Bucket Full of Grace

Daniel 12: A Pattern and a Promise Because this is a book for all ages and all peoples, studying the book of Daniel can really have you following rabbit-trails all over the place as Pastor Brandon mentioned last week, so you have to always bring yourself back to the thought, this scripture is here for a reason, to teach me, to encourage me, to train me in righteousness, to bring hope and a promise , not just for flexing my intellectual muscles or making me proud of my charted timeline of the prophetic 490 years [70 weeks] or the correlations between the anti-Christ and current world leaders.    What is important to the Lord, is your relationship with Him and your relationship with the Father.  Find what He is saying to you every time you study the Word.  And we want to find what He is saying to us in Daniel 12. Before we dive into Daniel 12, I want to bring us back through the whole book of Daniel to see a pattern and a promise . There is an obvious pattern in Dani...

I don't like the "Daniel Fast!"     Reading this title might make you think that I don't like the "Daniel Fast" because it's hard and I like my sugary foods, meat and dairy.  That is not what I meant by the title, although it is true.  I love meat and eggs and one week into the "Daniel Fast" I miss them.  However, my dislike of the "Daniel Fast" has nothing to do with it being difficult and being a challenge.  After trying this out for a week, I notice that it really hasn't been a biblical fast for me.  I have done water only fasts quite a few times throughout my Christian experience and they have been powerful times of prayer and mediation; freeing up the time that I had been spending preparing food, eating, and cleaning it up and using that time for prayer, mediation, and biblical study.  Every time I have done a water-fast I have felt like my emotions and my own thoughts get out of the way and I can hear the Lord the most clear...

It’s easy to miss the point.  It’s easy to not hear what the Lord is saying to you in your inner life.  It’s easy to listen to the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den and say well that’s a good story.  It’s easy to do this and that but not make a real substantive change in your eternal life.  Your life will be eternal, it’s just a question of where that eternity is spent… Can we have open hearts and minds today to learn from the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den? Can we invite the Holy Spirit into our midst to teach us, to give me the words and give us all the ears to hear? God arranged this to happen in the life of Daniel for so many reasons, and you are one of those reasons, for you to hear this today, for you and I to have a chance to change, to come closer to who we could be in Jesus Christ… if only we would really have ears to hear what He is saying to us through His Word today. Prayer Father, make this moment real and present in our lives today.  I see the ...