Standing Firm
Daniel 3:1-15 Jude 1”1-7 May 31,2015
How many of you have ever been to a movie in which there is a scene in which an enemy is coming and everybody is getting tense, but the leader says “not yet, stand your ground”. Some people want to panic and the music is getting louder and the leader finally says “now” and the enemy is stopped or destroyed. The captain knew that if he reacted too soon the plan would not work. He knew he had to stand his ground even in the face of fear.
Or you may have been at a basketball game, and down by one point and the guy with the ball is dribbling as the seconds wind down on the clock. He waits until there is just two seconds left before going up to shoot and then he releases the ball knowing that it is all or nothing. He stands his ground lets go of the ball with nothing but nets as the time expires and the buzzer sounds.
We know what it is to celebrate the person who waited to the right moment and was brave enough to stand firm even in the face of fear and possible rejection.
Can you think of a moment in your own life in which you were able to stand firm in a situation. Somebody wanted to borrow money from you one more time even though they didn’t pay you back the other three times, and this time you said no and meant it. Someone wanted to talk you into doing something that you knew was not right, and even though your were tempted you stood firm and said no and went the other wa. Someone that you had reached out and cared for and been burned by, came back asking you for a fourth chance to take them back, but this time you stood firm and said no. Even though it may have hurt to stand firm, you were glad that you did.
Can you think of a moment in your life, when you wished you had of stood firm, but you did not? When that happens it leaves an ache in your soul. You feel like rejecting yourself, even asking the question, “what’s wrong with me, how could I have been so stupid.” How did I let him or her talk me into that. I knew I should have never accepted the offer, never signed the papers, or never went out with the person in the first place.
The World in which we live is constantly changing. That’s one of the reasons many of us stay broke. Just when we get what they told us we should have, they go and change it which means now to be accepted we have to upgrade the model. It can be the fashion style, the car we drive, the neighborhood we live in, the shoes we wear, the music we listen to or the colors we paint our homes. Those changes don’t affect us that much as believers if we can keep our priorities straight on seeking first the kingdom of God rather than seeking the things of this world with our tithes and offerings.
But then there are changes that take place in the world around us, that directly confront us as followers of Jesus Christ, because they force us to choose between being faithful to Jesus, and being loyal to others who may be our family or our friends. Or having to choose between Jesus or being afraid of losing something we have such as a position, status, or property.
Sometimes we think that being a Christian means God always has our back and nothing bad will happen to us. God does always have our back, but that does not mean God will guarantee to keep all the things that have been added to our lives in our lives. When we are faced with a choice between Jesus and what others are saying is best for me, which way are you going to stand.
One of the reasons the values of our society changes is that there is nothing firm upon which it stands. We were once under the delusion that our country had an anchor in its Constitution, and we boldly proclaimed “The Constitution of the United States” guarantees this or that. Now we have discovered, that the constitution is not really an anchor. It only means what the nine justices of the Supreme Court says that it means. They can add to its meaning and take away from its meaning with simply a majority vote of 5 to 4. They can find rights, that the original writers never put in the Constitution or even thought about. Out of a nation of 300 million people, one person on the Supreme Court may determine the law of the land.
The only think that is exactly as it was at the beginning of this nation is God. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That is something that we can stand firm on because its in God’s word. Over the last 239 years of this nation’s history, God has not changed His desire to be in a personal relationship with each and every person in this world.
God has always reserved for Himself, the right to set the guidelines for the relationship. God then gives it to us or a take or leave it proposition. God does not bargain His laws with us as though we were in a negotiating arrangement. Moses did not look at the 10 commandments and let God know, three of these are going to be a hard sell to the people. Could we knock off 3 or at least make some exceptions to them? God stood firm. It was 10 commandments not 7.
When Jesus came in the New Testament, Jesus took the same position. Jesus once said, before you want what I have to offer, sit down and ask if you’re willing to pay the price to receive it. You can have salvation for free, but it will cost you your life. We make an exchange, we give Jesus these worthless lives of our, and God makes us sons and daughters of God with a vast array of promises and eternal life after we die.
Every believer is going to be confronted on several occasions in their lives with the question, “How much of a price are you willing to pay to follow Christ”. Nobody gets an exemption, not even the youth or the aged or anybody in between. Will you give up your popularity or shot at it for Christ? What about your acceptance by others? Will you surrender your fear of the unknown? Your security which comes from your job or your wealth? Will you stand for Jesus when it is not the popular thing to do?
God places us in situations in which we will have to choose whether or not we will stand for God, or we will go along. In our Old Testament Reading, God’s people had been taken away as captives in a foreign land. The best and brightest of them were trained to serve in the King’s court and the king’s government positions. The rest were either slaves or poor people. Many of them had been brought to Babylon with nothing but the clothes on their back.
