I Dare You: Pray! Part 1 - Part A

I want to make simple three statements, three true statements about prayer based upon these five verses in Daniel 9. And the first is that prayer is prominent in Daniel's life. And for us, prayer should be prominent. We all pray, but how well do we understand prayer and its place in our life?

Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip looks at Daniel's life to show you some powerful truths about prayer. But first, we want to tell you about an exciting resource that will bless and strengthen the soul of your marriage. Great marriages are made, not born. God wants you to have a strong, thriving, and fun marriage. The Marriage Devotional, 52 Days to Strengthen the Soul of Your Marriage by Levi and Jenny Lesko is designed to help your marriage not just survive, but thrive. You want to understand God's secret, the secret for fruit in your marriage, in your family, in your parenting. If you feel overwhelmed because your marriage is a long way from where you feel like it should be, or if you feel discouraged and excluded today because divorce is in your story. And here you see God's plan for flourishing, and you've disqualified yourself because of what's in your past.

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That's connectwithskip.com slash offer. Now, as we go to Skip for today's study, we're in Daniel chapter nine. God doesn't speak like he used to speak. You ever heard that? You ever heard people say God doesn't speak like he used to speak? Somebody said that and a lady overheard it and she said, pardon me, perhaps it's because people don't listen like they used to listen. Now, I think both are true. Certainly God doesn't speak like he did in the Old Testament or even through the apostles in the New Testament. That is, there are not written revelations given today like there were in Bible times. That's true.

But I also think that in our fast-paced society, we don't take nearly the time our predecessors took in listening to God and talking to God. How many of you have ever seen the movie Castaway? Remember that about a decade ago? You can admit that you go to a movie.

You're not going to go to hell for that. It was a great movie. It was a long movie, but it was about a castaway.

Tom Hanks played the part of a guy named Chuck Nolan, who was a fast-paced, busy FedEx executive whose plane with parcels went down over the South Pacific and he got stranded on this island. And so he's trying to survive. And in trying to survive, he lit a fire with a very sharp stick. He cut his hand pretty severely.

A lot of blood was coming out. And in anger and frustration, Hanks picks up a volleyball, part of the parcels, and he throws it as far and as hard as he can. Later on, he picks up a ball and he notices that on the ball is a hand print.

His bloody hand print makes what looks like a fiery head. And since the ball is named Wilson, it's a Wilson volleyball, and he's got this fiery kind of head-looking hand print of blood on the ball, he takes his finger and smears the blood to make a face. And he calls it Wilson. And Wilson becomes like his new best friend. He has a personal relationship with the volleyball, essentially. He talks to Wilson and they spend their days together and he pours out his heart to Wilson. And when Wilson at the end of the movie gets taken away because of this sea storm, he's up in arms and all emotional.

There's something very noticeable about the film. Not once in the entire film does the character played by Tom Hanks ever pray to God, not even once. He'll talk to a volleyball, but you gotta wonder, he won't talk to God.

But then you gotta wonder about some people. They'll talk to their friends, they'll talk to their therapist, they'll talk to their counselor, they'll talk to the dead, they'll pray to the dead, they'll talk to Dr. Laura, Dr. Phil. They don't talk to God much. Daniel chapter 9 is a great story of a prophet who is actually a businessman who talked to God. And the result of him talking to God is one of the richest prophecies of the future in all of the Bible. In fact, it has been called the backbone of biblical prophecy. It's a landmark text. Daniel chapter 9 is like a Mount Rushmore of the Bible, a Statue of Liberty, an Eiffel Tower of Scripture.

It's really a landmark text. Without it, much of the prophetic literature in the Bible would be an enigma to us. And though it is insightful to look at the prophecy, it shows us also insight into how to talk to God, prophecy but also prayer.

In fact, the prophecy is a result of the prayer that Daniel prays toward the beginning. Now I think it's safe to say that people pray all over the world. It's one of the most common human activities people pray. Christians pray, Muslims pray, Jews pray, Hindus pray, Buddhists pray, even atheists under certain conditions will shoot up a prayer. George Barna reckons that about four out of five Americans pray regularly.

Now I don't know who they're all praying to or why they're praying or what the sincerity level of their hearts are, but people pray. I've always been fascinated by the story of the little sweet boy who prayed before he went to bed at night. Dear God, bless mommy and bless daddy and bless the kitty and bless the doggie. And then with a very loud voice, he said, and God, I really love a bicycle. And mom said, sweetheart, God isn't deaf.

He said, I know mom, but grandpa's in the next room and he is hard of hearing. So there's a little boy whose prayer life is sort of really all about getting his will done through his grandpa. Now, let me tell you one thing I don't want to do this morning. I sincerely don't want to guilt you into praying because you'll only do it for like a day if that's the case. And I know that every time prayer is mentioned from a pulpit or there's a sermon on it or teachings on the radio, our guilt meter goes bonkers. Oh, here it is. Prayer.

Yeah. Because if there's one area I think every believer would say that they're a little bit amiss in, it's that area. You bring up prayer and they go, oh, I'm such a hypocrite. I don't pray enough.

