All right, thank you guys We do a lot of praying in our service. They're probably more than most Churches that you can attend. We spend more time prayer. I take longer during the time of pastoral prayer I know than then it's customary most churches We feel like prayer ought to be a part of worship service, but I know it's hard to stay with us sometimes I know it's it's sometimes hard to focus that longer in prayer prayer Prayer is not a polite recitation of a bunch of religious sounding phrases Prayer is not a ritual or a routine something that we're just supposed to do so we go through those motions Prayer if you properly understand it prayer is an open-honest intimate sometimes even a raw outpouring of our hearts before our Heavenly Father if you When you pray if you don't say things to God that you would never say to another human being You're not being honest enough If you aren't willing to say things to the Lord that you would never want to express in front of anyone else I challenge you that you're not being honest enough. You're I think you're probably being too spiritual And not real enough prayers to cry the soul Prayer is a cry of our hearts somebody said well I couldn't be that blunt and talking to God to tell him what I really think in the words I really do you think he doesn't know Do you think we're fooling him? Do you think he's going to be shocked? I had no idea you felt that way I mean he already knows so let's get real with us be honest with him We're in Daniel chapter 9 this morning And I've told you before that the first six chapters of Daniel are stories about Daniel and his friends the last six chapters 7-12 are visions of Daniel Here in verse 9 there's a there's a little bit of parenthesis and this is a prayer of Daniels This is a cry of Daniel's soul before we look at it. Let's go before I got in prayer
Father, I'm very honest with Our people your people this morning You know That when I go before you in prayer, I speak with you in ways I would never say in front of me when else Not to be disrespectful or ever but simply to be honest to be real I think you're big enough to take it Father now in this time where we come before you is your people in prayer and as we look into the word of God My prayer is that you would help us to get real and that you would reveal yourself to us now as we pray and as we study your word And I ask this in the name of Jesus who is himself the living word. I'm in Well, and by the way, this will be part one of a two-part message You've got verses one through 19 and your bulls will get to verse 11 this morning As I studied the text and some of the commentaries that I read talked about that this is a model prayer Daniels prayer to model prayer for hours Well, it is it's a good model, but Daniel didn't pray it to be a model Daniel simply poured out his heart Chapter 9 you know the book of Daniel goes back and forth chronologically a bit Chapter 9 takes place in the year 539 BC. We can take that explicitly because he says in verse 1 in the first year of Darius son of Xerxes a Mead by descent who has made ruler over the Babylonian kingdom in the first year of his reign I Daniel understood from the scriptures according to the word of the Lord given to Jeremiah the prophet that the Desolation of Jerusalem would last 70 years So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petitioned in fasting and His sackcloth and ashes Let's stop there for a moment Great changes had taken place in Babylon in the year 539 BC Babylon the great kingdom Had fallen and the kingdom of a Persia had risen up Darius the Mead was ruler over Babylon and Daniel who's now an old man probably about 80 or so Daniel had lived most of his life in Babylon. I meant he had met most of his life in captivity He'd been taken from his His place of birth in Jerusalem. He'd been taken from there as a young man carried off to Babylon where he had been Raised up and trained in the ways of the Babylonian he had been in service to the king of Babylon now for most of his life And now he wants to go home He wants to go back to Jerusalem. I don't know what you do when your lives are chaotic or your point of great up Heavall you know I've turned upside down inside. I don't know what you do What Daniel did was he went to the word of God? He went to specifically the book of the prophet Jeremiah and since she's here in the word in year 539 BC The Daniel already realized that his predecessor Jeremiah who had lived about a hundred years earlier than It'd been born about a hundred years earlier than Daniel had minister decades before Daniel You know Daniel he was recognizing Jeremiah's writings would he would have had in a scroll or scrolls? He recognizes this as the word of God the Bible itself authenticates itself at various places when later writers refer to earlier writers And their writings ask scripture so turn us the book of Jeremiah and He reads in part What we have is Jeremiah 25 8 through 11 remember the biblical writers did not write in chapters and verses that we do for our Communities and Jeremiah 25 verses 8 through 11 Jeremiah had written Therefore the Lord Almighty says this Because you have not listened to my words. I will summon all the peoples of the North and my servant Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon to clear the Lord and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants and against all the surrounding nations I will completely destroy them and make them an object of horror and scorn and an everlasting ruin I will banish from them the sounds of joy and gladness the voices of Brian and Brian The sound of millstones and the light of the lamp this whole country will be a