Please turn with me to the opening verses of the book of Daniel. We began last week a series of topical studies from Daniel. I want to speak this evening and in our next study about appreciating the pressures under which Daniel and his friends had to live. It, of course, has never been easy to be a believer in God. Our Lord Himself said in John 16, 33 to His disciples, in this world you will have trouble or you will have pressure. So that is a given for all God's people. As long as we're in this sinful world, we're going to have pressure from the world. Some periods, however, seem to be more difficult than others for Christians. And some places are certainly more difficult than others. And our Lord Jesus urged anyone who would follow Him to count the cost. He was absolutely open and honest. He never pretended that it's easy to be a Christian. And we have to count the cost. And this is where the book of Daniel can be a great help to us. Because Daniel and his friends were placed in God's providence in a very uncomfortable and difficult position, where it was extremely difficult to live as believers in God. We saw last week how they were exiled to Babylon. And those new surroundings meant intense pressure. And Scripture, as it always does, describes those pressures realistically. Now, it doesn't tell us all the pressures that Daniel faced. Doubtless, like each one of us, he had his own personal pressures, his own private pressures, things that happened in his heart, in his life, in his relationships, which were difficult and stressful. The book says very little about these. They were there. But we can, however, as we look at the book as a whole, isolate, I believe, at least four aspects of severe pressure in the face of which Daniel had to live his Christian life, his life for God. And I want to look at two of them tonight and two of them, God willing, at our next study. And the first of the two this evening that I want to mention is the pressure of change. The pressure of change. Now, most human beings enjoy change. God has created us in such a way that we appreciate it and need it and want it. And we live in a changing world. Every day changes from sunrise to sunset. It's constantly changing. The weather changes. In Ireland, it changes very frequently. The seasons change. Spring gives way to summer and so on. Our bodies change, our relationships change, our tastes, our interests change. Monotony doesn't suit us. We don't like it. We can listen with pleasure to a piece of music. If, however, one single note was to be played On and on and on. After 10 or 15 minutes, we'd be growing tired of it. After 30 minutes, we would be starting to lose our reason that would grate on us, the sheer monotony of it. We pity the person who never changes. We consider them boring. We're positive about change. We say a change is as good as a rest. And yet, there's a fine line here. Because if the change becomes too radical or too disruptive, it then becomes stressful and it becomes damaging. A certain amount of change is beneficial. Too much change is deeply unsettling to us as people and we don't do well with it. The insurance companies have what they call tension tables, which are supposed to predict whether or not the people who take out these policies are going to have heart attacks or strokes. And they have a certain weight given to various stressful events in your life. For example, a bereavement, or moving home, or losing your job, or changing to a new job. And all these things are given a stress value. And if someone, for example, is bereaved while they are moving home after losing their job and moving to a new job, the insurance companies would say they were in a very stressful situation. And young Daniel would have scored high on any stress indicator if there had been insurance companies in those days. You remember how we saw last week that King Nebuchadnezzar came and invaded his country and took into exile many Teenagers, young Hebrew men and women, took them far away to a different country. It was a shattering, devastating change. They were suddenly taken from a quiet, peaceful existence and plunged into a whirlpool of radical change. Think of it for these young people. Cultural change. Suddenly they were violently, forcibly taken away to a completely new country. They had to start speaking a new language of which they wouldn't understand a word. They would have to eat food that they'd never tasted before. They would have to live a completely different lifestyle, a new culture, new customs. New reactions, all strange and unfamiliar. That's a very dramatic change. In addition to cultural change, there was domestic change. Their families didn't go with them. For the most part, their relations and friends and even their parents were left behind in Jerusalem. the Jewish family was always close-knit. And we can imagine these homesick young people traveling hundreds of miles away to new surroundings, away from everyone they had known and loved all their lives. And this would intensify their feelings of loneliness and stress. But most serious of all, was the spiritual change. Daniel and his friends were no longer in the promised land where God dwelt among his people. No longer was there a king of David's line to rule them. The temple which they had loved and where they had worshipped had been plundered and dishonored. No longer were any sacrifices offered or allowed to be offered to God. In the land to which they were going, there would be very few fellow believers. Most of the people they lived among would never have heard of Jehovah, the God of Israel. God's law would be unknown. His holy Sabbath would be non-existent. His covenant and his Messiah, meaningless. These Jewish teenagers are facing enormous pressure. And we've got to understand that as we read the book of Daniel. Here are young people under very, very severe stress. Is it possible that their faith is going to stand the test. Now, it's unlikely, I suppose, that we will face in Northern Ireland a takeover by a foreign power. I suppose the only foreign power that might take us over is in Dublin. It's possible, I suppose, but perhaps not likely. It's not likely that any of us will be driven into exile, but we certainly are living in a world which is very fluid and rapidly changing. We'll probably move home more than our parents ever did. Many of us may well change our jobs several times in our lives. And we're living in a period of history where there are profound changes taking place. Many of the protective structures of society are being removed. I don't want to sound like an old duffer who's looking back to the good old