Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - You Are An Influencer | The Writings | Daniel 1

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

News flash: you're an influencer living as an exile in a foreign land. This might sound weird. How do you influence others with your faith? In today's episode, Tanya kicks off the story of Daniel in Daniel 1. 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 1

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 Daniel Wilmuth. Imagine you're a teenager and you're living in a place where your faith is shared by most of the people you know, where it's culturally acceptable, even expected to worship God. This is what it was like for Daniel and his friends when they were taken out of their land and into exile by the Babylonians. Daniel had grown up with other people who worship God. He grew up going to the temple to worship. But the Book of Daniel is about him living in Babylon, a place where his faith wasn't shared,

a place where he believed something completely different from what the culture believed. But it's not a story about him hunkering down and just trying to survive while he was there. The book of Daniel is a story of influence. What about you? Are you hunkering down and trying to survive? Or are you influencing others by your faith? Maybe we don't think about this much because we haven't been taken captive and moved to a foreign land against our will. But we do go to college and we go to work.

We go to play in our sports teams. We go to parties. We go to the store. Let's take a self-test. Are you living in exile? Here's a question. How comfortable are you sharing your faith when you go out and about to the store, to school, to work, to a party?

See, we don't live in a world where we go to these things, where we go to school and sports events and business meetings and talk about our faith, or pray together before they begin. I mean, if we're lucky, we might have a pocket where this is okay, where this is acceptable, but it probably is more of the exception than the norm. It's no surprise then that we're living in exile. That's what the Bible is talking about when it says we are foreigners and aliens. That this world is not our home.

We're waiting for a better home, a heavenly one. But when we forget we're living in exile, we're surprised when we're not in the positions of power, when we're not respected, when we're not treated well all the time. Instead, we should think, how are we influencers in the places where we live? How is the upside-down way of viewing life, being last, putting others' needs before me, serving people. How are those things ways to influence people in the places where we learn and where we work? This is exactly what the book of Daniel has to teach us, how not to be surprised and defensive and bitter and silent and afraid, but how to live for God, knowing that he has the end of

the story in mind. So how are we living as influencers in a foreign world? The goal for the king of Babylon was to take the best people, bring them into Babylon, and retrain them, show them a different way to eat and think and live than their old ways. the ways that they were using to follow Yahweh. The goal of the Babylonians was to transform Daniel and his friends into their culture. They wanted them to eat their food and go to their school and enter into their king's service. But Daniel made a resolve not to go against the Hebrew food laws and not to drink the wine. And he said, please give me 10 days and then compare my appearance with the others.

If I don't look as good, then we can talk more. but I think you'll be surprised. And God was with Daniel and his resolve. Daniel 1, verses 18 to 21. It says at the end of the time set by the king to bring them into his service, the chief official presented them to Nebuchadnezzar. The king talked with them and he found none equal to Daniel and his friends. So they entered into the king's service.

Now Daniel's an example of how not to only live faithfully, but how to influence a world that wanted him to assimilate. He went all the way to being third in power. How does someone who doesn't assimilate with the culture gain that kind of influence? How do you gain influence? First, you have to look at the world through eyes of faith. Daniel was where he was. He was in exile, in Babylon, because the Lord put him there.

This is what it says about the exile in Daniel 1. It says in the third year of the reign of Yehoicum, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord delivered Yehoiqam king of Judah into his hand, along with some of the articles from the temple of God. So it was God who put Daniel in Babylon. If you face some kind of opposition or difficulty, it's because that's where God has put you.

Christians have always been in difficult circumstances. God has put you where you are to have influence, to be a light to the people around you. When you look through the eyes of faith, you see your purpose to be the light of God to the people that he's placed around you. Second, you have to understand what Jesus said about being in the world, but not of it. From John 17, verses 11 and 14 and 15, Jesus prayed for his disciples and for us. He said to his father, I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world.

And I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you. gave me, so they may be one, as we are one. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one. Jesus wasn't praying for us to live in a holy bubble, but he was praying for our protection from the evil one while we remain out in the world. Christians have always been prone to separate themselves from the world, but when we separate from the world, what we do is come across as very judgmental people. You're making choices I don't like, so I'm going to step over here and look down on you. People who aren't Christians aren't drawn to a

faith when they see us acting like that. They think we lack love and compassion. Yet those are the things that are supposed to identify us as children of God. When we are completely separate, we lose our ability to influence. On the other hand, we also don't want to assimilate when we do that, we leave what we know to be true behind. We ignore what the spirit puts in our hearts and minds because we want to fit in or we want to make people happy. When we do this, we lose our influence because we don't look very much like our Heavenly Father at all. So how do we do it? How do we influence a world while we're in exile? Well, that brings us to our last point. Three, you have to want the best for the place where you are, for your city. Wherever it is that God has your,

you have to want the best for those who live where you are. Jeremiah 297 says, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. We should be involved and engaged in doing the best for the city where we live,

not because we want praise or blessing, but because it's biblical. For you, that might mean running a business that pays people fairly, serving the teachers at your local school, tutoring kids so they know how to read, doing whatever it is that God gave you to make your city prosper. Mother Teresa did this. See, she didn't want people in Kakuta to die on the streets alone,

so she made it her life's work to make sure people had someone with them when they died. She would walk through the streets and find people who were dying and take them to a place where they can be cared for until the end. She honestly wasn't even trying to heal them, just be with them. She got people to donate empty warehouse spaces to house the dying, and then others started working with her to bring the dying to those warehouses to be comforted in their last hours. Historically, Christians have been doing things like this to shelter and feed and take care of people who are vulnerable.

When you realize you're living in exile, you build bridges instead of burning them. This is how you influence a culture that's not a human. not your home. You build bridges. Bridges of kindness. Bridges of love. Who needs to be impacted by your loving kindness? Our love for others, it doesn't even start with us. It starts with what Christ did for us. Because he loved us when we were completely unlovable. We want to share his love with others. We want people to know our God, our Jesus, our Savior. That is the gospel we want to share with others.