Increasing My Courage

Grab these message notes. They're on the inside of the bulletins that you got when you came in. And if you didn't get a bulletin with the message notes inside of them, just head to the back and one of the ushers will be able to give you one of these. But these are so that you can follow along with the message a little bit. The message is called "Stands Strong." That is the name of our summer series in the book of Daniel in the Bible. This morning, kind of some behind the scenes info here, this morning I am going to preach one of the toughest parts of the book of Daniel to preach.

You know why? Because what I'm about to explain to you happens to be one of those Bible stories that everybody thinks they got nailed. Daniel chapter 6—because from the time we are little kids, we are taught this on flannel graphs in Sunday school. We think we know all about the story, right? There is nothing anybody could tell us about the story of Daniel and the lions that we don't know. In fact, my own kids must have watched this next scene from a certain video series about roughly a million times. Watch this: "Because you violated section 4 2 1 9 2 r 9 1006 dot 1 - 7 be of the code of Babylon forbidding prayer to anyone but King Darius, you're hereby sentenced to be consumed by the lions. Goodbye." We think we know the story, right? But most of the time, I would say we totally miss the point.

I'll illustrate. Think about it. Shout it out. What do we usually call this story? Daniel in the lion's den? Wrong! That is not the emphasis here. In fact, the narrator in Daniel chapter 6 doesn't give us any description of Daniel's experience in the lion's den. That's not what the story is about. There's not one word. There are 153 verses in Daniel on Daniel's life before the lion's den, and aside from the fact that Daniel tells the king that God had shut the mouths of the lions, there are zero verses describing his time in it. The reason is because Daniel's courage in the lion's den isn't the point. After all, shutting the mouths of lions is God's thing, right?

I mean, once Daniel gets thrown into the lion's den, what is he really gonna do? It is totally a situation out of his control. The point of the story and the reason that the story is in the Bible for you and me to learn from is the way Daniel lived before he got thrown into the lion's den. For 85 years, living in the kingdom of Babylon about 500 years before the time of Jesus Christ, the choices that Daniel made before he gets to the lion's den. Point I want you to check this out: as our story opens, the new Persian rulers have taken over Babylon. And so the Persian Empire has now been added to the Babylonian Empire, and it is gigantic.

With all of this extra real estate basically covering almost the entire known world at the time, they need lots of new governors. They hear great things about this guy Daniel, and so they promote him. Even though he's not Persian, he's not Babylonian, he's Jewish, but they still promote him to be one of the top three governors over the entire Medo-Persian Empire. True story. But when the other guys who got passed over for the promotion hear about it, they are furious. These characters want him out. But verse 4 says they could find no corruption in him because Daniel was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. They're trying to rake some mud. They're trying to get something on Daniel so that they can say scandal, but there is nothing to start a scandal about.

And so they hatch a plot to bring him down. Here is the sheer genius of this plot. I got to give you kind of a Discovery Channel, History Channel moment here for you to understand just how brilliant and kind of nefarious these characters were. The Persians were innovators when it came to government. They were way ahead of their time, and one of their main innovations that really changed the world and is still changing the world to this day is something called the rule of law. Say that phrase with me: the rule of law. Now what's that all about? In those days, 500 years before Christ, most governments were monarchies, right? And in most monarchies in those days, the king's word went. He could kill anybody he wanted to kill. He could reward anybody he chose to. It was like Conan the Barbarian time. It was completely whatever the king wanted to do.

But the Persians looked at that and said, "Hmm, that means if a king is unstable, then the whole country is unstable. We got to find a way around that." And so they started a system where the law ruled. If a law was made and they made it on tablets of clay like this, then even the king was subject to the law. That was a totally groundbreaking idea—a very modern concept. And this is important. It was designed to bring fairness and justice to a society. But then, as now, as soon as a law is passed that somebody meant for good, people are going to twist it to their own ends.

So you got the picture now that for the first time, like ever on planet Earth, a king cannot do whatever he wants to do. When the Council of Elders makes a law, the king is subject to that law. So these guys decide to use it to their own kind of plot-hatching purposes here. They realize Daniel's a friend of the king, and the king would never do anything against Daniel. And so without mentioning Daniel at all, they go to the king and they say, "You know, king, you're brand new here. You're the new Persian ruler. You guys took over Babylon and liberated us from our unjust rulers. And I think we ought to kind of celebrate by passing an honorary law in your honor." And he says, "What are you talking about?"