There were three guys who had taken a stand with Daniel on whether or not to the eat the king’s food a few years earlier. They were called Shadrach, Meshack and Abednego. Their faithfulness to God in that situation had led God to using King Nebuchadnezzar to promote them to some pretty high government positions ahead of the native Babylonians. You know how we can all be when jobs that we had our eyes on, got to a bunch of foreigners. We get upset and sometimes we will smile in their face until we can find a way to stab them in the back.
King Nebuchadnezzar was ruler of this vast empire with people from different races and religions. He wanted to make sure his nation was united. He didn’t mind people having their own religion, so long as everybody worship his god in the form of this huge idol that he had built. You could believe whatever you wanted to believe or nothing at all.
Whenever anyone heard the music, the rule was simple. Stop what you were doing. Drop down and bow to the idol. Then go back to whatever you were doing. If you didn’t go along with this, you were thrown into the fiery furnace to die. The King had all the important people around when he made this decree, and boom they hit the ground as soon as the music was played. For some reason or another, the three guys did not make the initial meeting, but they heard about it later.
For some people in the kingdom, this was not a problem at all. They were already worshipping several gods, what was one more idol going to do to the mix. King Nebuchadnezzar thought like a lot of people today think about religion. They believe that all religions are the same , worshipping one God.
The issue of religion is not is it a good one or a bad one, but rather is it the truth about God. If Jesus says, “I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.” It is either true or it is not. When Jesus says I and my Father are one, it is either true or not. Will you stand firm with Jesus on his conviction or will you be embarrassed and try to dumb down what Jesus is saying?
God’s people are in a country that is hostile to them. All of them were capable of bowing down for a couple of minutes to this gigantic statue. The only problem for them was their anchor. Their anchor was rooted in God. And God had made His will for their lives perfectly clear on this issue.
We find it in Exodus 20:1-6 (TNIV) 1 And God spoke all these words:
2 “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 3 “You shall have no other gods before me. 4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
So we know its not God’s will for us to do this, but who wants to lose their job, their home or their lives over something like this. You want to stand firm but you don’t want to lose your friends or offend anybody else. After all everybody else is doing, and the Supreme Court of Babylon has found that Nebuchadnezzars actions are constitutional. Well here are somethings that people do today to get around the revealed will of God.
• We could take the denial approach and say God’s word does not apply today because now we live in Babylon, but when it was given we lived in the desert.
• We could take the cowardly approach and try to hide every time the music played or try to figure out when it was playing and make sure we were only among friends.
• We could take the shallow religious approach and say God knows my heart, and when I bow down outwardly on the inside God I’m really bowing down just to you.
• We could take the rebellious approach and say I know it’s a sin but God is just going to have to forgive me.
• We could take academic approach and take a vote that God’s people can bow down when the music plays and it will not be a sin any longer.
• You can believe there were plenty of people wanting to have their cake and eat it to. One foot in and one foot out.
Well as it turned out, there were some people who were not bowing down when the music played. Some of God’s people were going on about business as usual and standing for God as they had before the law was passed. Somebody saw an opportunity to get the high status and good paying jobs of Shadrach, Meshack and Abdengo. They sent spies to see what they did when the music played. If they had of had cell phones, they would have sent video of them straight to Youtube. It was good news to them when they didn’t bow.
They took their report straight to the king to put the king on the spot, by telling him in front of a group of important people, there are three guys here that you gave real good jobs to who don’t give two cents for the law you made. They have taken a stand against you and the unity of the kingdom. King Nebuchadnezzar wanted to be able to save face and give the three guys a way out. Both of them could compromise a little. He starts by reminding them who he was and how he had given them their job, and that he didn’t believe any kind off gossip others were saying about them.
He was trying to say, look, you owe me after all I have done for you. I didn’t even have to give you another chance. Now the least you can do is fall in line and go along with the plan. If you don’t, I guarantee you will suffer for standing against me. But hey let’s put all this behind us and show we’re on the same team, just bow down when you hear the music, and we will write this little thing off as failure in the communication process.
Before they could get the band together or push the play button on the i-phone one of the three guys spoke up with the others saying amen.
He basically said, “look we are not even going to try to defend ourselves in this matter. We are guilty as a charged. There’s no need to play any music. We know where we stand and we stand on the Word of God. We will not reject God’s word in order to keep our jobs or to try to save our lives. We can’t stop you from throwing us into the fire, but we know a God who can deliver us from the fire. He might choose to let us burn up, but either way we are going to stand on His word. Our God has brought us too far for us to leave Him for something in this life. Thank you for what you did for us in giving us the jobs, but it wasn’t you who did it. God was simply working though you in order to take care of us.”
Nebuchadnezzar was enraged. You ungrateful traitors. He demanded the furnace be heated seven times hotter than usual so that he could demonstrate his power and his authority over them.
I want us to notice that Shadrack, Meshack and Abenego had not received a word from the Lord in advance saying that everything was going to be alright if they took the right stand. Faith is not believeing that the outcome you desire is going to happen. Faith is believing in God that God is going to do what is best, regardless of what you earnestly desire. Every time we take a stand for God, does not mean everything ends with a victorious testimony.
