Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing, a biblical faith-filled vision for your life. Do you feel oddly out of tune with the world? I mean, sometimes feel misunderstood, maybe even. Maligned? Good.
It means you're a citizen of another kingdom, a foreigner to the spirit of the age. in the kingdom of God. Your royalty? You're seated with Christ. You're destined to reign.
But in the kingdom of this world, Your lofty estate is unrecognized. Your real identity is. unknown. I bless you, like a Daniel in a foreign land, to remember your worth. To refuse the culture's idols, to rejoice in God's rule, to remain in the promises of God, and to remember Him.
Who was the ultimate alien, Christ, our exile, who has been highly exalted? Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Alan Wright. We are living in the sense of having already been made new in Christ, and yet knowing that one day we'll be made totally new. This already sense of knowing that we belong to Him and nothing can separate us from God, and the favor of God is on us, and yet we might be in a culture where people around us don't understand or appreciate it. That's Pastor Alan Wright.
Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt. Excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series called Daniel, as presented at Renolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Allen Wright Ministries.
As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at pastorallen.org or call 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching.
Here is Alan Wright. Verse 14: So he listened to them in this manner and tested them for 10 days. And at the end of ten days, it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh. And in this case, fatter in flesh is actually a positive term. Yeah, it's done.
Not appealing to us, but in this case it was. Fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king's food.
So the steward took away their food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables. As for these four youths, God gave them learning and skill in all literature and wisdom, and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams. At the end of the time, when the king had commanded that they should be brought in, the chief of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar, and the king spoke with them, and among all of them, none was like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Therefore, they stood before the king. And in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom.
And Daniel was there until the first year of King Cyrus. It's just an extraordinary thing that God did here. Because the Lord did not have, of course, to allow Jerusalem to be overrun by the Babylonian Empire. The text, all throughout the scripture, says God was overseeing this. This is part of the discipline of the Lord.
He didn't have to, he could have just not allowed Babylon. He wasn't off of his throne. God was still in charge. And yet, He allowed them to be exiled, and he didn't have to let Daniel be exiled, but he allowed him to become a stranger in a foreign land. And while there We have the book of Lamentations.
We have the prophecies of Jeremiah. We've got Ezekiel's text. All this going on amongst the exiles. We've got, as we'll point to later, Psalm 137, we can see the heart of the exiles. But what God chooses to highlight in his word is Daniel.
Who is a favored foreigner who is exiled as part of the discipline against his own people, and yet while there, he is unbelievably favored and promoted. He's protected, he's provided for with all his wisdom and revelation, and then he's actually promoted in the foreign court. How interesting. God could have easily prevented him from even being in exile, but instead he lets him go and promotes him while he's there. He could easily keep Meshach and Shadrach and Abedego out of the fiery furnace, but instead he's with them.
He could keep Daniel out of the lion's den, but instead he chooses to be with Daniel and shut the mouths of the lions.
So this is not really a new concept. It's just, it is something that is pervasive throughout God's word, that he takes someone. Who is going to go to an uncomfortable place, be surrounded in an unfamiliar setting, and yet be favored by God? in that context. It's something about the way of God.
That he starts with Abraham, who calls up out of his homeland, takes him to a new land, promises him this land. He says, You're going to be a blessing. But Abraham goes to a place where he's not comfortable, he's not in his own land. Joseph, the whole story of Joseph, very similar to Daniel's story, isn't it? He is sold into slavery into Egypt, and while he is there, He is subjected not only to slavery but also to incarceration, and yet he is promoted while a slave and promoted while he is in the prison and ultimately promoted to second command of all of Egypt.
He's a favored foreigner. Moses Moses was a little baby, the Hebrew baby, and the only way he was not slaughtered was he was put out into the Nile River in a little basket. And the princess of Egypt comes and rescues him from the Nile, and he's raising the Egyptian court. He just raised Right in the lap of the luxury of the Egyptian court and all the Egyptian ways, he's a favored foreigner, but he's still a Hebrew. And when he sees an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Hebrew, he so identifies with his own Hebrew brother that he himself kills the Egyptian, and then Moses lives in exile in Midian until God brings him in back into the very place he was raised, once again as a foreigner, but now favored by the anointing and signs and wonders of a supernatural, miraculous outworking of God by which he saves his people.
David was sort of like this. David was out in the fields, unlikely candidate to be king, so much so that Jesse, his father, didn't even bring him into the lineup for Samuel to look at when Samuel was going to anoint the new king. And the Lord says, It's not any of them. He said, Don't look upon the outward appearance. The Lord looks on the heart.
David is appointed the new king of Israel, but before he ever gets on the throne, Saul, the former king, chased. Him and David lives in exile for a long period of time, hiding in the caves of Adullum with a ragtag group of men. He's a favored exile. And the prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, they speak to the people of Israel that they will experience exile, but they say, comfort, comfort, my people. Because fear not the Lord's with you and always point to restoration.
