Idolatry

Hey, everyone! Good to be with all of you here. Once again, good to come home to Indianapolis. Always good to get back over here. We left early enough yesterday to be here plenty of time, had an hour traffic delay around the loop in Cincinnati before we ever got out of there. Then we got stuck in another delay on the south side loop here in Indianapolis, but made it here and you just have to kind of roll with the punches and just keep right on going. Kind of like your choir. You know, Chris Herman has done that before. I've heard him give that over when the choir was first doing their piece here this year. And I thought, man, get through all the books of the Bible to sing that. One thing in itself. And then, you know, every time you go someplace else and technical problems can cause glitches. But I thought Chris handled it really well and settled right through the adversity there, which is something you have to do.

Again, Shoemaker is just always an enthusiastic choir director.

That's the first time I've seen him knock over a music stand while he's conducting it. May not be the last, but it was the first for me. But he just picked it right up and kept on going and just sailed right on through. And you've got to roll the punches and don't get too upset and too flustered. Kind of that kind of a week for us at ABC.

I was giving a test yesterday in class. Every Friday morning in the World News and Prophecy class, I give them a current event squib. And it's their highlight of the week, I tell you. They just love it, but they know to expect it. And so it's teaching them to either watch World News or keep up current events or just ignore the teacher. I'm not quite sure yet. We're working our way through that class. But yesterday's class, I put the slide up with the first question and I had the answer in the question.

And I don't know how I did that. It was late at night when I was putting it together. And so I had my own technical glitch that I had to kind of pick up and move on from. So the moral lesson for us all to learn is when something happens, you just keep right on going and act like it never happened. And don't forget through it all. We have a very good ABC class this year.

It's a smaller one than last year and sort of reflects and require, but not any less so in the quality of their presentation and their heart. But we're enjoying getting to know one another as we go through the year. It will be over very, very quickly. But ABC is, I think you know, this year we changed our name from the Ambassador Bible Center to the Ambassador Bible College.

And that other than the name, I think one of the reasons for that was to hopefully look a little better as we're trying to get a status definition with either something to do with the government, Homeland Security, or whatever. So it will hopefully be easier for some of the international students to come in, especially from Africa, where we have not been able to get them in in recent years. So we hope that that will happen. We had a visit from Homeland Security, and they checked us out and made sure we're not radioactive and terrorist threats and everything else.

So we were waiting on a determination in regard to that. I mentioned that we had this past Council of Elders meeting, they had a report given to them from a committee of the Council, a subcommittee that had been working for several months on kind of evaluating the Ambassador Bible College. It's 16 years in operation, and we've never had a thorough evaluation. So a group of educators and faculty members and others were put together in several meetings held during the past year, and a report with some recommendations was brought to the Council this past week when the Council of Elders was meeting.

And out of that, we hope that we will be able to have a, you know, it's been good to go through a review of the curriculum, the mission of the college, and the Center, and kind of look at everything. And I think it will give us a basis to make annual reviews of everything and hopefully continue to improve the curriculum and matters that we're dealing with there. But it has borne fruit.

One of the things that we determined from it is that it has helped to create an atmosphere of service among those who have gone through ABC. I was noting as I was listening to the report in the Council session the other day that some of the complaints from certain areas where they send students to ABC and they don't go home, they stay in Cincinnati. And it kind of looks like a lot of them do, but really the majority of students over the 16 years have gone home or to other places.

It's just that because it looks like we got a lot over there that they've all stayed around and more have stayed in other areas because of the nature of that. They stay around for a number of reasons. So I did note that of all the ones that had gone through Minneapolis through the years, as far as I know, every one of them came back here and integrated quite well into the service to the church and the congregation and went on with other degrees and jobs and careers and lives. And that is it was good to note, at least from a local perspective as well.

One other thing I wanted to mention, we are working in the media department for a September-October period where we are going to be putting, changing the name of the Good News magazine to Beyond Today magazine. That was announced some weeks back and I won't comment too much about that, but we are working towards September-October, being the time when we do that or several things that have to be done. And one of the big work items is to design a new logo for Beyond Today that will fit on the television screen, on the computer screen, and on a magazine.

And that has sort of been needed because the original Beyond Today logo was done just for television 10 years ago and it doesn't work right graphically with other applications, print, or especially the web. And so we've narrowed it down and I believe we have a firm that's going to help us to design a new logo for Beyond Today and also a church logo as well.

