Hey, that's not John. No, it's not. But I bring you greetings from John and his family. Um It's been a long time since they actually were on a true family vacation and they're having a great time. I can't tell you where they are because it's a secret. But tonight they're going to a Luau. So I'm guessing Ohio, right? The famous home of the famous Ohio Luau. Anyway, thank you, Mission Grove for worshiping with us this morning. We're gonna look at the story of Daniel and the lions den. Now this is a pretty familiar story for a lot of you. But I thought why not turn it into a movie? It's gonna make, it would make a great movie. It's got all the pieces in it. And this is what I taught for many years at Cedarville University in video and film production. And honestly, my favorite class of all time was actually screenwriting. I love that challenge of teaching students how to put words on a paper that actually ended up being a visual story on a big screen. It's actually a little trickier than you think. But I thought, you know what this would make a, a great screenplay. So let's write the screenplay this morning of Daniel in the lion's den. And you can follow along if you brought a Bible or have a tablet or something in Daniel. Six, most uh screenplays have what's called the three act structure. The first act is the setup and exposition. It's where you introduce the characters and you lay the groundwork for the plot. You do some foreshadowing of what's to come. The second act is called the rising conflict. This is where the evil plot starts to show itself and the, and the conflict starts to ratchet up a little bit. And then finally the third act which has many different names. I call it the no turning back now because at this point it's either do or die. Uh I always taught my students the worst thing you could do is get to the third act and then have a compromise where we just agree to disagree. That's not good drama. So basically, when you get to act three, it's either overcome the evil or the evil overcomes you. OK? And we're gonna see that today with the story of Daniel. Now we'd start our movie with the graphic based on a true story because it is and it gives us credibility in writing the screenplay. We're gonna take some creative license. OK? Because we weren't actually there. We don't really have a word by word dialogue of what took place, but we can guess what was in the minds of a lot of these characters and then we'll uh put words in their mouth and hopefully make it, make it seem possible this could have happened this way. So keep that in mind as we go through this, uh every good movie needs a good premise. John likes to call the premise the big idea in church. And so our premise today is evil men can scheme but God is ultimately in control. Evil men can scheme but God is ultimately in control. So let's get right into it. Act one. Daniel is favored. You. Remember Daniel? We, we last saw him as a teenager in chapter two and he was working with uh King Nebuchadnezzar. He was brought into uh uh uh he was an exile from the land of Judah. He was basically a slave, but he was chosen to be part of their educational reed education program. He did very, very well. And uh he actually got his political stamp on things when he actually was able to interpret the dream from Nebuchadnezzar. As we heard a couple of weeks ago from John's sermon on that uh we're gonna fast forward now 70 years and now Daniel is most likely in his eighties and he's now the wise old man of the civilization of the culture, but he's climbed quite well in respect in terms of acknowledgment. Think of him. If you're a Star Wars fan, he could be maybe like the Yoda character. OK. So wisdom, wisdom I teach. So I, I don't know. I, I always wonder why Yoda had such bad syntax backwards. I talk was he dropped on his head as a child? I don't know. But we're just going to let that go. Daniel was not dropped on his head as a child and he actually could speak good language. And so he was highly respected by King Darius. Now, Darius is an interesting study too because he's the more popular king when it was predicted in Nebuchadnezzar's dream that the Babylonians would be overthrown by the Medes and the Persians. And now we have the Persians ruling and Darius wanted to be more of a king of the people. So he didn't really want to be like a dictator, autocrat like Nebuchadnezzar, he wanted to be more popular. So he set up 100 and 20 provinces to rule the land of Persia, the kingdom, which was the most civilized nation in the world at that time. And over these 120 states, if you would, he put a say trap. Now, what's a say trap? Say trap is pretty common only to the Persian culture. It's a word you're not going to find in any other culture, but it basically means protector of the realm. Now, if that doesn't sound like it's right out of a marvel movie, right? So Thor was the protector of the realm with his brother Loki as they ruled the land of a garden. Ok. Ok. Ok. And I just want to point out the difference between this Bible story and the Marvel movies, which I enjoy. But those are just fiction written by the Creative Mind of Stan Lee where this is based on a true story. All right, just keep that in mind. So as we go through this, uh Daniel was favored by Darius. He was not well