there is but one good, and that is God.

Everything else is good when it looks to him and bad when it turns from him.

And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels.

It is not out of bad mice or bad fleas that you make demons,

but out of bad archangels.

The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother love or

patriotism or art, but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.

So the question is, what are we worshiping? And I think we all here would actually

agree that we all worship and we want our deepest desires and affections to be for God.

But if any of you are out there and you're like, I'm not sure that we worship.

I think you can have a life where you live that's not in worship.

David Foster Wallace, a notable author from the 2000s, who's no longer with us.

He's not a believer, but he says this about worship.

He says in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such

thing as atheism. them. There's no such thing as not worshiping.

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

The compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of God or spiritual type

thing to worship, be it JC or Allah,

be it Yahweh or a Wiccan mother goddess or the four noble truths or some inviolable

set of ethical principles is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life,

then you will never have enough.

Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and

sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly.

And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths,

proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables.

The skeleton of every great story, the whole trick is keeping the truth up in

front of your daily consciousness.

What Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego teach us is that we worship and that there

are gods of the Babylons that we live in today that crave for our attention,

that crave for our worship.

And if we're not careful, we can subtly move into these, as C.S.

Lewis puts it, these virtues become vices.

And so we want to examine as the people of mountainside, we want to examine

what are our deepest affections? What do we love most?

And Tim Keller encourages us to ask two questions. One, well,

he encourages us to ask two questions because it's so challenging to figure

out what is it that our ultimate loves?

Like that question in the soccer, I want, how do I know what I want when I say

I want to be a vegetarian, but my stomach still hungers for a steak, right?

How do we know what our deepest affections are? And Tim Keller says,

ask two questions. One, what are the material of your nightmares? years?

And two, what if you lost would cause you to lose the will to live?

These questions, they play off each

other, but they can be helpful for us understanding what we love most.

So, how does the story of Daniel 3 end?

Nebuchadnezzar, he, the three men, they come before him and he gets really mad.

And he says, in my translation, he says, now, if you are ready to hear the sound

of the horde, the loop, the flute, the harp, the lyre, and the psalter,

and you will bow down. Good.

Like that's, it just says, good. That's good. But if not, then I will cast you

into the fiery furnace. And in our minds that might conjure up this image of

a bunny loving chocolate, bunny loving cucumber, right?

Who wants to throw some veggies onto the grill, but the reality of the story is not near as kind.

It's grotesque and violent. It's PG 13.

Sometimes when we're inundated with these stories, the intensity of the stories

actually lose their weight. But this is such a severe response.

And these three men, they had no idea how the story would end.

So they say that they will not bow and Nebuchadnezzar heats the furnace up seven times hotter.

And it says that the image of his face changes.

And in his fury, he throws them into the fire.

And so just picture you are either Shadrach, Meshach, or Abednego,

and you have no idea what's happening, but as you're walking or you're tied

up, as you're being carried towards the fire, the men around you,

these Navy SEALs of that day, they're actually being burned alive as they're approaching the fire.

And you have no idea what's happening and you get tossed in and then your ropes

burn off and you stand up.

And then in you, with you in the fire is this divine presence, this divine being.

And Christians throughout the centuries have interpreted this to be Christ.

And I think that's a good interpretation.

I'm not a biblical scholar, so people who disagree with that,

you probably have good readings on that.

But I think it's good and a fair assumption or a fair interpretation for us

to see Christ as the one in the fire.

So, what is this story telling us? What is the wisdom of Daniel 3?

Is the story giving us a promise that if we subvert with wisdom and we don't

bend the knee to the gods of our culture, that God will save us from the experience of persecution,

that we won't even smell like fire as Daniel 3 says.

And I think that there's, you can make an argument for that,

but I think the totality of scripture actually would disagree with that certain

conclusion that if we do it right, then we'll be saved from persecution.

The totality of scripture and the whole of church history actually paints a

different story that when we worship Yahweh, when we have our lives submitted

to Christ, we actually will endure persecution. So what is the hope?

The hope might be in Matthew 5, where Jesus says, blessed are the persecuted

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And with a little bit of poetic license.

So I'm not saying this actually happened. I don't know, but with a little bit of poetic license.

