Daniel 6:1-23
1 Darius the Mede decided to divide the kingdom into 120 provinces, and he appointed a high officer to rule over each province. 2 The king also chose Daniel and two others as administrators to supervise the high officers and protect the king’s interests. 3 Daniel soon proved himself more capable than all the other administrators and high officers. Because of Daniel’s great ability, the king made plans to place him over the entire empire.
4 Then the other administrators and high officers began searching for some fault in the way Daniel was handling government affairs, but they couldn’t find anything to criticize or condemn. He was faithful, always responsible, and completely trustworthy. 5 So they concluded, “Our only chance of finding grounds for accusing Daniel will be in connection with the rules of his religion.”
6 So the administrators and high officers went to the king and said, “Long live King Darius! 7 We are all in agreement—we administrators, officials, high officers, advisers, and governors—that the king should make a law that will be strictly enforced. Give orders that for the next thirty days any person who prays to anyone, divine or human—except to you, Your Majesty—will be thrown into the den of lions. 8 And now, Your Majesty, issue and sign this law so it cannot be changed, an official law of the Medes and Persians that cannot be revoked.” 9 So King Darius signed the law.
10 But when Daniel learned that the law had been signed, he went home and knelt down as usual in his upstairs room, with its windows open toward Jerusalem. He prayed three times a day, just as he had always done, giving thanks to his God. 11 Then the officials went together to Daniel’s house and found him praying and asking for God’s help. 12 So they went straight to the king and reminded him about his law. “Did you not sign a law that for the next thirty days any person who prays to anyone, divine or human—except to you, Your Majesty—will be thrown into the den of lions?”
“Yes,” the king replied, “that decision stands; it is an official law of the Medes and Persians that cannot be revoked.”
13 Then they told the king, “That man Daniel, one of the captives from Judah, is ignoring you and your law. He still prays to his God three times a day.”
14 Hearing this, the king was deeply troubled, and he tried to think of a way to save Daniel. He spent the rest of the day looking for a way to get Daniel out of this predicament.
15 In the evening the men went together to the king and said, “Your Majesty, you know that according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, no law that the king signs can be changed.”
16 So at last the king gave orders for Daniel to be arrested and thrown into the den of lions. The king said to him, “May your God, whom you serve so faithfully, rescue you.”
17 A stone was brought and placed over the mouth of the den. The king sealed the stone with his own royal seal and the seals of his nobles, so that no one could rescue Daniel. 18 Then the king returned to his palace and spent the night fasting. He refused his usual entertainment and couldn’t sleep at all that night.
19 Very early the next morning, the king got up and hurried out to the lions’ den. 20 When he got there, he called out in anguish, “Daniel, servant of the living God! Was your God, whom you serve so faithfully, able to rescue you from the lions?”
21 Daniel answered, “Long live the king! 22 My God sent his angel to shut the lions’ mouths so that they would not hurt me, for I have been found innocent in his sight. And I have not wronged you, Your Majesty.”
23 The king was overjoyed and ordered that Daniel be lifted from the den. Not a scratch was found on him, for he had trusted in his God.

How did Daniel get to this point?
King Jehoiakim was conquered by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.

Daniel 1:1-6
1 During the third year of King Jehoiakim’s reign in Judah, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. 2 The Lord gave him victory over King Jehoiakim of Judah and permitted him to take some of the sacred objects from the Temple of God. So Nebuchadnezzar took them back to the land of Babylonia and placed them in the treasure-house of his god.
3 Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, his chief of staff, to bring to the palace some of the young men of Judah’s royal family and other noble families, who had been brought to Babylon as captives. 4 “Select only strong, healthy, and good-looking young men,” he said. “Make sure they are well versed in every branch of learning, are gifted with knowledge and good judgment, and are suited to serve in the royal palace. Train these young men in the language and literature of Babylon.” 5 The king assigned them a daily ration of food and wine from his own kitchens. They were to be trained for three years, and then they would enter the royal service.
6 Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were four of the young men chosen, all from the tribe of Judah. 7 The chief of staff renamed them with these Babylonian names:
Daniel was called Belteshazzar.
Hananiah was called Shadrach.
Mishael was called Meshach.
Azariah was called Abednego.
18 When the training period ordered by the king was completed, the chief of staff brought all the young men to King Nebuchadnezzar. 19 The king talked with them, and no one impressed him as much as Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. So they entered the royal service. 20 Whenever the king consulted them in any matter requiring wisdom and balanced judgment, he found them ten times more capable than any of the magicians and enchanters in his entire kingdom.

Ok, what can we learn here about bravery from Daniel and his story?

