Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 20 The king tells them to come out of the fire. Read Daniel 3:26. If you’ve ever grabbed ahold of a hot pan, you understand that you generally don’t have to be told to let go of something that’s on fire. Typically, that happens automatically. Your body’s response is to let go of something that you’ve grabbed that’s too hot. However, these 3 men, after having been thrown into a fiery furnace that killed other people, were walking around in there like it was nothing. They had to be told to come out. The king, who threw them in, was the one who told them…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 19 The mystery man. Read Daniel 3:24-25. In the verse before, we see that the king jumped up in amazement. I bet he did. He knew exactly what he expected to see when he looked into the furnace. And what he saw was completely unexpected. He knew he threw three men in the furnace. And yet all three of them plus one extra were walking around in the furnace as though nothing was wrong. I often wonder why the three men were walking around in there instead of walking back out, but they waited until the king called them out. Also, we know that the…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 18 Not everyone appreciates when you have integrity. Read Daniel 3:19-23. When you choose to take a stand and maintain integrity in situations, not everybody is going to love that. There will be people who actually really wish that you would just go along with the flow and do whatever anybody else is doing. People with integrity do not always fit in. Unfortunately, the world does not always have integrity and when other people do, it can be very difficult to manage through that situation. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego figured that out quickly. They shared their convictions with the king and explained to him the…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 17 Integrity. Read Daniel 3:13-18. Every discussion of leadership needs to have a piece that is tied back to integrity. You truly cannot be a leader, if you do not have integrity. However, that looks different for different people at different times. Ultimately, for these 3 men, integrity looked like them standing before the King and refusing to bow down and worship, anyone or anything other than the one true God. They managed that in an incredibly interesting way. They recognized that God could save them. They could live through the king’s wrath and the king’s punishment. God was capable of that, and they knew…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 16 The bigger picture. Read Daniel 3:8-12. I’ve read this story numerous times and seen this depicted in lots of children’s Bibles and children’s stories, but I never really noticed these verses until today. So often we’re taught that this whole story is about 3 men who stood up to the king. They refused to bow down to him and would worship God alone, and that is completely true. However, there is an additional aspect of this that I hadn’t noticed before. These men were set up because they were Jews. This was a hate crime that was initiated because the other wise men that…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 15 Follow the crowd. Read Daniel 3:4-7. It can be really easy to follow along through the crowd. There’s a lot less thought that has to go into our actions, and there’s not nearly as much pressure when you just do whatever around you does. However, often we find ourselves getting into trouble when we just blindly go along with the crowd. These people were told that they should bow down to this giant statue, and so everyone did. There wasn’t anything mentioned about people refusing to do this. We also get the idea that this wouldn’t have been that uncommon. A lot of countries…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 14 How quickly we forget. Read Daniel 3:1-3. How good of a memory do we have? How long do we remember the things that God has done for us? I don’t know how much time has passed between chapter 2 and chapter 3, but we ended chapter 2 with the king bowing down and worshipping the one true God. Then, we move forward in chapter 3 with the king building a giant idol of himself and asking people to worship him. When God has done something amazing and revealed himself in a tremendous way, how long does that stay with us? I’ve certainly been impacted…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 13 The reward for faithfulness. Read Daniel 2:48-49. As we close out this incredible chapter, we see a very interesting statement, that if we’re not careful, we’ll misunderstand. Having worked for much of my life in the business world, I’ve seen people get promotions and move through the ranks all because they were friends with people or networked with the right people. We see all the time that favors seem to be passed around and bestowed on those just because they are friends of the person in charge. At first glance, that almost seems like what is happening here. The king is so overjoyed and…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 12 Recognition. Read Daniel 2:46-47 Daniel finally finishes telling the king what his dream was and the interpretation. The king is in shock. He immediately has to recognize that Daniel’s God is the one and true God. I almost wonder if perhaps the king was trying to weed out and replace all his wise men by setting a task that he was so sure they would fail at. The beginning of the chapter mentioned that this was only the second year of his reign, so it’s certainly a possibility that he was using this as a tactic to make replacements in a politically strategic way.…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 11 The everlasting kingdom. Read Daniel 2:44-45. God shares the message of Jesus at every opportunity, and so should we. As Daniel finishes up his interpretation of the dream that the king had, we see the foreshadowing of the coming of Christ. Daniel explains the kingdoms that are going to come after the current one. These will be the different rulers and empires that will be over the land. God then shares that there will be a kingdom that will be established that wasn’t created by man and that is going to be greater than every single kingdom. God was sharing the message of the…