What if when Christ was in the fire and he sees these three Jewish men,

he said to them, blessed are the persecuted for yours is the kingdom of heaven.

And what does that mean? Blessed are the persecuted for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I think that's a whole other sermon that we don't have time to get into today,

but perhaps the end of Revelation 7 will be instructive for us.

So we'll kind of bring it to a close with this.

It says, then the elders in Revelation 7, verse 13, answered,

Revelation 7:13

saying to me, who are these arrayed in white robes? And where did they come from?

And I said to him, sir, you know. So he said to me, these are the ones who come

out of the great tribulation and washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb.

Therefore, they are before the throne of God and they serve him day and night in his temple.

And he who sits on the throne will dwell among them.

They shall neither hunger No longer anymore, nor thirst. The sun shall not strike

them nor any heat for the lamb who is in the midst of the throne will shepherd

them and lead them to the living, the fountain of living waters.

And he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

This idea that though we will endure persecution, it is Christ,

the blood of the lamb that washes the robes white.

It is that Christ, who is the great sufferer, the one who is persecuted,

he is the one in whom our hope lies.

He is the exemplar of our enduring persecution.

He entered into the fire, and yet, unlike Shadrach, Meshach,

and Abednego, Christ felt the full weight, felt the full pain of his persecution.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were spared the pain. Christ was not,

yet he endured it willingly.

So Christ, our suffering one who endured the greatest persecution that we might

know God, yet his was not the final persecution that we know.

It was the fulfillment of it, but it was not yet the completion of it.

And we have brothers and sisters today who are actually living in persecution,

who have empires around them, be they governments, be they towns, be they families,

and they actually really do suffer a very real persecution.

And we, in our current social, economic, religious moment, don't actually have

such an experience of that.

We might hear stories of it, but we have an opportunity to share in the sufferings,

both of Christ and our brothers and sisters around the world.

And so, I want to close today praying for our brothers and sisters in Christ

around the world who do endure persecution,

who like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are cast into the fire,

yet they might be feeling the fullness of the weight of it.

And they might have their hope of heaven, of having Christ among them and being with him.

But in this moment now, they feel the weight and they feel the pain of persecution.

And throughout the centuries, Christians have prayed together for the persecuted church.

I would love for us today to gather in groups of two or three with the people around you.

And I want us to be praying for the persecuted church, for the church who say,

we are not going to worship the gods of Babylon, but we're going to choose to worship Yahweh.

And so there's two points that I want us to pray over.

And the first is, that's a lot of texts and I should have edited did that. So I'm sorry about that.

But when, when the three were in the fire, they met Christ and.

So I want to pray that our persecuted brothers and sisters would meet Christ

in their persecution, that they would see him and hear him say,

blessed are the persecuted for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

That they would have a real encounter with Jesus as we're praying that we would

believe that they would know and experience the nearness of Christ.

And then the story of Daniel three, it ends in a really unique way.

It ends with the worship of Babylon changing.

And so the empire empire, actually it's worship changed and it wasn't a full

change to complete rightness, right?

Because Nebuchadnezzar said, if you don't worship this way, I'm going to cut

you in half and burn your house down.

So that's not what we're going for. That's not the aim, but it's a movement

in the right direction, a movement towards the glorification of Yahweh.

And so we want to pray together that the persecuted church, when persecution

comes, that we would have our sights it's set on glorifying the kingdom of God.

That our deepest desires and affections would be turned towards God,

that we would seek to create a harmonious unity around the essentials.

And so Bree is going to play guitar for a few minutes. These are up there for you.

We're going to pray and then we're going to move immediately into a time of

communion. So whoever's doing communion, you can bring it up.

And the last note I want to make is when we dip the bread into the cup or when

we take of communion, we are sharing in the sufferings of Christ.

We are making his story our own and we are taking on the story of Christ and

we are being clothed in it.

It is our sustenance. It is our source.

It is our fuel for our obedience in the kingdom of God.

And so we're going to pray, we're going to do communion, and then we're going to worship.

Thank you for listening to Mountainside Church's podcast. We hope you found

inspiration and encouragement in today's teaching.

To learn more about our church, stay connected or partner with us, visit mcboone.org.

Music.