A few weeks back I published a post stating that I was in the process of looking for a new church body to join. Good news, I found one! I'm thrilled to have officially found a new church home and this week's post is actually from last week's sermon.
The Scripture passage is from Daniel chapter 2 where King Nebuchadnezzar has a dream and asks his wise men to not only interpret his dream but tell him what the dream was. See, he suspected that they were just making up answers and so he wanted them to prove that they knew what they were talking about by telling him his dream before they interpreted it. Information, of course, that they had no way of knowing unless they did indeed have supernatural knowledge as they claimed.
Now I've been hearing this story since I was a little kid but the pastor on Sunday pointed out something I had never thought about before.
Daniel 2:14-19 "When Arioch, the commander of the king's guard, had gone out to put to death the wise men of Babylon, Daniel spoke to him with wisdom and tact. He asked the king's officer, 'Why did the king issue such a harsh decree?' Arioch then explained the matter to Daniel. At this, Daniel went in to the king and asked for time, so that he might interpret the dream for him. The Daniel returned to his house and explained the matter to his friends, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. He urged them to plead for mercy from the God of heaven concerning this mystery, so that he and his friends might not be executed with the rest of the wise men of Babylon. During the night the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision. Then Daniel praised the God of heaven..."
Did you catch it?
I didn't at first.
First Daniel spoke to the king and asked for time, second he prayed that God would reveal the dream for him. Think about that for a moment. Daniel is living in a land that he never wanted to go to in the first place, he's a captive, facing death and instead of giving up or panicking he takes a huge step of faith. He believes that God can and will save him from this horrible outcome and he believes it so strongly that he goes straight to the king and asks for time. Then, after that, he starts to pray with his friends that God would reward his faith.
How much faith must that have taken? More then I have quite possibly!
And yet isn't that the faith we're called to have? That instead of saying "Oh, I can't possibly make this decision without praying about it first" we're already praying about everything so when the time comes we can step out on faith and ask God to honor that step.
Now please don't misunderstand me here. When we have the opportunity to take some time and pray about important issues it's a very important step. However we shouldn't respond out of fear and call it faith. Nor should we ignore prayer right up until the moment we have to make a decision. We should, like Daniel, be praying about everything so that when we need to take a step of faith, we're prepared to and we trust God with the outcome.
So here's my challenge, take some time to practice praying all the time so that when you;re called to take immediate action, you're ready to do just that.
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