"We have so much to look forward to, Church, no matter what comes our way, because we have a risen savior who goes before us, who walks with us, and waits for us on the Journey of life and Eternity." [29:43 ] (Download)

"Neither political party has the moral high ground as it relates to Jesus. On the one side of the political aisle, it's easy to spot compassion, on the other conviction. But Jesus demonstrates and demands both from us." [26:43 ] (Download)

"Daniel knew how close he was to being penalized, especially at key markers in his life, but here's the thing: he still faithfully and kindly followed God and didn't compromise his compassion or his convictions." [29:06 ] (Download)

"Our faith should be full of compassion, but faith full of compassion, while it isn't inaccurate, it is inadequate. Jesus describes faithful followers as Salt and Light; we are different on purpose." [20:24 ] (Download)

"For many of us, the greatest threat to our faith isn't persecution, it's Prosperity. We're so worried about the criticism that's holding us back that we've lost sight of the Comfort holding our faith hostage." [22:17 ] (Download)

"Daniel faced a potential cost of his convictions throughout his entire life, but he never let it stop him. God delivering him wasn't even a requirement for him with his compassion for others and personal convictions of faith." [22:52 ] (Download)

"We live in a world that loves compassion but not convictions. The problem is, like that ride at the amusement park, there are necessities to our life, faith, and eternity that are bigger than the niceties we are settling for." [15:01 ] (Download)

"Daniel carries some of the most helpful and hopeful principles about how to live in a world where we carry a different set of core beliefs than those around us, and we can still have an endearing faith within a difficult and domineering culture around us." [16:08 ] (Download)

"We don't want God, we want what God can get for us. Even Heaven is not the goal; eternity with Jesus is the goal. Heaven is just a location in the process." [24:08 ] (Download)

"Daniel's life was not easy. I'm sure he made mistakes, but he also stayed faithful when it would have been much easier not to. The comfort that was available to him if he had simply compromised his convictions would have." [26:06 ] (Download)

Happy New Year, Menow Church!

Thanks for being flexible with this online service as we give so many people a chance to travel and rest after a set of incredibly fun and meaningful extra services at all of our campuses last week.

I hope you'll post a picture on social media of where and how you're experiencing this service as a family. We're still learning to adjust to winter without snow, but it really has felt like a fun Christmas season with all the normal routines of commemorating that help anticipate and celebrate God's love extended to us through the birth of Jesus.

I hope that you have found pockets of joy in this season as well. Messages like this are unique because we can have a conversation that feels a little more set apart. It's something that's been on my mind for a while and in my heart for a long time. While I've alluded to it several times this fall, I want to focus on something that we can all slip into if we're not careful.

I'm going to pray for us, and I hope that you are carrying a willing and humble spirit into the new year as we ask God to show up in a special way, maybe like never before.

Let's pray.

Dear God, thank you so much. Thank you for another year to experience this journey and pursuit with you for a deeper relationship. Thank you for the promise that your kingdom really is breaking through into our life and into the lives of those watching right now. Even when it feels like our world is breaking down, you are breaking through. God, would you give us the faith to see your work in our daily lives and the courage to join you in it. In Jesus' name, amen.

Earlier this fall, my oldest child, my son, turned 14, and as a part of the celebration, we went to an amusement park together. Now, I'm not going to share the name of that park because I don't want it to be about criticizing them specifically, but I can guarantee you this isn't the one that focuses on mice.

The park had all the normal perks available for pre-registering and a reasonable group of people that were waiting for it to open when we got there, but everything felt kind of tired, felt run down, like they were all going through the motions without any emotion for what they were doing.

We still had a great time, and because it wasn't very full, we could get on nearly every ride. There was one ride in particular, though, where a girl didn't want to wear the safety harness, and the employee who was trying to help, out of a sense of kindness, eventually gave up. It was a pretty lame ride, so it probably would have been okay, but as a parent, I was mortified.

As I was about to get out of my seat to help, a supervisor noticed and fixed the situation. It was admirable that the first employee wanted to be compassionate, but that wasn't the only priority. See, that moment is an easy one to see the potential danger of a compassion-only focus. There's a real risk when that is the only attribute that someone exhibits.

Some core convictions around safety have to inform our compassion; they can't be ignored. As we begin this year, there is going to be a temptation that you feel growing in you if you're a follower of Jesus. It's growing in all of us, myself included. It's the temptation to let our faith be full of compassion but empty of just about everything else.

We live in a world that loves compassion but not convictions. The problem is, like that ride at the amusement park, there are necessities to our life, faith, and eternity that are bigger than the niceties we are settling for.

I want to talk about an example of someone who modeled this for us thousands of years ago in the Hebrew Scriptures. We will see a kindness in his character but also a shrewd ability to live with compassion because faith full of compassion isn't inaccurate; it's just inadequate.