desolate wasteland and these nations will serve the king of Babylon 70 years Jeremiah prophesied that years before that because of the unfaithfulness of God's own people The nation of Israel the Jews because of their faithlessness and their sin God It said I'm going to raise up a pagan Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon I'm going to bring him down from the North and crush Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah as it already happened 150 or more years before a little over a hundred years before with the Southern kingdom or the northern kingdom of Assyria They come down and taken the kingdom of Israel and captivity now King of Babylon Nebuchadnezzar is going to come and do the same for the people of Judah and he had done that And the Jeremiah goes on I know I skipped around you guys see if you can find this passage more Jeremiah 29 verses 10 through 14 This is what the Lord says I Know I feel a little bit of change up can you find Jeremiah 29 put it up on the screen for me Jeremiah 29 beginning of verse 10 This is what the Lord says when 70 years are completed for Babylon. I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to you to bring you back to this place For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord plans to prosper you and not to harm you plans to give you hope in the future Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will listen to you You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart I Will be found by you declares the Lord and bring you back from captivity I will gather you from all the nations and places where I banished you Declares the Lord and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile 70 years Jeremiah had said and remember you have to remember this So as you particularly the prophecy the Bible does not use numbers the way you and I use numbers They mean it's wrong It means it was a product of its writers and it's time And they simply don't use numbers the way a modern Westerner would use them if you want it to be that way You're going to be very frustrated and understand the Bible But Jeremiah has said 70 years You'll be an ex on M captivity to the kingdom of Babylon. I Won't boy with all the math here when Daniel read those words. It had been about 67 years They've been in captivity In Babylon about 67 years from the time they have been carried off by the Babylonians and so Daniel Knowing that the Prophet Jeremiah spoke truth Know that he was a prophet of God and whatever God said through his prophets must come true Daniel says Lord The clock's ticking Well, he would have said sundial, but you get the idea Lord Times got to be drawing nine. I'm an old man. I don't want to go home I want to go back and see Jerusalem before I die It was the cry of his heart Jeremiah had told him it was going to be about 70 years That's a Daniel one knowing that time must be drawing nice as Lord. Please let me see Jerusalem Before I die. I don't know other than second hand, but I think probably a lot of our Cuban refugee and immigrant friends. I think they feel the same way about Going back and seeing Havana seeing it free before they die and my heart beats with them I don't understand first hand what they go through, but I know their stories And I hope and I pray that they will get to see a free Havana before the end of their days It's worth noting here too folks. Please take note of this Daniel is not a priest Daniel is not a Levite Daniel's a civil servant Daniel's an advisor an administrator pretty high up He's an advisor to the king There are people who believe that People I mean, you know those who are professionally religious But our prayers have an inside track to God that what I pray gets to God more directly and more immediately in your prayers Do believe me if my prayers had an inside track? This would be a different place. I'd be a different pastor and you'd be a different congregation Not much of course, but just a little Daniel's just one of us. He's not a priest. He's not a Levite and yet his prayers are Effective before God don't ever think that because you're not filling the blank You're not a pastor. You're not a missionary. You're not a Sunday school teacher Whatever but somehow your prayers are disadvantaged not at all It's part of the Reformation Teaching that the priesthood of all believers Every Christian stands on level ground at the foot of the cross and your prayers are just as effective as mine Some of you suspect probably a good deal more so now as I said you're I don't know how your prayers sound I'm pretty sometimes mind get a little bit stuffy a little bit button down. You know how it goes Lord, thank you for this day bless my wife my children of us all the missionaries in Africa let the Marlins win the world series this year You know, it's the normal stuff It's pretty plain vanilla pretty oatmeal Our kids when they ask the blessing at the table tend to fall into some same patterns and sometimes they go sort of like They're really thank you for this wonderful day. Thank you for this wonderful food. Thank you for mom preparing this food Thank you for making mom so she could prepare the food about which point somebody usually meals say amen so we can eat, you know Pray so long that gravy gets skin on it, you know It's time to stop. It's not time to make up for all the prayers you haven't prayed during the week at the table at the time At the table it's time just to ask God to bless the food I So a Daniel listen to this prayer the cry of Daniel's soul begins with a cry of confession go back with me to verse 4 Wea Daniel says I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed Lord