Not the seal that I think you have a seal up here, but that's going to, that stays the same, but the church logo that appears on our letterheads and mastheads, it will be redesigned.

And we will put the Beyond Today name on the magazine. And in addition, we're working to redesign the magazine, the layout of the magazine, and to create additional features, columns, and articles within the magazine. It's still going to carry the same doctrinal teaching and emphasis that it always has and be very, very familiar in that way. But we are going to be redesigning the magazine and creating additional features that will help us to convey the message. So we're working quite a bit on that and that's going to be occupying our time going forward and hopefully we'll be seen by all of you when it comes to the name being put on the magazine here in the fall. So it's going to be more than just putting a swapping out names. We hope that it will also give us an opportunity to put a kind of a fresh approach to a number of different things that will appear internally in magazine as well. So those are some of the things that we're involved with in the media department and ABC.

If you will, please turn in your Bibles over to the book of Daniel, chapter 3.

Daniel, chapter 3 opens with an interesting scene.

We see three men who stand bound by ropes in front of a roaring furnace of fire.

For these three men, it was a moment of truth.

They were going to live or die. They did come down to that point. The only question for them to determine was what would they do? Would they live or would they die? And in Daniel, chapter 3 and verse 16, we come to the core of the story. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter.

If that is the case, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fire refurnace and He will deliver us from your hand, O King. That's confidence. That's grace under pressure. But in verse 18, they then go on and to make an even deeper point. But if not, three words, but if not, in other words, if He doesn't spare us and rescue us, let it be known to you, O King, that we do not serve your God, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up. They had complete confidence that God was able to save them even at that moment as they saw the flames and felt the heat of this furnace and knew the wrath of the king was hot as well because they would not bow down to a giant gold image that He had erected and demanded everyone bow and pay homage to. And they felt that God could deliver them even at that moment, but if He didn't, if not, then it wasn't going to change what they did. Now, how did these three men get to this moment? And what are the lessons for you and I as we look at this? We know the story may have been a while since some of us have kind of opened up the Daniel and read this particular story in chapter three. Let's look at a little bit of the background that led them here as we look at the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Makes a cute, you know, not all literate, but kind of the three words just trip along real well and you could almost make a song out of it if you wanted to, I suppose, to help remember their names. But it's more than a song, it's more than a cute little Bible story that we take out of the Old Testament. It's a story that has direct implications and application for you and I today in any and everything we face in our own life. These three men had found themselves transported to an alien culture. They might as well have been put on a different planet, so have been taken from Jerusalem to Babylon in their day. For you and I, you know, to go whatever distance that was is nothing we in our modern world, but for them in the ancient world, they might as well have gone to the moon. The contrast was completely different in terms of religion, culture, atmosphere, and everything that they were used to. They had been uprooted from their familiar land and gone through a change that very few people could put up with.

They had seen their city burned, their temple destroyed, their way of life, their religion denigrated, and they had had to put everything they had on their backs or in a cart and be transported to a different land. And then this particular group of people, along with one other, Daniel, who we read in the first chapter of Daniel, did find themselves when they got off the train, they went to the right. Somebody kind of motions that they go to a different direction than perhaps the other refugees went to, and they wound up through the circumstances working in the palace and in kind of the State Department of Babylon in their governmental functions because of the training and ability and testing scores that they came up with. And they found themselves in unique positions. But now these three men in the story, when you go back to the first one of chapter three, Nebuchadnezzar, being the despotic man that he was, had let the episode, probably, of chapter two, where Daniel interpreted his dream that he had of an image. And in that, Daniel told him, well, you're just head of gold, Nebuchadnezzar. And so, likely Nebuchadnezzar, being the personality that he was, decided, well, if I'm the head of gold, let's just make a whole statue full of gold. And I'm going to command everybody to bow down to it. And if they don't, then into the furnace of fire with them, which is how Shadrach, Meshach, and Epedegoth got there. They would not bow down to this golden image because the envy in some of the others in the Babylonian court, they were reported, they were called before the king, and they were given a second chance to recant and change their mind and bow down at the sound of the music, and they wouldn't do it. And this is how they found themselves here. At this moment, quite likely, as far as their mind was concerned, they're lastly.