1. Compromise kills courage
The Bible does not give a history of Daniel before Babylon, but we do know some things about Israel as a whole leading up to the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC.
In 975 BC, Israel split into two kingdoms.
-Northern Kingdom Israel was led by Jereboam
- Southern Kingdom Judah was led by Rehoboam.
- These were Solomon’s sons, David’s grandsons.
- Solomon served with a divided heart, so he left a divided kingdom.
Northern Kingdom Israel had 19 kings, all who forsook the Lord and worshipped idols.
- In 722 they fell to the Assyrians
Southern Kingdom Judah had 20 kings, 12 bad, 8 good.
- The fell to the Babylonians in 587 BC.

This was the fulfillment of many warnings from the prophets of Israel’s coming disaster because of the nation’s sins against God.
- Israel had forsaken the law and ignored God’s covenant (Is 24:1-6).
- They had ignored the Sabbath day and the sabbatic year (Jer 34:12-22).
- The seventy years of the captivity were, in effect, God claiming the Sabbath, which Israel had violated, in order to give the land rest.
- Israel had also gone into idolatry (1 Ki 11:5; 12:28; 16:31; 18:19; 2 Ki 21:3-5; 2 Ch 28:2-3), and they had been solemnly warned of God’s coming judgment upon them because of their idolatry (Jer 7:24— 8:3; 44:20-23).
- Because of their sin, the people of Israel, who had given themselves to idolatry, were carried off captive to Babylon, a center of idolatry and one of the most wicked cities in the ancient world.
- It is significant that after the Babylonian captivity, idolatry never again became a major temptation to Israel.

Now that you’ve had your history lesson, what is the point?
Daniel 6:10
But when Daniel learned that the law had been signed, he went home and knelt down as usual in his upstairs room, with its windows open toward Jerusalem. He prayed three times a day, just as he had always done, giving thanks to his God.

No matter what was going on around Daniel, he refused to compromise.
He didn’t join the nation around him as they worshipped idols. He didn’t ignore God’s law for his own comfort. He didn’t engage in actions that would compromise his integrity.

As Isaiah said, “They were a ‘sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the Lord.”

Are you willing to be faithful when everyone around you refuses to?
Are you willing to choose righteousness over comfort?
Are you willing to embrace purity over fleshly satisfaction?
Are you willing to stay faithful even if it is illegal?

What compromises are you making right now?
Compromises might come in the form of blatant sin. You know what to do but you refuse to do it.
Compromises might come in the form of persuasion. You know what to do but you are trying to convince yourself compromise is ok.
Compromises might come in the form of justice. You know what to do, but because you were previously taken advantage of, you choose to do what you want instead.
Compromises might come in the form of ignorance. You don’t know what to do but you’d rather not know because ignorance is bliss.

Integrity is living life in such a way where your words and actions are consistent with your beliefs. Godly integrity is when those beliefs are congruent with the Bible.

Hypocrisy is living life in such a way where your words and actions are not consistent with your beliefs.

Compromise lives in the space between integrity and hypocrisy.

Compromise kills courage. Why?
Because when you are living in compromise, you are undercutting the very foundation upon which you are building your life, and that undercutting creates instability that destroys your ability to stand for what is right.

This is why when you live in compromise you live in fear. Your unstable foundation is at the mercy of the weather around you.

Matthew 7:27
And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

The wind is going to blow. The rain is going to fall. The house will be beaten. Your foundation is what makes the difference. But if you are living in compromise, you live in fear of the wind and rain and storm.

Revisit Daniel 1
17 God gave these four young men an unusual aptitude for understanding every aspect of literature and wisdom. And God gave Daniel the special ability to interpret the meanings of visions and dreams.
19 … no one impressed him as much as Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. So they entered the royal service. 20 Whenever the king consulted them in any matter requiring wisdom and balanced judgment, he found them ten times more capable than any of the magicians and enchanters in his entire kingdom.

God gave them incredible aptitude, the ability to interpret dreams.
They were wise and balanced. They were faithful before Nebuchadnezzar ever came. They were faithful when everyone else around them were faithless. They didn’t compromise! And they were still conquered, taken captive, and led away.

Where is the encouragement in that?

Courage isn’t contingent upon your climate.
It is contingent on your consistency. It is contingent on your refusal to compromise.

Faithfulness feeds faith and faith is the assurance of that which you cannot see.

If you are feeling faithless and fearful, have you been compromising?