He says, "Let's do something like the National Day of Prayer to you. In fact, let's make it the Worship the King Month in the Persian Empire. You're new; people need to pledge their allegiance to you. So let's say that anyone who prays to any God or any man during the next 30 days except to you will be thrown into the lion's den." Now based on how the king reacts later, I really don't think that he took this seriously. I think the king understood that people in the privacy of their own homes were gonna keep worshiping their gods and keep having allegiance to whoever they wanted to have allegiance to. I think he understood this is something like symbolic that people in public would kind of go, "Yeah, you know, praise to the king," and then do whatever they wanted to behind closed doors.

I think he thought it would be an honorary law, kind of like saying it's James Durbin year in Santa Cruz, right? That's awesome. It's cool, but the cops aren't gonna pull you over and say, "Are you honoring James Durbin?" You know, and arrest you. It's kind of an honorary thing because everybody is like, "Yeah, go James!" But once this is a law, the king can't change it. Rule of law. And you see, these guys know something the king doesn’t. They know that Daniel prays with his windows wide open facing Jerusalem every day. Daniel is the target of this law. And when lawyers decide they don't like you or when government officials decide they don't like you, they can make life pretty miserable.

And Daniel's next steps in this story, before he ever gets to the lion's den, show me three choices that create courage. Could you use some courage? Are you discouraged? Well, this is what this story is really about—not the lion's den. And this is super important because in my observation as a pastor, a lot of people want a lion's den experience. Maybe not the danger, but they do want to see God do great things in their life, right? Who doesn't want that? They want to see miracles. They want to see God come through for them in big ways, like, "God, show up in my life! Show everybody that you're not just the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament; you're a God of today!"

But if you want that in your life, the point of the story is not, "Be like Daniel in the lion's den." The point of the story is, "Be like Daniel before the lion's den." Before you even get to that point, there are three choices that he makes then before, and you and I can make these choices too every day. They're not easy choices, but these are choices that will revolutionize your life and will give you a rich and fulfilling life and will give you courage. So jot these down. Number one: choose convictions over comfort. Choose convictions over comfort. Now personally, I like comfort, and I think most of the time you can have convictions and comfort. I hope for all of your life you can have both convictions and comfort. But once in a while, there's a fork in the road, and comfort goes down one road and convictions go down the other road, and you realize that to keep my convictions, it's gonna be socially awkward, or I might get passed over for a promotion, or I might actually lose my job if I do what's right, if I say what's right. And when you get to that fork in the road, always choose convictions over comfort.

Daniel did that. I've been getting back to the story. What do you do when you discover that your enemies have passed a law aimed at one person, and you're that person? Daniel 6:10 shows this guy's character. Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem, and he prayed. I want you in your notes to circle that phrase: when Daniel learned that the decree had been published. In other words, Daniel did this knowing that his adversaries would catch him, and he did it anyway. He had a choice. He walked upstairs to his house. Here's the way I kind of picture it: he walks upstairs and he's thinking as he goes home, "Well, I'm still gonna pray to God. The question is, am I gonna close my window? You know, like a coward? Or am I gonna do what I always do?"

Every day, and he goes to his window when it's time for him to pray, and he goes, "You know what? I'm just gonna leave my window open like I always do." The Bible doesn't say that it happened exactly this way, but this is the way I picture it in my mind's eye. He kneels down and he puts his elbows on the bottom of the window frame, and he prays, and he looks down on the street, and he sees these guys, and he sees them go, "Yeah," and they scamper off to tell the police, and he goes, "God help! God help!" Because he did this knowing. He did not do this. He did not act out of ignorance. He acted out of conviction. He did it because it was right. He did it because he loved God. He did it because it was what he always did. He did it against unbelievable pressure.

Now what about you, and what about me? Let me dare to ask you a question. I want you to think about right now in your mind. You don't have to say anything out loud, but what are you sometimes afraid to do because of peer pressure? What are you sometimes afraid to do that you know is the right thing to do because it's socially awkward or costly? Sharing your faith? Responding to God's leading? Telling somebody else, "You know what? I pray. I believe in God." I can't do that because it might cost me this friendship. Let me show you something. I want to show you the story of a modern Daniel. I've shown this to some of you before about three years ago, but this is just amazing.

