Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - When to Slow Down and Pray | The Writings | Daniel 6

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

How do you know when you really need to pray? Why is prayer so powerful? When should I pray? In today's episode, Tanya looks at Daniel 6 to learn an important lesson about prayer from Daniel himself. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Daniel 6

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmuth. Jealousy can make you do crazy things, can't it? I mean, have you ever said something embarrassingly raggedocious because you were feeling jealous of someone else's success? Or have you bought something outrageous or unimportant to you because someone else had it and you wanted something better?

Or have you said something embarrassingly regretful to put someone else down because you you were feeling jealous. Whether we're aware or not, we live in a world orchestrated by jealousy. It's called advertising. People pay other people to make us feel jealous, so we will do something about it. Let's look at an example. Mattresses. If you Google Mattress right now, you will find that there are over 14,000 mattress stores in the U.S. alone. That's crazy. There are more mattress stores than McDonald's. But they are also online mattress stores. And the way these stores work is they have, quote, people review their mattresses and tell us how amazing they are. If we want to sleep as good as Oprah, we need to buy this mattress.

Now, the problem with this is that the mattress companies are just paying PR firms to buy these reviews and make up these reviews so that we'll buy their mattresses. But how can we, from our view, be the only people in the world that aren't currently sleeping on that amazing mattress out of a box. We must be crazy, or at least totally missing out. Now, not only are these campaigns meant to make us jealous, but they're put on by people who are trying to take business from other people. So like I said, they pay an agency to create incentives, to boost reviews, to hire influencers, to talk about how great their product is that they probably don't even really use. And we're not surprised by that, for sure. This is the world that we live in. And this is the world Daniel lived in, too.

young people were competing for top positions in the kingdom, and there were fewer and fewer of those the higher up you went. So to get ahead, you had to make yourself look good and make other people look bad, or at least that's what involves in Daniel chapter six. Puff up yourself, put others down. But Daniel did things differently. Even though the culture was caught up in worshiping the king like in chapter three where Nebuchadnezzar had a statue belt that looked like him and made everybody worship it. Or here in chapter six, where the king issues a decree that his citizens can only worship him. This sounds foreign to us, but it really isn't. And yet, Daniel didn't get caught up in it. I mean, today we worship the throne of influencers and people who speak loudly and have

lots of power and money. The messages are more subtle. But they're still telling us how to look and what to buy into. But Daniel was still able to live faithfully to God in the middle of this kind of influencing culture. And he actually had success there. Let's look at Daniel chapter 6 versus 1 and 2. It says it pleased Darius to set over the kingdom 120 satraps to be throughout the whole kingdom and over them three high officials of whom Daniel was one, to whom these sat traps would give a count so that the king might suffer no loss.

So Darius had it set up so that his 120 regions were all ruled by a sat trap. And those sat traps all reported to an administrator of which Daniel was one of three. Now, it was set up this way to prevent loss. I mean, you know how people are. We tend to cut corners, takings for ourselves, especially if we live in a jealous culture. Okay, Daniel 6'3. through this, Daniel became distinguished above all the other high officials and satraps because an excellent spirit was in him and the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom.

Now, Daniel stands out because he's really good at what he does. He took his God-given gifts and he worked hard to develop them and were his coworkers happy for him to have this great success? Well, let's see. The next verse is four and five. It says, then the high officials, and the sat traps, sought to find a ground for complaint against Daniel with regard to the kingdom. But they could find no ground for complaint or any fault because he was faithful.

No, they weren't happy. They were jealous. So they set up a PR campaign to find the dirt on Daniel and to have that dirt exposed. But they're surprised because they came up empty. Daniel actually was a overroach. He lived out what he talked about. He was a man of character. So, So what we know about Daniel so far is that he stands out. What does it look like to stand out as a Christian? Was Daniel a Senate school teacher or a small group leader? Did he attend conferences with other believers? Well, all we know about Daniel is that he stood out by doing his job very well

and being a person who prayed. See, when the administrators and sat traps realized they couldn't come up with anything against Daniel about his character, they went after the way he prayed. They went to the king and said, hey, we've all agreed that you should make a decree that anyone who prays to any God or any human except you for 30 days should be thrown into the lion's den. They knew this was going to trap Daniel. And when Daniel heard about it, he didn't go to battle, he didn't issue a complaint with HR. He just did the same thing he'd always done.

He prayed and he prepared to die. It says now when Daniel learned that, the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem, and three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed. So on one hand, you have a country, a kingdom that has made their king into a god. And because that king is human and has all the flaws of human, these key leaders have been able to appeal to his jealous nature to trap Daniel. The king doesn't want Daniel to be thrown into the lion's den. He needs him to be a leader. But the king does want all the loyalty. He does want all the devotion for himself.

And so it comes down to this. Daniel, the one he trusts more than anyone else, is going to be eaten by lions because he prayed. Look what jealousy made the king do. Now Daniel, on the other hand, is prepared to give up everything in this life because he believes there's something greater than the king. He believes God is the one in control, and God is the one that ranks higher than the king. So Daniel on his knees asking God for help. Unfortunately, the king, by law, wasn't able to retract a decree that he'd already made, but he's still very upset about it when he realizes that he's actually targeting someone he likes, Daniel. Now, you probably know how this story goes. Daniel gets thrown into the lion's den, and it says, may the king you know and serve continuously rescue you.

So Daniel goes into the lion's den, God sends an angel, and the angel holds the lion mouths shut. But the king doesn't eat or sleep all night because he doesn't know that. And so he goes the next morning and he finds Daniel still alive. And then he has all the people that convinced him to make this decree thrown into the lion's den instead. And the lions apparently eat them up before they even hit the ground. What do we take from this account from the book of Daniel? Well, we should be praying, especially when things are against us. We shouldn't be so focused on pleasing our bosses or being popular that we forget to pray.

We shouldn't be so focused on getting further in our jobs that we don't take time to pray. We shouldn't be so different from someone or upset about someone's actions that we refuse to pray for them. Psalm 143 takes on a lot of meaning when you think about the story of Daniel. hear my prayer, O Lord. Give ear to my pleas for mercy. Verse 3. For the enemy has pursued my soul. He has crushed my life to the ground. He has made me sit in darkness like those long dead. Therefore my spirit faints within me. My heart within me is appalled. In verse 11. For your namesake, O Lord, preserve my life. In your righteousness, bring my soul out of trouble. When you pray, will you sit in silence and, ask God, where are you calling me to be faithful to you? In what area of my life do I need to stop chasing the rabbit and turn to you? When Daniel prayed, with the windows open toward the temple in Jerusalem, it was a sign of repentance. See, the nation was in exile because of their disobedience.

So with the windows open toward the temple, Daniel was symbolically turning away from sin and toward God. Will you ask God what you need to turn away from? Will you listen to what he puts in your heart and carry it with you. Remembering when you're tempted that you could always get back on your knees, literally or figuratively, and pray. He's always there to receive you and help you.