the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments We have sinned and done wrong We've been wicked and have rebelled we've turned away from your commands and laws We have not listened to your sermons the prophets who spoke in your name to our kings our princes and our ancestors and all the people of the land Lord you are righteous, but this day we are covered with shame The people of Judah and the ha and the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel both near and far In all the countries where you have scattered us because we're on faithless to you We and our kings our princes and our ancestors are Covered with shame Lord Because we've sinned against you The Lord our God is merciful and forgiving even though we have rebelled against him We have not obeyed the Lord our God or kept the laws he gave us through his servants the prophets All Israel has transgressed your law and turned away Refusing to obey you This is a cry a confession. It's it's gut wrenchingly Honest there there's no hint here of self Justification of self-rationalization did you take note of all the first first and plural you find here in these in these verses It says we have sinned and done wrong we have been wicked and have rebelled we have turned away from your commands and your laws We have not listened to your servants the prophets and We Live in a time Where no one's ever responsible for his or home behavior are they? Nobody's ever fought for what he or she does in our culture Some of you are old enough and have been South Florida long enough you may remember back in 1977 when a 15-year-old named Ronnie Zamora and an accomplice murdered an 18-year-old widow and his defense attorney one Ellis Rubin tried to tell the jury that Ronnie Zamora did it because he was addicted to television He watched too many Crime dramas police dramas on television. He was just acting out of script. It wasn't really his fault Jury didn't buy it And a couple of years later in 1979 in San Francisco when a former police officer in a firefighter Turned commissioner by the name of Dan White assassinated mayor George Moscone in a fellow Supervisor of a Harvey milk and his defense attorneys tried to argue that White when he committed that those crimes he was in an altered state of consciousness because He'd eaten too much junk food had too much processed sugar. This became known as the Twinkie defense Still gets referenced that way the Twinkie defense Next time you go through McDonald's and order a cup of coffee you'll see on that cup writing that says caution Contents are extremely hot That's the legacy of one still a lie back Still a lie back in 1992 drove through McDonald's and ordered coffee and spilled in our lap and burned herself very badly So she sued McDonald's one lot of money from them for making that coffee so hot We live in a time and in a culture where nobody's ever responsible for his or her own Behaviour his or her own sins. It's always somebody else's fault and our friends up in Washington They have raised this to an art form have they not no matter what goes wrong the Republicans say it's all the Democrats fault No matter what goes wrong the Democrats say it's all the Republicans fault You go back and say yeah, but you voted for it. Well, yes, but I Wish I hadn't I was deceived I was forced I was coerced It's never their own fault, but Daniel's confession Bluntly brutally honestly acknowledges his own sins And sins of his people in verse four when he calls to the Lord our God He uses God's covenantal name Yahweh, and this is the only time the book of Daniel in chapter nine We're Daniel uses God's high holy covenantal name. He does it because he's acknowledging we have violated the covenant They have transgressed your commandments and your laws the terms of your covenant we deserve what has happened to us Lord God Almighty He acknowledges the sins of his people that they have no right They have no claim on God Folks, this is not ancient history. This is the first step in our getting right with God You know, if you made right with God Then we got to get real Quit playing games Don't go before him with a bunch of pious sounding platitudes. Oh God and all the bees and the cows and the believers Get real Talk to him acknowledge your sin and your culpability Folks, when we take our time of corporate prayer And after I thank God for allowing us into his presence and I said now we're gonna take some time for signing the confessional sin I don't do that so I can catch my breath It's not a formality. I am sitting up here acknowledging my own sins and the places where I have come short of what God would have me to be and I hope you're doing the same thing We need to be getting real and getting honest With God we're not fooling anybody. We're certainly not fooling him We need to come before him like Daniel did we need to acknowledge we have no right. We have no claim It's because we go to church because we dress up nice because we do some religious stuff We need to understand what God Daniel was preaching the gospel of God's grace 539 years before Bethlehem But we don't have any right to ask this of you we acknowledge that we're unworthy before you We simply ask because of who you are by your mercies and by your grace That you come alongside and minister your people That's the gospel folks. That's the gospel grace The God Even though we were dead in our transgressive our trespasses in the sense When we were dead God being rich and mercy because we're great love with which you loved us Made us alive together with Christ. It is by grace. We have been saved and that through Christ and Christ alone We've been wicked. He says we've rebelled that we're wicked the Hebrew