Today we continue our series entitled “Pursuing Grace-Based Success!”
Here are our foundational scriptures:
(Ephesians 2:8-10 ERV)
8 I mean that you have been saved by grace because you believed. You did not save yourselves; it was a gift from God.
9 You are not saved by the things you have done, so there is nothing to boast about.
10 God has made us what we are. In Christ Jesus, God made us new people so that we would spend our lives doing the good things he had already planned for us to do.
(1 Corinthians 1:30,31 NLT)
30 God has united you with Christ Jesus. For our benefit God made him to be wisdom itself. Christ made us right with God; he made us pure and holy, and he freed us from sin.
31 Therefore, as the Scriptures say, “If you want to boast, boast only about the Lord.”
(2 Timothy 1:9 NKJV)
Who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began.
We have been covering the story of Daniel for a while now, and since we are getting to the end of the year, I will cover a good portion of the story today. I will break it up into parts.
Part 1
(Daniel 2:31-35)
Daniel said to King Nebuchadnezzar, “King, in your dream you saw a large statue in front of you that was very large and shiny. It was very impressive. The head of the statue was made from pure gold. Its chest and the arms were made from silver. The belly and upper part of the legs were made from bronze. The lower part of the legs was made from iron. Its feet were made partly of iron and partly of clay. While you were looking at the statue, you saw a rock that was cut loose, but not by human hands. Then the rock hit the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold broke to pieces all at the same time. And all the pieces became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summertime. The wind blew them away, and there was nothing left. No one could tell that a statue had ever been there. Then the rock that hit the statue became a very large mountain and filled up the whole earth.” Daniel depicted the king’s dream with vivid detail. The type of detail that could only come from God by His grace. Daniel had no way of knowing this outside of the spirit of God.
This reminds me of something that happened not too long ago in church. A young lady came to the altar for prayer. As she stood in front of me, she was visibly distraught. Before praying with her I asked one of our sisters to hug her. As the young lady received the hug tears rolled down her face and her body continued to shake as she released a portion of the pain.
After the hug, she came back to me for prayer. I asked her, “What can I pray with you about?” After a long pause, she shook her head and said, “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know how to verbalize it.” She was obviously going through a great deal internally, so I said, “Don’t worry about it. God will show me. God will tell me what to say.” I was placing myself in a position like the one Daniel found himself in – where I needed to hear from God.
As I stood before her, I opened my heart to receive whatever God wanted to tell me about her. God began to show me the young lady as a little girl, and He began to speak to me. I said what I heard and saw. I said, “You were raised in church. I see you as a little girl. You were raised by a strong Christian family. You were prayed over and many powerful things were spoken over your life. As a girl you believed those things. You spoke them. You prayed about them. You were excited. But then “life” happened. Somewhere along the way you made what you considered to be “too many” mistakes. You got to the point where you no longer believed. You thought you had disqualified yourself from God’s plan for your life. But God says, “No. No daughter. It’s still yours.” See, the giftings and callings of God are without repentance. God will never give up on you. You thought you wrecked your life, but you haven’t. God is still there and He is ready to do all He said He would do through you. Even as I am speaking to you, the Lord is bringing back many of the things you used to pray about and believe Him for. It’s like He is showing you a commercial on the canvas of your mind. He is showing you things, one after one, over and over. These are all the things God wants to do in your life. Not because you have earned them, but only because of His grace.”
The entire time I spoke, the young lady kept nodding her head in agreement as the tears continued to flow. She saw all the Lord wanted her to see. Afterward, I prayed for her, and she was restored. She came to church one way and she left completely different, by God’s unearned and amazing grace.
Here are a few takeaways from this:
1. The supernatural is available to you, but you will never tap into God’s limitless power if you don’t believe.
2. If you want to flow in the Spirit, who is limitless, you must remove every artificial limit you have ever placed on our limitless God.
3. Stop asking for small things. If you only ask for something you can do, you will never use your faith, and you will never tap into God’s grace to do things you can’t do on your own.
4. Your desire must be equal to all God has placed IN you! If you want to walk in the fullness of your divine purpose, your prayers must be the size of your assignment!
5. Only God-sized prayers tap into God’s grace for the supernatural.
6. Daniel believed God would show him the king’s dream. God did. It had nothing to do with natural power, strength, or intellect. This was completely a supernatural act performed by the grace of God, accessed with the faith of Daniel.
