Think Long
Marc Jolicoeur · Tidal Church Moncton · September 22, 2024 · The Circle Maker series
Marc Jolicoeur looks at Daniel's life, including the lions' den and his long seasons of waiting, to show how thinking long grows through consistency, patience, and humility in prayer. He invites the church to join a 24-hour prayer vigil and to fast.
More from Marc Jolicoeur · The The Circle Maker series
Topics: Faith, Prayer, Discipleship
Transcript
[0:00] We've been in the middle. There's reason, there's little circles around, Matt's chair in that video is that we have been talking about being circle makers and drawing circles, and we talked about, you know, dreaming big, and we've talked about praying hard. And I have the blessing and the opportunity today to talk about thinking long. And so actually on the screen behind me here, you'll see this is a tweet. You guys know there's a website called Twitter. It used to exist. We don't need to talk about what it is now, but there was a, I used to be on this social media platform a long time ago. And so people often say things like, I always say, or I've often said, et cetera, et cetera. I want you to know, I have often said that life is short. You better play the long game. And I have the receipts to prove it right behind me. Twelve years ago, I said this online, and it's true.
[0:46] It was true for me then, even though I had less gray in my beard and I had a little bit more hair on the top of my head and two less mouth to feed around that time. I stand by it, that life is short and you better play the long game. Now, even though I have often said this, you need to know that I'm a novice. And when it comes to prayer, I am very much a novice. And so I stepped into this with you this morning a little bit with fear and trembling, and I'm preaching this message as much or more to myself than possibly to anybody else. If we wanna follow in the footsteps of Jesus and His followers, we may want to, as we've said already, dream big. We may wanna pray hard, and we'll definitely want to be thinking long. Now, in the book that many of you, if you picked up this book, maybe you've been reading along, maybe you've gotten to this part where it talks about thinking long.
[1:34] Batterson shares a really interesting story in the middle of Lake Vättern, which is a little, there's a little Swedish island, and this island is named Visingsö, which is fun to say. On that island is a mysterious forest of oak trees, or at least it used to be mysterious. Because since people became interested in this area a little over a hundred years ago, it was clear that while oak trees aren't indigenous to this island, no one seemed to know who planted them or why. Then in 1980, the Swedish Navy received a letter from the Swedish Forestry Department reporting that their requested ship lumber was ready, but the Navy didn't even know that it had ordered any such lumber. After a little historical research, it was discovered that in 1829, the Swedish Parliament, believing that it could actually take this particular species of oak tree, which was the one that was most popular at the time for building ships, believing that it could take those trees up to 150 years to mature, and looking into the future, they foresaw a lumber shortage near the beginning of the 21st century.
[2:41] So they ordered that 20,000 such oak trees would be planted on the island of Visingsö and that they'd be protected for the Navy. Now, my friends, that is thinking long. It's a very interesting story, but you might be saying, Marc, that's all well and good, but what does the Bible have to say about thinking long? Well, I'm glad you asked, because the Bible has tons and tons to say about thinking long, so many stories, so many amazing characters. And the one that we're gonna drill into today is a character named Daniel. Now, Daniel is a character who gives his name also to a book, the book that we usually call The Book of Daniel. It's not actually a crazy long book. And most of our Bibles would be about kind of 12 chapters long. If you have a Bible and you want to kind of flip along, we're gonna be reading mostly from the New Living Translation today.
[3:31] You can kind of look that up online. It's gonna be a high flyer, so we're gonna kind of be zooming around the book, but I would encourage you in the coming week, go back, reread some of these things, check our work, you know, see how this is going. The book of Daniel, like I said, 12 chapters long. It is the last of what we call the major prophets. So there's the larger kind of prophetic books. It's near the end of the Old Testament, right before the 12 minor prophets, and therefore, kind of not long before you get into the New Testament, just like the book of Daniel kind of operates in a bit of a liminal space and medium space. So too did Daniel himself. Daniel was born in Jerusalem, raised in Jerusalem for a while, but then he was left. He got taken in what we often call the Babylonian exile.
[4:18] So around 600 years before Christ, Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, they came in, they cleaned house, they took all the money, and they took most of the people, at least the wealthy people, and they brought them back to Babylon. It was a terrible, terrible time in the life of the Jewish people. And in their own writings, when they try to figure out why is this happening, they said, and it says this in the book of Daniel as well, they interpreted this as a punishment, a restorative punishment, but discipline from God. So why are we gonna take a look at this particular story of Daniel this morning? Because thinking long is actually a mindset shift. And shifting mindsets is not actually like a switch, and it's not something that we can do just by wishing for our minds to switch, but we actually need to practice things.
