Daniel 10

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All right, so that's the, that's that, right?

And so what happened?

This happened in 2006.

We played for three more years, right?

But in the year of 2010 to 11, he needed full reconstructive spinal surgery, right?

He needed to reconnect the nerves that like died because of this injury, like, you know, had slowly started to die.

The reason I point this out, you're like, how does Peyton Manning connect to Daniel?

This is a little weird, Josh, right?

Daniel was so well versed in what he, how he knew, how he did things, right?

He is 84.

He's done so many dreams.

He's the highest official in the land, right?

Just like Peyton Manning.

Peyton Manning was, he's called the sheriff.

The dude could throw the ball.

He'd won a championship at this point.

Like, he was the dude, right?

And in this moment where you just feel like you know what you're doing, you have these answered prayers, you have everything in life, and it's just like, well, what happens when that's kind of taken away, right?

And for Daniel, right, there's three weeks.

We look at this because we can look at the timeline, we're like, oh, there's only three weeks.

Daniel had no idea it was going to be three weeks, right?

And so Peyton Manning had a full year where he had to rehab, right?

And so he had this, he had three spinal surgeries to reconnect these nerves.

And that was when the Indianapolis Colts caught him.

And then the Denver Broncos, where I am from, shout out Denver, Colorado, signed him.

But at that point, he had no idea if he'd ever throw again.

Like, he had no feeling in his arms.

Like, he had to really rework, like, the whole way he did something.

And I think for Daniel especially, like, having answered prayers or having this ability that you know how to do things, but then it not turn out the way you want, it creates this idea that you just don't know the future, right?

But you still stick to the plan, right?

So for Daniel, right, he was, he prayed.

He prayed for three weeks.

He didn't stop, right?

And as we'll get into this, like, it's an answer to prayer, but he didn't know that moment.

Just as Peyton Manning didn't know that he'd ever play football again.

Spoiler alert, he did.

He was really good for the Denver Broncos.

Won us the Super Bowl.

I was very happy.

But, right, for us, though, it doesn't have to be this intense fate of a people, right?

Like, that's what Daniel's praying for, or the fate of our working career.

But there are big and small things that put us in this state of weakness, right, the state of, like, do I know how to do this?

Am I going to be good at whatever this is again, or am I good at this at all, right?

The question is, do you quit, right?

Even if you don't know the outcome, would you still give it all to God, especially in this idea of prayer?

You know, that's the attitude we need to take from Daniel through the process to start this Daniel 10.

So we have that.

We have the start.

We have Daniel's state in the beginning.

And then this next part is the spiritual opposition to Daniel.

And if you want to jump down to verses 12 through 14, I won't read that again, but read that through.

But I am going to go through certain little parts here, right?

And so this first part, when you read it, it says, you know, since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and humble yourself before God, your words were heard, right?

So for three weeks, Daniel prayed.

But what God is saying here is that Daniel's prayers, the very moment he made his request known, that they were heard, right?

So his prayers had been heard on the first day, right?

So you're like, well, I had to take three weeks, right?

We're getting into that, right?

Daniel had been in great and serious prayer for these three weeks.

That next point, right?

I have become, I have come because of your words, right?

I have come in response to them.

I don't think we can pass this lightly, right?

An angel was dispatched because of Daniel's prayers.

This is another of many reminders at the book of Daniel that prayer matters, right?

Prayer matters.

It isn't merely a therapeutic exercise for us spiritually, right?

Our prayers for faith, bold prayers can dispatch angels in our behalf, right?

I don't know if, I'm like, I don't know if I can think about that all the time, right?

I think it's just for me to get out, right?

A therapeutic exercise.

No, God is saying that angels will come to your behalf from faith, bold prayers.

And then this next part, right?

It says, the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me for 21 days.

This is the kind of the part where we talk about spiritual warfare.

Since the prince was able to oppose an angelic messenger of Daniel, we know this was more than just a man, right?

The prince was some kind of, you know, evil being, angelic being, because he was one that he could oppose the word of God coming to Daniel and stood against the angelic messenger that withstood me with 21 days.

Since the angel was dispatched immediately, right?

Like we get that point, like when the prayer was heard, he was dispatched.

So that means that Daniel's period of prayer and self-denial was 21 days, right?

We see that the answers of the prayer were delayed because of this battle, right?

A 21-day battle, like even in a modern day, like battles don't, like there's wars, but battles only last like a day or two.

To think about a 21-day fight for a prayer to be answered, it's hard to put our minds around, right?

