In reading this chapter, which is really a prayer and response session between Daniel and God via Gabriel, I can’t help but appreciate the pattern Daniel uses in his prayer.

Declaration - God is great, and God is in control of His creation

Confession - We have sinned...and here are our specific confessions

Request - Following an honest confession, you can’t help but be completely humble in your requests, because you’ve just declared how undeserving you are of grace, and that’s the perfect state from which to make requests

This is the same pattern we see in The Lord’s Prayer, and really any other prayer sequence in scripture - it is a great reminder for us.  Our hearts have to be in the right place, and our requests in the right context, if we are going to pray effectively.  This sequence is for OUR benefit, so that when we ask, we are ready to hear from God.

As a side note - it is readings like this where we find some of the best evidence for supporting the idea that there were already books/manuscripts that were considered sacred.  Daniel is quoting various parts of our Bible in this prayer, as do many other prophets, and that really establishes that there were books that were already adopted into our faith way before we ever created and bound ‘the Bible’ that we carry around today.  In other words, most of what is in the Bible is in the Bible not because people put it there - but because it was already widely accepted that those were the legitimate manuscripts and teachings that actually happened and had wide acceptance.  That’s a big idea to grasp.

In reading this morning, I also found a mind-numbing amount of information and narrative around trying to reconstruct timelines based on Daniel’s numbers in here.  It is amazing the lengths to which people have gone to try to decipher these numbers.  After thumbing through the commentaries, what I find MOST fascinating is that, regardless of the commentary, there seems to be amazing predictive power in these words.  There are several plausible interpretations, but they are all accurate in describing events to come in the future from Daniel.  That’s amazing.

For today though, the big idea that I am left with really is this idea that Daniel gives us around prayer, around getting into the proper frame of reference when we pray.  And, once we are in the right frame of mind, we are in a place where we can hear from God.  It seems to me that there are few absolutes in terms of ‘if I do this, God will do that’; but when we pray, not with the right words, but with the right heart and mind, God always seems to show up in one way or another.  It may be a whisper that we hear, it may be a thought we coincidentally get in that moment, it may be a person we are reminded of, it may be a feeling of contentment, or it may be a feeling that we sense we are being called to some action...but, I really can’t recall a time I earnestly prayed like Daniel shows us and I didn’t get some kind of a response from God.  That’s encouraging.