Maintain Your Identity

Daniel 1

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Introduction

Tonight, we are starting a new series called Babylon.

As we begin this new series, it is important to understand what Babylon is in Biblical times so that we can understand what Babylon is in our present times. In short, the nation of Babylon has overtaken Israel and is now taking the Israelites into captivity, back to Babylon, to serve their king.

All throughout Scripture, the name “Babylon” is used to represent a foreign authority that rules very differently than God. If Israel is the nation that operates under God’s perfect rule, then Babylon is the nation that operates under man’s sinful rule. Babylon has different guidelines, values, and a completely different way of living, and they will try to get the people of God to live their way instead of God’s way.

Does this sound familiar at all? You shouldn’t have to think about it for very long to see that this is a lot like what followers of Jesus experience today. Our friends, our school, our city, our teams, and maybe even our families will try to convince us to live in a way that often contradicts our faith. Our world constantly tries to convince us that its way of life is far better for us than God’s way of life.

In this way and so many others, we live in our own Babylon type even today. As followers of Jesus, it can often feel like we’re out of place, and the temptation is to try to fit into the world around us. To give up what we know is true so that we can feel like we belong.

And this longing to belong somewhere is not a bad thing! WE’VE ALL BEEN CREATED WITH A SOUL THAT LONGS TO BELONG. But again, the problem is that when we are surrounded by the people and culture of Babylon, our soul will try to conform and take on Babylon as its home.

Optional Illustration: Tell a story about a season of life or a culture of people that make friends really fast and describe those friendships as if they have more depth than they really have. However, the reality is that these friendships are made for survival and out of their loneliness. It could be your first semester in college, a new school after a big move, or even a time your friends shunned you.

Camp and A’1s

In these types of friendships, we reveal our soul’s deep longing to belong to something or someone at almost all costs. When surrounded by something different from what we’re familiar with, we can go into panic mode and latch onto the first thing we see.

Tension

WE WILL ABANDON OUR IDENTITY IN ORDER TO BELONG

Optional Illustration: Tell a story about a time you personally clung to something new and/or foreign to fit in. KY AND TN FANS. OR IF IM SPICY THE WHITTAKERS AND ORCHESTRA… LOL

Ex: I tell a story about moving to a new school in 3rd grade and having grown up an Arkansas Razorback fan my whole life. However, at my new school in Texas, all the kids around me were Texas Longhorn fans. In order to survive and make new friends, I adopted a new sports team to be a fan of, cheer for, and wear the colors of so that I could make new friends. I abandoned something foundational to how I had lived before in order to live in this new world.

When you feel the need to belong strong enough, you will abandon your identity, convictions, and beliefs and craft a new one. This isn’t always terrible, but a lot of times, it’s really unhealthy.

This is that moment when you go to college, you come back home, and your parents are like, “Who even is this person?” Because in just six short months, you have moved to a new place, made new friends, been exposed to new information, and in your introduction to adult life, you’ve become someone different than you were. You’ve crafted new beliefs and started believing something totally new.

But this isn’t just something that’s going to happen when you graduate and move off to college. This is something that is happening right now. Because the truth is that if you’re a part of the family of God, then you’re in the process of being transformed and being made to look more like Jesus. But every time you walk out the front door, the world wants you to look different. It’s going to give you a different message. It’s trying to give you different hopes and promises that honestly don’t fill you up.

And sometimes, it’s just small changes. It probably won’t start with a big change or altogether abandoning your faith. It’ll usually start with a slight adjustment or adding a little something onto a belief until you look up and you’re a long way from where you used to be.

And I have found that more often than not, when we haven’t already come face to face with this truth and tried to prepare for it, then it’s that much easier for the world to change us. And all of a sudden, we’ve abandoned our entire identity in Jesus and placed our identity in the world – in Babylon.

This is the kind of scenario we step into in Daniel 1 as we see a group of young men who strongly believe in God and how He wants them to live. But all of that is challenged by the Babylonians and their way of life. Which identity will they cling to, and what do they do to stay faithful to it?

Scripture

For some background, this is what’s happening in Daniel. As I mentioned earlier, Babylon defeated Israel and took some of the Israelites into exile. Exile is just a big word for being thrown out or taken away. They are now living in a world that is not their own, under rules that are not their own, gods that are not their own, and expectations that are not their own.

As people of God, this idea of being exiled might feel really familiar to you. It’s that tension we get in our souls when we realize everyone else lives a certain way or is doing something that doesn’t align with who God is. It’s the feeling that you don’t quite fit into the world’s standards. It’s the feeling that there’s a better way, a better life, a better place out there.

