The Cost Of Success
Daniel 1:1-10 1 Peter 4:12-19
If someone were to ask you, what does it mean to be successful, what kind of images begin to pop into your mind. For many of us the first thing that comes to mind is money, for others it may be a graduation, a promotion on the job, winning a championship or an award in your field, being popular, or having a great home.
All of these things may be good in and of themselves, and having a combination of them all may be pretty impressive. Think of some of the superstars you know that have all these things, but who you are not quite sure they are what you call successful. You are not willing to get up and trade places with them in life. In fact, you may actually be more successful than they are.
Now I don’t want you to think for a minute that I do not want you to plan to obtain the things that we call success. I want everyone of you to graduate and keep on graduating. I want you to rise to the top position on your job. I want you to receive as much money as you possibly can. We’re praying for 1.76 million dollars, and God may want to provide it through you. I want you to have the best home and family life that you can.
But I want you to know that being successful does not start with a vision to do something great or to have something wonderful. Being successful starts with planning one’s funeral and working backwards from it. For Jesus said in the word of God, what does it profit a person to gain the whole world and yet lose his or her soul?. Success in life is dependent more on what we take out of this world when we die, more than on what it is we leave behind. We’re going out to take out our character and the choices we make in life and lay them before God.
To be called successful by God, always comes with a price tag. Those of you who graduated this year, you did not get your degree simply by showing up every once in a while. You did some things you did not want to do. You went some places you did not want to go. You studied at times when you had rather been doing something else. There was a price that had to be paid to get you to the point of being called a graduate. There were others who started out with you, with the same opportunity, but they did not pay the price and they did not graduate.
It is amazing how many people want to be a success with God and fail to understand there is a cost involved to walk with the Lord. They have cheap “forgive me religion.” They are under the impression, all I have to say is Lord forgive me and I can do as I please. That’s not having a relationship with Christ. That’s a bad case of misunderstanding the grace and mercy of God. I can tell you this, God expects everybody to pay a price to follow him. Sometimes the price just might be, the cost of not being successful for the moment.
Let’s turn in our Bibles to Daniel chapter 1. The history is that the children of God, the Israelites, they have been taken away into captivity to the land of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar is king of Babylon, and he’s looking to take away the most promising of the captives, and put them to work for him. He wants to prepare them for graduation and to make them all successful. But old King Nebuchadnezzar had his own agenda for making people successful. After all, if he could control the minds of the elite, the masses would be easier to control.
Look at Daniel 1:3-5 Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring in some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility-- young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace. He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians. The king assigned them a daily amount of food and wine from the king’s table. They were to be trained for three years, and after that they were to enter the king’s service.
I want you to notice how the king was only interested in the cream of the crop. His goal was not to educate them to help their own people, but to put them in his service. They were not to learn about their history or their literature, but that of the Babylonians. At the end of the three year period, they were to be more Babylonian than they ever had been Hebrew. That plan is still in effect today.?
Those of you who are going off to college or entering a workforce, their job is not to make you make you more like Christ. Their job is to make you more like them. You will be introduced to things that will challenge the Word of God by treating it just like any old book. You will be considered old fashion and not thinking for yourself if you admit believing the bible to be God’s work. You will be told that now that you are intellectually maturing, you will not need that religious stuff.
Those of you entering the work force, they want you to be concerned with the company’s bottom line in terms of dollars. They’re not going to want you to remember that God placed you in that job for a reason that has nothing to do with the company’s bottom line. God placed you there to make that place a place of justice and righteousness. You are called to speak forth what is right in your sphere of influence. There will be two forces competing for the control of your heart and your mind. You will learn, if you want to be successful, you must go along with the game plan.
No my friends, if you want to be successful, you will hold to the faith and principles that God has placed in your life. When God places you in a place to make a difference, make an honest difference for God. Don’t ever forget who you are, and where it is God has brought you from. There will always be some who will stand for God. Make sure you’re in that group regardless of the price, you’re going to have to pay. When you become managers, and vice presidents, and CEO’s don’t forget how your policies affect the least of these. For Jesus said, “how you treat the least of these, you’re treating me.”
Look at Dan 1:6-7 Among these were some from Judah: Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. The chief official gave them new names: to Daniel, the name Belteshazzar; to Hananiah, Shadrach; to Mishael, Meshach; and to Azariah, Abednego. Why is it that when the world wants us to do wrong, they want to change our names. When our boys get old enough to run the streets, their friends change their names. Slick, sly, fingers, dawg, hitman, and ears . They change the names of our girls. Hoochie mama, candy, foxy, sweetie. The world knows that if they can get us to change our names, we can be made more easily to act out of character.