If you read the great chapter of faith in Hebrews 11, it ends with the testimony of those who found out that God does not always arrive right on time when it comes to the things we have in this world including our own lives.
That passage says Hebrews 11:35-40 (TNIV) 35 Women received back their dead, raised to life again. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. 36 Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37 They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— 38 the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. 39 These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. 40 God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.
In our New Testament passage, the apostle Jude told us that we are to contend for the faith.
The Greek word that we translate as "contend," is found only this one time in the New Testament. In Greek secular literature the word is used to describe the intense struggle in an athletic event. You recognize you have got to give your all if you are to win in the event. Think of how Lebron James contended against Atlanta in overtime.
The apostle Jude is calling believers to action to have that same kind of determination in defending the truth of the gospel. Contending would not be easy. It called for hard work, diligent study, willingness to stand against society’s desire to water down the gospel. We are called to speak up for the truth and bear the burden of interpreting the timeless truth to a changing society.
Today we are going to vote on changing denominations. Our vote should not be seen as a stand against the PCUSA, but rather as a stand for what we believe about the truth word of God. God has done a lot of good on our behalf through the PCUSA over the many decades of ministry together. Most of us here have received a benefit from God through the PCUSA. We are not ungrateful.
We do not see ourselves as being holier than the other churches which remain in the PCUSA. That would be pride at its worse. A Covenant Order of Evangelicals is not made up of churches that are more righteous than the PCUSA churches because none of us are righteous in the eyes of God. We simply see them as being more faithful in the clear teachings of Scripture and the authority of the Scriptures over our lives. The Scriptures ask the question, “how can two walk together, except they agree.” Our Session believes we are in far more agreement with A Covenant Order of Evangelicals than we are with the PCUSA.
Like Shadrach, Meshack and Abendego, there are risks involved in taking a stand. Our faith is not rooted in getting rid of the risks. Our faith is rooted in a God who says to us fear not, if I know how to take care of the sparrows, I certainly know how to take care of you. The three guys had to go into the fire, in order to stand with God. It was in the fire that the miracle was going to take place. They tied them up and threw them in. Nebuchadnezzar was looking into the flames, and had to ask the question. “Didn’t we throw in three guys. How come it looks as though there are four in there at the moment and one of them looks like a Son of God.”
Nebuchadnezzar thought he was throwing them to their deaths. What he did was put them in the place for a miracle to take place. In the fire, the things that had them all bound up were burned away and they found a freedom to walk around in a place they had never been before. In the fire, they found a God who could walk alongside of them and talk face to face. In the fire they found out that just when you think it’s over, God is ready to do something new. Just when things were getting good between the four of them, Nebuchadnezzar interrupted it all by “yelling out, Shadrach, Meshack and Abednego, servants of the Most High God, Come Out and Come Here.”
Many believe that this fourth figure was an appearance of Jesus in the Old Testament. Don’t forget, Jesus did not come into existence when he was born in Bethlehem. We know that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word, was with God, and the Word was God. Jesus loved those guys enough to show up early on their behalf.
Nebuchadnezzar was first angry at the stand that they took. Many people will be angry with you for standing firm for Jesus in your situation. It’s only after you have stood and paid a price that some will see your God as they have never seen them before. Shadrack, Meshack and Abednego didn’t come out proud or boastful.
They came out the same way they went in, which was a willingness to stand for God no matter what. Jesus had enveloped them in some kind of a force field, because not only were their clothes not burned, they didn’t even have the smell of fire upon them. The same king who had condemned them, now understood their stand. He went as far as to change the law and to impose a swift sentence against anyone speaking against the God of Shadrach, Meshack and Abednego. They didn’t get to go back to their old jobs. Instead they got a promotion.
What would have happened if they had burned in the fire. We would still hold them in high esteem as a model for people to follow. People would have remembered, those guys took a stand even to death. It would have given others courage to stand in their situations. They would have gotten even a higher promotion in heaven because they loved God more than they did life.
I do know if they had chosen the route of compromise, nobody would be looking up to them. They would not have been considered among the heroes of faith. They would not have received any promotion of any kind. We would not still be talking a few thousand years later about Shadrach, Meshack and Abednego.
Today somebody is watching you to see what decisions you are going to make in your life. They are trying to find out if this religious thing you have been talking about is really real, or will you go along with the rest of the crowd when the pressure is on you. They are going to make a decision about Jesus, on whether or not you choose to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. You will be shocked to get to heaven and to discover how many people might come up to you and say thank you, I saw the stand you took at the school, at the party, on the job, or in the church and I never forgot it. Your stand made me consider that Jesus just might be real. I later discovered He was.
Jesus told us to go and be witnesses for Him throughout the whole earth. Every time we take a stand for Him based on His words, we fulfill his command. We are all standing for something today. If its not Jesus, its no different than standing for Nebuchadnezzar’s idol. It may bring you acceptance and position today, but it won’t be there to help you when you leave this world to enter the next. Don’t forget, your stands today determine what you will be doing not only later in your life but also in heaven.