A good story, but a story that has some big lessons for us. What do we learn? What can we learn from this story? Let's pause for a moment in the flow of the story here and kind of leave them at the mouth of that fiery furnace and consider it. First of all, this is a story by Dallin, plain and simple. One of the classic ones that we would find from the ancient world of an image being made, crafted, and created by, in this case, the king. After a very familiar pattern, the Babylonian religion had all kinds of idols that people bowed down to, as did all the other cultures of the ancient world.

Made of stone, made of wood, made of glass, made of, as in this case, of precious metal.

And they all had one thing in common. All of the idols of the ancient world, no matter what they looked like, no matter what they were made from, they all had one thing in common. They could not see, hear, nor speak. Couldn't have a relationship with an idol. You couldn't expect an answer from that idol. You couldn't walk necessarily with that idol, which is why God said to his people, Israel, throughout their whole history that led up to this point, don't do it. I'm your God. I brought you out of Egypt. Come to know me. We will have a relationship. We will have a relationship that you obey me, and I will bless you, and you will know that I am God. Didn't I show you the worthlessness of the gods of Egypt? And this was the story of Israel, and of course, they didn't learn it. That's why these three men wound up in Babylon, and in their own case, because they did not compromise their integrity, they found themselves standing before a fiery furnace.

It would have been very easy for Daniel and these three men to have come to a conclusion, you know what? Our hometown's gone. The church we grew up in is gone. The building that we went to every occasion no longer exists. Therefore, they could have concluded our godhood. There is no god.

Certainly not the god we heard about growing up. Let's just go ahead and adapt ourselves to the Babylonian culture. It would have been very easy for these men who have given in. They were captives in a strange land. Their parents, or their friends, or their community that kind of was a bond and a cohesive feature of their life was no longer there any longer. Everything they had believed in had been swept away by this pagan power. It would have been easy to blend in and to succeed. And now, especially with their lives on the line, how would you and I have reacted to that moment?

That's the question for us. The Life Application Bible, which I know many of us have copies of, in their commentary on this part of the passage, they have an interesting eight excuses that Chad, Rick, Meshach, and Abednego could have gone to and used. Let me just give you what the Life Application Bible says, which would have given these men one more chance. Number one, they say that they could have said and used as an excuse, well, we'll bow down but not actually worship the idol. We'll just go through the motions, but in our heart, we won't worship the idol.

Excuse number two, we won't become idol worshipers, but we'll do it this one time. Then, we'll ask God for forgiveness. Easier to get grace than permission, right?

Excuse number three, well, the king has absolute power and we must obey him. God will understand.

God will understand. Human reason works that way sometimes. Human reason tells us at times that we have a better read on what God's mind is than someone else might have.

We bend it to our purpose. Excuse number four, they could have used. Well, the king appointed us.

We owe this to him. We owe him this.

Number five, this is a foreign land, so God will excuse us for following the customs of the land.

Instead of winning Rome, do as the Romans do, win in Babylon, do as the Babylonians do. The way that works. Number six, they could have said, our ancestors set up idols in God's temple.

This isn't half as bad, which is what happened. Excuse number seven, they could have said, well, we're not hurting anybody. It's our life. It's our call. It's our decision. It's not going to hurt anybody.

That's a very modern excuse, right? And excuse number eight, if we get ourselves killed, and some heathens take our positions, they won't help our people and excite.

So eight excuses they could have used to have saved their life and to have walked away, and all they would have had to have done is figure it out in their own mind how to excuse it, justify it, and with it. Which again, takes some mental gymnastics, but, you know, I think every one of us have done that at times or have been tempted to do it and find ourselves at that moment, don't we, where we may find ourselves making it an excuse for something rather than just acknowledging sin or guilt and repenting and doing what is necessary to move on and to move forward from. So it's the story of idolatry here in simple, in its rawest form, and the despotism that is right here. You know, when you look at a man like Nebuchadnezzar, and he was a conflicted man, obviously in chapter two, Daniel revealed secrets of his dream to him, and he makes Daniel, acknowledges Daniel's God, and puts Daniel over a portion of his kingdom.

On chapter four, Nebuchadnezzar was going to do that again because he has another dream. And again, he comes through circumstances to make an acknowledgement of Daniel's God, which is quite a bit for the type of man that he was and the king that he was in that day and in that age and that neighborhood. Babylon was an interesting neighborhood to live with him. Right there in the center of empires that had come and gone already, and now the Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar had risen to the point where it would give birth to not only its own time, but for all successive empires that would come out of that region would owe something to that head of gold, which was Babylon, according to the interpretation of the dream there. You know, that is the area today that we see being the fulcrum of the current strife in the Middle East and what is modern-day Iraq.