Not all name changes are for the streets. Doctor, Attorney, CEO, Professor, Executive Director, Superintendent , CFO, and President in front of our name, can also be a means of getting us to act in a certain kind of way. We can get to thinking our success has moved us beyond having to deal with those people. But in our God our success is rooted in investing in those people and showing them the light.
I was speaking at the conference with a black pastor from Kenya in Africa. He said, if you look around the world, you will see that Blacks are at the bottom. In Australia, the aborignees are on the bottom, in India they make up the untouchables, you see the suffering going on in Africa. He said, “The African American as a whole is the most advanced black in the world and yet they are not doing much to help the rest of us.” How will we have a heart for the blacks of the world, when we want little to do with the blacks in the hood? God has a purpose for our church here in the hood. What does it mean for us to be a success here, and what price are we called to pay?
Why did the chief official give them new names. Well Daniel meant "God is my judge". Mishael meant, "who is what God is". Hananiah meant "the Lord shows grace". Azariah meant "the Lord helps." Each of their names were directly related to the God that they served It was too Hebraic for the chief official. How could he get them into his service without getting them away from their God. Well he gave them new names with God in it, but it wasn’t the same God that they had learned about at home. The worlds’s view of success involves getting us a little further away from God.
Daniel’s new name Belteshazzer, had the Babylonian god Bel in it. Hananiah’s new name Shadrach and Mishael’s new name Meshach had the Sumerian moon-god in it. Azariah’s new name Abednego had the name of the god Nego in it. It’s something how Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego stuck with the three, but the name Belteshazzer never quite stuck with Daniel. We all know Daniel as Daniel. Part of the reason may be found in the very next verse.
Dan 1:8 But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way. It says Daniel resolved not to defile himself. He was the first to make this resolution. The problem with the food was that a portion of it had been offered to idols and some of the wine was poured on a pagan altar. Animals that God had told them not to eat were used and other animals were not prepared according to the regulations of the Jewish law.
The food on the other hand was the best in the land of Babylon. It looked good and probably tasted good. This was one of the rewards of success. Everybody in the king’s college was eating it. Everybody working in the high level jobs of the king was enjoying it. Well not quite everybody. Daniel made up his mind in advance to be true to his name which was God is my Judge. He was not going to defile himself by eating that which God had forbidden. He didn’t care how good it was, or if everybody else was doing it not.
Here is the key to walking a victorious life in Jesus Christ and be willing to pay the price for the cost of success. You have got to make up your mind in advance not to defile yourself with whatever comes you way. There is not a situation you can come across that God can’t keep you from defiling yourself, if you have determined in advance not to be defiled. Daniel knew who he was and where he was going to stand, before the place of having to decide ever came up.
A man will not be faithful to his wife nor a wife to her husband, if he or she has not decided in advance to be faithful regardless of the cost on that particular day. Those of you who are dating , young or old, if you have not made a decision together with each other openly not to participate in sexual sin, I guarantee you, it’s just a matter of time before you will. Some of you are being tempted by things on your job, if you don’t make up your mind not to be defiled, you are going to give in and you’re going to be sorry.
It took courage on Daniel’s part to make this decision. It was the equivalent of risking a free Ivy League education at Harvard or Yale with all expenses paid just to remain faithful to God in this small area. Some of us would have said, oh God understands, and God I ask you to forgive me for breaking the law in this small area. But God you know I need this position. You know I need this money. You know I need this thing. You know I need this person. Part of the cost of success is trust.
Saints, if Daniel had of done any of these things, there would have been no book of Daniel and certainly no story about Daniel in the lion’s den. As hard as it is to accept, there is no such thing as being unfaithful to God in just this small area. Unfaithfulness is unfaithfulness. Jesus said if we cannot be trusted in the small areas, then we must certainly cannot be trusted with much. What does your behavior say about who you are and what price you’re willing to pay for being a follower of Jesus Christ?
God doesn’t forsake us when we determine to stand firmly for him. Let us grow to the point in which we will be more willing to lose our possessions and our positions, before we lose our character. Sometimes we may lose what we have when we stand for God. Success in God can mean losing a lot of what we have. When Karen Hoagland went to prison, she was successful in God.
