Stand Out

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Thanks for coming today. Thanks for those who are here in worship today with us. It's great to see you all here, and thanks for those who are online with us today. We're starting a brand new five-part series called Stand, as you saw the video before, and at the end of that video was a photo that I took, well, I took off the internet. Somebody needs to open the door, because Cody just went outside, so, all right. We're having fun this morning. Okay, so, it was taken from a photo of who's called the Tank Man, I don't know if you remember this, back in 1989, June 5th, the day of or the day right after the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, where being the military just came in and just tried to wipe it all out. A man who looks like he came from the grocery store at the time, because he had bags in his hands, just gets out in the middle of the street and stands right in front of all the tanks that are going to come in and says, no, this is where I stand. And we know nothing about him. After that picture, he was hustled away by we're not sure whom, if it was some of the democracy protesters or by the police. We're not sure. We've never heard of him before. He may be alive, he may not be alive, but I think his stand that day is a good kind of visual image as we start this series in the book of Daniel. So for five weeks, we're going to explore the question of how do we stand? How do we stand firm? How do we stand up? How do we stand out? When do we stand firm in the fire? What does it mean to stand? What do we stand for? Why do we stand in the first place and what do we stand upon? Those are some of the questions we're going to be asking. And we're going to be looking at the fact that for us today, that's a good image of what I think Daniel is getting after. Right now, there are a lot of people who are taking a lot of stands in our society. And you've seen that this last week. But these stands are often just various versions of self-interest, egotism, and self-will. I'm going to stand up and get what, you know, that is not the way Daniel was at all. We're going to see a contrast today with the way that he stood out and stood up in Babylon to the way that some people, even Christians today, are doing it. And I think we're going to learn some wisdom from Daniel. So we're going to find out Daniel, as he was in Babylon, is a good model for how we can be in our culture today. Because I don't know if you realize this or not, as I mentioned a few weeks ago in a sermon on the prophet Daniel, we are, right now, in Babylon, okay? Bonnie Kirsten, I quoted her in an article that she had written in Christianity Today, and she said this, we're not headed to Babylon, we're already there. For American Christians, the United States is not our true home. Scripture insists that to be a Christian, by definition, is to be foreign to any earthly nation. America is no exception. I think that's an important distinction. We're not trying to create the new Jerusalem on earth. We realize that we are in Babylon. And it's not quite the same as Daniel, but there are some similarities and parallels. David Kinnaman, in Barna Research, he's adopted a phrase for our version of Babylon today. He says, our culture right now is marked by unlimited access, profound alienation, and a crisis of authority. Does that sound about right? Unlimited access to almost anything you want, alienation, and a crisis in authority. He calls it digital Babylon. And then he writes, ancient Babylon was the pagan but spiritual hyper-stimulated multicultural imperial crossroads that became the unwilling home of the Judean exiles, including the prophet Daniel in the 6th century BCE. Digital Babylon is not a physical space. It is the pagan but spiritual hyper-stimulated multicultural imperial crossroads that is the virtual home of every person with Wi-Fi, a data plan, or for most of us, both. So you're experiencing it all the time. You're in the midst of a culture that's very different than what the Christian faith is. So how do we deal with this? Now you might say, well, why should we stand out at all? I mean, why not just kind of go with the flow? Why not just kind of fit into society? And there's a number of reasons, because basic and fundamental is this. You were created for much more than what this culture offers you. Your deepest longings, your most fundamental needs as a human being is to be connected to God and to community. And that is all being choked out in a culture of binge-watching television, political news coverage, social media scrolling. So you don't even, with all of that going on all the time, you don't even know who you are, what you are, why you are, where you are. And when things are not going your way, it's so easy to fall into anxiety or depression because it seems like the ground is moving underneath your f...