If you are new or newer to your Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures, or what we often call the Old Testament, records the story of God's work and faithfulness in creating the world, selecting a people, and protecting that group of people from threats, which are often from their own choices.

The Book of Daniel was written about the final centuries before Jesus came to Earth for his earthly ministry. The book is basically broken down into two sections: a story of Daniel and his friends living in captivity, and then a future-looking section called prophecy about how God was going to fulfill the promises that he had made to Israel about the entire world.

Daniel carries some of the most helpful and hopeful principles about how to live in a world where we carry a different set of core beliefs than those around us, and we can still have an endearing faith within a difficult and domineering culture around us.

As a matter of fact, Israel as a people still exists, but the nation is quite different compared to the heights of the impact in its past, even for when Daniel's story takes place. Under the new regime during Daniel's time, the king of Babylon selected a group of young men from Jerusalem to learn under the same approach as their people.

This is the first time that we see Daniel and his friends have to make a decision that they knew would be counter to the request. Going along to get along would have been way easier. They were handpicked for this special program, but they didn't want to violate their core convictions.

The problem was diet. For Orthodox Jews to this day, they eat a type of diet called kosher. Kosher was a specific type of diet that not only prescribed what foods you could eat to honor God but also what the preparation needed to look like. Daniel and his friends knew this food wasn't kosher.

The reason that they selected vegetables instead was that it gave them things they knew they could eat, and they likely cleaned them themselves to make them conform to kosher standards. God supernaturally gave them more strength and more insight eating this way to gain favor with the king.

Now, as an aside, there are principles for us in living a life with compassion and countercultural convictions, but this supernatural fast, the Daniel Fast as it's called sometimes, isn't something that God is asking us to model. Followers of Jesus no longer have to eat kosher because Jesus' perfection gives us access to God, not our performance.

But don't hear me wrong; this was a risk for Daniel. At a minimum, he could have been forced to eat the food that would defile him, and he could have faced prison, including even death for disobeying the king. We'll see that come up later.

How about your diet? I think our cultural consumption is doing more to distort our desires than we think it is. This story stands out because of how dire it feels, but see, if we don't look out, we'll discover that there are these principles of living as ambassadors in a foreign land that actually haven't gone away.

The Apostle Paul, writing the New Testament with this very concern, says this: "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

I don't know about you, but my media diet, my social media and news diet, doesn't always look like this list. Look, it doesn't mean that we have to live in denial, but we should expect that our conviction will cool when the patterns of what we're processing stray away from the path that God has for us.

One of the main reasons that we struggle with a faith that has both conviction and compassion is because of what it risks. We want to have the perks of a culture that wants nothing to do with God while we try to seek the path of Jesus to live in that very same culture. They're not compatible.

Even in the limited detail that we get from Daniel, he is never weird, he's never off-putting, he's never expecting the Babylonians to live with his convictions. He is satisfied to live counter-culturally with compassion for those who have different convictions while he doesn't compromise his own.

And how does God respond? Well, this is how they are described: "In every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in his kingdom." That is a picture of faithfulness.

So what will you do with that? Will you decide to just settle into whatever the shifting cultural sands say is okay? Will your faith always be compassionate for others but always one step away from the moral compromise you are trying to avoid?

See, our faith should be full of compassion, but faith full of compassion, while it isn't inaccurate, is inadequate. See, Jesus describes faithful followers as salt and light. We are different on purpose. We don't just have different hearts; we have different habits.

We don't have to be intentionally weird, but we should be intentionally obedient. Over the course of Daniel's life, it became more difficult to remain faithful to conviction and compassion, not because of failure but because of success.

See, when no one else could solve a problem, interpret a dream, or overcome a challenge, Daniel could, and it got him promoted over and over. At one point, when Daniel had accomplished the impossible for the king, this was the reaction: "Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face and paid homage to Daniel and commanded that an offering and incense be offered to him."

Think of a world leader doing this for you today. Every time that Daniel experienced a win from the culture around him, he felt a weight for the faith within him. Can you relate?

For many of us, we think about people who face great persecution for their faith as heroes, which they are, but there are threats for you and me as we walk out faithfulness as well. For many of us, the greatest threat to our faith isn't persecution; it's prosperity.

See, we're so worried about the criticism that's holding us back that we've lost sight of the comfort holding our faith hostage. Has your faith become only compassion simply because the cost of the convictions would be too great?

Daniel faced a potential cost of his convictions throughout his entire life, but he never let it stop him. As a matter of fact, God delivering him wasn't even a requirement for him with his compassion for others and personal convictions of faith.

When the king was tricked into commanding his people to worship a golden image, not only did Daniel and his friends disobey the order, but Daniel did it in a way that was intentionally visible. When the punishment was going into a fiery furnace to face death, Daniel had an incredible response.

He said, "If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O King. But if not, be it known to you, O King, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up."