[5:07] And I believe that we can see in Daniel someone who develops an ability to think long by practicing in three ways: practicing consistency, practicing patience, and practicing humility. So we're gonna start by taking a look at practicing consistency. You wanna say consistency? Oh, I like that word. We're gonna get to an absolutely mind-blowing revelation later on in Daniel's story, where it sheds so much light for us on the way that our prayers are heard by God. But before we do, let's take a look at Daniel's greatest hit, Daniel and the lions' den. Everybody know this one? Anybody know this one? A lot of people know this one. Chapter 6 of Daniel, he has been involved in not one at this point, not one, not two, but three miraculous revelations.
[5:57] He's either interpreted dreams or he's interpreted signs for not one, but two different kings. This guy is crushing it. If you've got a problem, call Daniel, he's gonna solve it for you. Okay? That weird thing happens now is the third king enters the scene. And this is where we pick things up. This is actually the very top of Daniel chapter 6. Darius the Mede decided to divide the kingdom of Babylon into 120 provinces, and he appointed a high officer to rule over each province. The king also chose Daniel and two others as administrators to supervise the high officers and to protect the king's interests. Daniel soon proved himself more capable than all the other administrators and high officers. Because of Daniel's great ability, the king made plans to place him over the entire empire. Then the other administrators and high officers began searching for some fault in the way Daniel was handling government affairs.
[6:54] They were jealous. They couldn't find anything to criticize or condemn. He was faithful, always responsible and completely trustworthy. That'd be nice to hear about ourselves, wouldn't it? So they concluded, "Our only chance of finding grounds for accusing Daniel will be in connection with the rules of his religion." So the administrators and high officers, they went to the king and they said, "Long live King Darius. We are all in agreement, et cetera, et cetera, that the king should make a law that will be strictly enforced. Give orders that for the next 30 days any person who prays to anyone, divine or human, except to you, your great majesty, will be thrown into the den of lions. And now, your majesty, issue and sign this law."
[7:40] So Darius signed the law, but when Daniel learned that the law had been signed, get this: he went home, he knelt down as usual in his upstairs room with its windows open toward Jerusalem. He prayed three times a day, just as he had always done, giving thanks to his God. Man, he doubles down. As usual and just as he had always done, as usual and just as he had always done. Thinking long isn't a switch that you can flick. It's a muscle that has to be grown over time. Trees that have to be grown over time.
[8:26] Thinking long is a pattern of life. Of course, everything starts somewhere. So if you're thinking, "Ugh, that's not me," that's okay. We're gonna get there. We're gonna start small with some bite-sized things. Also, if you don't know the rest of the story, they throw in the lions' den. Turns out the lions aren't hungry for him because of an angel, et cetera, et cetera. But they are hungry. The lions eat some other people later on. It's kind of a sad story for them, but it's awesome for Daniel. It's a great story for them. So practicing consistency starts small. Practicing patience, that's the next thing that we're gonna talk about. Daniel is receiving. And we're gonna look at the end of that chapter 12. So actually the very end of the book now, Daniel is receiving yet another vision, and it's either about the end of Judah's exile or maybe it's the end of all things.
[9:14] It's a little bit hard to tell, the book of Daniel, just to be honest with you. If you're gonna go through it, it's a head-scratcher. It's a complicated book with a lot of things that you're gonna be walking away with questions about. But some things, I will argue, are actually abundantly clear. He's told that part of the revelation he's being given is not actually for most people to know. And actually, this is important. We'll circle back to this later. Part of the revelation is not even for him to know, but we read this, the very last couple verses of the book, chapter 12 of Daniel. It says, "Blessed are those who wait and remain until the end of the 1,335 days. As for you, go your way until the end. You will rest.
[10:00] And then at the end of the days, you will rise again to receive the inheritance set aside for you." Now, don't get hung up on the number of days, 1,335. I'm not sure that that's actually the point here. The point is, I'd actually like to key you in to the, what I'm calling the weight of the wait, right? The heaviness of the weight that's being described for him. This Daniel, the one whom God has been speaking to and through so mightily throughout this entire book, he receives word that his own ultimate salvation, his own ultimate fulfilled purpose will take, what, even more waiting. And that he in fact will need to be waiting, get this: beyond death.