That's ancient Babylon. That's where Nebuchadnezzar stood. That's where the city of Babylon was. And in the northern part of Iraq is where in recent months this group called ISIS has been on a rampage doing unspeakable acts of horror that we see confronting us today of beheadings, even down to the point, as they did a few weeks ago, where they burned a man alive in a cage, a Jordanian pilot who had been down. I didn't see it, except I saw a picture of it, a still picture. I didn't care to look it up and see it, but I saw the still picture of it, and that in itself was was horrible enough. But as bad as that is, and that group today, look, the story we read here in Babylon, three men of faith, were going to be burned alive too by an evil-minded system.

Kind of makes you realize that whatever spiritual realm was working in the time of Nebuchadnezzar that would inspire him to rule with such horror, probably still around the neighborhood today, to inspire the same acts now that the whole world must witness if they choose on social media by a group of renegades and pure, unspeakable evil being done there in the name of religion, a caliphate. Same neighborhood, same gods with a small g at work influencing these matters.

This is the area. This is a mindset, and this is what is happening in this story.

There's another lesson for us to consider with this. As we look at this lesson of idolatry, I always like to bring it down. What does it mean to us today? What might our idols be that we are challenged and tempted to bow down to? I don't think anybody in this room is going to be tempted to bow down to a gold image or to a porcelain statue hanging on a wall or a wooden statue or whatever. We have moved far away from that in our church of God culture and certainly on our modern world that is not of the same particular fashion. Now, there are religions with idols hanging on walls and icons that they do worship. That's true. But for you and I, and for a good portion of the world, idolatry takes on a bit of a different task and a different measure.

Tolerance is today's phrase that's used to mold the values and shape the behavior of a generation of people today. You and I, the desire is of holding on to godly values, biblical values, every day we face pressures to tolerate, to accept things that were once considered sin.

Same-sex marriage, for instance. Ask yourself how your attitude, especially those of us of the Boomer generation, has been tempted to be shifted and changed in the last 20 years because of what we see. We can't watch or view anything of any length of time, it seems, without being confronted either sometimes directly or subtly with a character, a situation meant to god cause us to be sympathetic towards something that is sin. Couples living together without marriage, unmarried, rampant throughout our culture today. Children born out of wedlock and how things have changed. I even use that term, and it's different from the term that I grew up with, but it is shifted. Abortion, drugs, even the culture of violence that we live in. These are some of the measures and the changes in our culture that bombard us all the time and depending on how we have been acclimatized to it, we might even have to admit that perhaps we have become a bit more tolerant than we would like to admit. There's sacred issues in today's postmodern culture, that's for sure. They are the modern forms of, many of the modern forms of idolatry that are, people are being pressured to bow down to and to accept. And that's a part of life today. We would do, you know, you look at Chadrak, Meshach, N but those are some of the idols that we have in our larger culture. So I was looking at this topic and thinking about it and preparing it. I thought to myself, well, dare I bring it even closer down to home for us?

Into the church of God culture and list a few idols that we might have in our church of God culture? Surely we don't have any idols in our church of God culture, do we? Well, how about legalism? Is legalism an idol that is a part of our culture at times?

It is if you ever think that anything you do, any part of your obedience to God, your necessary obedience to God, merits grace or merits or earns salvation, that anything we do as part of our worship, merits and earns salvation or God's grace. If you think that, legalism may be a part of your thinking and sometimes that can be a bit of a… it can frankly be idolatry because we look at something that we might do, some work of our own as something that substitutes for the work of God and the grace of Christ and the mercy of God, which is free and unmerited and undeserved and whenever God gives it to us. But if we think that something we do earns us anything in those areas, it is a form of legalism. And when it raises its head, as it does from time to time, it's uncomfortable, but it's necessary for us to ask ourselves, why do we do what we do? And if we think that we are earning anything and we then begin to use it as kind of a crutch or a cane or a stick that we beat somebody else up with, then that might be one of our own Church of God idols.

