When Your Beliefs Are Belittled — Part 1

This is Pastor Rick's daily hope. I'm so glad that you found us today. And whether you're at home or in your car, we're so glad that you're here.

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You hope in times of difficulty. Rick is taking us through the book of Daniel, and that's so we'll be equipped to handle whatever curveball life throws at us, even the most difficult trials. So let's jump right in for part one of a message called when your beliefs are belittled.

Here's Rick today.

We're in part three of unshakable thriving, no matter what they throw at you. And we're looking at nine lessons from the life of that great character in the Bible, Daniel. You know, starting at about the age of five, you're gonna spend the better part of the next two decades getting an education. And hopefully that education will continue learning the rest of your life. Now, an education is a good thing. In fact, the Bible has a lot to say about the importance of you getting an education. The Bible says we're to love God with our minds. That's in the great commandment. How do you love God with your mind? By using it. By developing it. By not wasting it. By educating it. That's one of the ways you love God with your mind, by learning all you can. The Bible's got a lot to say about learning and education. Let me just show you a couple verses here on the screen. The Bible says in Proverbs 19:8, do yourself a favor and learn all you can. Then remember what you learn and you will prosper. He says you're doing yourself a favor when you get an education and then remember and you're gonna prosper. That's another word for success. You wanna be successful in life, get a good education. It's not by accident that in almost every country of the world, the first school and the first hospital were started by Christians, started by the church. The church invented the hospital. We are a preaching, teaching, and healing faith. That's why there's Christian schools and Saint Mary's, Saint Joseph's hospitals everywhere you look. Because we believe in the body, the mind, and the soul. God doesn't just care about your soul. He cares about your mind and. And your body. Now, your education doesn't end with school. And to be successful, you're gonna be learning the rest of your life. Let me show you another verse. Proverbs 24, verse 5 says, this wisdom brings strength and knowledge gives power. When I was driving into the services last Night I heard an ad on the radio and somebody said, knowledge is power. Do you know where that came from? Came from the Bible. The Bible was the first to say that knowledge is power. If you wanna be strong, you wanna be powerful, learn as much as you can. Get an education. Wisdom brings strength and knowledge brings power. Later on, I'm gonna talk to you about the difference between wisdom and knowledge. Cause they're both important, but they're different. And the Bible actually says that getting an education is a good investment of your time and your life and your money. In fact, it's an investment in yourself. But the Bible also says that you need to be careful about your education. You need to guard your education. Cause you need to learn the right stuff. Proverbs 4:13 on your outline says this. Your education is your life. So guard it well. Guard it well. Students, are you guarding your education? Say, I don't know how to do that. We're gonna talk about how to do that today. Parents and relatives, are you helping students that, you know, guard their education? Now, last week, in the last message I talked about, before every test, there's. I mean, before every blessing, there's always a testing. God tests you to see if you are ready to handle the blessing, the success, the influence, the power, the blessing he wants to give you. Before every blessing in your life, there's always a testing. And God tests you with stress. Before he blesses you with success, before he trusts you with success. He tests you and then he trusts you. And we've been looking at the nine common tests of life. They're all in the life of Daniel. And we looked at a major change, and we looked at peer pressure this week. Daniel's still a teenager. This is the last message on his teen years. We're gonna look at the test of challenges to your faith. Now, remember last week I told you the background of the life of Daniel. The most powerful empire in the world was the Babylonian empire, which is in modern day Iraq. King Nebuchadnezzar was the most powerful man in the world. He comes in and he crushes Israel, a neighboring nation. He destroys the city of Jerusalem, and he takes 25% of the Jewish population as prisoners of war. 25% of the country is taken as prisoners of war and taken back to Babylon. For 70 years, they're held captive. One of those in that prisoner of war group is a young teenager named Daniel. He's 15 years old. He has three good friends that the Bible talks about in this book. And he's in a brand new country. And the Bible says that after these prisoners of war were taken back, that the king Nebuchadnezzar decides that he's going to create an indoctrination program for the prisoners of war. And I told you last week, they gave you a new identity, a new name, a new religion. You can't even eat the food you used to eat. Everything changes in your life. He says, we're gonna make you Babylonians. You're gonna forget God, you're gonna forget the Bible, and you're gonna do this. And he's gonna start a three year indoctrination program. And the Bible says In Daniel, chapter one, verse four and five, King Nebuchadnezzar commanded this select young men, these POWs, and make sure that they're well versed in every branch of learning. This is gonna be like a college degree here. He says, I want you to teach these young men all the language and all the literature of the Babylonians. They're gonna learn our culture. They are to be trained for three years, and then some will serve the king and after they graduate. So this is an indoctrination program. Now, Daniel and his three best friends actually get chosen for this program, and they're gonna be educated. Now, they're probably pretty excited about this. They're just prisoners of war. They're young teenagers in a foreign country. And all of a sudden the king picks them for his top degree program. And there was probably a little bit of mixture of excitement and fear, kind of like when you went off to college. A little bit of excitement, a little bit of fear, but it sounds pretty great. However, a lot of the courses that they were gonna be taught were totally anti God because the Babylonian culture was filled with polytheism and it was a pagan education system. In fact, Daniel 1:4, in the message paraphrase says this on the screen. Indoctrinate