[10:48] That's what's being alluded to there. He will rest and then he will rise again. I can't help but think, I mean, what a miraculous thing lies for us. Sometimes we ourselves receive healing, the kind of story we heard today. But ultimately, thinking long means not just, will I be well tomorrow? Thinking long means, will I be with Him in eternity? And thinking long means a lot more than that. The truth is that maybe this wasn't news to Daniel when he received this from the angel. Maybe he actually kind of knew it earlier on in the book. In Daniel 9:1-3, we read this, it says, "During the first year of Darius's reign, I, Daniel, learned from reading the word of the Lord as it was revealed to Jeremiah the prophet, that Jerusalem must lie desolate for 70 years.
[11:47] So I turned to the Lord and pleaded with Him in prayer and fasting. I also wore rough burlap and I sprinkled myself with ashes." Now look at this. Daniel was not only in prayer, but Daniel was in the Scriptures. What it's seeming to say here is that Daniel was reading the scroll of the prophet Jeremiah that's also in the Bible. So Daniel was not only getting these direct revelations, he was not only praying consistently, but he was actually searching the Word. And when he was in there, he discovered something. He discovered that there was a prophecy that God had made through another super legit prophet by the name of Jeremiah, that the time in exile was going to be about 70 years. Now Daniel, he's a pretty smart dude. In fact, it says in here that he is a wise man and so he can do math.
[12:36] So he knows this kind of general equation, which is like 70 years plus however old I am equals a dude who's probably too old to travel back home even when this thing is settled. So Daniel already knows that when he's contending, he's not just contending for himself, he's contending for others. So does that sap his energy? Does that stop him from praying fervently? No, not at all. His consistent practices of prayer helped him to also practice patience, because he knew way in advance, long before the apostle Paul wrote this, he knew the same thing that the apostle Paul would write in Romans 5, which is this: suffering produces perseverance.
[13:24] Perseverance, character, and character, hope. And the rest of that says that hope, my friends, never disappoints. We're gonna talk a little bit more about our own practices of patience in just a few minutes, but now we're gonna move on. So we've talked about practicing consistency, talked about practicing patience or perseverance, but check it out. Daniel also practiced humility. This is now from Daniel 10, starting at verse 12, at the beginning of the chapter. What we won't read is, we'll see that Daniel had been in mourning and fasting for three weeks, mourning and fasting for three weeks. Three weeks. That's a long time to be mourning and fasting. And he gets yet another message.
[14:09] The angel said, "Don't be afraid, Daniel." That's apparently angelic protocol. They have to say it every time. It's contractual. "Don't be afraid. Since the first day you began to pray for understanding and to humble yourself. Since the first day your request has been heard in heaven, I've come in answer to your prayer. But for 21 days, the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia that blocked my way. Then Michael, one of the archangels, came to help me and I left him there with the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia. Now I'm here to explain what will happen to your people in the future." Now again, Daniel, it's a bit of a wild book, and we could get hung up or distracted on a few things.
[14:54] Like for example, what's an archangel versus a regular angel? What's a spirit prince? How far in the future are we talking here, Daniel? Here's what we actually want to see this morning. This same Daniel, the Daniel that you know has been having these wildly close encounters with God. All along this Daniel, he didn't have assurance that God had heard him in prayer. This time. Maybe that resonates for people this morning who have had these mountaintop experiences with God, who've had these answers. But now when we're going back, God, are You listening this time? It's been a while. Nonetheless, this Daniel, he practiced consistency. He practiced patience.
[15:40] And when he did, in fact, end up receiving assurance of this, how long, three weeks later, he is told that, in fact, it wasn't three weeks after he started praying that his message was heard. But from the very first day that he began praying, and not only pray, but to humble himself in prayer, his prayer was heard. What's more, not just heard, it says that his prayer was answered at that time. Actually, a very similar truth shows up a few chapters earlier, chapter 9 of Daniel. It says, this is Daniel speaking, "I went on praying and confessing my sin and the sin of my people, pleading with the Lord my God for Jerusalem. And as I was praying, Gabriel, whom I had seen in an earlier vision, he came swiftly to me at the time of the evening sacrifice.