were their connotes a guilty a a godless way of life Verse 60 knowledge is they had been they'd set aside and repudiated the terms of covenant They they said things like these old commandments He's old laws. He's old traditions out of date out of touch. Come on, man. It's 539 B.C. Would you get with it? They wouldn't know B.C. But you get the point How many times do I hear that today? Oh come on man that book It's old it's out of touch. It's out of date. Get real. It's two thousand men fill in the blank It's 2011 would you get real and we knowingly and willfully Sometimes ignorantly repudiate the terms of our covenant to come before the Lord Walk before him and be blameless they rejected the rule of God and it became just like the pagan culture around them God says if I look at you, I can't tell the difference between an Israel line and a cane at night and Then he says and he'd warn them he'd warn them through the terms of the covenant. He'd warn them through the prophets And he finally said since you live like them as you've seen the like the way they live so much Why don't you just become part of them and he sent them off into exile into Babylon Now those of you who are awake in our paying attention, you know there are some parallels here We live in a culture that glorifies Sinfulness that glorifies Depravity that glorifies anything to do with the dark side we live in a time in a culture if you stand up and say excuse me But I think that's wrong if you dare use that other S word, and I mean sin You will be called all kinds of things self-righteous intolerant Judgmental Taliban I've had all those thrown at me For daring to say yeah, I hear what you're saying, but I have a problem because the Bible says otherwise We live in a culture that no knowingly or ignorantly repudiates God's standards of holiness As much as I'm grieved for my country because I love my country. I'm really talking about the church folks I'm talking about the church. I think sometimes God looks down at the church and says I Couldn't tell the Israelites from the Canaanites and so look at your culture I can't tell the Christians from the pagan Because we act so much like them I'm reminded of something Isaiah said a couple of hundred years almost to the day before Daniel's prophecy Isaiah chapter five or twenty twenty one Woe to those who call good evil and evil good who put darkness for light and light for darkness Who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and Clever in their own sight Yes, that includes our culture But it also describes the church We've not obeyed the Lord our God Daniel said or kept the laws he gave us to his servants the prophets All Israel has transgressed your law and turned away refusing to obey you They were guilty of knowingly and willfully disobeying and disrespecting They're God they're guilty of ingratitude the trifecta disrespect disobedience And ingratitude You know when in those of you who've raised children, you know when when kids are small parents meet out different kinds of Consequences for different kinds of offenses or infractions if you're four or five-year-old Just gets a little out control a little rembunctions and breaks the antique vase or I guess if it's an antique it's a vase Breaks the the antique vase by jumping over it and you just got a little out controlling breaks it That's bad and you meet out one kind of consequence for that You meet out in an entirely different kind of consequence if that four or five-year-old looks at you Dead in the eyes full of defiance picks up that family heirloom that vase and Smash into the ground right in front of your face The end result of both those actions are the same that the vase is broken. It shattered But we deal with those two kinds of offenses totally differently because one is an accident the others willful defiance And we treat those things very differently And so does God Let me change the metaphor a little bit. You've raised your child You've done the best you can to raise Him and I'll just use the mask and if you don't mind you raised him in the nurture and ammunition of the Lord you've taught him to Respect others to love God to honor God to work hard to be a good citizen and He sent him off to a school Where you sacrifice light you sacrificed to put him in good private good Christian schools growing up You sacrifice even more to put him in a private college. So I get that good education and go out and get a good job I'm a productive citizen and after a short amount of time in that college You come to visit and you find that he's become lazy and disrespectful and disobedient And he's not going to class and he's staying out late parting and his grades at once for a's have become C-minuses are incomplete And he's willfully repudiating all the things you've taught him after all you've done for him How do you feel parent? Now multiply that exponentially and that's how God felt when he looked at his disobedient people I've raised you better than this you know better than this and you willfully repudiated the covenant And after God had warned them again first those commandments through the stipulations of the covenant He said if you obey these things, I'll bless you if you disobey these things I'll punish you and he told him he'd warned him over and over again and he'd warned him for the prophets And he warned them of judgment so he wouldn't have to send judgment We read the prophets and think what a bummer those guys must have been to be around But they were warning the people. They were warning them of judgment So the guy wouldn't have to send the judgment and then finally he said All right, you won't listen Not just judgment not just punishment The fall of Jerusalem the destruction of the temple Ultimately exiled and then they cried out why God? Have you abandoned us? Where are you now, God? parallels in our culture We push God to the margins of our culture We have people who are Hellbent and I mean hellbent who are dedicated every five-brother beings to Scrubbing the public square clean of any mention of God Almighty We have people who are working day and night to try to make us forget This country was founded primarily for freedom of religion primarily For the freedom of religious expression. That's why they left Europe Because they're being persecuted for their religious beliefs more than any other thing They came over here at great risk and Many of them died in the journey and a lot more died when they got here and they found it a nation