them in the Babylonian lore, okay? That's the myths and stuff of magic and fortune telling, huh? Do you wanna be educated in magic and fortune telling? He says this education system was designed to produce psychics and fortune tellers. Why? Because the Babylonians were incredibly superstitious, so they're gonna have to learn a lot of stuff they obviously don't agree with and don't believe. But God had prepared Daniel and his three teenage friends. And in verse 17, it says this. God gave these four young men an unusual aptitude for learning the literature and the science of that day. Now, let me just pause on that verse for just a minute. What that verse says is that God never asked you to do something he doesn't give you the ability to do. Let me say it another way. God will never put more on you than he puts in you to bear it up. These guys had already passed two important tests. Major change and peer pressure. And they came out with flying colors. Now God gives them an even bigger test. And that test is this. Can you study in a pagan school and not lose your faith? And if they pass this one, they're gonna get promoted again. Every time you pass a test, you, you get promoted. Now the problem, as I said, with this Babylonian school system is that it's totally, totally ungodly. They're gonna learn all kinds of myths and all kinds of superstitions and not one God, but multiple gods and all kind of occultic practices and false science and fallacies and bad logic and reason. Now, not everything the Babylonians believed was bad. In fact, the Babylonians gave us some stuff. The Babylonians were the first to discover the planet Jupiter without a telescope. And they were great students of the stars. But it wasn't for scientific reasons. It was for religious reasons. It wasn't for astronomy. It was for astrology. You see, the Babylonians believed that there were many, many kinds of gods and that they spoke to us every day in omens by what color the planets were. And so if the moon was this color, then one of the gods was saying this to you. And if Jupiter was another color, then God was saying this. And where it rose, you know, the zodiac, they invented it, they invented astrology. So it wasn't about astronomy, a legit science, it was about astrology, a fake religion. And they believed that God spoke through all of these stars and stuff like that. And it's kind of really. So you got your mystics and your psychics and your fortune tellers and your stargazers, and that's what they're gonna learn. And so they're gonna be trained to be like fortune tellers. This is not really that good of a program. Now, as I said, you did learn some stuff from the Babylonians. For instance, the 60 minutes on your watch. The reason we have 60 minutes an hour is cause the Babylonians thought the number 60 was a magical number. So they divided up an hour and 60. We talk about 360 degrees in a circle. That's Babylonian. Cause it was a root of 60, they thought that was a magical number. So even till today, we still have some of the leftovers of why things are the way they were from this society. Now in verse 18, the Bible says this. When the three year training was completed, they had to learn all this phony stuff as well as some good stuff. When the three year training was completed, the chief official brought the young men to King Nebuchadnezzar. All the POWs and the king talked with each of them and none of them impressed him as much as Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. That's his three best friends. So they were appointed to his regular staff as advisors. Now, now get this. They're 15 years old when this thing starts. They go through a three year process. They're only 18 years old. And now you're an advisor to the most powerful man in the kingdom, in the world. This is what you call graduating with honors. Okay? I mean, this is not magna cum laude. This is over the top. You go from a 15 year old POW to three years later at 18, you're an advisor to the most powerful man on earth. The leading empire at that day and time. That's pretty heady stuff. And it says so. They're appointed to his regular staff as advisors. And in all matters requiring wisdom and balanced judgment, the king found that the advice of these young men, Daniel and his three friends to be 10 times better than that of all the magicians and enchanters in his entire kingdom. That's called excelling in your education. Now what I wanna talk to you today about is how do you do that, whether you're a student now or the education for the rest of your life? How do you learn what the world wants to teach you without losing your faith? That's an important thing you need to know. You see, your education actually is only as good as the content you learn. You can go to school all your life, but if you're learning phony, fake, false, unscientific, untrue content, it's not gonna help you. Now this has happened, of course, in our country here in America. In 1962 and 1963, the Supreme Court, in three major rulings, took the Bible and prayer out of school. 1962 and 1963. Up to that time, for over 300 years, the Bible had been the primary textbook in public education. Right there, along with McGuffey's reader and a few others, the Bible was the primary textbook for education in America. It's what made our country great. In fact, maybe you don't know this, every one of the Ivy League schools were started by pastors to train pastors. All the education starting in America was Christian when it started, every one of them. Harvard started by pastors to train pastors. Yale, started by pastors to train pastors. Princeton, started by pastors to train pastors. Every single one of the Ivy League schools were started by Christians to train Christians. The only exception is Cornell. So the Supreme Court takes 3, 300 years of the Bible, all of a sudden out of the school, Public schools. Now, a lot of people thought, maybe this is a good idea. Maybe they're just taking religion out of schools and really, church should teach religion and schools shouldn't, okay? And they said, well, just take it out. The problem was they didn't just remove a religion. What they did is they took out Christianity and they replaced it with another religion called secular humanism. Now you say, well, secular humanism, that's not a religion. Oh, yes, it is. It's definitely a religion like Buddhism. It's a religion without a God, but it's a religion. The founder of modern education was John Dewey, and he was a very famous humanist. And he called humanism our common faith. Quote, our common faith. And in 1933, when a group of educators got together to write what? The Humanist Manifesto, which Dewey and many, many other famous educators signed. In that document, secular humanism is called religion. Julian