Scripture: Daniel 2:1-16

I want to share with you from the second chapter of Daniel. It is a message that is certainly dear to me and I believe is much needed today, that is, that especially at times when we have done everything we have known to do and it seems hopeless, that is especially a time that we pray and we discover that God is not dependent on circumstances, He is not living under the circumstances, that is especially a time that He demonstrates to us His power, His might, and when we wait in prayer, great things can happen. In Daniel, chapter 2, the king, the mighty king, Nebuchadnezzar has a dream:

It is oftentimes when we are the most discouraged that God impresses upon us the need to wait in prayer upon Him, and He encourages us that an answer to prayer is soon to come. It was the summer of 1978 and it was a time I was very discouraged, to say the least. I felt that I was between a rock and a hard place. I had gone back to summer school to finish my degree at Carolina and, at least I had finally, after the first session of summer school, I had finally passed the second accounting course on about the third try; but at least I had passed everything that I needed to; I just needed to make a few more B’s and A’s to have the grade points to graduate. The only problem with that is, I realized, you know, I was trying as hard as I knew how. I mean I would study, sometimes, five or six hours a day. I mean I literally studied myself stupid. If you have studied a lot, you know what that means. I realized that it wasn’t a matter of just trying harder, I really was in a bad situation because I began to wonder, how am I going to get out of here and what seminary in the world is going to take me without a college degree? I prayed. And I remember the words coming to me: Trust Me. Trust Me.

I went back to that last session of summer school; I had a guidance counselor who obviously was pulling for me to get of school. I guess she had a reason, a motivator there. She began to ask me — I had taken about a hundred and sixty hours already — “Well, what courses are you good in?” I couldn’t think of any, but she said, well, she was going to let me take courses again, and so, that’s what I did; I took three courses and she encouraged me. I did something I had never done before: I began to ask questions in class. When you get to that point, you are near the finish line, you really could care less what people think about you. I began to ask questions; I began to get tutored because I wanted to graduate badly. I actually studied less and I finally began to have a regular time to pray and a devotional life. I had no idea at that time what a worry habit I had, how much that was draining my energy, actually hurting my academic performance. But I remember those six weeks as a time that God really was helping me. I didn’t quite meet my goal of getting out; I still had to take two more correspondence courses, but finally I did graduate.

Emory took me on academic probation and I actually had the opportunity to preach. But I look back on that time — I didn’t know how it would work out — but what God did, as I waited in prayer, He encouraged me that if you listen to Me and if you follow Me, I will show you how this is going to work out. And I went from an attitude of fear and worry to an attitude of faith and trusting. (tape change)

.. . . .He (King Nebuchadnezzar) is the most powerful man on the face of the earth. He is one of the wealthiest, but he has insomnia. He is having dreams; he is having bad dreams. And not only does he want to have the dream interpreted, but he wants someone to tell him the dream. He knows these astrologers; he knows they are crafty. He knows that if he tells them the dream, anyone can come up with an interpretation of a dream. If we talked about the dreams we had here today, anybody could come up with some kind of interpretation.

So the king says, “Tell me the dream and I will give you riches and honor, but if you can’t tell me the dream, I am going to tear you limb from limb.” And Nebuchadnezzar was the type that — he was not teasing; he followed through on those kinds of threats.

So they are stalling for time. “Well, King, just tell us the dream and we will interpret it for you.”

He says, “No, you are stalling for time.”

And finally they tell him, “Well, no king has ever asked something like that before.”

Well, Nebuchadnezzar has a bad temper and he is furious, so he doesn’t just want to kill them, he wants to kill all the wise men in the kingdom. So he sends Arioch, the commander of the king’s guard, to go to Daniel and his friends to put them to death.

The Bible is full of dreams. Jacob dreams there was this ladder in the old testament. He made a covenant with God. Joseph had a dream, early in his life of his sheaves, of other sheaves bowing down before him. In the Christmas story you find that Joseph is told in a dream, “Fear not, take Mary as your wife. The child that Mary has conceived is of the Holy Spirit.” And also, after the child is born, he is told that there are those who want to take the child’s life. Go into Egypt.

In Katherine Marshall’s book, Something More, she has a chapter that I highly recommend to you: “To Sleep, Perchance to Dream.” She points out that, first of all, at the turn of the century, Sigmon Freud’s interpretation of dreams is what most people went by — that dreams are, as you would expect from Freud, about sexuality. But she also points out that Morten Kelsey, an Episcopal priest, in the 70s especially, did a lot of work with, not only Christian spirituality, but with dreams. Two things that he pointed out, that his conviction was, that ninety-five percent of the time the dream is about you. You might be dreaming about someone else, but oftentimes it is a way that God speaks to us. Then, oftentimes, it is figurative language. For example, I remember a recurring dream years ago I had, that I was in prison, and I know I was, because I was always glad when I woke up. But I could actually feel the sense of — I lost my freedom; I’m not going to see my family, and I wasn’t sure why I was having this dream. I used to think it was to be able to relate to people in prison ministry. Morten Kelsey probably would say, “Well, you may have felt trapped and imprisoned at that time. I don’t know.

