Death Defying Wisdom

Even now You have made known to me what we requested of You,

For You have made known the king’s matter.

Daniel 2: 23b

Daniel was in the sort of position that most of us don’t actually need to face, for he had already received a death sentence from the King of Babylon, and he was a man who had the power and the ability to make whatever he wished happen. Daniel was in need of insight and understanding in matters that were far outside of the human realm, and he needed that wisdom in a big hurry. Since he had taken the time to build a relationship with God, and he trusted his God to have any and all of the answers that each life situation required, Daniel has confidence that the outcome of this death or life situation will be a successful one.

All of us are placed into situations where our responses do have the ability to change the course of people’s lives, and some of those situations involve really small events or actions and some of them involve things which are played out on a much larger scale; yet, there are real death defeating opportunities in every one’s life. You may not be a person who goes about seeking this sort of adventure, or it may be the very thing that gets your day started; regardless, it is a part of what living as children of God in this world is all about. Like Daniel, we all need to continually seek God’s wisdom and understanding, and we need to come to a place in our relationships with Him where we can absolutely trust the Lord to provide everything that we require to be victorious.

There is no better starting point than now, and there will not be a greater opportunity to trust God with everything in your life than this one. Talk through what you are facing today, open your heart to God regarding the things that are causing concern or worry, and trust His Spirit to speak truth to your mind. If this sort of interaction with God is a well established part of your life, then continue to go deeper with Him, for no one has even scratched the surface of the depth of God’s wisdom and understanding. If this idea is new, then trust the Lord to be faithful with you as He was with Daniel and He has been with everyone who seeks His face.

 

Thanks

To Thee, O God of my fathers, I give thanks and praise,

For Thou hast given me wisdom and power.

Daniel 2: 23

Everyone has a family history of faith, and it doesn’t matter if your parents and your grandparents knew God in a deep and an intimate way or not, for each person who does know the Lord in this personally redemptive way is the descendant of a long line of people who have likewise been close to God. I am truly thankful to God for the way that He has always been the active seeker of the hearts of people, and I am very blessed by the way that He has worked trough these people to make Himself more accessible and better known to me. God has caused others to write down their story of how they came to know Him, of what the Lord has done in their lives, and of the transformation that His love brought about in them; then, He continually speaks to my mind to provide me with an understanding of these stories that makes them applicable to my life.

God wants to be understood and clearly available to all people; He doesn’t need the type of power that comes from being obscure; so, He makes the process of entering into a relationship with Him very simple. Then, God stays with us through the entire journey of life, and His loving grace continues to make it possible for even a person as flawed and weak as I am to stay closely connected to Him. Thus, I am thankful to God for His love for me, for His desire to be close to me, and for His continued interest in my life story. Additionally, I praise God for the amazing ways that He works in my heart and my mind on a daily basis to bring about an on-going process of growth and of movement toward His will.

It is through this process of recognition of all that God is in our lives that we come to a place where we are made open to the interaction of His Spirit in us, for as I look at the stories of my spiritual fathers that are told in God’s word and as I reflect on the odyssey that is my own life, I am led to see the never ending and unfailing touch of the Lord’s hand at every turn of those roads. Knowing God is to know His power, and truly knowing God’s power places me in a position to humbly allow Him to be my strength throughout the day.

 

Hearts Revealed

It is the Lord who reveals the profound and the hidden things;

He knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with Him.

Daniel 2: 22

There are many things in this life which are too deep to be readily grasped, and other things have the keys to understanding them well hidden. Some of these are the products of the hands of people; while, many of them are matters of human behavior and dwell in the province of the human heart and soul. Unfortunately, it seems to me that I get in the most trouble and have the greatest personal challenges when I am operating in this murky realm of grasping what others think, believe, and feel.

My greatest problem in this area is that I think that I can solve the mysteries of other people’s deepest selves myself; so, I make assumptions and reach conclusions about what is motivating another and about how to respond to that person; then, I formulate a plan and act upon it based on my own understanding and flawed wisdom. All of this has a success rate that is far from spectacular. There is one and only one source of true understanding regarding all things and situations that are deep, complex, and vital, for the Lord is the Creator of the human heart and mind, and He is the keeper of our souls. If we want to know how to respond to another, whether good or bad, or we need to know how to communicate with someone, the starting place for it all is in prayerful conversation with God.

My Lord knows the dark corners and the hidden recesses of my own heart, and He gets how all that is concealed there has a powerful influence on the way that I deal with others. God is also intimately familiar with this same terrain in the hearts and the minds of everyone, and He wants people to connect with each other in love, peace, and with a spirit of reconciliation. So, the Lord will provide each of us who seek after His wisdom and understanding with a clear perspective on how to interact with the people in our lives, and as His truth fills our minds, the Spirit of God makes us into beacons of righteous light.