You know, but here's what's cool.

Think about like the three weeks are important with what we just said.

The correlation between Daniel's time of self-denial and prayer and the time of the duration of the battle between angel and the prince of the kingdom of Persia established a link between Daniel's prayer and the angelic victory.

Since the angelic victory came on the 21st day, we can surmise that if Daniel would have stopped praying on the 20th day, there's a chance that answer never came.

You know, I found this quote by this, I don't know his first name, but this pastor, his last name's Archer.

I found this in one of the commentaries I was reading.

And he says, there may be hindering factors of which a praying Christian knows nothing as he wonders why the answers to his requests are delayed.

Nevertheless, he's to keep on praying.

It may be that he will not receive an answer because he was given up on the 20th day when he should have persisted to the 21st day.

Right?

And then this last part when he says, now I have come.

You know, I think this is cool.

We have the spiritual battle.

We have this idea of this fight for our prayer life happening on a day-to-day basis.

But also, we also know that God is the most powerful.

He could change that in an instant.

Just like we know, like right with Jesus, like he could have saved his son on the cross if he really had to.

But God allowed this kind of conflict because he has a purpose in allowing it.

He certainly could have blasted away in any moment any demonic opposition.

But God's plan was probably to use this time of delay to develop Daniel as a man of persistent prayer.

Persistence in prayer is necessary.

But not because God is reluctant and needs to be overcome.

Rather, it's necessary to train us in discipline.

To train us to go to him, to rely on him and not the answers from him.

Daniel's success makes us reflect on our failures.

How much angelic insistence or insight has never been realized?

Or greatly delayed because of a lack of persistence in prayer?

Right?

As I kind of said, like this intensity we can almost really only find in our wars, right?

The physical battles that we as humans have fought for our whole existence.

Since the time of Cain and Abel, we've just, you know, as sinful humans, we've kind of sought out to kill each other.

But there's something so visceral and eye-opening about the stories of perseverance in fighting evil.

And so I have this, I don't know how many of you guys have seen this movie.

It's a movie called Unbroken.

It was released in 2014.

It's about the experiences of a man named Louis Zamperini.

After a near-fatal plane crash in World War II, Louis Zamperini spent a terrible 47 days in a raft with two fellow crewmen before he was caught by the Japanese Navy.

This is a true story too.

This isn't like fake.

You can look videos up.

This is him telling this.

So this isn't like Hollywood overdoing it.

Right?

So he was at sea for 47 days.

And then when he did find a boat came, it was the Japanese boat, the enemy, right?

And so at that point, he went to be sent as a prisoner of war at a POW camp.

There he was brutally beaten and singled out by a colonel in the Japanese army.

Because the colonel found out that Louis Zamperini was a Christian and he despised Christianity.

So he went after him trying to break his will for God.

For this, Louis understood about the perseverance of just one more day.

During this whole time, there's a bigger battle going on between the U.S. and Japan.

That's what we remember.

You don't talk like, hey, what do you know about World War II?

It's like, oh, Louis Zamperini.

You don't think about it.

It's like, well, you think about the big points.

It's like, well, the allies beat the Axis in Germany and in Italy.

And then we had to go to the Pacific and beat Japan, right?

Those are the big things.

We think about that.

That's the big overhauling concept, right?

But it's so important.

That's so important in the grand scheme of things.

But for Louis, he knew that if he didn't fight the battle in front of him, he would have never got to see the end of the bigger battle.

I think that perfectly explains the situation in Daniel 10.

Daniel had to persevere with the battle he was dealing with, right?

It was tough.

It says it brought him to his knees in weakness and in pain.

But as the angel explains, the battle was so much bigger than just about Daniel, right?

If Daniel didn't have grit, if Daniel didn't grind out the ugly days, the days, you know, day 18, right?

We think about day 20.

It's like, I bet you days 15 through 18 were awful, right?

You know, he ground out the ugly days.

He would have never have known the bigger plan, the bigger battle going on if he didn't fight out those days.

For him, it was three weeks.

Louis Zamperini, he had those 47 days, but he was caught in 1943.

The battles didn't stop until 45, 46.

Louis Zamperini was in a POW camp for over two years.

So what's the point of this?

Grit can't have an expiration date.

Right.

You know, if we give up in the hardest times of our lives, we will never see the bigger picture.

Never see the answered prayers.

The miracles God had planned for you, you won't know them.

The spiritual battle for this world is real.

And I'm not going to dig all too deep into what that looks like, you know, but feel free to talk to me about it.