Huxley, a very famous atheist of that day, called secular humanism religion without revelation. In other words, without a Bible, without a text. And in fact, in 1961, two years earlier, the Supreme Court had actually ruled in a decision that secular humanism is a religion. The Supreme Court called it a religion. So they just took out Christianity and put in another religion. Now, what that means is that for the last years, since today, it's not uncommon. If you grew up in public education like I did, and you probably did too, that during your years of education, there are gonna be probably some people who belittle the Bible, attack your beliefs, contradict your values, ridicule your faith, laugh at your moral stance, your values and your ethics, they're gonna laugh at that. And today, opposition to the Christian worldview has increased so much that they've now made movies about it. Now, there are gonna be some people who try some, maybe a few, who try to get you to doubt the Bible or deny your faith or whatever. And if you're a freshman, in particular, a secular teacher or atheist professor, can be pretty intimidating. What most students and even most adults don't know, something you do need to know when that happens is two things. Reality. Reality check right here. Number one, the actual number of atheist in the world is minuscule. It's actually quite small according. Go look. This up. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, right now, today, that in the world, about 2% of the people in the world are atheists. The actual number of atheists in the world is actually quite small outside of Europe, Manhattan and college universities. Okay, got student, you know, teachers who have tenure, you know, they can believe whatever they want. But. And not only that, every study, including Encyclopedia Britannica, has said, you can go Google this, that since 2000, the number of atheists in the world has actually shrunk. Since 2000. It's not getting bigger, it's actually shrunk. In fact, it has shrunk 0.17% since the year 2000. The other thing that every student, Christian student, needs to know this is that the world is actually getting more religious, not less. The future of the world is not secularism. Nothing points to that. It is actually the opposite. It's getting more religious. Let me put this in perspective. There are about 15 million Jews in the world. 15 million. About half of them live in America, and about another half live in Israel and a few scattered around the world. There are 600 million Buddhists in the world. There are 800 million Hindus in the world. There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, and there are 2.3 billion Christians in the world. One out of every three people on this planet is a Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ. I have spoken three times at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and it's a gathering of all of the brainiacs, the intellectuals of Europe, the bankers of Europe. And they're very secular. And the last time I was there, it kind of shocked them when I said, now, you may not like this, but the future of the world is not secularism. We're not becoming more secular, we're becoming more religious in different religions. And Islam and Christianity are the two fastest growing religions in the world. Islam is growing through birth rate. Christianity is growing through conversion. Through conversion. And so you're gonna have to learn how to live in a pluralistic world of people who disagree with you, but it's not gonna be primarily secularism. So since though public schools, particularly universities, are the seedbed or the primary bastion of unbelief, I want us to look today at how do you excel in school, how do you really graduate at the top of your class, just like Daniel and his did. When you don't agree with a lot of stuff that's being taught, how do you do that without losing your faith? Now you're gonna learn a lot of good stuff in public Education and secular schools. But you might learn some stuff that the Bible says. It's just flat out wrong. And many schools today are wrong about a lot of the important stuff in life, like your identity, your sexuality, your purpose in life, the meaning of your life and all of these kind of things. One of the reasons is because one of the big ideas held in a lot of schools is the idea that all truth is relative. You know that what's right for me, what's true for me, may not be true for you, and what's true for you may not be true for me. No, opinions are relative. Opinions are relative, but truth is truth. If it's true, it's always true. It's true a thousand years ago, it'll be true a thousand years from today. Gravity will not change in the next 100 years. There's a truth to gravity, and if it's true, it's not new, it's been around forever. But this idea that truth is relative, and some professors, particularly in universities, will go so far to say, and you might even hear this, there is no absolute truth. Now whenever anybody says that to you, you should say, are you absolutely sure? Because they just did a self refruiting statement. It's nonsense, illogical, it's irrational. You can't even say that because it violates the point itself. There is no absolute truth. You've just stated an absolute, so it's nonsense. Nobody can live that way. Even if you did believe it, nobody believes that everything is relative. If that was true, nobody would stop at a red stoplight. Oh, that's not true for me right now. No, you always stop at a red light or you get killed. It's just not true. There's stuff that's always absolutely true and stuff that's always not absolutely true. And so today in secular education, the idea is it's okay for you to think you're right. It's just not okay for you to think somebody else is wrong. Well, there are some things that are always right and there's some things that are always wrong. I could say the moon is made of silica rock, or I could say the moon is made of peanut butter and the moon is made of spaghetti. Those are not equally valid ideas. And yet some people say all ideas are equally valid. That's nonsense. All ideas are not equally valid. If that were true, you could pick up your phone, dial any phone number and get home. The fact is, in the entire universe, there's only one and only one number that will get you home. Every other number you dial will be a wrong number. Some things are wrong and some things are right. You just say, well, I can dial any number and get home. It doesn't work that way. I mean, I could say, okay, Jesus is God. Rick Warren is God. Bruno Mars is God. Those are not equally valid ideas. Okay, One might have a better likelihood than others, but some things are going to be right and some things are going to be wrong.