I'm a poor example. I'm not a good Christian. So it's my hope that rather than impugning guilt to y'all, I'd rather encourage you by looking at Daniel and what he did and how he did it and what role it played in his life. And because much of chapter 9 of Daniel is devoted to that, we're going to have the opportunity to look at it this week and next week. So this morning, we're only going to look at five verses. And out of those five verses, I want to make simple three statements, three true statements about prayer based upon these five verses in Daniel 9. And the first is that prayer is prominent in Daniel's life. And for us, prayer should be prominent.

Prayer should be prominent. Let's look at the first five verses. In the first year of Darius, the son of Ahasuerus, of the lineage of the Medes, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans, in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood by the books the number of the years specified by the word of the Lord, the word of the Lord, through Jeremiah, the prophet, that he would accomplish 70 years in the desolations of Jerusalem. Then I set my face toward the Lord God to make requests by prayer and supplications with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes. And I prayed to the Lord, my God, and made confession and said, O Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant and mercy with those who love him, with those who keep his commandments, we have sinned and committed iniquity.

We have done wickedly and rebelled even by departing from your precepts and your judgments. So here we begin the chapter and we find Daniel once again praying. Now, it's fascinating that we have the date of this prayer.

We know exactly when it happened. It said it was in the first year of Darius, the son of Ahasuerus, Darius, who's called the Mede. So we immediately know that it was 538 BC because that was the first year Babylon had fallen to the Medo-Persians and Darius was ruling over the province of Babylon.

Actually, this is how it worked. The king wasn't Darius, the king was a guy named Cyrus who was a Persian, but he brought a coalition of Media and Persia together, strengthening his kingdom. But he made Darius, his viceroy, his king in his stead over the realm of Babylon.

And Darius the Mede was king de facto, but he used other people in his kingdom to help him rule, one of which was Daniel the prophet. Now, we know all this from chapter 6. Chapter 6 and chapter 9 are parallel accounts in terms of chronology. They both happened at the same time. The same time Daniel and the lion's den happened was the same general year that this prayer was uttered by Daniel.

So here's what's interesting. Daniel was one of the three governors of the territory of Babylon, which means he was a busy guy, means he was an important guy. But as important as Daniel was and as busy as Daniel was, and might I add as old as Daniel was, he's about 82 in chapter 9, he finds time to pray and pray what we would say a rather lengthy prayer before the prophecy is given toward the end of the chapter. So prayer in his life played a prominent role, not just here, but we find that was his MO throughout his life. Since he was a teenager onward, he made sure that prayer was prominent.

A couple of examples that are notable. In the second chapter, Daniel's like, I don't know, 19 or 20 because he was a teenager when he was brought into Babylon. And that was the chapter when King Nebuchadnezzar had that frightening dream of that image of gold and silver and bronze and iron and iron and clay. And Nebuchadnezzar didn't know what it meant, so he told his court advisors to tell him what he dreamed and what it meant, or he would kill them all. And as the edict went out to kill them all, Daniel heard of it and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, now wait a minute, go tell the king just to give me a little bit of time.

So he goes back home with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and what's the first thing he does? Prayer meeting. It's time for a prayer meeting. Our necks are on the line, so they pray. And they say, God, be merciful to us and show us what this dream is and what it meant, and God revealed it to them.

So I love it. Daniel, as a young man, turns his panic into prayer. Isn't that what the Bible says? Be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication. With thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. He turned his panic into praying. There's a great church sign in front of a church building during one of the wars, and people were filled with fear. It simply said, if your knees knock, kneel on them. If you're living in fear, in other words, your knees are knocking, pray.

Turn your panic into praying. The second incident in Daniel's life of his prominence in prayer comes in chapter 6. I mentioned that's the parallel chronology to this chapter. That's the year when Darius gets on the throne, Babylon has fallen, and Daniel is made one of the three administrative governors over the land. His buddies were jealous of him and wanted to get him fired, and they knew the only way to get him fired is to come up with some kind of an accusation dealing with Daniel's relationship to his God, because we know he loves his God, and we know he prays a lot. So they said, King, could you make a law and pass it? So it reads, no one can pray to any God except for you. They have to pray to you for 30 days, just 30 days, because they knew Daniel would be caught. The law was passed. Daniel knew it.

Listen to what it says. This is Daniel chapter 6 verse 10. But when Daniel learned that the law had been signed, he went home and knelt down as usual in his upstairs room with its windows open toward Jerusalem. He prayed three times a day, just as he always had done, giving thanks to his God. Did you hear the language in that?

Did you hear the language in that verse? He prayed as usual. He prayed as he always had done. So Daniel prayed because Daniel always prayed. Prayer was a preoccupation. God was a preoccupation to Daniel.

It wasn't just a weekend exploration. It was a preoccupation. The reason I got into the ministry was not because it was an occupation. It was a preoccupation with me.

I was preoccupied with learning about spiritual things. Now that's not to say you need to be a pastor or a missionary or a prophet to have an effective prayer life or to have an effective life of service to the Lord. In fact, Daniel, though he's called Daniel the prophet, was Daniel the businessman. He was a business executive.

