Luke 18 beginning at verse 9. To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable. Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed, God, I thank you that I am not like other people, robbers, evil doers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.
I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his chest and said, God have mercy on me, us sinner. I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God, for all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
The next passage is from Daniel, chapter 9. In the first year of Darius, son of Xerxes, a need by descent who was made ruler over the Babylonian kingdom in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures according to the word of the Lord, even to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last 70 years. So I turn to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting and in sackcloth and ashes. I pray to the Lord my God and confess.
Lord, the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments. We have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled. We have turned away from your commands and laws.
We have not listened to your servants, the prophets, who spoke in the name to our kings, our princes and our ancestors and to all the people of the land. Lord, you are righteous, but this day we are covered with shame, the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, both near and far, in all the countries where you have scattered us because of our unfaithfulness to you. We and our kings, our princes, and our ancestors are covered with shame, Lord, because we have sinned against you. The Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against him.
We have not obeyed the Lord our God or kept the laws he gave us through his servants, the prophets. All Israel has transgressed your law and turned away, refusing to obey you. Therefore, the curses and sworn judgments written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out on us because we have sinned against you. You have fulfilled the words spoken against us and against our rulers by bringing on us great disaster.
Under the whole heaven, nothing has ever been done like what has been done to Jerusalem. Just as it is written in the law of Moses, all this disaster has come on us. Yet we have not sought the favor of the Lord our God by turning from our sins and giving attention to your truth. The Lord did not hesitate to bring the disaster on us.
For the Lord our God is righteous in everything he does, yet we have not obeyed him. Now Lord our God, we brought your people out of Egypt with a mighty hand and who made for yourself a name that endures to this day. We have sinned, we have done wrong. Lord in keeping with all your righteous acts, turn away your anger and your wrath from Jerusalem, your city, your holy hill, our sins and the iniquities of our ancestors have made Jerusalem and your people an object of scorn to all those around us.
Now our God, hear the prayers and petitions of your servant. For your sake, Lord, look with favor on your desolate sanctuary. Give ear our God and hear. Open your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears your name.
We do not make requests of you because we are righteous but because of your great mercy. Lord, listen, Lord forgive, Lord, hear and act. For your sake, my God, do not delay because your city and your people bear your name. This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God. It's great to be with you all today as we continue our series in prayers of confidence and confusion. Today we get a clear picture of both of these things as we come to the prayer of, I think it's fair to say, an old buddy of mine, Daniel. Two weeks ago I submitted my PhD on this book which puts everyone in this room in a perilous position.
We don't know how long I could speak for. Oh, sorry, kind. Oh, that's so nice to you. Writing something that's only 25 minutes long was difficult for me, but I think I got there.
So you can try and hold me to account. One thing that's worth knowing is, some of you will probably have reflections as you read the book of Daniel on things that are going on at the moment in the Middle East. And I'm not going to directly address that today in this sermon, but I have written a pastoral note reflecting on Daniel two, which is at the back, which I'm more than welcome to take away and read today. But today I'm going to share with you the beauty that I personally see in this prayer.
Have you ever prayed with all your heart, but the confusion only deepened? Today we come to a place in the Bible where we find a man reading the word of God, looking for answers, but is confused by the contrast between what he reads and what he sees around him. I always stop by praying together, please by your head to me. By the God, we thank you for your word, and we pray now.
It was that you would hear our prayers. We thank you that we can come to you in confession and seek confidence in who you are. And we pray as we consider your word now that you would give us this confidence in the face of confusion. In Jesus name I pray, amen.
I think a place of confusion that we often find ourselves in now is the fact that technology for all of its goodness continues to lie to us. I had an example of this the other week when I was driving through Rivendell, our church weekend away. I made the very wise move of leaving during rush hour. And when I left my GPS told me it was going to be 32 minutes from where I was to get there.
And after 10 minutes, it still said 32 minutes until I was going to arrive as the North got busier and busier. What I was seeing before me on my phone was not matching the reality of what I was experiencing. I was also thinking about the other piece of technology that lies to us in our lives, which is the washing machine. The washing machine lies about how long is left on the cycle.
What I see before me does not match the reality of what is going on with my clothes. And today we are seeing somebody who is dealing with a confusion that's coming from a tension that they feel between what they are reading and what they are experiencing as we come to Daniel. Today I'm not going to read out a ton of different verses from this, but please do keep the passage in front of you because you'll see that I am working through the verses as we go through the passage in Daniel 9. So please do keep that open.
That being said, I'm not going to read from chapter 1. In the first year of Darius, son of Xerxes, a need by descent who was made ruler over the Babylonian kingdom. In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures according to the word of God the Lord given to Jeremiah the prophet that the desolation of Jerusalem would last 70 years. So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition in fasting and in sackcloth and ashes.
As you see in the passage, Daniel is an exile in Babylon reading from the prophet Jeremiah. As a result of their turning away from God, God's people had found themselves under the rule of a foreign nation, their city had been destroyed, and their religion was being oppressed. In Jeremiah 25 and in 29, before the exile had occurred, the prophet Jeremiah declared that this exile would last for 70 years. Yet here Daniel and God's people still are.