7. I needed the Lord to show me what was going on with the young lady supernaturally. God did. God allowed me to see her past and speak into her future. This had nothing to do with me or my power. This had everything to do with God and His grace. But I would have never accessed God’s grace if I did not use my faith.
8. You are only limited by your capacity to believe.
Part 2
(Daniel 2:36-38)
Daniel said to the king, “That was your dream. Now we will tell the king what it means. King, you are the most important king. The God of heaven has given you a kingdom, power, strength, and glory. He has given you control, and you rule over people and the wild animals and the birds. Wherever they live, God has made you ruler over them all. King Nebuchadnezzar, you are that head of gold on the statue.“
Here are a few takeaways from this:
1. All earthly authority operates under the permission of our God in heaven.
The Apostle Paul said, “All of you must obey the government rulers. Everyone who rules was given the power to rule by God. And all those who rule now were given that power by God.” (Romans 13:1).
— God is the ultimate authority. He is the King of kings and Lord of lords. While He does not actively make everything happen on the earth — because He allows the system of sowing and reaping, cause and effect, and the free will of humans to run its course — God is still sovereign, and any authority on the earth is authority He has permitted.
— God can prevent, and He can permit. Whatever He permits, He has purpose wrapped up in.
2. Acknowledge the awesome sovereignty of God.
Daniel told King Nebuchadnezzar, the man with ultimate authority in his kingdom, “The God of heaven has given you a kingdom, power, strength, and glory. He has given you control, and you rule over people and the wild animals and the birds. Wherever they live, God has made you ruler over them all.”
— Daniel acknowledged God’s involvement in Nebuchadnezzar’s life, even though Nebuchadnezzar had never acknowledged God.
— Daniel did not think like many Christians think today. Daniel did not say, “Oh King, since you are good, holy, and righteous; since you have lived a life pleasing in God’s sight; since you have honored the Lord Jehovah since your youth, now the Lord is going to bless you.” No, Daniel did not focus on human performance because the king was not living as a child of God. Daniel was laser-focused on God’s grace.
— Daniel basically said, “Oh King, even though you have never acknowledged the only wise and true God, even though you have never called on His name, even though you have never worshipped him with your heart, God has still blessed you and made you the ruler of this kingdom. Do you know why Mr. King? God did not do it because you have been so good. God did it because He is so good. God did it by His grace!“
— To be successful in this world, especially around people who are not followers of Jesus, you must acknowledge the hand of God on the just and unjust. God wants you to honor and respect those in authority, even if they don’t believe what you believe!
3. You have the grace to lead.
— If you are in a leadership position of any kind, God has given you the grace to assume and excel in that position.
— God did not start working in your life the day you accepted Jesus as Lord. God made plans for you before the world began. So even if you were in a leadership position before coming to know God, God wants you to know that He was already at work in your life and placed you in the position to lead, even before you ever called out to Him.
— Don’t pray and ask God to give you the grace to lead. If you do that, you are praying from a position of need and not a position of grace. If you ask God to give you the grace to lead, then you are asking for something you believe you don’t already have. God wants you to know that He already placed the grace to lead IN you. Pray from a position of grace and ask God for the outworking of the internal. Ask God to help you to maximize the purpose and potential He has already placed inside of you.
— No matter the challenge you face at work or in your business today, no matter the size of the project, the size of the budget, the size of the issues, or the number of opposers, God has already given you the grace to lead and succeed.
— Greatness is IN you. The fullness of the measure of Christ is IN you. It is Christ IN you, the hope of glory!
Part 3
(Daniel 2:39-44)
Daniel said, “Another kingdom will come after you, but it will not be as great as your kingdom. Next, a third kingdom will rule over the earth—that is the bronze part. Then there will be a fourth kingdom. That kingdom will be strong like iron. Just as iron breaks things and smashes them to pieces, that fourth kingdom will break all the other kingdoms and smash them to pieces.
You saw that the feet and toes of the statue were partly clay and partly iron. That means the fourth kingdom will be a divided kingdom. It will have some of the strength of iron in it just as you saw the iron mixed with clay. The toes of the statue were partly iron and partly clay. So the fourth kingdom will be partly strong like iron and partly weak like clay. You saw the iron mixed with clay, but iron and clay don’t completely mix together. In the same way the people of the fourth kingdom will be a mixture. They will not be united as one people.