But the king has a dream that he wants people to tell him what it was, and if it is not going to be interpreted, a lot of people are going to die, including Daniel and his friends. Well, I want you to look at Daniel’s response. Daniel has tact and wisdom. He is obviously a man of prayer because, first of all, he responds with tact and wisdom to Arioch. Then he is allowed to go to the king and ask for time to pray. And amazingly, Nebuchadnezzar allows him to do this, so God is already at work. But they go home and they pray. Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, they begin to pray. And then during the night, a mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision, and then Daniel prays to God in Heaven and says,

Daniel took time, as the answered prayer came to him, to thank God for the prayer. Do you do that when God finally — you’ve been praying and praying, “Lord, please answer this prayer.” — He finally answers it and we oftentimes think we can go on to something else, but we need to take time to thank Him for the answer to prayer. Nebuchadnezzar hears Daniel’s response; he hears the answer to prayer, which incidentally, if you read on in chapter 2 what the answer to prayer is, is that God is showing him of kingdoms that are going to come, about the Medes and the Persians, of the Greeks, of the Romans, and he also speaks of a kingdom that will be eternal that will be coming, the kingdom of God, initiated by our Lord Jesus when He came to us at Christmas. But Daniel’s response was to wait in prayer because he knew that only God could help him in this situation. Oftentimes, when we come to the end of our rope, we know that God really can do His best work.

His name was Steve Tomasi. He lives in Bakersville, California. Several years ago this forty-nine year old man was told that he had three months to live. He had a blood disease, a type of cousin to leukemia. First of all it was such a shock. He was Southern Baptist but he admits that at time, he really didn’t pray a lot, but that changed. As time went on, he says it this way:

Steve Tomasi is alive today. Oh yes, he’s been through bone marrow transplant; he’s been through chemotherapy, but he certainly believes that when a time of crisis comes, you take it to the Lord in prayer.

Daniel’s response was to wait in prayer. How can we learn to wait in prayer? When I look at the New Testament, first of all, it is so important to have this attitude that Jesus speaks of in Luke, chapter 18. He tells two stories in that chapter. First of all, it is so important to persist in prayer when we wait in prayer. Jesus told the story of the persistent widow, a widow who kept coming to a judge because she was being faulted and she wanted justice. The judge's response was, “Well, because you keep coming to me I will give you justice; I will give you what you want.”

And the Lord told that story to remind us that we just don’t pray just one time or one week, but we keep praying because as we keep praying and persisting, as we wait in prayer, our faith grows, and discouragement, more and more, can’t get its hold on us. We are encouraged that even though we still may not know exactly how it is going to turn out, we persist and know that the Lord is at work in the situation.

Then we also need a prayer of humility, because the truth of the matter is, praying is humbling. Proud people generally don’t pray. Because why? Because they have it all figured it out themselves but when we humble ourselves before the Lord, it is a good thing. He has told the story of a Pharisee and a tax collector in that chapter.

He said, “There was a Pharisee who prayed to the Lord, ‘Lord, I thank you that I am not like other people, especially this tax collector over here praying. I fast; I tithe.’”

And basically the Lord says he is praying with himself. But this tax collector would not even look up to Heaven, and he prayed, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

What is it? It is an attitude of humility. So when we wait in prayer, we want to be persistent. We want to lay hold of Heaven and we humble ourselves before the Lord, realizing that we need Him. But then we also pray His promises, and I wrote down some of the promises that have always meant the most to me. Here are some of them:

Matthew 7:7: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.

It is very important to believe that God is going to answer this prayer, somehow, someway, and that He is not just playing games with us; it is not a call-waiting situation. He will answer our prayer.

And then in I John; 5:14 He says,

When I wait in prayer, I want to be reminded from the Scriptures that the Lord is listening, but then I want to get to where I really want His will. It is fine to tell Him how you think. You know, sometimes I still don’t know how the Lord feels about when I prayed for the Braves or I prayed for Carolina. I tend to think, well, the other people that we are playing against, they can pray for them and that is fine and I will pray for my team, but you know, God has children on both teams, but anyway I just pray that they can play the best. But we especially want the Lord’s will. We want to get to the point where we are praying for His will.

And in Philippines 4:4-7:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let all men know your forbearance. The Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Why do we pray that? Because oftentimes when we are waiting in prayer, it’s a battle; it’s worry and faith, worry and faith, fear and faith. But when we make the request to Him we have a confidence and a peace will come that God is at work.

And then the last one is from Isaiah, chapter 40:31 You hear it a lot from me, that actually waiting in prayer strengthens us:

Anne Graham Lotz, in her book, Why Trust in God When We Don’t Understand, (and in the Christian’s Readers Digest there is a condensed article from that) talks about going to see her mother who was very ill and wondering: Why does my mother, who has served God so faithfully all these years, why are her latter years filled with so much suffering and pain? And she wonders about her son who is going through tests because five years ago he was diagnosed with cancer: Lord, why is this? And she tells the tale of two birds, one a turkey, one an eagle, and said that when a storm comes turkeys just run through the barn and they run to hide; they just hope the storm doesn’t come. Eagles, they get with the wind current and they rise above. And she says, “You know, I still don’t understand all that has gone through in my life, but I realize that God is wanting me to soar in faith. He is wanting me to wait in prayer and faith and to rise above, and I am going to a deeper level of faith.”

What a difference it makes when we believe that Jesus is truly on the scene. In the eleventh chapter of John, Lazarus was dead, in the tomb. And when he said, “Lazarus, come forth,” everything changed because Jesus said,

Daniel, when everyone thought it was hopeless, he knew that there is One you could turn to and trust and ask Him for His guidance. And he did and He answered his prayer in a marvelous fashion.

What happens when we wait in prayer is that it changes our vision. It changes us from a vision of discouragement to a vision of hope.

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great Father, and I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

And the last stanza:

High King of heaven, my victory won,
May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright Heaven’s Sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.

Let us pray: O Lord, we confess at times we are discouraged and lack hope. O Lord, we do pray that you would encourage each one who has come to you today with a sure and certain hope of your love, of your promise to answer prayer, and, Lord, of the power of the Resurrection, for we thank You for this, in Jesus name, Amen.