During this exile, Daniel and his three friends, whom you might also know if you grew up in church, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, are asked to be servants in the king’s court. And there’s a particular way of life when you’re in the king’s court. There are specific things that you do, that you say, even that you eat and drink. But all these expectations would require Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to compromise their identity in God. They’re faced with the decision that you and I face every day – do they stand strong in their God-given identity and consequently stand out, or do they conform to the Babylonian identity so they can fit in?

Read DANIEL 1:1-7- JAY HOY A KIM

These four men are at the top of their class. These guys are like the varsity athletes, the best of the best, the smartest and wisest. These are some of the most successful men among the Israelite people. It’s precisely why they are chosen for the king’s court.

So, the king brings them in and tells them they are to eat the food and drink the wine of the king’s court, but this doesn’t match up with the strict dietary restrictions that the people of Israel have been given. The point of these restrictions is that Lord wants His people to look and behave differently than the rest of the world around them.

Read DANIEL 1:8-10

Daniel basically hears this requirement and says, “Hey, we’ve been given instructions on what to eat from God, and we want to stick to those requirements.” And the king’s eunuch looks back at Daniel and says he’s worried that if they don’t eat the king’s food and drink the king’s wine, they’ll start to look sick, skinny, and weak. And then it’ll be known that they haven’t been eating the king’s food, and the eunuch will be held responsible for it.

So, what does Daniel do here? How does he deal with this push to conform to Babylon when God’s directions are so clearly different?

Read DANIEL 1:11-21

So again, what Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are being told here in Daniel 1 is that if they conform to the Babylonian way, if they conform to the world’s way and abandon the way of the Lord, they’ll be the strongest and the smartest and the wisest people in the land. They’ll gain more by doing this the world’s way than they could ever get by doing it the Lord’s way.

But Daniel tells the eunuch to give him and his friends only vegetables to eat and water to drink and to test them for ten days. First of all, this is the quickest fitness plan ever to exist. Ten days?! But Daniel assures the eunuch that they will look healthier than all the other men who were eating the king’s food and drinking the king’s wine. By doing things according to how the Lord had commanded them, they will be stronger, wiser, smarter, and healthier than anyone else who is doing it according to the world’s way.

In our day and time, we don’t really use food like that, so we have to think about how this applies to us. What are the things the world tries to use to get you to conform to its way of living? What lie does the world try to sell you by saying, “You can only be successful in this world if you do this…”? What is the king’s food and wine for me, a 16-year-old?

I think it looks a little something like this…

You will never be successful if you don’t go to a big college

And you won’t go to a big college if you don’t take so many classes that you’re regularly in tears

And to make it in those classes, you’re going to have to cheat to maintain a high enough class position

Oh, and you’re going to need scholarships, so overload your schedule and fill it up with community service, which is a good thing, but you’re going to have a super unhealthy relationship with it

Next, you need love. So start dating

And you’ll really only understand love once you start having sex and having a lot of it.

So just pretend to be married so that one day you can be good at being married.

And if you do all these things, you’ll be happy...which is the ultimate goal in life, right?

Welcome to Babylon. Is that not the message of being great and successful in the world you live in? Is that not what is force-fed to you every day?

“Take 17 AP classes and stress yourself out so that you can get ahead in college,” but you hate the life you’re living right now. “Be famous on social media; go viral! Connect with thousands of people!” But no one’s going to really listen to what you have to say because it’s for no good reason. And none of those people really care about you – only what you can produce.

I was watching a movie the other day called Castaway, Tom Hanks is the star and the premise is that this guy gets stranded on an island by himself, and his only friend is a ball that he names Wilson. And we think to ourselves, “Oh, how depressing. His only friend is Wilson.” But y’all, we’re all staring at Wilson every day; it just looks like your phone.

I hear a lot from parents that they just want their kid to be like every other kid. Why? Statistically, the average teenager is depressed, riddled with anxiety, and emotionally homeless. You know that all of this is true. You know that’s how your friends feel. You know that’s how you feel. You live in this world. You navigate this world every day. You’re living in Babylon right now.

You’re living in a world that tells you that if you do these certain things, you’ll be successful and happy. But ask any adult in the room – it’s all a lie. None of these things are fulfilling. Our degrees, all that studying and stressing over school, it doesn’t fulfill us. Our dating life when we were teenagers never fulfilled those promises. As a matter of fact, it just made for some pretty awkward and hard conversations when you meet the person you want to marry and be with forever.

Don’t. Buy. Into it.

Application

How will you live in Babylon?

WILL YOU CHOOSE TO MAKE GOD SUPPLEMENTAL?