You know the magician's Penn and Teller? How many of you have ever seen Penn and Teller live or on TV or something like that? Right, they're amazing. Well, Penn, the one who talks, is a staunch atheist. In fact, he makes fun of Christians on his cable TV show and mocks the whole idea of faith. Well, he's a good guy, though, and he has a video blog. And on one of his video blogs, this guy Penn describes his encounter with a guy who comes up after one of his shows, and this guy really had the courage of a Daniel, and he stood up and he shared his faith. Watch this and listen to what Penn says.

"And at the end of the show, as I've mentioned before, we go out and we talk to folks and, you know, sign an occasional autograph and shake hands and so on. And there was one guy waiting over to the side in what I called the hover position. After I was old, a big guy, probably about my age, big guy. And he walked over to me and he said, 'I was here last night at the show, and I saw the show, and I liked it.' He was very complimentary about my use of language and complimentary about, you know, honesty and stuff. Said nice stuff. No reason to go into it. He said nice stuff. And then he said, 'I brought this for you,' and he handed me a Gideon pocket edition. I thought I said from the New Testament, but I also thought it was Psalms in the New Testament, right? Psalms from the New Testament, a little book about this big, this thick. He said, 'I wrote in the front of it, and I wanted you to have this. I'm kind of proselytizing.' I mean, he said, 'I'm a businessman. I'm saying I'm not crazy.' But he looked me right in the eye, did all of this, and it was really wonderful. I believe he knew that I was an atheist, but he was not defensive, and he looked me right in the eyes, and he was truly complimentary. It wasn't in any way. It didn't seem like empty flattery. He was really kind and nice and sane and looked me in the eyes and talked to me and then gave me this Bible. And I've always said, you know, that I don't respect people who don't proselytize. I don't respect that at all. If you believe that there's a heaven and hell and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life or whatever, and you think that, well, it's not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward. And atheists who think that people shouldn't proselytize just leave me alone, keep your religion to yourself. How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? I mean, if I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming at you and you didn't believe it, so that truck was bearing down on you, there's a certain point where I tackle you. And this is more important than that. This guy was a really good guy. He was polite and honest and sane, and he cared enough about me to proselytize and give me a Bible, which had written in it a little note to me, not very personal, but just, you know, like to show and so on, and then like five phone numbers for him and an email address if I wanted to get in touch. Now, I know there's no God, and one polite person living his life right doesn't change that. But I'll tell you, he was a very, very, very good man."

And that's really important, and that is just fascinating, isn't it? There are so many things about that that are interesting to kind of dissect and to talk about, but let me just ask you to respond to me on one issue. What were some of the terms that he used to describe the man that he experienced? He described him as what? He was polite. That's good. What else? He was good. He was nice. What else? He was kind. He was sane. Anything else? He was sincere, honest, complementary. You know what? Every single one of those were words you could use to describe Daniel in the book of Daniel. Daniel was a guy who stood up for his convictions, but if you read the book of Daniel, he stands up for his convictions, but he's never kind of weird about it. He never is disrespectful about it. He has strong convictions, but he's not cranky. He has strong convictions, but he's not contentious, like, "Put up your dukes! Let's argue about this!"

The Bible says that that's the kind of attitude that we're supposed to have as well. And you can see why. Because people then are willing to hear, "Yeah, tell me what you believe. I'd like to hear what you have to say," because you're being respectful, because you're being polite and kind. This isn't in your notes, but you might want to in the margin somewhere jot down 1 Peter 3:15-16. Two of my favorite verses in the Bible say, "But in your heart set apart Christ as Lord. Always be ready to give a reason for the hope that you have to those who ask, but do this with, listen, gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ might be ashamed of their slander." And that's Daniel right here, too. He had those convictions, but he wasn't cranky. He was always unfailingly polite, but he never backed down.

Now what about you? I gotta tell you something: in this story, Daniel is standing up against one of the hardest things for human beings to stand up against. And it isn't lions. You know what it is? Two words: peer pressure. Now before you say, "I don't experience peer pressure," peer pressure exists for all ages. Take one family: the three-year-old insists that his parents buy him the latest fad toy because his friends have it. His nine-year-old sister wears a new shirt to school once and then will never wear it again because her friends made fun of it. The 16-year-old athlete older brother accepts steroids from friends who tell him the whole team's taking them. And their 40-year-old dad just took out a loan that he can't afford to buy a Lexus because all his friends drive luxury cars, and he doesn't want them to think that he can't afford one either. No one is immune from peer pressure. I'm not, and you're not. And get this: sociologists say that studies prove peer pressure is the single biggest influence on human behavior. There is no greater pressure you face than peer pressure.