2. Impulsive decisions create fearful results
By the time we get to Daniel 6, we’ve seen:
- Judah captured by Babylon
- Daniel having a standoff over unclean food rations
- Daniel interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the golden statue
- Shadrach. Meshach, and Abednego being thrown into a fiery furnace for refusing to bow to the statue
- Also with Jesus making an appearance in the furnace with them
- Daniel interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a tree
- Which was followed by Nebuchadnezzar wandering in a field eating grass like a cow for 7 years
- Nebuchadnezzar giving glory and honor to the one true God
- Belshazzar becomes king and while partying with the utensils from the Temple, writing appears on the wall, signifying his demise. (He died that very night)
- Darius the Mede takes the throne, Daniel finding favor with him.

Darius made some good decisions. He created 120 provinces and appointed rulers over each one. He set three administrators to supervise everything, Daniel being one of them.

But he made some really bad decisions, too. He was talked into creating an irrevocable law by some jealous people. That law was for the next 30 days, only Darius could be worshipped.

First, that is ridiculous and and fed squarely into Darius’ own insecurity and selfish flesh. He made an impulsive decision because it felt good in that moment and made himself the center of attention. I know none of us have ever made a decision like that. We never impulsively decide to do something with our own selfish wants center stage. We never act in a way that makes us god and our desires requirements for satisfaction. Darius did.

But second, it created a series of events that would cause Darius extreme anxiety and fear. Look at your life and analyze your anxiety and fear. Are any of those anxieties and fears born out of impulsive decisions? Frivolous spending, poor health choices, angry outbursts…

So what happened?
The jealous leaders know Daniel was faithful and refused to compromise, so they waited for him to go home and pray so they could catch him.

Please notice that while Darius was making impulsive decisions, Daniel wasn’t.
- At no point in the first six chapters of Daniel do we see him wig out.
- At no point did he get angry or afraid.
- At no point did he scream into the heavens demanding to know what God was doing.

After all, what right does he have to do that? Because his expectations weren’t met? He didn’t go nuts when Israel was conquered, when his food rations were forced upon him, when he was conscripted into the service of a foreign, pagan king, when a law was signed that would certainly see him arrested, and not even when he was led into the lion’s den.

Darius made two impulsive decisions and he was inconsolable all night.
Daniel 6:14-18
14 Hearing this, the king was deeply troubled, and he tried to think of a way to save Daniel. He spent the rest of the day looking for a way to get Daniel out of this predicament. 15 In the evening the men went together to the king and said, “Your Majesty, you know that according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, no law that the king signs can be changed.” 16 So at last the king gave orders for Daniel to be arrested and thrown into the den of lions. The king said to him, “May your God, whom you serve so faithfully, rescue you.” 17 A stone was brought and placed over the mouth of the den. The king sealed the stone with his own royal seal and the seals of his nobles, so that no one could rescue Daniel. 18 Then the king returned to his palace and spent the night fasting. He refused his usual entertainment and couldn’t sleep at all that night.

Daniel made two prudent decisions and he was filled with peace. He refused to compromise and he chose to trust God.

We have to be very careful that we don’t blame bad results on God’s inaction.
God does not make impulsive decisions. He has had a plan from the start. When Eve bit the apple, God wasn’t pacing Heaven trying to figure out what to do. Jesus was slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8) Jesus’ sacrifice was Plan A not Plan B.

Jesus didn’t make impulsive decisions. Even in the Garden where he was troubled even unto death, he still refused to compromise and remained faithful.

If you want to have the courage that Daniel had as you face the battles before you, it will require you to refuse to compromise in your life, and to refuse to make impulsive decisions. Satan uses compromise and impulsivity to feed fear in your heart, robbing you of the courage you need to face what is before you.

Where are you compromising? Where are you acting impulsively?
If your boat was leaking, you’d look for the leak. If your courage is leaking, look for compromise and impulsive decision making.

Lastly, I want to share a side of Daniel that I find the most intriguing, which is also the hardest part for me, personally, to master.

3. Daniel resisted the trap of control
Control will ruin everything. And what is nuts is that not only are we born in America with an innate sense of independence and control, we are born into a sin nature that is made to revolt against the sovereignty of God.

Matthew 16:25-26
25 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?

We’ve heard this before and we know what happens when we try to control what is going on around us, yet for some crazy reason, we are willing to cling to our lives, gaining the world, yet losing the one thing that is most important

Look at Daniel’s losses
- He lost his home, his family, his nation.
- He was conquered, taken into captivity, and conscripted.
- He was elevated to a role where he had to tell these pagan kings that they would die or be conquered or be ousted from their throne.
- He was conspired against and hated and ultimately thrown into a den of lions.

Yet never a reaction was recorded. No screaming fits. No angry words towards God. We see every word from Job and his friends, but in the midst of all the loss Daniel experienced, all we see is calm commitment.