liked by the others traps. He was, they were actually threatened by him. How did Daniel become such a favored soul? In fact, Darius actually set up in this realm of government over these 120 provinces. He set up three presidents that would rule these 120 states. So to be a president was to be like the second seat in power next to King Darius himself and Darius made it well known that he loved Daniel so much. He was going to make him the head president over the other two presidents. And this did not go over very well. We can get a clue as to how Daniel rose to power in Daniel six verse three, where we read this in verse three, then this Daniel became distinguished above all the other presidents and say traps because of an excellent spirit was in him. Other translations say outstanding spirit, capable spirit, uh great ability as a leader. He was apparently very good at, at running a country he had those kind of skills, administrative skills and the king planned to set him over the entire kingdom. How did Daniel become this ex this excellent spirit? Well, that brings us to a biblical bullet point number one, Daniel was really a man of character. He was an honest man, a faithful man. He was a man of integrity and I know integrity is kind of tossed around today. It's kind of loosely defined with other people. But really, he was the definition of integrity. The English word integrity comes from the word integer, which is a whole number versus being like a fraction or a divided. Daniel was whole. He was a whole person. There was no pretense to him. He was a weiss a wig for sure. Anybody know what a Weisser wig is. I'll start, you finish what you see is. Thank you. What you see is what you get. That was Daniel. No pretense, no mask, no pretending. Uh He says what he means and he means what he says, good men want to be like him. Evil men seem to be threatened by him and to describe the opposite of that, the opposite of integrity. We could go to the D section of the dictionary where you'd find words to describe the others, traps, devious, deceitful, dishonest, double minded, duplicitous, defrauding. These are the colleagues. These are the coworkers that Daniel had to put up with, which brings our screenplay to act two. Daniel was framed. Now the others traps were threatened by Daniel. They didn't want to be ruled by Daniel, the Hebrew, the Exile. Uh, and so they, they formed a plan. They said to themselves there's got to be, this guy is too good to be true. He's just, there's gotta be something there, there's gotta be some skeletons in his closet. Let's go find him. And so they bugged his house and they said, well, I don't know, they didn't really have electronic devices. I don't know. Maybe they threw bugs into his house. No, probably not. But they, they, they checked him out, they listened through the walls. They followed him to see who he was keeping company with. They charted his, his, his day, what he would do. They checked his financials for sure, because it was very common even back then if you got to a seat of, of significant power, most likely you had paid some people off along the way. There were some payouts and they were going to find them and they want to bring Daniel down. And so they did this exhaustive search of Daniel and they found drum roll. Nothing. Couldn't come up with a thing. This guy didn't even get a parking ticket growing up. Ok. He was never late for class as a student. I mean, he was just, I'm telling you they just, he's too good to be true. And so they're very frustrated as we get to Daniel. Six verse four, then the presidents and the say traps sought to find a complaint against Daniel with regard to the kingdom, but they could find no ground for complaint or any fault because he was faithful and no heir or fault was found in him. Pause for just a second. Isn't that a wonderful legacy to leave? Warren Wisby has a commentary on Daniel and I love what he says. Wouldn't it be great if we all could be remembered for being too consistent and too faithful in how we lived out our lives? Oh, that Daniel. He just prayed too much. Wow. What a knock, huh? And then they get frustrated. So, in verse five, they get real creative. Anybody got any ideas? Well, let's look at verse five, then these men said, we shall not find any ground for complaint against this Daniel unless we find it in connection with the law of his God. Ah, an opening a crack in the door and they concocted this really crazy scheme and they thought, you know what? I don't know if Darius is gonna go for this, but let's try to sell him on the idea that we can make Darius like the top God of all gods. And let's do it for like 30 days. They have to do it and if they don't do it, then we'll make this ridiculous punishment that we're gonna see here in just a second. So they brought this plan to Darius using flattery deception. Look at verse six. Then these presidents and Satraps came by agreement to the king. There's your first lie and said to him. O king Darius live forever a lie. They didn't want him to live forever. They wanted him to die so they could take over the precepts and the say traps, the councilors and the governors are all agreed. Really? All of you, all of you, I mean, there's three presidents and how many were at the meeting? Oh, there was