There have been so many studies done on this. One of the most famous is called the Ash experiment, and it's been duplicated many times, including up at Stanford. Here's the way they do it. They have approximately 10 people sitting around a little conference room, and then a teacher comes in, and he says, "We're just kind of investigating people's perception, depth perception and stuff like that." And he puts a slide up on the wall that looks like this. In fact, this is actually a duplicate of a slide that was actually used in the study. And he says, "See that reference slide there on the left? Now which of the lines on the right, A, B, or C, is closest to the length of the reference line?" And the answer, of course, is what? Right, C. Well, in the experiment, what happens is all of the other people—nine out of the ten—are in on it. And as they go around the room, the professor says, "Just tell me out loud what do you think?" And one person after another says, "Oh, well, obviously it's B." "Oh, it's B?" "Oh yeah, yeah, it's an optical illusion. I've seen this before. Everybody thinks it's C, but it's B." And then by the time it gets to the one person who the experiment is actually being done on—the tenth person—get this: 75% of the time they go, "It's B!" Incredible! They're willing to be obviously wrong because of one thing: peer pressure. The single most powerful force on human behavior, way more powerful than the threat of a den of lions.

So my question is, how in the world do you stand up against the most powerful force in human society? Well, I read a study yesterday that said the only people who successfully resist peer pressure in test after test are people "whose resistance was based on deeply internalized values." So how do you get deeply internalized values? How did Daniel get deeply internalized values so you can stand up for what's right even against this incredible pressure? Well, I'm going to say it in one word, and it's a word you're not going to like. It's a word I don't like. It's a word nobody likes to hear. It's a very unpopular word. And here it is. Ready for it? It's the word discipline. Yes! And a groan went out throughout the land! Exactly! But that's the first word in the next choice that you and I have got to make. Point two: we got to choose discipline over disorder. Discipline over disorder. Every great musician, every great architect, every great soldier or scholar knows that discipline plays a huge role.

Notice what the Bible says: "Discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness." I like these other translations too: "Keep yourself in training for a godly life." "Spend your time and energy in the exercise of keeping spiritually fit." Now a lot of you are going, "I'm just not a disciplined person." Actually, I would say that every single person here is disciplined in some areas. Some of you are very disciplined in your work. You get to work in the morning, you make a to-do list of ten items, and by the end of the day, you have eleven items done. You're very punctual. You're always on time. You never are late with a project. You people drive me crazy, I just have to say that, alright? But almost everybody here is very disciplined in some areas. Some of you are very disciplined in your physical workouts. You never miss one. Some of you are very disciplined in your TV watching. You never miss a favorite show, ever. Very disciplined there. Some of you are very disciplined; you never miss a meal. You are a very disciplined consumer of mass quantities. Some of you are disciplined to read a half an hour before you go to sleep every single night. Every night you got that novel out. My point is you're already disciplined in some area. In fact, you know where you're disciplined? Where you want to be? Because there's another word for discipline. We like this word a little bit better than the word discipline. It's the word habits. What I'm saying is develop holy habits that help you develop those deeply internalized values. And that's exactly what Daniel did.

Back to the story, it says at the last part of Daniel 6:10, "Three times a day Daniel got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to God." And notice the last phrase: "Just as he had done before." I mentioned Daniel's an old man now. He's in his 80s somewhere. And so that means that for his whole life—80 plus years—he's gone down three times a day on his knees, and he's prayed to God. Doesn't say when—maybe breakfast, lunch, and dinner—but each day was the same. It was a routine. I did the math and I asked myself, how many times would Daniel have prayed if he prayed three times a day for 80 plus years? And it comes out to roughly 93,000 prayers. It's no wonder he goes back to his room and he starts praying. An 80-plus-year-old habit is extremely hard to break. For Daniel, prayer was like breathing.