Then I thought about another idol that sometimes raises its head in our culture, and that's called pride. The pride that I'm right because I'm in God's Church. I know the truth, and we have these endspeak that we use that we are very pleased with in one's sense. And yes, there is truth, and yes, there is the truth of God, and there is the calling of God. And yes, there is a matter of conversion. But then if we let that get us to the point where we think that with it, I'm more right than you, and I'm more right than anyone else, and it comes out in the way we speak of the world, we speak of others, then we have a problem. Because we think of ourselves a bit more righteous than we really are. And we think of what God has given us in a way that separates us and doesn't really fill us with the love of God. And if that happens and creates a pride and an overbearing, condescending approach for people in the way we speak, think, write, communicate the words of the gospel, then we might have a problem, because it can create a separation. We need to be careful about that. Sometimes we look at it that way. Even men can be an idol in our Church of God culture. Our Achilles heel through the years has been putting men on pedestals, worshiping them instead of God, even at times to allowing that to cause the body of Christ to be split. And that is one of our, I call it our Achilles heel at times, that we have you know, at times never been able to get rid of. I think any man who has allowed, any man who has allowed himself to be looked at as that way, as someone who must lead the people of God or be worshiped in that way, is really no different than Nebuchadnezzar is here in this story, where he built an image, very likely parroting himself and commanded people to bow down to it.

Men can be a form of idolatry in our own culture as well. We need to be careful about that. We worship God in Deuteronomy 6. This among other passages tells us that we worship God in the name of God. Verse 4, Deuteronomy 6, a very famous part of this passage.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Christ repeated this in the New Testament.

To be the great commandment, to love the Lord your God with all your might, heart, and strength. And let nothing come between them, not even our own pride, not even our own standard of legalism.

Certainly not any other physical matter that we might bow down to, all of which are idolatry. Don't let that happen. And ask and make sure that we don't have any idoles lurking around in our life today. There's a third lesson to learn from this story, and that is a question to ask ourselves, how real is God's promise to us? How real is the promise of God?

We'll go back to the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego there.

They said to Nebuchadnezzar, our God is able to deliver us from your hand, from this furnace.

That's faith. That was a statement of faith. And it can apply to you and I at any time when we would make a statement in our heart about how we are going to put our faith in God, to deliver us from a trial, to fight a battle for us in a challenging passage of life, to heal us.

When we are sick, face and put our life in His hands and call upon God and faith and trust, promise to heal us. Faith takes many shapes and forms as it conforms to the needs of our life.

And we profess that very readily and very sincerely, just like these men do. Our God is able to do what needs to be done and we will say that and we will live by that.

And then what they said though, but if not, in other words, if He doesn't physically deliver us at this moment and you push us on into the furnace, we're still not going to worship you or bow down to your image. We're not going to compromise. We're not going to give in on any part of our faith, believe, way of life, not one. That's what they were saying. They were willing to go all the way. And in their mind, they had resolved that they're going to trust God, believe God, obey God, put His way of life first, not give in to whatever might be the temptation to walk away from. And as a stress and trace, their own real life at that moment would have given them more than eight or ten excuses. They probably could have come up with 15 or 20 excuses as to why it would have been all right to bow down, to go along, and they wouldn't do it. And they resolved in their heart, which is something you and I can only do in the darkest moment of the night, the quietest moment in our own private place of prayer, our bedroom, our living room, where we go to our backyard, our little favorite spot where we may walk and talk with God and walk with God literally and come to certain conclusions and faith. And in a moment, we resolve. Thus is the way it will be. But if not, no turning back, no turning up, no turning back.

The great definition of faith is when we read the book of Hebrews, that faith is the substance of things hoped for. It's the evidence of things not seen, Hebrews 11 and verse 1. You look at that phrase again, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. There are tangible things right there in that sentence, the substance of things hoped for. Substantive matters represent our faith, and there is evidence for our faith. There is evidence for the way we choose to live our lives, that it is the best way, a good way, that has many, many benefits, that we have lived and understood and experienced in our life and would make us to not want to go any other direction, to live any other way of life, regardless of all the ups and downs in the seasons of life that come about. There's substance, and there's evidence in our life that we've tended all upon. It's not just something that is vague and ephemeral and unknown, unknowable, or unseeable.

There's substance, and there's evidence there. The fourth thing that we can learn from the story is that it's in those three words, but if not, and this it is that faith has consequences. When we make our decision, when we choose to put God first, that faith can have consequences, and we should be able to live with that and know that. Shadrach Meshach, in a bit ago, knew God could deliver them, and they knew that by personal example.

They had read the Scriptures. They knew the Scriptures. We read the Bible, and we have personal experience, too, which informs our faith.

