Please, Please, Please, Read.

"I encourage you to dig into Daniel." (Pastor Shane)

In this past Sunday's sermon, Pastor Shane echoed Pastor Sam's appeal of the previous two Sundays: it is the appeal of the Lord. Read your Bible. Read these passages that My servants faithfully documented. 

Pastor Shane noted that the first six chapters of Daniel give us the story of how Daniel came to Babylon (and what he experienced there). The storyline also takes time to recount the experiences of Daniel's three friends.

The book of Daniel is a snapshot of radical, revolutionary faith in God. Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were not the only four individuals carried off to Babylon in exile. There were other young men, from nobility and from royal families, who found themselves conscripted into the service of a pagan king. But Daniel and his friends chose to remain faithful to the God of Israel, while the other young men bowed their knees to foreign gods.

Why does God keep pointing us to these stories of life in exile? Why does the Lord keep appealing to Bronx Bethany to become absorbed in these narratives, to learn from them, to study them, and to live them out in this twenty-first century? In this year which our leaders have themed Pursuing Holiness, Promoting Healing, why are the lives of Joseph and Daniel (and Esther) continuing to resurface? I will leave you, readers, to answer the questions. But I hope that you are noticing the move of God, and that you are heeding His call to "dig in" to His word.

In a world of quick fixes and lives lived by third-party hearsay, even the act of reading for one's self is a revolutionary move. I pray that we all will heed the call. Have you still not read the book of Daniel? Please read it, even if you have read it before. God desires to speak to each of us through His word. There are keys to appropriating revolutionary faith which the Lord desires to show us. Those keys, though they will be touched upon over the next few days of Glossa Water, are better and more fully discovered as we read our Bibles and seek God's wisdom for ourselves.

Do you desire to hear from your Lord today? Fix your eyes on His word; hear Him speak.

Consider Daniel... consider yourself.