Now some of you might think, "I could never be disciplined in my prayer life like that. Man, my life's crazy. I'm so busy." Remember who this is: Daniel is one of the top three guys in the Medo-Persian Empire. You think he had a plate full of responsibilities? Yeah! And yet he still found time to pray three times every day. And by the way, I think that's why Daniel did it this way—not just like prayer at random, like, "Okay, I'm going to pray morning, noon, and night." Because he knew that with all those responsibilities, prayer would soon be squeezed out if he didn't live by his schedule. But the point is not you got to pray three times a day or four or whatever. The point is that small habits add up—for good or for bad. So pray, read the Bible, get into the habit of serving other people.

Now before I leave this point and move on to number three, I want to address something here. To a lot of people, the mere term discipline carries huge baggage. It sounds so religious. It sounds so legalistic. Or it brings back horrible memories of some sports coach that always yelled at you, "Discipline!" When I was younger and I heard about spiritual disciplines, I always had two responses. It was a two-step response every time. Number one, I'd immediately feel guilty, right? Guilty about not reading the Bible enough, not praying enough, not memorizing, not sharing my faith enough. And then response to the big plan: "For the rest of my life, I'm going to get up at 5 a.m. and have an hour of silence and memorize a chapter a week and serve in Calcutta when I get older." And what happened three weeks into this big plan? Burnout! And I stopped for like a year, and then guilt again, and then back into... Anyone else ever been on that treadmill, that cycle?

So let's talk about what discipline is not. Discipline is not burning yourself out. Discipline is not doing something so that maybe God will like me, and maybe I'm kind of giving God this, and so maybe he's going to bless me. God already likes you. God already loves you 100%. God doesn't love you more if you read the Bible or memorize verses or come to church. God doesn't love you less if you don't do those things. That's not what discipline is about. Here's what spiritual discipline is. Paul says in Romans 12:1-2, "In view of God's mercy, offer your bodies as living sacrifices." Discipline is not done to earn God's mercy; it's done in view of God's mercy. Because God already loves you, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The renewing of your what? Mind! Say it again: the renewing of your mind. It's all about what you put into your mind. If you put joyful things into your mind, you'll be more joyful. If you put godly things into your mind, you'll be more godly. If you put peaceful things into your mind, you're going to be more peaceful. If you put angry news commentators into your mind, you won't be able to get that out, and you'll be angrier. If you put a lot of sexual fantasies and imagery in your mind, you're going to be a lot more lustful. This is not rocket science.

And listen, every day, every minute, you are transforming your mind all the time. Your mind is never static. Your mind is always changing. And the way it is changing is determined by the content that you are pouring into your mind. So discipline is not about, "Oh, I've got to add something to my life that I don't have now." Discipline is just about controlling what you put into your mind. That the person you are changing into is the person you want to change into. You're choosing the kind of input because you're going to get input anyway. And so Daniel prayed three times a day as a habit. This strengthens him. This changes him. This molds him to the point where he has those deeply internalized values. So much so that the peer pressure rolls off of him, and he's so transformed, he's able to make choice number three: choose love even over life. Choose loving God even over life itself.

If it really comes to that fork in the road, you know, I really think that Daniel thought he was going to die. I think he thought he was going to. I don't really think that he—I think he believed God could deliver him from lions, but I think, here I go, this is how I end my life, right? That's what everybody would think. I'm sure he was praying even as they flung him into the cave, even if it wasn't like on his three times a day schedule. He was going, "God help!" And the way I imagine it is he hits the bottom of the pit, and the Bible says in an interesting detail that they roll a stone across the entrance. Boom! And then they put an official seal around the stone so that nobody can tamper with it. So he's down there in the dark, and he hears the footsteps going away, and he hears the sound of the lions breathing. And how lions breathe—that huffing sound. Can you imagine how scared you'd be?

My own daughter Elizabeth, she's nineteen years old, and she was driving to Boulder Creek last week to Camp Hammer, where she works as a counselor with three other, like, eighteen and nineteen-year-old girls. She's driving a little Hyundai. You know, these things are made out of like aluminum. And she's driving up Highway 9, and walking across the road right in front of her is a mountain lion. I know! How many of you have lived here your whole life and have never seen a mountain lion? And she sees one right in front of her, and she says, "Dad, it stopped and looked at us." She says, "It was the most scared I've ever been in my life!" Well, can you imagine being in a pit with lions all night? And by the way, why lions? Why didn't they just, you know, spear him or something? The lions were a huge part of the imagery of power in the Babylonian and Persian culture in Daniel's day. In fact, see this? This is the carving of a lion from King Darius's palace—the king that this Bible story is about. And here's another carving of a lion that Daniel would have seen. This was on the Ishtar Gate in Babylon in Daniel's time.