a president missing from that meeting yet. Here we all are in agreement. They should establish an ordinance and enforce an injunction. We'll talk about that in just a second. Whoever makes petition to any God or man for 30 days except to you. O King shall be cast into the den of lions. What if we were writing this as a true screenplay? And we were pitching this to Hollywood studio, the studio would say now you gotta rewrite that. That's not believable that no, nobody's gonna buy that. You're actually gonna make uh a worship of the king punishable by death. Come on guys, come up with a little better device than that. So, and yet that's exactly what they came up with and they sold it to Darius. He bought it because I think if we use modern language, I think they use the word. Awesome. Probably right. So let me just speak like a millennial for a second. It's kind of scary. Oh, you're so awesome. You're the awesome is awesome. Really? You're like, really, really awesome. You're so awesome. I'm sorry. Millennials. I know. That's not really, you, I know, but I had to pick on somebody. So there, there's nobody more awesome than you, Darius. You deserve it, man. You, you should have like, your own month where everybody just bows to you and worships you. Yeah. And let's incentivize the people to do it because if they don't do it, let's come up with a punishment that fits the crime. Any ideas. How about uh yeah, in the back a fine, a fine. They're, they're poor people. They don't even gonna pay a fine. They'll throw them in jail. Big deal. What else? What else? We got lashes by a whip? Oh, that's pretty good. I like it. I like it. It's got potential. We'll write that down. All right. Hashish, you got an idea, right? Den of lions. Throw them in a den of lions and let them be eaten to death. Yes, that's the perfect punishment for this perfect crime. Is it really? Is it there he is. He bought it. How did he buy it? The flattery got to him. Can you see Darius sitting there going, you know what I am? I am the coolest, you know what I am the coolest king ever. Let's be honest, nobody like Nebuchadnezzar. Am I right? Raise your hand if you like Nebuchadnezzar. See no hands. Nobody liked him. He was a tyrant. He was not likable. I am likable. I am the cool king. People love me. When I go out, they, they cheer me, they praise me. I deserve this. I deserve a month where everybody just bows to me and worships me and only me. Yeah. And what's the punishment again? What? No, nobody's gonna be that stupid to do that. Right. So that's fine. Let's sign it. Should I read it first? No, Darius, it's just boilerplate, worship you or go to AD L stuff, just boilerplate stuff. Just sign it. Don't worry about the lawyers. We'll work it out later. So Darius signs it into law, signs it into law irrevocable law. And now we've got a problem because Daniel isn't gonna, isn't gonna compromise. Brings us up to biblical point number two. Daniel was a man of conviction. Remember teenage Daniel wouldn't eat the food, wouldn't wear the clothes, wouldn't take the name. He stayed true to the living God. No doubt. He heard about this very quickly. And the word went out. Everybody was told 30 days we're gonna worship Darius. Nobody else, anybody bows down to anybody else. Praise to anybody else even mentions any other God. Dana lions. And I'm guessing 99.99% of the people obeyed that law pretty well. Not Daniel couldn't do. It was a man of conviction. Wouldn't compromise. I wonder if Daniel ever just reached a point of frustration being the wise old sage that he was. I wonder if he ever was like guys, I am so frustrated with you all. I am just sick of putting up with your nonsense. That's a church word nonsense. Ok. I'm just sick of this. You guys are idiots. I mean, that's what I'd say if I was Daniel, but he couldn't, he, he's gonna do it anyway. And you know, you think about it, he could have gone incognito for 30 days. I'm gonna take a trip, I'll be gone for 30 days. Nope, could have closed, his blinds, could have closed his doors. Seen Daniel haven't seen him, got his doors closed. Nope just went right about his business of conviction of serving the one true God because he was a man of conviction and he was a man of integrity. So they knew they had him, they knew it, they knew when they came up, they knew the moment Darius put his signature on that edict. They knew they had Daniel. It didn't take long. I don't think that it was a, a long investigation. I think they caught him in the act of praying and they brought him before Darius. And now we pick it up the story in verse 13. Then they answered and said before the king, Daniel, who was one of the exiles from Judah, by the way, seriously, you gotta keep throwing shade on Daniel whenever you can. Right. You gotta keep reminding Darius. You know, he's not one of us, doesn't think like us, doesn't behave like us. He's not one of us anyway. So, you know what he did? You know what he did? Hey, you know what he did? Well, he pays no attention to you, King. That's another lie. He pays no attention to that injunction you've signed. That's actually true. But he makes his petition three times a day. Oh, what a criminal? What an outlaw praises three times a day. If he prayed once a day, uh we might just scold him but no, he prays