I messed up. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t make a bad decision so much as put off a good one for a little while. Then a little longer. Then time gets away from you and bad habits set in. Like millions of others, I began to treat church like a weekly event, an hour long show you sit and watch. Like a short dinner theater, without the dinner.
Many today even look for the kind of church experience where they can slip in and back out unnoticed. Maybe this is because that makes it hard for people to say, “We missed you last week.” They want a church where people aren’t all up in their business.
But church is all about having people all up in your business. For our next Lesson from Babylon, we need to look at how Daniel and the other faithful Hebrews benefitted from real community.
Christians have always been musical people. Worship through song is part of our earliest traditions. However I worry that today we put too much emphasis on singing and vastly overestimate how important it is to God. We’re commanded to sing, but we shouldn’t think that’s the only or even highest form of worship.
Singing is the icing on the cake. It’s the gravy on the biscuit. It's good, but by itself, it’s not much. What is the main part of the worship God wants from us?
They say character is what you do when no one is looking, but sometimes the hardest thing is to do what’s right when everyone is looking. It’s easy to go along with the crowd. It’s like riding the current of a river — you really don’t have to put any effort into it at all. What’s hard is going against the crowd, against that current. It takes physical, emotional, and moral effort, and not many people do it.
Daniel and company found themselves having to do just that. So as we continue our Lessons from Babylon, let’s look closer at their experience and see whether that was an oddity or the norm.
When I was a child, I sometimes felt a bit lost in the crowd at home. I was the third of three sons. The first is the one you put all your hopes and dreams on. The second is your backup. The third is the redundant backup, only important if everything else goes south. It was silly, I know, but that’s the way kids think.
Sometimes I feel lost in the crowd of God’s children. Yes, God saved me, but I’m just one of millions, maybe billions. Just one unimpressive face is a sea of faces. One more sinner for his vast collection.
In such times I turn to one of the most amazing passages in the scriptures.