And the lions in Daniel's lion's den, by the way, probably are a little bit different than you picture. They're not African lions; they were Persian cats. And I don't mean this kind of Persian cat, okay? Because that would not have been a miracle. Well, Daniel survived, but he's having bad allergies, you know? That's no miracle. No, the Persian lion was a subspecies of the African lion that in Daniel's time roamed from the coast of the Mediterranean to India. And I just thought they were extinct. And I just discovered during research for this message this week that they're not quite extinct. They survive in very small numbers in India to this day. But these carvings help me imagine what it must have been like. Daniel sees these lions, and they just stare at him. Maybe they purr a little bit, you know? Like, "Oh yeah, I'm gonna get something to eat." Our cat catches some new rodent, like, you know, every single week. She brings in something—mice and rats—and she catches bats out of the air. And every time she tries to find a way to come into the house, she caught a bat the other day, and it's fluttering in her mouth like this. And she spits it out, and she looked down at this thing and just started purring. And maybe, you know, Daniel was like, "Why are they purring looking at me?" But the seconds tick away; they don't attack. Minutes pass, he starts to relax. And then hours, and the lions do not touch him. Maybe he got to touch them, you know? Maybe he got to pet them, you know, under the neck or something.

This story in the Bible reminds me of something I just read. In case you're going, "That could never happen," last year at the London Zoo, a tiny owl chick gets out of its nest and kind of stumbles and flutters into the lion's den at the London Zoo. There are pictures of it all over the internet on Flickr and stuff. This is not Photoshop; here's one of the pictures. This is a cool fuzzy owl chick. How come these lions resist it? It looks delicious to me, you know? But this chick spent the next three days hanging out with this female lion. And her mate actually stayed between her paws most of the time, even kept opening its beak, demanding food. The zoo staff said they thought the owl was doomed, you know? But for some unknown reason, the lions protected it for three days. And then they ate it. No, just kidding, that's not true. No, they protected it until, you know what happened? It learned to fly and it flapped off again. You know, why do animals, even in the wild, sometimes just choose not to eat something that is normally their prey? Well, you don't know; it's a mystery, right, of the animal kingdom. And somehow something like this happens to Daniel. He tells the king, "King, it was amazing! God shut the mouth of the lions with an angel." I'm sure he was surprised when this happened. Like Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego, Daniel was blessed to believe God could deliver him. But he had the same attitude they had when they said, "But even if God does not deliver us, we want you to know, O king, we won't serve your gods."

Here's the deal: we talked about standing up for convictions. Well, you can't really call them convictions unless you're willing to die for them, right? This is where you distinguish between just personal taste, you know, and little personal convictions and really the big core convictions of your life. Because the core convictions of your life, you'd be willing to die for. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said these words: "If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live." Well, Daniel had discovered something worth dying for. Like Queen Esther, when she said, "Hey, if I perish, I perish. I'm willing to do the right thing and resist to the death if I have to." It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was killed by the Nazis in World War II. He was a German pastor. He said, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." Now, you know, there's no Nazis in this country killing Christians and Jews, and so we're not used to having to really believe this and say it out loud. In fact, I would say in American culture we get soft, and we lose that clear sense of crossing a line.

But I've been with believers in a country where their faith could get them killed by their own families in an honor killing and could get them arrested by the secret police. In fact, Paul Spurlock, our missions pastor, and I sat in a living room with two of these people. One was—they didn't look anything like—they looked totally normal. One was a middle-aged woman; one was a guy who was about 27 years old. And they both had become Christians in a place where they could get killed. In fact, they'd been threatened with death. And I said, "I gotta ask you something: how do you do that, right? Who would do that?" And they both looked at me in the eye and smiled and said, "We live in a place where it's hard to become a Christian, but it's really easy to be one." They said, "Once you cross that line, it's really easy to stay consistent." Kind of like that whole line-crossing thing; it happens all at once. And they said, "You know what?" They said, "We laugh when we hear that American Christians are praying for us." Because they said, the 27-year-old young man said, "I feel like it's easy to be a Christian here because you gotta stand up for something." He said, "We pray for you guys." I said, "Why do you pray for American Christians?" He goes, "Because you live in a place where it's easy to become a Christian but hard to be one." Because of all the peer pressure to compromise, that's a lot of insight.