three times a day was just kill him. Ok? It doesn't make any sense. Now, we get a true sense of Darius's relationship with Daniel and we're gonna do it using what we call the Hitchcock dolly. Let me teach you a film term. A dolly is when you move the camera in very quickly on a close up to somebody's face. Alfred Hitchcock started this movement and he's one of the greatest early directors we ever had. He would use it like in a court of law where the witness was about to reveal the true murderer. And so then he's about and the real killer and then they would dolly in on the face and get a close up as he'd say the line of who was guilty. OK? So we, we put that dolly on Darius. Now as we go to verse 14, let's take a look at verse 14. Then the king, when he heard these words, which was much distressed and he set his mind to deliver Daniel. He labored till the sun went down to rescue him. Darius loved Daniel, loved him. No doubt about it. Thought highly of him. Absolutely. He was gonna make him the second in command of the greatest civilization in the world. Think about it gonna make him his number two. Wow, what have I done? There? Had to be a moment where Darius is like, what have I done? I did not see this coming and he set his mind to changing it. Can't change it. It's in law, it's irrevocable. Wow. Can you picture the scene? Harsh lighting, emotional music tearing up. What have I done? How stupid am I? And then he says something real curious in verse 16. Look at 16. He says, but may your God whom you serve continually deliver you? Hm. Interesting. Kind of like kind of like Hans Solo in Star Wars. Remember that point where Hans didn't buy into any of this Jedi stuff, the force stuff. The just give me my money. Let me go stuff. But yet when they were going into the big battle at the end of episode four, he turns to Luke and he goes, hey, Luke, may, may the force be with you? What, what's that Hans? What'd you say? I said, may the force be with you? All right. He's one of us. Right. Well, that's Darius. May your God, whom you serve continually, he recognizes that deliver you. Wow. So Daniel's brought to the lions den. But before we get there, there's a technique in screenwriting that's called parallel storylines. Think of it as train tracks where you have two stories going together at the same time. But eventually these stories are going to intersect with each other. In fact, it's not uncommon in a screenplay to have three parallel storylines going and that's what we have here. We have Daniel going into the lion's den. We have Darius uh just distressed and anguished about it trying to figure a way out which he can't. And then we have the say traps over here, other side of the city and you know what they're doing, they're throwing a party. Oh man, this is the greatest day ever. Ding Dong. The witch is dead. Do we have got him? We are gonna kill our, our biggest political enemy and it's not even against the law. We're doing it under the law. There's not even gonna be an investigation. We don't even have to form a crew of assassination. We don't even have to take him out and disappear him. This is, this is we can do this in public because we got King Darius decided in the law. That's the evil laugh. By the way, they are having such a great time. They are throwing a party at the biggest mansion of the say traps they knew and there's music and there's too much drinking going on and they're making jokes and they're toasting each other and they're mocking Darius for being so stupid and so gullible. And they're making jokes about the Hebrew. Do you think the lions will fight over? Who gets the biggest piece? Do you think? You know he's a Hebrew? Do you think they have a problem eating Kosher meal on Friday? This is so funny. All that while Daniel is being thrown into the lion's den, which brings us to act three. No way out here's Daniel facing off with these hungry lions. Now, we don't really know what happened because the author himself doesn't even tell us what he went through to be. There doesn't really spend any time on it in the scriptures, which is amazing to me, but we are taking some creative license so we can figure it out. But here's the problem growing up in Sunday school, I'm gonna show you this is the picture of what most people think of lions, right? I remember in Sunday school, the Flann gra and they had Daniel sitting there petting the lion. Oh, pretty lion. Pretty lion. Who's a good boy. Who's a good boy. You're a good boy. I don't think so. I think the lions look more like this. Scary, really scary. Remember the Bible talks about how the devil is the lion going about seeking whom he may devour? I think that's exactly what we had here. Lions were circling Daniel all night and they were just growling. Yeah, the problem was they couldn't open their mouth so be aligned for a second. And you're having a conversation with other lions and you're like, oh, here comes to a Hebrew. I'm so hungry but I, I can't open my mouth. Leo, can you open your mouth? I can't open my mouth either. Well, how are we gonna eat this Hebrew if we can't open your mouth? I'm just so frustrated. It was God close the mouth of the lions. They couldn't open their mouth. Wow. Now we understand that Daniel never was really afraid because biblical 0.3 