He was a political administrator. Simply, the Bible says this, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The word all is mentioned four times in one sentence. God would say, be all in when it comes to me. Be preoccupied with me. And you can do that be preoccupied with me.

And you can do that if you're a doctor, an accountant, an assistant, a zookeeper, or a mortician. But when you discover in your life what all means, what it means to love God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, all your strength, you're going to discover in the process that central to that must be prayer. Because when you pray, it's an exercise of dependence and humility. Dependence upon God, humility before God. And so Daniel, for him it was prominent.

Prominent. Prayer should be prominent. How prominent is prayer? I'm not going to ask you how prominent it is in your life. That's what we're dealing with internally right now, as the Spirit of God is speaking.

But can I just throw something out at you? The average computer user, and probably most of us are computer users, the average computer user in this country spends 49 minutes per day managing emails. A little frightening, isn't it? 49 minutes per day managing emails. How much time does the average Christian spend managing emails? Prayers. Do we spend 49 minutes a day praying? I don't. I'd love to. I aspire to.

Sometimes I get to. The average Christian spends how much time every day do you think? That many minutes. Three minutes per day. Three to four minutes per day, the statistics tell us. So George Barna will say that four out of five Americans pray regularly. Christians pray three minutes per day. Now allow me, permit me to suggest something that can help cure that.

That brings us to our second point. Prayer not only should be prominent, prayer should be prompted by something. Verse two. In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood by the books the number of the years specified by the word of the Lord through Jeremiah the prophet, that he would accomplish 70 years in the desolations of Jerusalem.

Then I set my face toward the Lord God to make requests by prayer and supplications with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes. His prayer was prompted by his reading of the word of God. Daniel's been reading his Bible. Daniel's been reading his Bible. The New English translations puts it this way, I was reading the scriptures and reflecting.

So apparently, apparently the Jews, especially Daniel, had in his possession the scrolls of the Torah and the prophets when they left Jerusalem and went into captivity in Babylon. And he was an intelligent man. He could read, so he was reading through. He made it evidently his practice to read through the scrolls of the Old Testament. And as he's reading, as he's studying, as he, we would say, having his devotions, his quiet time, something catches his attention. And it catches his attention enough for him to stop and pray about what he just read.

So now it's not a monologue, it's a conversation. God is speaking to him, and he speaks something back to God. Prayer was prompted by that. One of the best books I have ever read on prayer, bar none, is a book simply called Answers to Prayer.

Not flashy. Put out about a century and a half ago by a guy named George Mueller. Some of you will recognize his name. George Mueller was a pastor, but more than that, he ran an orphanage called the Ashley Down Orphanage in Bristol, England. Tens of thousands of little children were there, and he educated them and fed them for years. He was a man of prayer, and his book Answers to Prayer is a classic, an absolute classic. Let me share a paragraph. It has pleased the Lord to teach me a truth, the benefit of which I have not lost for more than 14 years.

The point is this. I saw more clearly than ever than ever that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not how I might serve the Lord, but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. So I saw the most important thing I had to do was give myself to the reading of the Word of God, not to prayer, but to the Word of God. And here again, not the simple reading of the Word so that it only passes through my mind like water runs through a pipe, but considering what I read, pondering over it, applying it to my heart. To meditate on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed, and that thus by means of the Word of God, whilst meditating on it, my heart might be brought into communion with the Lord. He said, prayer is most effective after the inner man has been nourished by the meditation of the Word of God. And he said this, I sought the will of God only in concert with the Word of God, for the will of God is never contrary to Scripture.

You get a secret? His prayers to God were prompted by the Word of God to his heart. So it became a conversation. Now wouldn't you like to know exactly what passage of Scripture Daniel was meditating on this for his quiet time to get this prayer? Would you like to know?

We actually do know. It says, he was reading through the prophet Jeremiah. He was reading the books of Jeremiah, and he understood 70 years. God said 70 years.

Listen to this. It's 538 BC. He was taken captive at 605 BC. It's 67 years of the 70. Time's almost up.

He's reading that and go, whoa, whoa, whoa. God said, 70 years? Time's almost up? I'm going to set this aside now, and I'm going to pray about that. So there's two places in Jeremiah, chapter 25 and chapter 29, that speak about the exact 70-year time frame that he's referring to. I'm not going to read them both, but I'm going to read to you Jeremiah 29, beginning in verse 10, a very famous portion of Scripture actually, some of which you know, but listen to it this way.

Now picture Daniel. He's reading the scroll. For thus says the Lord, after 70 years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform my good work toward you and cause you to return to this place, Jerusalem. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.

It's amazing how we rip that verse from its context. The context of that glorious promise to give you a future and a hope was all about the Babylonian captivity for 70 years, but at the end of that, he would bring them back to fulfill his good purpose. That concludes Skip Heitzig's message from the series, I Dare You. Find the full message as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskipp.com. Now here's Skip to share how you can keep these messages coming your way to connect you and many others around the world with God's word.

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800-922-1888. Thank you for your generosity and come back tomorrow as Skip continues to examine prayer in the life of Daniel. How much of the Lord do you want? How much is all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, all your strength? To Daniel, it was everything and God gave him more revelation. Connect with Skip Hyten is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever-changing times.