[16:29] He explained to me, 'Daniel, I have come here to give you insight and understanding. The moment, not just the day, the moment that you began praying, a command was given. Now, I am here to tell you what it was, Daniel. It says here, listen carefully so you can understand: you are very precious to God.'" And this morning, I just feel like maybe you need to hear this, 'cause I need to hear this. Daniel was very precious to God. You are very precious to God. He is. He's not sitting on an answer to prayer because you are not loved.
[17:15] You, my friends, are loved. Daniel was able to practice consistency. He was able to practice patience, and he was able to practice humility. But what did practicing humility actually look like in Daniel's life? Well, first of all, we have to kind of just split up humility into two different kinds of humility. There's humility of knowing, and then there's humility of being. Let's talk about humility of knowing for a moment. Church, there are absolutely core beliefs of the Christian faith and the life that we as a church make absolutely no bones about. You can find them. They're on our website. They're publicly linked. We talk about them from the platform. Actually, it would've been a few months ago, at the beginning of one of our worship services here, Pastor Jeremy led us through a corporate reading of what's known as the Apostles' Creed, which does a really good job of kind of summarizing a number of things that were like, "Hey, these aren't up for debate.
[18:10] These are what we believe to be true." Absolute truth is an absolutely fundamental part of the Christian life. Sometimes though, some of us are tempted to put way too many things over into that bracket, into absolute certainty, not realizing that for a lot of things, it's actually just okay not to know. And that sucks. That's a brutal truth sometimes, but it's actually quite freeing to know that we don't need to know everything. Think of how many things, if you reread this book, how many things Daniel didn't know until it was revealed to him. But then maybe look again. I just think of how many things Daniel probably never knew: what happened between Michael and the spirit of the Prince of Persia.
[18:58] Like, was it a knock-down, drag-out battle? Was it more of an arm wrestle kind of thing? Was this kind of like a, you know, thumb war? Like, what actually, why did it take 21 days? Is it actually that far away? You know, do angels have a speed limit for how fast they can fly? I'm kidding, but I'm also kind of not kidding. The point is, is that there's things that we just cannot know, but we do know what it says in 2 Peter 1, 2-3, His divine power. God's divine power has given us everything that we need for a godly life through our knowledge of Him who has called us by His own glory and goodness. If you know Jesus, you know all that you need to know.
[19:44] So that's humility of knowing. But what about humility of being? Now, I've already mentioned the Apostle Paul. He lived, you know, not long after Christ, probably shared some birthdays together. In fact, when he was writing to some of the earliest followers of Jesus in the Greek city of Philippi, he admonished them to follow in Jesus's footsteps. He said, "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but rather in humility value others above yourselves, looking not to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of others." Practicing humility of being in the context of thinking long with our prayers means expanding our frame for the needs of others so that we pray for those needs as much as, or perhaps even more than, our own.
[20:40] When Daniel became aware of that mathematical formula I told you about, you know, 70 plus blah equals not sure, he still fervently prayed. Was Daniel praying for himself? I tell you what, you can read through the rest of Daniel chapter 9, and you tell me. We've been hearing about honing the circle maker. Did he pray for rain for himself or for his community? Was Daniel praying for himself or for the people of God? Jesus, when He was at the end of His earthly ministry? Listen, the Gospels tell us He spent an awful lot more time praying for the needs of other people than He did for Himself. And why is, that's the kind of humility That's being modeled for us.
[21:29] Humility of being is key to thinking long, because listen, life, at least Life 1.0, is short. And so you have to play the long game. We have to pray the long prayers. Now, you may be saying, "Mark, it's all well and good to say that Daniel practiced consistently, patiently, and humbly. But what did he actually do? What did his practices look like? And how can they apply to me here, now?" Be irresponsible for me to, you know, tell you exactly what his life looked like and exactly how you can model it. Totally, because I just talked about humility of knowing. There's some things that we just don't know about what his context was like, but there's a bunch of things that we can know because the Bible makes them clear to us and we can trust.
[22:19] Here are some of the ways that he actually practiced. First of all, it says that he prayed three times a day, morning, noon, and night. He used certain prayer postures, right? It says that he kneeled, says that he laid down, and he fasted. He fasted in a couple of different kinds of ways. Now, I don't have time this morning to go through these things in detail. Take a look at, you know, how we might talk about praying three times a day as a model, how we might use different prayer postures. And I am gonna talk a little bit about fasting, but the good news is that this past winter, we actually spent a whole series talking about these kinds of practices. And we found it so important for us. We heard so many stories of people who had life change from this. We wanted to make it kind of portable going forward.