Daniel was a man of courage. We don't know exactly what he was going through, but we know that he willingly went into the den of lions. Didn't complain, didn't argue because he trusted the living God that had brought him to this point. He served God faithfully and he trusted God for the consequences. Right now. The real drama is back in Darius's bedroom that night. Look at Daniel eight verse 18. Then the king went to his palace and spent the night fasting, no diversions were brought to him, concubine, sorry, and slept and sleep, fled from him. And then at the break of day, the king arose and, and went in haste to the den. All lions. He couldn't wait to get back and see if Daniel's God had saved him. And in verse 20 as he came near to the den where Daniel was, he cried out in a tone of anguish. He may have just sacrificed his friend. And the king declared to Daniel Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you continually serve, been able to deliver you from the lions. Daniel. Daniel, are you alive? Are you alive? Long pause. I'm reminded, one of my favorite movies had to throw this in. It's from Apollo 13. Anybody see Apollo 13? Tom Hanks, directed by Ron Howard. Wonderful movie. Good family film. True story, by the way, based on a true story. There you go. It's the space shuttle or the spacecraft that was supposed to land on the moon part of the Apollo mission going to the moon explosion in the main capsule. They had to jettison the main capsule and go into the lunar module and try to put the lunar module back to a place where it could travel back to earth. It was no longer shall we land on the moon now? It was that can we even bring these astronauts back alive? And it was a, it was a miraculous story of engineering and how they pieced the thing together and had enough oxygen to get them back to earth. But they reached the scariest point because now they had to re enter the earth's atmosphere. And if you know anything about space travel coming back into the earth's atmosphere is the scariest time of all. Because when you hit the earth's atmosphere, it creates a lot of friction and a lot of heat. And if you don't enter at the right angle and the right trajectory and the right speed, you'll actually burn up, you'll burn alive. And so here we have the astronauts entering the atmosphere and they lose radio transmission with Houston because of the atmosphere and they're going to be out of contact with Houston for at least a minute and a half. That's normal. Two minutes. That's not bad. And so here we pick up the scene as the entire world is watching a, let's play the video clip. This is Houston. N that's four minutes, Odyssey. Uh Houston. Do you read this evening at anybody else tearing up? Gets me every time goose bumps. That's the moment Darius had. That's the moment Darius had. He's like, Daniel, are you still alive? In verse 21? Daniel says to the King O King live forever. There is Daniel. Daniel, you're alive. Daniel is alive. You guys, Daniel is alive as God saved him. And the words Daniel uses are important. He says, oh, King live forever. Daniel is not blaming Darius for being in the lion's den. He knows it wasn't him. My God sent his angel and shut the lion's mouth and they have not harmed me because I was found blameless before him. And also before you o king, I have done no harm. Daniel is, I'm, I'm loyal to you, Darius. You're my king. I will serve you faithfully, but I will worship my God. First and foremost, Daniel faithful to the one true God loyal to King Darius. But now we go to the other parallel storyline. Let's cut back to the house of the say traps. All right, early morning, just everybody flopped around on the living room floor, passed out, drank too much partied, too hard sleeping, snoring. You get the picture. Little messenger boy comes from the palace. Probably a teenager. Maybe an intern. I don't know. They probably sent one of the lowest of the low because this is a pretty scary little message. And he's like, excuse me. Mm. Excuse, excuse me, your royal highnesses. Excuse me. Yeah, I have a message. Um What is it? Boy, you woke us up. What's the message? Uh uh It's from the, it's not me, it's from the palace. Um Daniel is alive. What? I don't think I heard you right. Daniel. Daniel. Daniel survived the night. He's alive. Hitchcock Dolly. This can't be and, and, and there's a, there's a second part to the message. Uh oh, King Darius wants to see you all at the palace like now right now. Like now, can you, can you picture any kind of music that would fit here? I mean, we could get real hoagy and go dun dun Du. Right. And I'm, I'm wondering, we don't know I wonder if they just started to flee. I wonder if they just packed a suitcase quick and that, and that Darius had to send soldiers out to hunt him down because I can't think they're gonna show up at the palace. Right. Because Darius asked him to be there, but they didn't think they was gonna throw him a sole banquet. Right. Hey, Daniel's alive. Come celebrate. No. And we're going to read verse 24. But before we do, I want to warn the parents if brought young Children this morning, this is the part where you might want to cover their ears or cover their eyes because verse 24 is not PG rated. It's not even PG 13. I don't even know how we'd film this