During the time of the kings of the fourth kingdom, the God of heaven will set up another kingdom that will continue forever. It will never be destroyed. And it will be the kind of kingdom that cannot be passed on to another group of people. This kingdom will crush all the other kingdoms. It will bring them to an end, but that kingdom itself will continue forever.”
Here are a few takeaways from this:
1. God reveals secret things to humans all the time, but our heart must be open to receive.
— The Lord revealed the future in a dream to a pagan king who had never acknowledged His presence.
— The Lord revealed the dream and the interpretation of the dream to a teenage Hebrew slave.
— The Lord is always speaking, but we must slow down and tune in long enough to hear what He is saying.
2. God wants to reveal Himself on earth.
— The Lord explained Nebuchadnezzar’s dream to Daniel. By doing so, the Lord was revealing what would happen hundreds of years into the future.
— The Lord revealed five kingdoms to Nebuchadnezzar in his dream. The kingdoms were: the Babylonian empire, over which Nebuchadnezzar was ruling at the time, the Medo-Persian empire that would follow, the Greek Empire that would come after that (with Alexander the Great), and finally, the Roman Empire, during which time Jesus would be born. The last empire was God’s own empire. Jesus came to establish the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is the stone in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. This is a stone that could not be made with human hands. This stone crushed all the other empires, and it then expanded to fill the whole earth.
— Nebuchadnezzar did nothing to earn or deserve God’s revelation. All he did was go to sleep.
— Daniel did nothing to earn or deserve God’s revelation. All he did was ask in faith.
— God wants to reveal Himself to you by His grace. Why not slow down today long enough to ask God to show Himself to you? Ask in faith, and your faith will access His grace.
3. The secret things belong to the Lord, but the revealed things belong to us.
Moses said, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” (Deut 29:29).
God allowed King Nebuchadnezzar to dream about things that would not happen for hundreds of years. God then allowed Daniel to interpret the dream. There are several things we can learn from this:
— God knows the end from the beginning (Isa 46:10). We don’t know the future.
— Nothing is a mystery or a secret to God. Many things are a mystery to us.
— God chooses to reveal things to humans. When he does, divine revelation helps humans prepare for the future.
— Even though God can, He does NOT reveal everything to us. If He did, we would not need faith.
— There is a certain level of mystery to walking with God. Some things He will tell you, other things He won’t. He wants you to live by faith and to trust Him the entire way.
4. Live by revelation, faith, and trust.
— To succeed in life and your walk with Christ, your heart must be OPEN to everything God reveals. Expect God to speak to you and show you things to come. Live with an expectation of revelation.
— Have faith in every Word you receive from God – whether that Word was in the Bible or it came to you another way.
— Trust God when you can’t trace Him. Since God will NOT reveal everything to you, to succeed in life, you must trust God, even when you don’t know what He will do. Even when God does not tell you what He is going to do, you do know He loves you, so you know it will turn out for your good!
*** When you open your heart to divine revelation, believe what God reveals, and trust Him for the rest, you cannot help but become a success!
Declaration of Faith:
Father, I thank You for teaching me about grace-based success.
You revealed key things to King Nebuchadnezzar, a man who did not know You and who did nothing to earn or deserve your revelation. You did this because You wanted to, and You did it by grace. You then revealed Yourself to Daniel, a teenage slave at the time. Daniel exercised faith and you released Your grace for Daniel to see into the future. What You did for them, You can and will do for me!
You have secret things. You know the end from the beginning. There are things You will not reveal to me because you expect me to live by faith and trust You. But there are also many things You want to reveal to me. So this is how I live:
— I use my faith to tap into Your grace.
— You reveal things to me about my future by Your Spirit.
— I believe what You reveal by faith.
— I count them as ALREADY DONE!
— And when You have not spoken to me yet about something, it may even be something that You will never speak to me about, I trust You with my whole heart.
— I use my faith when You tell me what You are going to do, and I trust You when I don’t know.
— I live by revelation, faith, and trust.
This way, I am never unprepared, and I enter every day ready to WIN, by Your grace, for Your glory! Living this way, I know GREATER IS COMING FOR ME! I declare this by faith. In Jesus’ name, Amen!
This is Today’s Word! Apply it and Prosper.