As we look at our life, others that we know within the faith, we have a great deal of personal experience. If we are walking with God, seeing His hand in our life, through prayer and through a continual study of the Word of God, letting it wash over us, nourish us, remind us of many things, not enough can be said for our reading of the Bible, our study of the Bible, on a regular basis, on an ongoing basis, reviewing, rereading books and passages that we have read and heard and know, we think, many times, and even in the most obscure parts that we don't think are there.

All of us probably love to read the Psalms for comfort, encouragement, or read a proverb for wisdom, or to, you know, if we really want to go into kind of a semi-graduate level, we'll read the book of Romans and let Paul's windings through theology at times inform us about grace.

How often do we pick up the book of Exodus and read through the last 10 or 15 chapters at the building of the Ark of the Arquip and the Wolders, except maybe on a quick pass-through with an annual reading, Bible reading program, or some other passage that we don't often think to turn to? But you know what? Well, those even can be instructive to us about what God is and what He's doing at various times. You never know, which is why, whether it's an annual reading program that we put ourselves through, or some other systematic approach to it, as we read the Bible, it is a continual shoring up of our faith, coupled with our experiences, and even helping us to understand whatever we might be going through at a particular point in time. I mentioned the building of the Tabernacle in the wilderness. To be honest, I hadn't read that for a long time, reading through it a few days ago, and I had to coincide with something else that was going on, and I realized, hey, yeah, that's what we're doing now. That's what's going on right now when I go to work.

As I interact and engage with the others in the work of the Church. That's what's going on now.

God's Word has many different facets to it, and the ability to inform us, encourage us, inspire us, and just keep us in the way without being taken off someplace else. This is what these three men knew as they came to that particular moment in their life. Their faith was strengthened, and you and I have that as well. We live each day with decisions that faith that we have to make regarding God's way. The Sabbath, this entire way of life. Maybe it's health, maybe it's sickness or disease that will test us just how far we will go. In the book of Romans chapter 5, there's a passage that helps us to understand this and the things that we go through in the trials, and what it brings us to. Beginning in verse 1, it talks about being justified by faith. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, for whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand and rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Faith, grace, peace, and justification, being made right with God brings us into a relationship with God.

That, in two verses, can sum up 40 years of one's experience, or 30 years or 20 years of experience in the faith. But then in verse 3, he goes on and he says, and not only that, there's more to it, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance.

We glory in a trial. Now, we glory in a trial not by jumping up and down and saying, whoopee, a trial has come. We glory in that we deal with it and we face it head-on, kind of like these three young men did. We face it head-on, and we stay firmly in our faith as a result of it, knowing that that trial will produce perseverance. We stay with it. We will have a quality of character that is called perseverance or stick-to-it-ness. The ability to stay with it is ingrained within our nature. And we learn that, yeah, we can deal with this. This is bad. It's tough. It's unpleasant. It hurts. But I can deal with this. There is tomorrow. There's the next day. There is life beyond this. And as a result of that perseverance, it builds a character, a sterling spiritual character. And as we go through it and come to a point, either the trial passes, a season passes, there's a healing, there's a new job, there's a different job, the trial and the difficulty, whatever it might be, fades, and the sun does come out. Then what is left is hope, in verse 4. Hope. And hope's a good thing.

Hope is a great thing. Hope is what we then must have and what anchors our lives, because he says, hope does not disappoint, in verse 5, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Hope does not disappoint.

And we have got to live with hope. I was reading a book several months ago, and there was a great line in that book by the author talking about the state of our world, our modern world in many ways. And he said that when there's no hope, the only thing left is Prozac. When there's—think about it. When you lose hope, boy, you've lost a lot. And for some, Prozac is the only solution. But hope stabilizes. Hope keeps us connected with God. Hope does not disappoint. But hope comes as a result of character being built and perseverance, and yes, a difficult situation. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had hope.

They had hope that was being tested at that particular point in their life.

Now, there's a couple of takeaways, I think, that we can glean from the story back in Deuteronomy. Let's start—or in Daniel. Let's go back to Daniel's chapter 3 and wrap this up with a couple of points to take home with us. Daniel chapter 3.

We left them in verse 18, basically saying, we're not going to do this. God can deliver us, but if not, we're still not going to bow down. Well, Nebuchadnezzar's theory was fueled and enraged. He commanded the furnace to be heated up seven times more.