When you go out into your everyday life and try only to use God as a supplement to your life, it’s like trying to eat the king’s food and adding in a carrot every now and then. But at the end of the story, Daniel and his friends are ten times more than the Babylonians thought they would be. They’re ten times smarter, ten times more fit, ten times healthier, and ten times wiser because they remained faithful to the Lord.

God isn’t going to honor something that causes us to regularly abandon Him. He won’t honor relationships that cause us to regularly abandon Him. He won’t honor the pursuit of scholarships that causes us to regularly abandon Him. Because look at how He treats Daniel. The one who stayed faithful to Him and the way He asked him to live.

But the hard truth is that some of us, if not all of us, are trying to live in Babylon and just use God as a supplement to the life we want to live. And what ends up happening is that we look just like Babylon. We’re tired, empty, depressed, and unfulfilled.

Giving our life to Jesus isn’t about what we might “miss out on” according to the world; it’s about what we gain even though it looks different. And in the end, we are better off than the rest of the world because Jesus offers us something the world could never give us – joy, hope, unconditional love, and eternal life in Him.

OR WILL YOU CHOOSE TO LIVE GOD’S WAY?

We can’t move out of Babylon. We’re here until the Lord says otherwise. But we don’t have to live by its rules.

We can choose to live differently and lean into Jesus and His ways to guide us in this world even when it looks crazy. We can choose to see how Scripture points to a full life and that the world only leads us to emptiness. We can choose to define success by God’s standards and not the world’s. We can live as faithful exiles in Babylon who are set apart to make a difference for the glory of God.

Why would we choose to live any other way when Jesus freely gives us more than Babylon could ever dream of offering?

Gospel- HOW DO I LIVE GOD”S WAY?

MAINTAIN YOUR GOD-GIVEN IDENTITY IN A WORLD THAT TRIES TO STEAL IT

Because Jesus came saying, “You can find rest in Me. In My Kingdom. In My way of life.” Jesus came to give you a new identity. He promises to love you in a way that no other person in your entire life ever has or ever will. And He always follows through on His promises.

On top of that, He gives us some commands and some directions for how to live our lives so that we can have life and life abundantly through Him. We don’t have to go looking for it in other places; it’s all in Him. So don’t cave to Babylon’s way of doing things and its empty promises because all it does is give you a full calendar and an empty life.

Jesus gives you a new identity and a way to live out that identity that this world could never offer, and when we live in that identity, we will feel like we are in exile because we won’t look like this world anymore.

We follow a Jesus who, when He comes face to face with a rich man, a man who has everything according to the world’s standards, tells him to go and sell everything. And when we come to that passage, we might ask, “Why does Jesus want us to have nothing?” But that’s not what’s happening. Jesus doesn’t want us to have nothing; He just doesn’t want us to be owned by everything around us. He wants us to have an abundant life that’s more than we could ever imagine, but only He can give it to us.

Look at how much freedom we have in Christ that we could sell everything we have, and our identity remains untouched. That the things we own don’t own us.

Look at how much freedom we have in Christ that we can rest more and still be confident in our future because He holds our future. That our accolades don’t define us.

Conclusion

With all of this being said, I know that all of us have all but given in to Babylon before. That we’ve all been buried under Babylon’s crushing demands before. Maybe you’re still there tonight. But there is freedom in Jesus for you in this very moment.

What would happen if your generation refused to live according to Babylon’s ways? What would it look like if you refused to conform and instead chose to be faithful to the way of life that God is calling you to? Maintain your God-given identity. Don’t let the world steal it.

Let’s pray.

Hey small group leaders! Tonight will be the first night in our new series called “Babylon”.  asking the question, “How do I maintain my Identity?” Here are the small group questions for the night! Thank you all for all you do, if I can do anything for you all, please let me know!

1.     Read Daniel 1:1-21. What does this teach you about God? What does it teach you about yourself?

2.     How does the world define success? How would the Bible define it? What about you? What are the biggest differences you see in those definitions?

3.     Do you ever feel like an exile or like you don’t belong somewhere? What makes you feel that way? 

4.     What are some things you struggle with when it comes to standing strong in your faith? What are some of the things that the world uses against you (ex. popularity, school, sports, etc.)? Which of these do you struggle with the most? Why do you think that is?

5.     Do you ever feel like staying faithful to God is just too hard? Or like it’s reserved for a special type of Christian? What makes you feel that way? What would it take for you to believe otherwise?

6.     Do you really believe that you have everything you’ll ever need or want in Jesus? Why or why not? What makes it easy or hard to believe this?

7.     How are you supposed to stand strong in your faith and maintain your identity in God? What are some ways that you can refuse to live like the world and instead maintain your God-given identity in your life this week?