This is, really, beloved, one of the ways to understand the whole story of the Bible. It is a story of creation, of exile, and restoration. It is the story of God who created Adam and Eve in his own image, and he walked with them in an uninterrupted, intimate fellowship in the Garden of Eden until Adam and Eve sinned. And their sin and rebellion caused them to be cast out from the garden to the east of Eden, where now they were like exiles from their actual home. And this sense of not being in your ultimate home, your ultimate paradise, this is hidden in the heart of every man or woman, that there is something that is forever restless within us until we rest with God Himself.
And so there's a great longing that's in our hearts. And you see right from the beginning that man and woman are exiled from their actual paradise, their actual home. But as soon as they are exiled, what do you see? God is at work from the beginning, right from the moment that he slays the innocent animal in order to make skins to cover the shame and nakedness of Adam and Eve. Right from that moment of that shed blood that goes all the way through the Passover lamb and the blood over the Hebrew doorpost during the Passover to the crimson thread that hangs down from Rahab the harlot's house in the shambles in the midst of Jericho through the thousands upon thousands of turtle doves and rams that are offered at the temple in Jerusalem all the way through the prophets prophets Prophecies to the point that it comes to the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Himself at Calvary, that God was weaving a redemptive plan of restoration for the exiles.
And so the story really is understood in this way: that it is like sin entered the world, we are exiled from God, but God has a restoration plan, and our hearts long for God. And the people of God are those who have seen that though we are not citizens of this world, that through the gift of Christ, we are able to become citizens of an invisible kingdom. And not only citizens in that invisible kingdom, but we are made to be heirs within that kingdom. And not only heirs, but co-heirs with Christ, the Lord Himself. That the Son, who has been exalted to the right hand of the Father, we in this invisible kingdom are positioned with Him in the heavenlies.
We have been reckoned as righteous, and therefore we are princes and we are princesses in this invisible kingdom. Kingdom. And so we live, beloved, in this sense of knowing that our citizenship is actually in heaven. And so we are like exiles in the world. And we live in a dynamic tension.
And we happen to be at a season in a moment in the history of this particular great country in which we have seen that there have been many changes around us that might make us feel all the more like we're foreigners in our own culture. But the point of all this is to say it has always been thus. This world, as it is now, is not our ultimate home. Our ultimate home is a new heaven and a new earth. And so we are living in this incredible dynamic of the already and the not yet.
We are living in the sense of having already been made new in Christ and yet knowing that one day we'll be made totally new. This already sense of knowing that we belong to Him and nothing can separate us from God and the favor of God is on us and yet we might be in a culture where people around us don't understand or appreciate it. And I just think that it's appropriate To understand The nature Of The Babylon that Daniel lived in and the sadness of that. Babylon is. Not just ancient history, it's the stuff of today, Saddam, Hussein.
Sought to, at one point, rebuild the ancient Babylon, which has its ruins in the suburbs of Baghdad and Baghdad and today's Iraq. Um This is Saddam instantly started imprinting his name on the bricks the way Nebuchadnezzar had back originally. And um It comes from a Greek form of the original Akkadian name Bab-Elu, which means the gate of God. And Richard John Newhouse. Said poignantly, both literally and figuratively: Babylon has been the gate through which many gods have entered history.
Exile is a place where The first thing you actually have to do is be honest about where you are. Beloved, this is very important in life. It is very important in life to be honest. about the situation you find yourself in. When we have many hundreds of people that assemble on a On a Sunday morning like this, we have people of very different places in life.
Is this one of the great challenges of bringing a relevant word for the people of God? Because some people are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. And some people are on the mountaintop. And everything in between. Oh.
And one of the things that we're invited to do as Christians, and this is one of our giant secrets. is because we know and are assured of our home with God. We can be real. about the situations we face now.
Okay. It is actually those that are unassured of an eternal home. That can't be real. about the pain, adversities. and the eventual death that we experience in this world.
So The the first thing is not rush past. The sense of exile that these people felt. You have to imagine it. I invite you to just imagine with me what that was actually like. They are the favored people of God, chosen out of all the peoples of the earth to represent God on the earth, Israel.
They had all the promises, they had the Torah, the law, they had the promises. Of God through all the prophecy. They had the temple. They had their life of worship. And first, starting with Assyria that comes in 722, but then this, the Babylonians that come in in three waves.
And just start laying bare the city and deporting them one after the other. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands, snatched away from their homes, and their homes are destroyed. You got to think about this. This is what they are experiencing, and then the temple is raised. It is It is demolished.
The thing that is most holy to them and the center of their life, their communal life, is put to rubble.
Solomon's temple in all of its glory, put to rubble. And they're deported to Babylon. How are they feeling? I'll tell you how they're feeling. They're feeling like the Book of Lamentations.
They're feeling like Psalm 137. By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows, there we hung up our lyres. They're putting their instruments aside, their music, their joy. They're just laying it aside.
For there our captors, verse 3, required of us songs and our tormentors mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. See, the Babylonians are coming around there saying, you know, why don't you pick up your guitar and play us a little song from one of your songs you used to sing? They don't feel like. Verse 4, How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill.
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. This is earthy. And this is real. And this is in the Bible because this isn't what good Christians say, but this is what they were feeling. This is what the exiles were actually feeling.