Now if you don't know much about this guy Daniel, I'm delighted to tell you more about him. Let me give you a little bit of background. Daniel was taken into exile during the first transportation to Babylon with God's people when he was just a young man. Through his committed faith and courage and the help of God, he found ways to navigate living in those circumstances, and he did so very successfully.
He stood firm on his faith, went threatened with death, most famously in the lion's den, and was rescued by God. Daniel knows more than most people, the faithfulness and the power of God. And so it is particularly interesting that we find him in this place of confusion, wrestling with his reality and what he finds in the Scriptures. He has experienced the rescue of his God before, and he's trying to understand why the great rescue has not come.
So how does this great man of God respond in his confusion? Well, one of the biggest risks I think we have when we are doubting or when we are feeling confusion in our present circumstance is that we stop talking to God. But God isn't offended by our questions, and we see this because it is where Daniel turns. In grief and confusion, here we see someone who had experienced the power of God for himself, feeling, placing this feeling, and his response is to go straight to him in prayer, and we will see later that that is what God desires.
It is not a sinful thing to ask God what he is doing, and to ask for his help to understand. But what is key for us to see today will be the posture and the approach that Daniel takes, because in doing so, he guides us in what to do, and in what will be most helpful for us as we face these things. Most of you know that last year, I experienced for the first time what it meant to parent a small child. My son, Matthew, is one year is old now.
And I think, well, last time I did an illustration about him. I haven't done too many illustrations about him, so I'm going to go in quickly, because this was a point of moment where I thought, actually, I've experienced what it means to try and work through positive self-talk. See, in Daniel at the start, we get a number of affirmations that are about reminding us truth we believe, who's experienced various moments in your life, but this was clearly seen for me in the early hours of the morning when I felt like nothing, I was never going to get to sleep ever again, and things were continuing, and gone and on, and I'll tell myself now, it's going to get better. It's going to get better, it's going to get better.
And I'm sure you've had moments in your life when you had to remind yourself of truths, even though they didn't kind of match how you were feeling in the moment. But Daniel does this now. He first comes before his God, and he begins with adoration. He starts by declaring what he already knows God to be.
Great and awesome, covenant-keeping, and steadfast love, and then he continues by restating what he knows to be true. He's confused about his reality, and so he restates it to God, but I think also to himself. He earnestly prays the reality that he knows, and this is an act that both glorifies God, but also reminds Daniel himself of what it is he believes. Daniel, through prayer, is taking part in active reassurance and remembering.
And this is where I think the first person narration of this part of the Bible becomes really important for us. It is a really clever literary device. For the first half of the book of Daniel, chapters one to six, the narration's in the third person. It's stories about Daniel, where we learn about him and his experiences, and what makes him who he is, and what he is like.
But once you understand him, the text moves into viewing what is happening through his own eyes. And so as you embody Daniel, as you read viewing it through his eyes, you begin to import all that you already know about him. It's an empathetic lens, as you share his experiences through his perspective, as if you are experiencing him yourself. You see, Daniel is praying on behalf of the people, but we are being drawn into the prayer as we read it, as fellow travelers, by what Confuio also confused, by what God is doing in the world.
As we read this prayer in the first person, we're not just being called to pray. We are carrying out the act of praying at the same time. We are carrying out the act of praying as we read this in the first person. He acknowledges sin, he confesses the justice of what he is going through.
And as you look at the list, I think it's fair to say, he's fairly exhaustive. He fully recognizes the failures of the people, and also the pain and heartache that sits at the heart of their suffering and confusion. He's taking it upon himself to represent the people and to take on this burden of confusion. And this is a recognition that confusion is not just his experience, but the experience of all God's people who find themselves struggling to match the reality of their experience with the promises of God that they know.
But also leads them to take on the posture of humility that he takes. And so he teaches us how to conceptualize what is happening. He does not understand. We do not understand.
But he knows. And we know that this is not because of the failure of God, but because of Daniel's own failures and of our own failures. You see, when we do confessions at church that we say together, this is the empathy and self-understanding that we are tapping into. The ability to stand in true solidarity together as we come before our God.
We say that we are sorry for our sins and we turn away from them. We say we. This is a communal statement. And it reflects that we are part of a community that stands together in all of this.
We do not suffer the pain of sin alone. We do so alongside one another. And we pray not just for ourselves, but for the good of all those who are with us and are seeking God in the midst of confusion and wrestles with sin. This is a prayer that takes people who are confused and guides them into a posture of humility before God and alongside one another.
And then turns to reaffirm the confidence that we have. I think we all have different things that we hold onto at different times in our lives that are difficult. You may have a particular memory. You may be a photo that you look at that kind of gives you strength during a difficult time.
Many people have different songs or music that they listen to. My wife, it's the Morning Coffee, is a very important foundation of her day that keeps it going. We all have various things like this, right? When we're feeling shaky, we have foundations that we grab onto.
Daniel then shifts from confession to the foundation of the confidence that he has in the midst of his confusion. That is who his God is. He declares the righteous acts that he has carried out in the past. He mourns for the shame that his people have brought on him by their unfaithfulness.