How many of us would have risked everything we had to tell the truth when a simple lie, could have covered our skins? She chose to be successful and his been in prison for three years, and completely lost everything, her family, her husband, her home, her retirement savings, her high paying job, her health and her reputation.
We never know in advance which way things will come out, because we are called to walk by faith. Because God loves us, we should know that we should not try to keep anything that he does not want us to have. We never know which door God will open, unless we first reach out and take that step.
Daniel had no way of knowing what the chief official would do. But God already had a plan in mind. Look at 9-10 Now God had caused the official to show favor and sympathy to Daniel, but the official told Daniel, "I am afraid of my lord the king, who has assigned your food and drink. Why should he see you looking worse than the other young men your age? The king would then have my head because of you."
Notice that God can move on anyone’s heart, anytime God wants to. God is in charge and he is always over the circumstances surrounding our lives. We may not know who we are, but God never forgets. God is constantly looking over us. It really didn’t matter to this official if Daniel took a stand for his God or not. He simply wasn’t going to get in trouble for something Daniel wanted to do in serving his God.
Now I want you to notice also that Daniel heard the official’s concern. He didn’t just say, well that’s the way it is and you’ll just have to deal with it. It’s possible for us to take a stand for the Lord, and then expect others to pay the cost for our decisions. That’s not faith, that’s arrogance. No as Christians we should always seek to pay our own way for the decisions that we make. Daniel came up with an alternative to allow the official to escape the fear of the king’s wrath.
Look at Dan 1:11-17 Daniel then said to the guard whom the chief official had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, "Please test your servants for ten days: Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see." So he agreed to this and tested them for ten days. At the end of the ten days they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. So the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead.
Daniel and his three friends did all they could in this situation. They took a risk for God and they ate only the vegetables that had not been defiled. The rest however was left up to God to come and make a way for them. Their eating food in accordance with their beliefs was not going to make that much a difference in 10 days. But with the intervention of the Spirit of God, a tremendous change did take place.
They looked so much better than the other Hebrews who went ahead and ate and asked God to forgive them. They looked so much better than those who justified themselves saying that God understood they needed to eat, and that in the future they would use their position to help the people of God. We do not need the offers of Satan as much as we think we do to obtain in life what we desire to have. The bible tells us to delight ourselves in the Lord, and God will give us the desires of our hearts.
Daniel and the 3 came out so much farther ahead. We don’t lose when we stand with God. One day Peter told Jesus, Lord we have given up everything to follow you. Jesus replied in Mark 10:29, "I tell you the truth, no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields--and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life.
Daniel and the 3 risked losing their Ivy League Education, but ended up with 4.0 average and good looks. Look at verse 1:17 To these four young men God gave knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning. And Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds. At the end of the time set by the king to bring them in, the chief official presented them to Nebuchadnezzar. The king talked with them, and he found none equal to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah; so they entered the king’s service. In every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king questioned them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom.
Daniel, Mishael, Hananiah, and Azariah, all graduated and entered the king’s service, but they did so on their terms. They had come to the king with their commitment to God in tact, and nothing that the king’s college threw at them during the past 3 years had been able to change that commitment. They may have entered the king’s service, but they saw themselves as the servants of their God.
They knew who they were, and their positions in leadership didn’t change it. How can we be sure that the power and prestige they received didn’t go to their heads? We can just follow their names in the book. King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream that he didn’t understand. He asked the astrologers, enchanters, magicians, and wise men to interpret it for him. They said tell us the dream and we will interpret it.
Nebuchadnezzar said no, you tell me the dream, and then I will know that you have the power to interpret it. They couldn’t, so he ordered that every astrologer, enchanter and wise men be put to death. His basis was probably on the basis of fraud. When they came to kill Daniel, he asked them what the situation was. Daniel went and told the king, give me a little time and he would interpret the dream.
No sooner than he left the king, he went to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, and told them, brothers, we have got some serious praying to do or we will be killed with the rest of the Babylonian wise men. Let us pray to God for mercy concerning this mystery. My friends the astrologers were not out searching the stars. They were hoping and praying that the God of Daniel, whoever He might be, would come through for Daniel.
During the night God revealed it all to Daniel. Daniel told the king picture for picture what the king had seen in the dream, and explained everything to the king. King Nebuchadnezzar told Daniel in verse 2:47 Daniel, "Surely your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you were able to reveal this mystery."