Even if he doesn't, they were still going to be faithful. What a statement! What if God doesn't heal your marriage? What if God doesn't give you that promotion or help you graduate this spring? Will you still live in the compassion and conviction that he wants you to grow through?

Don't answer too quickly. See, the more difficult the mirror that puts up in front of our faith, that's what it looks like for you and me to see. Maybe you know what? We may be only following God for what we can get for doing it. We don't want God; we want what God can get for us.

Even heaven is not the goal; eternity with Jesus is the goal. Heaven is just a location in the process. Daniel's story and influence lasted a very long time, more than just Nebuchadnezzar. Because of that, he faced a moment where praying to God was illegal.

What do you think he did? He found a way that was honoring and still maintained conviction and compassion to worship and pray to his God. King Darius was furious and sentenced Daniel into the lion's den. After a long night, God delivered Daniel again.

Another time where going along to get along, a little bit of compromise, would have even been so much easier an option, but Daniel insisted on staying true to his faith even when he knew it would cost him.

The moment was so powerful that Darius wrote to all people in all known languages: "Peace be multiplied to you. I make a decree that in all my royal dominion, people are to tremble and fear before the God of Daniel, for he is the living God, enduring forever. His kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion shall be to the end. He delivers and rescues; he works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth. He who has saved Daniel from the power of the lions."

What person, party, or power would you love to hear that come from today to that realization in their life? The reason that God was showing up so much in Daniel's life is because he was trusting him over and over again in the biggest moments rather than his own power to compromise by having a faith only filled with compassion.

Daniel's life was not easy. I'm sure he made mistakes, but he also stayed faithful when it would have been much easier not to. The comfort that was available to him if he had simply compromised his convictions would have been a huge temptation, but he was never willing to sacrifice being close with God for being comfortable in his circumstances.

How about us in the coming months? The easiest trade to make is the lesser of two evils in a political fight in our country. Let me remind you that neither political party has the moral high ground as it relates to Jesus.

On one side of the political aisle, it's easy to spot compassion; on the other, conviction. But Jesus demonstrates and demands both from us. It will be easy to accept narratives about how much worse one person or party is over the other, and it will be easy to accept intellectually dishonest ideas like Christians in America are persecuted, but we are not.

It is easy for you and me to see that maybe it's harder than it's been in the past, but that's different than being persecuted. I want to share a paradigm with you in hopes that maybe we can be ambassadors of nuance and hope in this conversation this year.

On one hand, we have persecution, which many followers of Jesus around the world experience, but I hope they never hear us claim to face it as they risk their lives following Jesus. Followers of Jesus in countries with persecution are literally risking everything to follow him, and we often mean whether or not someone will like us if they know what we believe. They aren't the same thing.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the idea of cultural privilege, which we may no longer have, but there are ideas between those two extremes. I think that most of the time, especially if we only carry compassion and not conviction, then we are still culturally preferred.

Letting ourselves feel the shift in our culture and even grieve it is fine, but don't forget Daniel. Daniel knew what it felt like to be pacified where his faith was tolerated for the sake of what he could do or how he could perform.

Maybe that's how you feel. Maybe that's how you feel with key relationships or even at your job. It's okay for you to be a Christian as long as you don't talk about it, as long as it's not really a big deal.

Then there is the challenge of being penalized for your faith, not for being unnecessarily weird but for having a Jesus-directed life. Maybe it's cost you friends or cost you a promotion at work. Daniel knew how close he was to being penalized, especially at key markers in his life.

But here's the thing: he still faithfully and kindly followed God and didn't compromise his compassion or his convictions.

So here we go, Menow Church, 2024 with all of its ups and downs is right in front of us. Instead of walking in as a victim of the offenses that we are sure to find, let's remember the compassion and conviction that Jesus offers to us as we live as ambassadors and exiles in a world that really needs to meet kind Christians.

Let's remember the words of Jesus himself when he said, "I have said these things to you that in me you may have peace. In the world, you will have tribulation, but take heart; I have overcome the world."

We have so much to look forward to, Menow Church, no matter what comes our way because we have a risen Savior who goes before us, who walks with us, and waits for us on the journey of life and eternity.

I hope that you're encouraged today and that God is building you up to face the storms ahead.

Can I pray for you as we begin this new year together?

God, we lift up every person who's going to spend just a few minutes processing this. We ask God that the path that's in front of us, that we don't really even know yet, would be one we would look for you on, that we would try to live this year flowing from an identity in you when there are so many options and places for us to hook who we are to.

Would you help us to remember that we are yours, your sons and your daughters, and that more people who don't yet know that truth might find it this year, even in relationship with us?

That we could be the kind of church that would avoid polarization, that we would be the kind of church that avoids extremes, that holds to the nuanced, thoughtful, generous orthodoxy that you have given us for many, many years.

God, now we ask that in 2024, your kingdom would come, your will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. It's in Jesus' name, amen.

Happy New Year, Menow!