[23:06] So if you have questions about these, you'd like to dive in a little bit deeper. If you go to MW church slash habits, you'll find a landing page that has kind of not only the four sermons that we preached during that time, but also some kind of helpful resources for you. I would encourage you to check those things out. In thinking long, each and every one of you have people and situations that God is calling you towards, to pray consistently, to pray patiently, and to pray humbly. Each of you have that. Maybe you haven't noticed it yet, but God is putting them on your heart. We, as a church, have at least three different areas that we're leaning towards, as you heard Pastor Jim talk about earlier. Next Sunday is gonna be a huge Sunday in the life of our church as we hear more about the new mission and vision and values of the church as they're unrolled and, obviously, yes, the new name.
[23:58] And so we pray that these new, as they're unrolled, these things would take deep root in people's lives. They would connect, that they would not meet with resistance, but they would meet with receptivity and that people would be on board with it. We're praying for that. You also heard that now, within the next couple of weeks, we'll be launching the church in Shediac and relaunching a church in Miramichi. We are praying that these churches will take deep root in the communities where they are, that they're not only impactful for the people who are there now, but that they'll be impactful for people who are there for generations to come. We're looking for the kind of life change that God wants. We're praying for that. And what you may or may not know is that we have another circle goal that we're praying towards, which is that for these churches, they continue up the eastern and the northern shore of New Brunswick as we keep planting churches along the way to reach those communities.
[24:47] And then we want to go all the way into Quebec, because we believe there are people in those communities who need to find the hope and holiness of Jesus Christ. And so that continued dotted route is something that we're praying towards. And so here's where I'm gonna lean pretty hard. If this is your church, listen, there's some people here this morning who are just like, "Man, what did I sign up for?" You're welcome to just, you're always welcome just to be here and hang out. But I'm talking to you, if this is your church, if it has been for a few months or for decades, if this is your church. This coming weekend, we have an opportunity that I'm gonna ask you don't miss. We have a prayer vigil be launching, starting next Saturday morning at 8:00 AM, running 24 hours to Sunday morning at 8:00 AM, leading right into the launch of MW 2.0, whatever we're calling it.
[25:40] Well, you'll find out then. But we're praying for these three things. Listen, it's gonna be an opportunity to pray for all kinds of things, the things that God's placing on your heart, but to come together as a church and to pray specifically to those three things we've talked about. So if you go to the website, MW Church, you can click on the link and sign up. You can sign up for different hours. I wanna say it might be inconvenient for you, and that's totally okay. Inconvenience, not a problem. Almost a spiritual discipline. So it's okay if it's hard for you, you can do it. There are some people, it's impossible for you to come here. There's actually gonna be a virtual time that you can sign up for as well. So that for those of you, we want you to be here if you can't be here. But if it's just hard, guys, let's try to make it happen. And one step further, here's where I'm gonna go even further.
[26:27] I'm getting towards the edge here. Now, some of you fast regularly. Some of you have never fasted before. Some of you have health reasons to not fast. I'm only talking to those of you. Again, you could do it, but it's inconvenient or it's just not been a part of your life right now. If you have a piece of paper or if you're more of a cell phone person, I'm telling you, we're gonna leave a little bit of space here, but 30 seconds. And in that time, I'm gonna ask that you write down a time this week, make a plan before you leave here, of when you will fast, what you'll fast. Whether that's gonna be food, whether that's gonna be skipping one meal, whether that's gonna be skipping for a day, whether, again, that's not something that you can do for health reasons. There's other things you can fast. But listen, we need God to show up in a mighty way, okay?
[27:15] And this is an all-hands-on-deck scenario. This isn't pastors, this isn't key volunteers. This is a church. We're talking about drawing circles. This is our circle. So Holy Spirit, as You call us and as You draw us towards Yourself, You show us that You are a God who has consistently helped people to dream big and to pray hard, but also to think outside themselves and to think long. So Lord, we need You to draw us even further along, to draw us out of our comfort zones and to draw us closer to You for the sake of the world.
[28:02] So even right now, just for these next few moments, I'm telling you, I'm gonna encourage you guys: Take out your phones, grab a pen, make some notes just between you and God. But on behalf of more than just you and God, make a plan for how you can join us in prayer this coming week.