The king then gave Daniel a very high position, lavished him with gifts, made him ruler over the province of Babylon and placed him in charge of all its wise men. Keep in mind this all started with Daniel choosing to be a success in God’s eyes by not defiling himself with the king’s food. He’s now in a position to eat whatever food he wanted to eat and do it according to the law of his God.
Daniel remembered not only who he was, but also those who had taken a stand with him when things were not looking so good. He was bold enough to ask the king for one more request. He said king, "I’d feel a lot better doing my job if you’d appoint Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah as my administrators over the province of Babylon." All three of them got the job. My friends this whole thing started a number of years ago, when the four were willing to risk it all by something as small as not eating the king’s food because they wanted to be true to God." A foundation had been laid that would determine the course of their lives.
My friends God is working for you. Don’t let the circumstances around you keep you discouraged. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. You are a child of God. Your life may not be all that you want it to be, but God is saying, I know about it. Come on back home and we’ll get this thing straightened out.
You may have never taken the kind of stand for Jesus Christ that you should have, but God is saying today is not to late to start. Your character can be rebuilt and your name can be restored. No matter what the world may call you, God calls you the one whom He loves. Jesus calls you the one for whom He died. Answer today, in view of life and of eternity, who are you?
Sermon Outline Pastor Rick 6/26/05
The Cost Of Success
Daniel 1:1-10 1 Peter 4:12-19
A. What Is To Be A Success
1. Money, Position, Power, Promotion
2. Successful Superstars
3. We’re Cheering For You
4. Where Does Success Vision Begin
5. The Kickoff From The Grave
6. Character Goes With You To Heaven
B. The Price Tag For Success
1. The Price To Graduate
2. Others Had The Chance
3. The Cost To Follow The Lord
4. Cheap Forgive Me Religion
C. The Israelites In Babylon
1. King Nebuchadnezzar Had A Plan
Daniel 1:3-5 Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring in some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility-- 4young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace. He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians. 5The king assigned them a daily amount of food and wine from the king’s table. They were to be trained for three years, and after that they were to enter the king’s service.
2. Only The Cream Of The Crop
3. Let Us Change You
4. College & Work Disciples
5. God Places You There For A Purpose
6. Pay The Price Where You Are
Daniel 1:6-7 Among these were some from Judah: Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. 7The chief official gave them new names: to Daniel, the name Belteshazzar; to Hananiah, Shadrach; to Mishael, Meshach; and to Azariah, Abednego.
D. Let’s Change Their Names
1. Slick, Sly, Fingers, Dawg, Ears
2. Hootchie Mama, Candy, Foxy
3. Dr., Attorney, CEO, Etc.
4. African From Kenyan
5. Status Of The African American
6. Why Change The Names
7. All The Names Related To God
8. New Names, New God
Daniel 1:8 But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way.
E. Have You Made Up Your Mind
1. Food Offered To Idols
2. Just A Reward Of Success
3. Make Up Your Mind
4. Daniel Surrenders Ivy League
Education
5. Do You Really Need It
6. Unfaithfulness Is Unfaithfulness
7. Would I Truly Risk My Possessions
8. Success May Mean Losing It All
9. It’s A Walk Of Faith
10. Daniel Didn’t Know
Daniel 1:9-10
Now God had caused the official to show favor and sympathy to Daniel, 10but the official told Daniel, "I am afraid of my lord the king, who has assigned your food and drink. Why should he see you looking worse than the other young men your age? The king would then have my head because of you."
F. God Never Gives Up His Control
1. We Pay The Price For Convictions
2. Offer Alternatives
Daniel 1:11-17
Daniel then said to the guard whom the chief official had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, 12"Please test your servants for ten days: Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. 13Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see." 14So he agreed to this and tested them for ten days.
15At the end of the ten days they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. 16So the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead.
3. They Did What They Could
4. God Did The Rest
5. Those Who Compromised Lost Out
6. Jesus Can Reward
Mark 10:29-30 "I tell you the truth," Jesus replied, "no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel 30will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields--and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life.
7. God Brings Them To The Top
17To these four young men God gave knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning. And Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds.
8. They Were In The King’s Place But
Were Servants Of God
G. Times Of Testing Will Come
1. Nebuchanezzar Has A Dream
2. Death & Execution Awaits
3. It’s Time To Pray
4. God Comes Through Again
Daniel 2:47 The king said to Daniel, "Surely your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you were able to reveal this mystery."
5. Daniel Is Rewarded Again
6. Daniel’s Success Rooted In His
Faith In God
7. God Is Working For You
8. Today Is The Day For Your Stand