Verse 7: Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem, how they said, Lay it bare, lay it bare down to its foundations. O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed. Blessed shall he be who repays you with what you've done to us. Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock. It's not nice talk.
That's not a happy song, but it's what they're feeling because they've been robbed of everything that they knew that was precious to them. And the Lord has allowed this. And you could just go, well, what is going on with this? And part of it, at the heart of it, can you just see the message that is underneath it? And the promises through the prophets of the comfort of the Lord and the presence of the Lord and the promises of restoration of the Lord to restore their fortunes to have compassion upon them.
He keeps promising them, promising them, this is not the way that it's always going to be. But he's allowing them to experience the feelings of exile. He's allowing them to experience some of the feelings of what it is to be separated from that which is precious because this is the human dilemma. Sin has caused a separation from God. We all, apart from Christ, are exiled from God.
And when we identify what it really feels like to be separated from our homeland, it puts us in touch with our great, great longing for our ultimate home with God forever. He's giving them a sense. Of picturing that you're going to have to rely upon something other than a physical temple and these vessels and all of these things that you're going to have to discover God in the land of your exile. It's an inward tension that they feel in exile. It's a.
It's already in that it's Not yet, and it's It's not comfortable. It's not comfortable when you're in exile. No longer surrounded by the familiar. And people aren't buying into your belief system just because you say so or just because it's popular. And you struggle between wanting to run away from it somehow, or wanting to fix it, or wanting to strike out against it, or choosing to bless them and point to God.
It is a dynamic tension. It is something that's hard to describe, but I tell you who has done this and described the picture of the reality of being citizens of the kingdom of heaven while also in this earthly realm, and that is C.S. Lewis in his Narnia stories. Because What they are, they're stories of these kids. that back in London are just kids.
And nobody pays them much attention. They're just kids, ordinary kids. But when they stumble through the wardrobe into the snow-laden forests of Narnia, They enter into a land of of magic, of a kingdom. Where it's been prophesied that they will have thrones at Care Paravel. They will be kings and queens.
in Narnium. And so the stories go of their great exploits. and how they conquer the white witch. And how all the animals of the forest pay great homage to these little children because they're kings and they're queens. In Narnia.
But there comes a time in which they are escorted back. into their old world. And at the end of the lion and the witch and then the wardrobe, when they are out, Riding their horses and speaking to one another the way kings and queens speak, and then they notice a lamppost and have a vague memory of it. Lewis writes, Before they had gone twenty more, they noticed that they were making their way not through branches, but through coats. And next moment they all came tumbling out of the wardrobe door into an empty room, and they were no longer kings and queens in their hunting array, but just Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy in their old clothes.
It was the same day. in the same hour on which they had gone into the wardrobe to hide. Ms. McCrady and the visitors were still talking in the passage, but luckily they never came into the empty room, and so the children weren't caught. That would have been the very end of the story if it hadn't been that they felt they really must explain to the professor why four of the coats of the wardrobe were missing, and the professor.
Was a very remarkable man, didn't tell them not to be silly or not to tell lies, but believed the whole story. No, he said, I don't think it'd be good to try to go back through the wardrobe door to get the coach. You won't get into Narnia again by that route, nor the coach be much use to you.
Now, eh? What's that? Yes, of course you'll get back to Narnia again someday. Once a king in Narnia. Always a king.
in Narnia. There we are. There we are. See, when you accept Christ. Whether you feel this or not, this is what happens.
You are born anew supernaturally. And there's a great shift in the whole cosmos about where you are positioned spiritually. You are reckoned as the righteousness of Christ. And that sense You are not only made his child, But you are positioned. with Christ as if you had lived A meritorious life.
And your citizenship is permanently, eternally, forever. With God in heaven. Alan Wright, and today's teaching, Christ, Our Exile. Ever feel like the pressure is always on? Do you find it hard to say no, worried that you'll disappoint someone?
The Bible tells us only one thing about Adam and Eve's relationship in paradise. They were naked and felt no shame. But as soon as sin entered the world, they became anxious, plagued with a gnawing question, what must I do to be accepted? There is only one solution. The grace of God that lifts our shame.
In a new six-week video masterclass, Pastor Alan exposes the dynamics of shame and shows the path to freedom. Whether as an individual or in a small group, the video series is sure to bring healing and hope. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries this month, we'll send you the digital masterclass videos and study guides as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. In a world so quick to say shame on you, it's time to let God's grace take the shame off you. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries.
This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support. When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Allen Wright Ministries. Call us at eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. That's eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty.
Or come to our website, pastorallen. org. Alan, are you saying as part of today's teaching from the book of Daniel that the gospel, if we get it and let it sink in, is great for us, but the culture around will still be confused and oblivious to the freedom we're experiencing? Exactly. And Daniel's such a good picture of this: that there are ways in which.
God will show you favor even in the midst of a culture that doesn't know the Lord. And yet, if we expect that the culture around us is going to get it when they don't know the Lord, then we're going to wind up both frustrated and mystified. I think instead we're in the world, not of the world. And people around us will react in a whole variety of ways. Today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.