I love the idea of spiritual warfare.

It's one of my favorite things about biblical theology.

So feel free to come and talk to me about it.

But I think for us today, what we need to realize that if we decide to make Jesus Lord of our lives, we fight and live for something bigger than our own wants and needs.

We become part of a battle against sin.

We kind of know that, but we often don't talk about that.

We are fighting against Satan on a day-to-day basis.

He is a very cunning enemy.

He knows what he's doing.

Like you said, he held an angelic messenger for 21 days.

He's not dumb, right?

We fight a spiritual battle day-to-day.

And to realize that and to fight through that, we fight it through prayer.

We fight it through this idea of praying to God and persevering in that prayer.

And we have one last point.

It's verses 15 through 19.

It's Daniel is strengthened in his weakness.

Once again, I'm going to look at some of these lines in here.

Go through them.

I'm not going to read the full verse.

So just follow with me.

Right.

So we jump in like in verse 15.

It says, I turned my face towards the ground and became speechless.

Right.

So this is idyllic.

He has this back and forth of like his position.

I think it's actually really, really important.

So Daniel started in the ground, verse 9.

Then he stood up in verse 11.

And now he's back on his face again.

Right.

He is going through the emotions like a 15-year-old kid again.

He's 84, right?

He's going through it.

But here's the point.

Like he says, because of the vision, my sorrows have overwhelmed me.

So I looked up the ancient Hebrew word translated for sorrows.

And we think of sorrows kind of like that sucks.

It's sad.

Boo hoo.

Like it's rough.

But actually, it's way more intense than that.

Right.

It's this thought like sorrow in the ancient Hebrew is the thought of twisting and writhing pain.

It kind of sounds a little different than boo hoo.

Right.

Like writhing pain is like I kind of think of like my back.

You know, when I've had a back injury, I'm like that hurt.

Like I felt like an 80-year-old man.

Right.

I was like, that was writhing pain.

You know, like that it was serious.

You know, it is used in several places in the Old Testament for labor pains and childbirth.

You know, Daniel was so severely affected by this vision that he could barely breathe.

Much less could he deal with a prophetic complexity.

Right.

And Jared talked about this when talking about chapters 7 and 8.

Because we kind of jumped from 6 to 9.

Right.

You kind of saw that.

Daniel, right.

The man who God deemed worthy of seeing visions, visions of God's future.

I can probably guarantee most of us aren't given that special ability.

If so, please come talk to me.

I want to know.

Right.

He saw this vision and other visions and saw them extremely prophetically complex, even for him.

To the point it caused him extreme pain.

I bring this up to remember that the vision itself shouldn't be the focus of this chapter.

Right.

We kind of talk about the vision, the vision, the vision.

It is in chapter 11.

Like if we don't, we don't bring it up in chapter 10.

I think it's important that we're ending in chapter 10.

Because what was so much more important is Daniel's journey of weakness, perseverance, and strengthening through God that were so much more important than the theological debates about complex visions.

So as we jump in, right, jump down a little further.

He says, so when he spoke to me, I was strengthened and said, let my Lord speak for you have strengthened me.

It's in verse 19.

This is such an important part of this story.

After so much pain, like I just talked about what sorrow really meant for Daniel.

Daniel was vulnerable and saying, honestly, that he can't do this.

He's like, I am too weak, God.

Like, I don't know, like, entirely.

However, I'm like, dude, I'm 84.

Like, chill.

Like, I'm done.

I've done your work.

I've done the things you want me to do.

I'm in too much pain.

Too much pain to carry out this last vision.

If any human being understands life is not easy, especially one live for God.

And Daniel understood this more than most.

Right.

He's been through three regimes.

Right.

He's been through countless kings.

But in the same breath, Daniel also understands that God is a God of promises.

You know, it's a God of love, understanding and strength.

And here at the end of his life, where is he going back to his strength?

It's God.

Right.

You know, this dude has seen it all.

And I think what's so cool, he has every chance to figure this out by himself.

How many visions has he seen?

Way more than we have.

Right.

Way more than anybody in the world has.

How many complex situations has he dealt with?

More than we could think of.

Right.

He could have easily figured this out on his own, probably.

You know, given something that was spiritually inclined, spiritually smart, like a spiritually good answer.

Or even I think of this other way.

Kind of like I've said about his tiredness.

He's in his 80s.

He could have walked away.

He could have been like, God, hand this off to somebody else.

Right.

This is like, that's actually biblical for some people.

Moses doesn't get to see the promised land.