 

Rulers Established

It is He who changes the times and the epochs: He removes kings and establishes kings;

He gives wisdom to wise men, and knowledge to men of understanding.

Daniel 2: 21

Governments come and go; presidents, premiers, prime ministers, and princes gain power and lose it; and the times that we live in change in ways that seem good for a moment and seem bad for another. This is the nature of our modern world, and this was the nature of the ancient one that Daniel lived in too. All of the institutions that provide structure to our lives exist because God has ordained it; He created a universe that was orderly, and He gives back to us some form of that order to keep the chaos of our sinful natures in check until Christ returns and the original perfection is restored.

Still, if we want to have the wisdom and understanding that we need to make the best possible decisions regarding these rulers and about the way that we will interact with our world, we need to look much deeper than the current news or than our own feelings and impressions of what is right or what is good. The Lord promises us that He will give all wisdom to those who are wise enough to turn to Him for it. He has also given His Spirit to us to explain the great mysteries of life to our hearts and to our minds.

Wisdom comes to people who realize that they don’t know it all, and true understanding is granted to those who accept that fact that they know nothing in and of themselves. God calls on His people to humble our hearts and to open our minds so that we are prepared to be filled with the eternal wisdom of His word. The Spirit of God comes into us in order to show us the righteous way to respond to our world, and the Lord sends us out into life to be sources of light in our darkened age.

 

Daniel’s Prayer

Let the name of God be blessed forever and ever,

For wisdom and power belong to Him.

Daniel 2: 20

We would all like to get up in the morning and be able to anticipate the very best from our day; so that, there would never be bills to pay, broken pipes, legal issues, harsh work situations, conflicts, or loss; yet, not considering those events as not only possible but as likely is naive at best and is probably foolishness. These are the sorts of things that come to all people regardless of state or status in life; however, the way that each of us responds to them tells a great deal about the current state of our relationship with God.

Daniel’s prayerful words of praise for God, although they were expressed in a very stressful moment, seem to be the outpouring of his continual attitude toward God and of his regular recognition of who God is, what He means in Daniel’s life, and of why that matters above everything else. In these few words there is recognition of the fact that the Lord is never absent, is always involved with us, and sees the entire picture of our lives; there is also understanding of the fact that God’s involvement in our lives is always directed toward our own good; thus, we need to keep thoughts of praise for Him on our hearts, in our minds, and on our lips continually. Daniel also recognizes that his source of truth and solid perspective on all that life will bring his way come solely from the Lord, and he expresses his grasp of the fact that there is no where else to go for the strength that he needed to handle it all. 

It is a simple and a too painfully proven fact that on my own I do not handle stressful situations and the people that seem to cause them very well, for I become fearful, thus angry; then, I lash out at others or become defensive; thus, I portray my God poorly, and I deny Him the opportunity to again prove the truth of His total, loving involvement in every aspect of life. The answer to this continual challenge is to take Daniel’s approach literally to heart; I need to prepare for the absolute probability that I will need to deal with hard situations today by staying close to my Lord at all times, by living life in a state of on-going conversation with Him, and by regularly reading the truths of His word and by listening to His Spirit as He speaks those truths to my heart. Lord, let Daniel’s prayer be the song of my heart through every moment of this day.

 

O, Freedom

Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.

Psalms 2: 3

“Freedom, O freedom”, this cry has been raised from the mouths of countless people over the entire continuum of history, for Satan has been oppressing us since the beginning of his reign upon this earth. Our wrists bear the welts from the ropes that have been tied around them, and our hearts are chained to the weight of guilt, regret, and lost opportunity. Too many of our days are filled with the sounds of “if only”, “why not”, and “that’s unfair”.

If you are looking at God and asking Him why He is holding you down and tying you up, then you are not grasping the most basic and fundamental aspect of how the Lord wants to interact with each of us, and you are not even remotely alone in this misunderstanding, either. This is a trap that is common to most people; yet, God provided the answer to all forms of real bondage in the absolute, chain-busting blood of Christ.

There are things that  God has for you to do today that will bring glory to His name, you will encounter people who need to be touched by the love of Christ, and there are challenges that you will face that will require the strength of the Lord to engage well. These are all situations where evil wants to slip its disabling ropes of confinement around your heart; so, in each of these times and throughout this entire day, freedom will be found by claiming God’s promise of total salvation.

 

Against The Grain

Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God that He may exalt you at the proper time.

1 Peter 5: 6

Every day of my life there is more than enough wisdom and way more strength available to me than I ever realize and than I ever utilize. This is particularly true on the days when I am most stretched by trying to just keep up with the stresses and the demands that life has covered me with, and these are the times when I am most likely to go deep into myself to try to find the resources those personal reserves of resources that my ego tells me are always going to get me through.