Daniel 6:10
But when Daniel learned that the law had been signed, he went home and knelt down as usual in his upstairs room, with its windows open toward Jerusalem. He prayed three times a day, just as he had always done, giving thanks to his God.

He even thanked God.

It is almost as if Daniel didn’t care about his own life. Seems Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego felt the same way.

Daniel 3:19-23
19 Nebuchadnezzar was so furious with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that his face became distorted with rage. He commanded that the furnace be heated seven times hotter than usual. 20 Then he ordered some of the strongest men of his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and throw them into the blazing furnace. 21 So they tied them up and threw them into the furnace, fully dressed in their pants, turbans, robes, and other garments. 22 And because the king, in his anger, had demanded such a hot fire in the furnace, the flames killed the soldiers as they threw the three men in. 23 So Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, securely tied, fell into the roaring flames.

In verse 26, rage monster Nebuchadnezzar, now praising “the most High God,” called them out of the fire, yet the Bible records no rage from the boys.

This week I have been really convicted of my own arrogance in how I attempt to control my own life and in how I demand God to answer me when my control doesn’t go according to plan.

Daniel was so brave that he endured loss after loss, and even a lion’s den with what seems to be zero concern about his life. Yet we so quickly lose control when just one thing doesn’t go our way. My way.

I am convinced that the level of courage in my heart is directly tied to how much control I exercise over my situations.

I was looking at the water soaked pad this week.
- We have to be in there in October
- Rain has to stop
- Finances need to come in
- We have the building coming and concrete to pour
- Delays and weather and finances and we gotta move!

What nerve. I am acting as if God doesn’t have the timeline worked out.
Am I really so controlling that I’ve stopped being grateful?

This week I had to come to terms with the fact that, in all of our Christian talk and best intentions, we don’t really trust that God is in control. For me, that can be the only answer as to why I try to control things.

I have more and more found myself wishing that I didn’t have the freedom to choose. I sometimes wish I was just in a situation where I was forced to trust God. Where I was made to choose his plan.

I look at Daniel in his captivity and it dawns on me that he was a captive, a slave or the king, not a constituent free to do whatever he wanted.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, too, and it makes Paul’s words make more sense to me in Romans 6:15-16, 18-19
15 Well then, since God’s grace has set us free from the law, does that mean we can go on sinning? Of course not! 16 Don’t you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey? You can be a slave to sin, which leads to death, or you can choose to obey God, which leads to righteous living.18 Now you are free from your slavery to sin, and you have become slaves to righteous living. 19 Because of the weakness of your human nature, I am using the illustration of slavery to help you understand all this. Previously, you let yourselves be slaves to impurity and lawlessness, which led ever deeper into sin. Now you must give yourselves to be slaves to righteous living so that you will become holy.

I realize the idea of slavery is rough, but Daniel was more than a slave to a pagan king. Daniel had chosen to become a slave of God in that he refused to fall victim to the trap of thinking that you have any control over the world around you.

You cannot control the political world.
You cannot control life and death.
You cannot control the economy or your current employment.
You cannot control how people treat you or what they say about you.
You cannot control outcomes.

But you can control whether or not you have time with Jesus.
You can control whether or not you obey God and his Word.
You can control how you respond to the world around you.
You can control your refusal to compromise and make impulsive decisions.

Are you willing to relinquish control and allow God to run the show?
Relinquishing control doesn’t mean letting go and doing nothing. It means letting go through obeying God and trusting him alone. It means refusing to try to manipulate outcomes and gratify your flesh. It means completely embracing his teaching, his Word, his guidance, and his will.

Do you trust God enough to do that?

Daniel did and he was brave enough to face captivity, betrayal, and a death sentence.

The courage to face the worst lies on the other side of the courage to relinquish control.

You want to be brave like the founding fathers, like Abraham, like David, like Daniel. Awesome.
- It’s gonna take realizing that the enemy will attack, but God has empowered you to win.
- It’s gonna take covenant with God, an active relationship with Jesus, and faith.
- It’s understanding that there will always be doubt around you, that what you have faced is there to prepare you for what you will face, and that when you focus on God’s faithfulness, your faith grows.

But to be brave, it also takes your refusal to compromise, your commitment to making prudent decisions, and trusting God enough to relinquish control.

God has not given us a spirit of fear, but he has given us opportunities to grow our courage.

Have you compromise and made bad decisions that have created fear in you?

Are you willing to let go and let God?

Let’s pray.

What is the Holy Spirit saying to you through this message?

How does he want you to respond?