It's handed off to Joshua.

Now, Moses messed up, but still old.

Like, he couldn't do it.

Right.

It was his time.

Daniel easily could have said that.

Daniel could have been like, push it on to another prophet.

I can't do this anymore.

But instead, what does he do?

He goes to the angel in vulnerability and says, help me.

Right.

So he goes back to God.

And what does God do?

He strengthens him one more time.

And going into Daniel 11, he is ready to do the will of God one more time.

As it says there in verse 19, right.

He says, let my Lord speak for you have strengthened me.

I want to wrap up this last section of verses with some lyrics from this song that has been kind of getting me in this idea of finding God in my weakness.

Him being my strength.

I'm going to read the first verse into this course.

The song is called Find Me.

It's by a man named Jonathan David Hessler.

I'm going to read the first verse in the chorus.

And we'll go from there.

Says I fall down upon the ground.

Press my face against the earth.

Till my heart it rises over my head.

As the weed it bows down low when the autumn wind blows.

I kneel before the one I love.

Find me grateful.

Find me thankful.

Find me on my knees.

Find me dreaming.

Find me singing.

Find me lost in your grace.

Not just in verses 15 through 19.

Not just in Daniel 10.

But in almost all of the circumstances we have found Daniel.

We have found him praying.

Most of the time on the ground.

We found Daniel grateful, thankful, pleading, dreaming and singing to God.

So I have this question for us.

Where does God find you?

Good question, bro.

Where does God find me?

Think about that a lot lately.

You know, I shared a little bit about our grit and toughness, right?

This idea of persevering through prayer.

I'm like, or persevering through just our life.

I'm like, sometimes you just got to grit it out.

I don't think I've talked about enough.

Sometimes there's something about human will and gritting things out.

But if we don't combine that with a humble reverence for our creator, the creator of the heaven and the universe, the God who made us from dust, we will never find the strength to live as disciples.

So once again, where does God find you?

So as we wrap up Daniel 10, but more importantly, as we wrap up the series of Daniel, I want us to reflect on prayer, especially in the terms of Daniel 10.

Daniel's life was truly defined by the aspect of prayer.

The man we read about that interpreted visions for multiple kings became one of the high officials for three different regimes, escaped the lions then, he wouldn't be that man without a life of preserving through prayer.

But Daniel's zeal for prayer didn't change from his teenage years through his final days on this earth.

So no matter what age you are in this room, we all can be convicted by the man that Daniel was in his prayer life.

We must have a heart to preserve.

We are humans.

If men like Daniel are going to go and have periods of great weakness, great sorrow, spoiler alert, so are you, right?

But we have learned so much in this past month and a half on how powerful our God is, how important it is to pray, especially in the tough times.

Daniel 10 opens up this whole world of spiritual battles that we partake in every day.

Don't be the one who gives up when God is trying to see what kind of character you have when the times get hard.

Be someone who is strengthened through the fire and doesn't fold in the fire.

And lastly, as we head towards communion, let us think about the strength we find in God.

Daniel never went into a situation without knowing God was with him, right?

He fought like he didn't get that vision.

He didn't learn the vision in Daniel 11 until he was strengthened by God.

He didn't go into it without that strength.

So I think that is only fitting that this sermon ends with a prayer for our communion time and persevering in our prayer.

So let us pray.

Dear God, I'm so grateful.

I'm grateful for the Bible.

How many times you've just shown us the way to live.

I'm grateful for Daniel.

God, I can't wait to talk with him one day, to figure out how it was like to persevere through such hard times, to go from a king to king, to not get killed, to persevere through that prayer when things looked so dark.

I'm just so grateful that there have been men and women that have gone before us that have shown us the path of your power.

God, let us not forget that.

We live in such a rich world here in America.

We're so grateful to live in this place, but also it gives us this idea that we are the Lord and we're not.

We're not.

We need to persevere in prayer with you, God.

Understand that you are our king.

You're our creator.

You create us from the dust, and we need to fight for that prayer on a day-to-day basis.

God, let us not quit on the 20th day or the 25th day or however long it takes.

Don't quit on the 10th year, the 20th year.

Keep praying the prayers until it matters, until the character is brought out in us, God.

So as we take communion, I just want us to be thankful for your son.

Pray, just remember that this is so much bigger than us, that we fight for a battle for your kingdom, God.

Just super grateful for you.

Love you, God.

In your name I pray.

Amen.

Thank you so much for listening to the Kalamazoo Church of Christ podcast.

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