But look at some of these famous last words of some saints. When the great saint Ignatius was killed for his faith, right before he died, he said, "I bid all men know that of my own free will I die for God unless you should hinder me. Now I am beginning to be a disciple." A Christian named Gabra Michael died for the faith in 1855 and said, "If they kill me, let me die as a witness to my faith. If I live, let me go on proclaiming it." Now some of you are like, "Well, I'll never have to make that choice." You know, you never know. How many of you remember Cassie Bernal? 17 years old, one of the students shot in the mass murder at Columbine, the high school in Colorado a few years ago. One witness said that Cassie was asked by one of the murderers, "Are you a Christian?" And when she looked at him and said, "Yes," he pulled the trigger. Do you have the courage of that 17-year-old girl?

Now how do you resist that kind of peer pressure, right? Peer pressure at the point of a gun? Deeply internalized values. How did she get that kind of courage? Here's a clue. One week before she died for her faith, she wrote this poem as an assignment in English class, and it was a poem about her commitment to Christ. This is a 17-year-old writing this poem. She says, "Now I have given up on everything else. I found that to be the only way to really know Christ and to experience the mighty power that brought him back to life again and to find out what it means to suffer and to die with him. So whatever it takes, I'll be the one who lives in the fresh newness of life of those alive from the dead." Wow!

Now sometimes the call to come and die is literal, but it probably won't be for any of us here in this room. For most of us, it will probably be figurative. You might have to die to a job or even a career or maybe to certain friendships if you choose to really stand up for what you believe. I mean really those core, core convictions in your life. But you have to have an "I don't have to survive" attitude. Just that go-for-broke attitude. We talked about this in week two. You have to be willing to say, "I will give it all up for the sake of loving and staying true to the God who loves me." And his Christians, of course, were inspired not just by those stories but by the example of Jesus Christ himself, who though he had no fault was like Daniel, you know, killed, thrown into a pit, a stone rolled across his pit, a seal put around that stone. But on the third day, he rose back to life, and his courage can give us courage.

So look back at your notes. How does the story end here? The king rushes to the pit the next day, finds Daniel unharmed, and being an ancient king, tosses the conspirators in for good measure. And then the king praises God. I want you to check this out. Look at the themes in what this new Persian king now says—themes that pop up again and again in Daniel as he praises God. He says, "He is the living God, and he endures forever. His kingdom will not be destroyed. His dominion will never end. He rescues and he saves. He performs signs and wonders in the heavens and on the earth." It's the moral at the end of every chapter of Daniel: the overall key to courage, believing God rules. Not kings, not lions, not enemies, not the tastemakers, not the peer pressure, but God rules. And there will come a point in your life where you've really got to find strength in this.

Because this is one force in the world that is stronger even than peer pressure. Some of you—we've got a lot of students here, a whole crowd from Monte Vista. We've got the campus crusaders. Some of you, when you go back to school in the fall, you're going to face a lot of peer pressure. Or you face a lot of peer pressure now with your friends. Or you're under pressure at work to compromise in some way that affects your core values. Today is the day; this is the moment. I want to challenge you to say to God, "I'll be strong; I'm going to stand strong." And I want to pray with you about that. But before we pray, I want to let you know that we're going to do something a little bit different than we normally do this morning. During our response song after the prayer, I'm going to give you a chance to come forward and kneel at these steps here, just in the privacy of your own conversation with God, and ask God to give you the spirit of Daniel. But first, let's pray. Would you bow your heads with me?

Lord, give us courage before we ever get to the lion's den. In fact, we don't pray for a den of lions. I pray that you would deliver any of us from any kind of den of lions danger. But God, we need courage to go there if that does happen. May our stand be clear on the important things so that everybody knows that we belong to you. And God, some people here in this building are facing a lot of pressure in their life right now. Help them to be bold, help them to be brave, help them to have courage. And God, help us as a church to have the Daniel reputation that we don't hide our love for God, but we express it with calm and with confidence and not crankiness and not contentiousness. And we look to Jesus now for strength. Amen.