The three men were bound in their coats and their trousers and brought up closer to the furnace, and they were cast, verse 21, into the midst of the burning fiery furnace.

And so hot that the ones who threw the men were killed as a result of that.

And they fell down bound, verse 23, into the midst of the burning fiery furnace.

Now, Nebuchadnezzar was astonished, and he rose in haste, and he spoke, saying to his counselors, did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? And they answered and said to the king, true, O king. Well, look, he answered, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God. Three were thrown in, Nebuchadnezzar then saw four, and the fourth one, he said, was like the Son of God, one like God. Firey furnace. Bible has other things to say about a fiery trial that might come upon us.

But in the case of Shadrach Meshach and Abednego, they had resolved, and they would not compromise.

You know, our walk with God will take many different paths.

As we go through our life, we might have a nice garden path. Many a case, very, very pleasant, very level, well tended and cultivated to walk through a field, through a wooded area, nicely kept garden path. We might have a period or a time we were walking in what has been called broad sunlit uplands, where the sun and the sky is as big as you please, and it's a calm spring day, and it's beautiful, and it's a joy to be alive. Then sometimes we might walk down the yellow brick road. You never know who you're going to run into next, along that way. And then sometimes we might have to walk through a time of fiery triumph, or a valley of the shadow of death, that Psalm 23 tells us. Our walk with God can take many different forms and many different ways.

And to walk with God, this is the point. These three men, in a sense, were in fire walking with God.

For you and I, the lesson is that if we're going to get to times as we walk with God, we might sometimes have to walk through fire and still walk with Him. He's still there with us, just as He was with these three men. And if we have not compromised, if we have come to a point like they did where we were going to say, but if not, then we will see God and we will know that He is with us in that tribe. It is always encouraging as a minister to listen to someone who is facing death in their own way, and they see God's hand in every step, every part of the trial that they are walking with. And as you see, I've seen that with our friends, fellow members, who listen to them. It's always a humbling lesson that I ask, will I have that type of an attitude? Will I see God in that decision that comes down? Will I see God in this dead end that we might be facing? Will I see God leading me in whatever way? I've had a number of different examples through the years of people who have had their reactions as they have walked through the fire and have been a testimony and an example that I have from them, as have you. To walk with God, we sometimes have to walk through fire. This is what Shadrach, Meshach, and Ephesus learn, and that's a big lesson for us here.

There's a second lesson to take away from this story. You go back here in Daniel 3, you see that when they were thrown in, they were bound, but have been with ropes, bound within their clothing and thrown in. But when Nebuchadnezzar looks in, he sees them walking around, unhinged, unburnt, but they're walking around. They were thrown in, remember, because they were carried to that point and shoved in. When he sees them, they're walking around, but it's as if they were just kind of, you know, taking a sauna, walking around in a sauna. Whatever it bound them didn't bind them any more. Sometimes it takes a severe trial to burn off or to release you and I from the bonds that we that have shackled us in our life.

Think about that. We all have various things that might bind us up emotionally, keeping us emotionally immature. Years or decades in our life because of something that happened some point in our life that formed our character, personality. Sometimes it's sin. Sometimes it's our sin. Maybe it's somebody else's sin, its impact upon us. That has bound us and impacted us in some way. Does fear bind you today? Does doubt bind you? Does cynicism, a lack of trust? What is it that binds insecurity? We all have various ropes around us emotionally, spiritually, mentally.

And sometimes it will take a fiery trial in life that we persevere through and we build character in and we maintain our whole, Paul wrote, to burn off, to remove that that's shackled, that rope of fear or doubt that has bound us for years, which is another reason for us to face the trial with faith and with confidence. And if we endure through it and stay with God, stay with faith, then He will and can bring us to a point where we understand that even in the worst time, we've been walking with Him. And when that happens, we maintain and continue with our hope.

But to get to that point, we must not bend any idol. We must not let anything compromise, cause us to compromise with our relationship with God and come between us. We must worship Him in spirit and in truth continually and never bend to any idea, any statement, any form of idolatry, old or new, that can come between us and our relationship with God.

So that when we come down to our moments of truth, we will be able to say, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednech, our God is a great God. He has been with us all of our lives, and He is able to deliver us from yet another time of difficulty and pain and suffering and trials.

But if not, we're still not going to give in. We will not turn back. We all come to that point and make those three words the words that are emblazoned in our hearts. But if not,