My mind tells me that I have it all under control, that I always have the answers, and that I am the captain of my own ship’s destiny; yet, my relationship with Christ is slowly teaching me that everything that actually works comes from Him; so, I am placed into a quandary of decision, for in the most demanding and stressful of times in my life, I need to become the most submitted to the love, wisdom, and grace of God. In other words, at the moment that my experience, training, and practice drive me toward independence and personal strength, the Lord asks me to let all of that go and trust Him first, and this is counter to my deeply-held and intuitive response.

Still, the truth is that God’s hand is mighty, His loving heart is huge beyond description, and His desire is for me to prosper in ways that matter at the eternal level. When I take the time to pray my way into and through the hard conversations, interactions, and decisions of my day, the Lord never fails to give me wisdom, understanding, and the peace that I need to proceed. As I let God’s word be my guide book and His Spirit my mentor, things become more clear, and my responses take on a loving attitude that is not naturally mine.

 

Covered By The Spirit

I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.

Joel 3: 28

The Lord does not want us to be in the dark; He desires for all people to understand the world that we live in, the life that we are living, and the future that He is calling us to pursue. Therefore, God communicates clearly, thoroughly, and continually with us; sometimes He does this in ways that are so subtle that His voice can be like the whisper of a hummingbird’s wings, and at other times, He shouts with the roar of a fighter jet in a maximum power take off. God’s point is that He wants us to hear, and He also wants us to be continually watching and listening.

All of the history is interlaced with God’s interaction and involvement with people, and it all leads me to see the Lord’s goodness, love, grace, mercy, compassion, and faithfulness as they are expressed in and through the lives of those people. As I look through God’s word, I am continually reminded that His greatest desire is for me and for everyone to know and to understand Him; so, He reveals Himself to us, and He wants us to share that revelation and the blessed freedom that it brings with others on a regular basis.

As we go through this day, let’s be continually aware of the way that God’s Spirit is covering us like the mist of a soft and refreshing Spring rain, surrounding us like a breeze off the ocean on Summer afternoon, and blanketing our world like that feather light fall of dry, powdery snow on a perfect Winter’s morning. The Spirit goes with us everywhere and in everything that we do so that we can be covered by His protection and love and be filled with His truth and understanding; thus, the Spirit leads us to see God’s view of the future and to know that it is good.

 

To Do

The Lord bless you from Zion, and may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life.

Psalm 128: 5

There seem to be a lot of days when thoughts about all that needs to get done and everything that is still outstanding on my list of important activities gets in the way of actually getting to where I need to be during my day. Additionally, I struggle with keeping that target in view, or maybe, I have a problem with identifying the true target; either way, I can expend a lot of energy and still not be able to lay my head on the pillow that night with a sense of satisfied accomplishment.

Yet there exists a perspective on my life that is clear and that will lead me to expend my energy and to focus the passions of my heart in the right direction, for the Lord views me, my life, and the details of it from His vantage point and with His clarity of vision. Additionally, God is neither distant nor uninvolved; He wants to share His vision for my life with me, and He desires for me to experience the joyous blessings that living each day in the center of His will brings. For God has a mission, a purpose, and a plan for each of the days of my life, and these have very little to do with the lists of important activities that I typically create.

Therefore, I need to set aside my calendar and put down the post-it note pad that I use to write out my lists of important things to accomplish; then, I need to seek God’s face by reading His word and through conversation with Him. As I listen to God speak to me, His clear vision for what matters and for how to get it all done becomes apparent; also, the Lord opens my eyes so that I can see the beauty, the riches, and the glory that He has filled my life with. When God creates the to do list, the burden of accomplishing it is truly light, and the day ends with joyous anticipation of tomorrow.  

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Consider Jesus

Holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the Apostle and High Priest of our confession.

Hebrews 3: 1

The ability to see a picture or to have something demonstrated is often the best way to learn a new skill, to change an old habit, or to understand a different concept. Jesus is our perfect demonstration of what life should look like, and He gave us a complete picture of the way that He lived so that we can more readily grow in our understanding and application of the righteousness that God calls all of His children to follow.

When we need to love an unlovely person, look at Jesus; when we are faced with pain and hurt, look at Jesus; when life seems cruel and unjust, look at Jesus. He shows us how we should respond to oppression in our world and in our own lives, and Christ provides us with the answers to all of our most troubling questions and concerns. Jesus experienced it all, and His Spirit caused all of His experience to be set down for us in His word; then, that same Spirit talks to our hearts to explain how these events that took place 2,000 years ago are even more valuable and pertinent today then ever before.

If you are in Christ, you are in this life with God, and the Lord, God Almighty of the Universe, is in your life with you. He loves you totally; He leads your steps through this day; and He counsels, corrects, praises, strengthens, and supports you in everything. Turn to the Lord with praise and worship throughout every day, for He is the only true High Priest of your life’s journey, and His truth, which is based upon real life experiences, will take you through this day with heart-deep peace and joy.