And he appeals to his character, to his history, to his deeds, and calls on him to be the restorer of glory. Not because he doubts it, but in order for him and in order for us to reaffirm, to remember the confidence that we have is based on who our God is. Verse 18, I'd say it's one of my favorite verses in the Bible if you look down at it. It says, we do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy.
You see, this is a prayer that frees us. We are responsible, but the onus is not on us to make it right again. It is the power of God's mercy. An understanding of where we sit and where God sits.
And that our confidence is not in ourselves, but in the mercy of our God who loves us in spite of our failures. Daniel calls on God to save his people, not because they are worthy, but so that the act of salvation can be seen as an act of God's glory, that he deserves among the nations. And so what's important to know is that in the next part of this passage, which we didn't read, partly because it continues on for quite a long time, and it's quite complex, but we worry a part of it now together. Verse 20 comes straight after the passage that we read today.
It says, while I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel and making requests to the Lord my God for his holy hill, while I was still in prayer, Gabriel, the man I'd seen in the earlier vision, came to me in swift flight about the time of the evening sacrifice. He instructed me and said to me, Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding. As soon as you began to pray, a word went out, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed. I hope you trust by summary of the rest of what's to come.
Gabriel appears to Daniel, this is a representative of God comes before him. He affirms, he praises Daniel, and then he corrects his interpretation of Jeremiah. While the exile is going to come to an end, and it does come to an end shortly after, the redemption of God's people is a longer-term plan that will require patience. What is helpful is that the prayer, the posture that Daniel takes, this is what receives direct praise from the divine, and a recognition that patience is needed for the outcome he longs for.
Daniel will not see this redemption himself in his lifetime, but the promise of what is to come is enough for him, because he has full confidence in who his God is. So what do we do with this? I think there's a few observations that I make and thinking about how to think about this passage in terms of our lives today, and the first one is that it is okay to be confused. Daniel was.
I think that we're supposed to look at Daniel and feel a sense of relief. If a man like Daniel, who saw God's power in the lion's den, who navigated exile with unwavering faith, who studied scripture deeply, and who had already had angels appear to him before this prayer, if he could wrestle with the gap between God's promises and his reality, then it is okay for us to as well. Confusion is not a failure of faith. Here, it is a doorway to deeper prayer.
So when confusion hits, maybe delayed answers to prayer, grief that lingers in your heart, questions about God's timing in your life, in your family, in your world, even our church, don't hide from it or stop praying, but bring it honestly to God. Say, Lord, I don't understand why things look this way when your word promises hope. Help me, because God's not offended by it. He's clearly invited it.
The second, our confidence is not in the answers to our questions, but in our belief in who our God is. We believe in a heavenly reality. And that reality overcomes our physical experience. That the truth of how things are for us now is found in Jesus and not in the changing world around us.
Our rock is in the unchangeable nature of God and his promises. And so the change and turbulence of the world may hit us, but it does not knock us down, because it is not what we are holding onto. Daniel didn't get an immediate resolution, but he rested on God's mercy, his forgiveness, and his great compassion, and that is an anchor for us too, in the face of our confusion in the world. And finally, there are things that we cannot understand on our own, and that is okay.
Daniel, for all his skills, did not fully understand Jeremiah. And that means there needs to be a certain amount of humility in how we approach the Bible. Even Daniel needed Gabriel's insight. Humility opens us to God's correction and to God's timing.
And so approach the scripture with teachability. Ask the Holy Spirit for guidance. Study it earnestly, but trust that when it comes up against the reality that you face, and the confusion that you experience, hold lightly, pray for understanding, wait patiently, and trust God to reveal in his time. This humility also shapes how we relate to one another.
Be patient with people in their confusion, humble in our own limits, and interceding for them, as Daniel intercedes for his people here. Daniel's prayer is answered. God listened, but it happened in God's time. Ultimately, in the Lord Jesus.
Gabriel told Daniel he needed to be patient, but the joy that we have today is that we get to see this passage in light of what God did eventually do, that he did restore his people, that his mercy has been given, and now our patience is in the final return of our Lord. Our second reading was of a parable told by this exact Lord Jesus. He shows us a prayer that in many ways, I think is a summary of Daniel 9. God have mercy on me, a sinner, and that he was the man who went home justified before his God.
You see, it was the posture of Daniel. It was the posture of the tax collector, and it is our posture now to take on in the face of our wrestles between the promises of God and the attention of our realities. We are often stuck in cycles of confusion in our lives, but take that confusion to prayer. State to what you believe, recognize your sin, and place your confidence in who you know your God is, because Gabriel promised Daniel, and he promised us, that God hears you, and he is everything that he has promised he is.
Let us pray. Father, we thank you that you are a God who is faithful and is trustworthy. We pray, Lord, that you give us the strength to turn to you when we face confusion about our world and about our lives. Father, I pray for each person here who's facing something difficult that they're trying to unite the hope that they have in you, Lord.
Father, help them to sit in this tension and to come to you, seeking you as a rock in their lives in the face of the turbulence that they may have. Father, we thank you so much for Jesus, who was ultimately redeemed us from exile. That's in his name I pray. Amen.