Dedicated to the proposition All men are created equal and are endowed by that creator with those unanimable rights We have people who are trying to make us forget that those things are true trying to pretend those things no longer obtain And when the next terrorist attack occurs and I'm not a prophet nor the son of one But I do believe it's a foregone conclusion It's not if but when the next one occurs God bless the people and Homeland Security in our military who kept the forces of evil at bay from the borders of this country God bless you and God blessed them But think of all the ones they've caught There are many more in the works and when the next one occurs and I hope I'm wrong about that But when the next one occurs you watch how quickly we cry out to God You watch the attendance in our churches Swel that next Sunday and the people of the United States Congress will stand on the steps of the Congress again I've seen God bless America and My plea is a stone weight Stone weight until the next emergency the next tragedy the scryote to God now and let repentance begin with us With the people of God. I'm not just talking about them. I'm talking about us Norman Vincent Peel you know Norman Vincent Peel and sort of the father of the positive Thinking movement in this country when he was a boy he found a big black cigar And he sneaked off to an alley and he lit that cigar and began to puff on it even though it tasted awful He felt that he was very grown up Until he saw his father walking toward him and then Norman Vincent Peel the young Norman Vincent Peel put that stoke you behind him Hope his father wouldn't see it and tried to distract his father. There's a billboard Just outside beyond that alley where you can see it and he pointed advertising a circus coming to town He pointed that billboard and he said dad dad the circus is coming to town. Can we go dad? Please could we go on that circus dad? His father was silent for a moment Looked down and then he looked up at his son. He said son Never make a petition while you're holding a smoldering disobedience
Folks, let's get real let's get honest about who we are This is the cry of Daniel so it begins here with the cry of confession Next week I want to look at two other aspects of Daniel's prayer It's a cry of confession where Daniel takes seriously the reality of his own sin And the reality of God's holiness and that's the good news. Yeah, we're sinners We're radically and pervasively depraved sin has Warped and touched the impact that every single aspect of our lives The good news is God great God's grace is bigger than our sins and he can be counted upon to meet us in our time of need Those of you who are parents who've had Active and energetic little people you'll appreciate this from Adana Kay heath in South Eastern North Carolina comes a story of a time that she and her family went church when her little girl Her little girl Tammy three years old Tammy was very active Verily rather precocious. She knew how to talk and she did a lot of it the only thing she didn't know was when not to talk Like during a church service, especially when the pastor was preaching Adana Kay he says our church is small it's too small to have an earthry so I had the pleasure of having my little girl with me Throughout the course of the service and it's one service in particular Tammy began to talk She continued to talk and even while the pastor was preaching she was talking and more loudly than she should have and her family Always had her front and even though mom and dad told Tammy she needed quit talking she need to be quiet They began to warn her what might happen if she didn't Tammy kept talking and so after They had enough of it daddy got up put Tammy on his shoulder and carried her out the long aisle down the church Tammy was precocious verbally she also knew the power of prayer So as she left the church Sanctuary she stretched out her hands toward the congregation and to the pastor and said y'all pray for me Y'all pray for me. We are I pray for you. Let's pray together
Father, I am so grateful that we can pray that you meet us in our time of need and our time of distress Lord forgive us those places Those times are all we forgot that we could turn to you or we just didn't believe we could Well, we do believe Help us in our unbelief Lord have mercy on us We are sinners We're just dust But we're dust that's made in your image and you loved us with an everlasting love and you called us to be your own And we thank you for that That inestible privilege of being sons and daughters of the Lord most high For what Jesus has done for us Make our prayer in his name Amen. Amen. Thank you for being with us this morning. Now receive the Lord's benediction now go the love of God the Father Grace and mercy of God the Son the fellowship and companionship God the Holy Spirit and live the life