John 6:43-58

How many of you have ever been at a loss for words, but not a loss of facial expressions?  I have that struggle from time to time.  And that’s when my wife when gently remind me to “fix my face”.

Now, I didn’t want to just cut the bush down.  I wanted rid of the entire thing, including the roots.  I didn’t want to take a chance of it growing back.  So, after cutting through it at the base of the tree, I proceeded to pull up the stump that remained.  I quickly found out that there was more underneath the ground than I ever thought there would be!

There was a game I played with my kiddos as they were very young.  It was called “out of sight, out of mind” and here’s how this game went.  When either of them would become infatuated with an item that I didn’t want them to have, I would remove it from their vision!

My first reaction was, “What’s this doing in here; it doesn’t belong here!”  You’ve probably had a similar experience before in your life, a time when you ran across something that seemed out of place or in the wrong place and you thought to yourself, “That doesn’t belong there!”

The design of the activity is to get you to recognize patterns, whether it’s shapes, colors, numbers or some combination of those items, the goal is to train you to be able to detect where a pattern is and then duplicate it.  Well, that’s what’s occurring in our text this morning.  Daniel is providing us with a pattern in an area; he’s educating us, but we often miss the pattern.  We see a historical event, but not the activity that is to be duplicated.

Colossians 3:1-17

Needless to say, the preacher’s attempt to provide a word of encouragement went very wrong.  As we come to our text today, there is a word of encouragement being provided to Daniel through a vision, but initially Daniel is left feeling much like this bride, not so encouraged.  But we’ll see that, in the end, this encouragement became clear for Daniel.  And it will for us as well.

I believe we all understand what is means to be confused about something.  That’s exactly where Daniel was in the text we’re going to look at today.  He’s beyond confused!  Let’s take a look at what I’m talking about now.

Kenan ends up being a picture of us, as Christians, in our spiritual walk.  We want to be strong and not willing to back down when faced with challenges to our faith, but more often than not, we fail to stand firm for Christ in the public eye.  And we write off our actions as faith simply being a private matter.