scene without getting a, an R rating. So maybe we'd have to do it with just offscreen, maybe with just sound effects. But let's look at verse 24 and the king commanded and those men who had maliciously accused Daniel were brought and cast into the den of lions. And this is where it gets pretty ugly. They, their Children and their wives and before they reached the bottom of the den, the lions overpowered them and broke all their bones in pieces. I mean, these were some hungry lions. I mean, think about it from the lion's point of view. They're like, hey, my jaw works. I can open my mouth again. Leo, how about you? Yeah, I'm hungry. Let's go. And they just devoured these, say traps quickly and, and, and violently. Now, is it tragic that the Children were involved? Yeah. Absolutely. We don't know if the Children were good Children or bad Children. We don't know. But did they deserve this? No, we don't think so. But here's the thing. And a lot of theologians have pointed this out. It was these very say traps that put this condition into the edict. If you break the king's law and it's punishable by death. It's not only you that gets punished, but it's your entire family that gets punished. Who I'm reminded of that verse in Proverbs, I think it's Proverbs 11 verse eight, the righteous is delivered from trouble and the wicked walks into it instead. Wow. Or Psalm 37 verse 12, the wicked plots against the righteous and gnashes his teeth at him. But the Lord laughs at the wicked for. He sees that his day is coming. Wow. Now let's go back and finish off this story because in Daniel's point of view, it's a really happy ending. Let's look at Daniel six verse 26. Here's king Darius again, I make a decree that in all my royal Dominion people are to tremble in fear before the God of Daniel. Wow. For He is the living God. This is Darius saying this and during forever, his kingdom shall never be destroyed. His Dominion shall be to the end. He delivers. And he rescues, look at his testimony from Darius. He works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth. He who has saved Daniel from the power of the lions. And finally we get a nice closure to our movie verse 28. So this Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus, the Persian. Wow, roll the credits hold for applause. As John likes to say, let's land the plane. What did we learn from Daniel? Well, we're going to do this very quickly. Daniel chose three things. Here. We're gonna talk about them very fast. So if you take a note, you got to write fast. But here we go. Number one, Daniel chose commitment over compromise. He could have taken the easier way. He could have made excuses. He could have said, you know what? I didn't, I didn't ask to be captured as a slave. So I'm just gonna go with the flow and become a Babylonian. Nope. Stay true commitment over compromise too. He chose obedience over opportunities. Daniel wasn't seeking to become famous, wasn't seeking to become popular or rich or powerful. He chose the road less traveled. He didn't know what it would bring him. He thought he probably would end his life very quickly as a teenager. But you know what if I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna go out serving the true God. He obeyed first and foremost and he trusted God with the outcome. And then third he chose faithfulness over favor. And this is probably the greatest lesson of all for us to learn. Name. 17 says the Lord is good ad a stronghold in the day of trouble and he knows them who trust in him. Matthew 25 talks about the parable of the 10 talents and how we each given talents to put into practice. And if we don't shame on us and at the very end, it says, well done. Thou good and faithful servant, God cherishes faithfulness, I think over against almost everything else. Obedience. Yes, trust, absolutely faithfulness is where we need to land. So what can we do to be more like Daniel? Well, it's pretty simple, but it's pretty important. Be faithful to your spouse, be faithful to your Children, be faithful to your coworkers, your family, your friends, be faithful to your prayer life. Daniel set an example, prayed every day for 80 years, three times a day. He'd go in and pray faithfully, be faithful to the study of God's word. Be faithful to your service at Mission Grove, be faithful to sharing God's love, be faithful. And finally, in your relationship with Jesus Christ, cultivate that relationship every day. Be faithful in your relationship with Jesus and watch what God can do. Amen. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father. We thank you for your work. We thank you for this just amazing example of a man who has put you first who has sought you first like Matthew 633 says, he sought you first your kingdom and your righteousness and he trusted you for everything else. Heavenly Father. May we be like Daniel? May we go out today tomorrow this week, this month and just be like Daniel and be found faithful in our worship of you in our service to you and in our trust of you, Jesus. That's our prayer this morning. Thank you for the opportunity now, to share this in communion and to remember what Jesus has done as he gave his life for us, that we might have life and have it abundantly for. It's in Jesus name, we pray and thank you, amen.