What a great message from Pastor Rick today. There's something I always take away from his message. Here's Rick to tell you how you can help support this ministry.

Jesus told his disciples that they should live their lives according to five specific purposes. He said, you've got to love God with all your heart. That's worship and love your neighbor as yourself. That's ministry. That's called the Great Commandment. And then Jesus said, go make disciples. That's evangelism. Baptize them into the family of God. That's fellowship, a sign of fellowship. And then he said, teach them. Obey everything I've taught you. That's discipleship. And we call that the Great Commission. We believe at Daily Hope that a great commitment to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission will produce a great Christian, a great church, a great company, a great community. You know, I started Daily Hope so I could spread the good news about Jesus not just across America, but all around the world. And we want people to know that God's word is filled with hope and truth and the power that we need to follow him every day is available to every single one. You know as well as I do that the word of God changes lives. It's alive, it's active, and it breathes new life and new love into all of our lives. So wherever you listen to this, whether you listen on the website, whether you listen on a radio station, whether you listen through a podcast, you're a part of the Daily Hope family and I need your help. We could not do this without your support. Now, you know I don't take any funds from this broadcast. We don't have any giant million dollar donor who's giving big gifts to this. It comes from daily donations from listeners like you. We're 100% listener funded. Would you continue to pray for this broadcast? And would you continue to support us and write to me?

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