days. And we recognize that there was no golden age in the past. But it's a simple historical fact that 40 years ago in this province, there was a great deal more respect for law, for life, for property, for truth than there is now. Old people used to be respected and honoured. Often now they're treated with callous contempt. They're a nuisance. Children used to be cherished and protected. If a child got lost when I was a child, any adult would have taken you safely home. We're living in a world where children are violated, often by the very people with whom they should be most secure. And many unborn children never get a chance to see the light of day. Divorce and marriage breakdown used to be rare, but now the integrity of marriage is collapsing. That's perhaps the most devastating social change that we'll see in our lifetimes. Every level of authority is being questioned, repudiated and sued. A businessman's word is no longer his bond. Politicians are a byword for dishonesty. We're being told that we're living in a multi-society, a multi-ethnic, a multi-cultural, a multi-faith society. We're seeing the rise of aggressive homosexuality. We're seeing a new self-righteous intolerance of Christians. We're surrounded by things that we don't really understand, genetic engineering, The communications revolution with its mobile phones and computers and television channels. Our lives are being governed by hugely powerful multinational companies. Did any of you like me feel a shiver of unease to learn the other day that everything in our kitchens and in our bathrooms is going to be provided by one company who will own everything and control everything. We're seeing the remorseless, perhaps, advance of the European Union. We're living in a very fluctuating, fluid situation. And these are pressures, and they're real, and they're potentially deadly, and it does make it more difficult to be a Christian in this sort of world. These pressures impact on us. They leave us vulnerable and fragile. We think we're standing on solid ground, and then we find we aren't. And I believe that many young people are being impacted by these pressures. And we're living in a world where lazy, not properly thought out opinions won't stand the test. Where Christians who are half-hearted, they're going to crumple. A second-hand faith won't be able to cope. So when Daniel We're going to be looking at young people who are being battered by change. That's the first pressure. But the second one is more subtle and much, much more dangerous. It's the pressure of brainwashing. Nebuchadnezzar had a problem. He had just become king. the king of an enormous conglomeration of various nationalities. Most were Babylonians, but there were many, many subject peoples. A ragbag of different races and languages and cultures and religions. And he was supposed to hold this vast empire together. His empire was a bit like the Russian empire in the 1950s and 60s. A collection of many, many different nationalities and languages and traditions. How was Nebuchadnezzar to keep this empire together? His political survival depended on it. In fact, probably his life depended on it. How is he going to hold this empire together? He came up with a brilliant solution, the solution of benevolent brainwashing. He decided that he would handle the problem of nationalism by destroying it. And in the early verses of the chapter which Simon read earlier this evening, we see what he did. He decided that he was going to pick out the future opinion makers, the future movers and shakers from all the nationalities in his empire. He was going to offer them university scholarships and bring them to Babylon to study Babylonian language and literature, a three-year degree course. Generous scholarships, student grants, All your food and lodging provided good jobs in the civil service at the end of their studies. That's what Medjugorje decided to do. It was a marvelous opportunity, even though his motives were cynical. And his goal was to produce a class of administrators or civil servants who were completely Babylonian. And what he did with these Hebrew young people is just one example of what he was doing with lots of different nationalities. These young men mentioned here were only a small part of a large-scale educational experiment to take the leaders of all the peoples, bring them to Babylon, turn them into Babylonians, so that they could keep the empire together and keep all these people under control. We're seeing it from the Hebrew perspective here, but it was something that was done for all the peoples in his whole empire. And one of the key components of this was to make them forget their religion. That's why the phrase at the beginning of verse 7 is absolutely key. the chief official gave them new names. In those days, a person's name was very, very important. And the names of these four young Hebrews all spoke of their God. Their names reminded them of their faith. Their four names either contained the letters E-L, which is the Hebrew for God, or I-A-H, which is the Hebrew for the Lord. Daniel means God has judged. Mishael means who is like God. Hananiah means Jehovah has been gracious. Azariah means Jehovah has helped. They had godly parents. Their parents gave them names which spoke of their God, of their faith, of their covenant commitment and loyalty, reminding them of the true God. And the Babylonian officials changed their names. Daniel became Bel-teshazzar, the keeper of the treasures of Bel. Hananiah became Shadrach, which is another name for the Babylonian god Marduk. Mishael became Mishach, which is the goddess Aphrodite or Venus. Azariah became Abednego, the servant of Nebo. They were given the names of heathen gods. Their original names reminded them of the true God. Their new names spoke of idols. And you can see the idea. By taking God out of their names, God would be taken out of their lives. And for three years, they were subjected to an intensive program of Babylonian culture. the language and literature, the mythology, the religion, the history, the philosophy, the drama, the art of the Babylonians. They were to be subjected to this brainwashing. And the pressure was kept up in Daniel's case for over 70 years. And the message was clear. Become a Babylonian. Become a Babylonian. Forget the past. Forget your God. Conform. This is the way to success, promotion, advancement, wealth, and honor. But one can't help wondering how many young Hebrews compromised and capitulated to this very, very intensive brainwashing. Now, we may listen to this with a degree of calmness. We may say, well, we're not brainwashed. People in North Korea are brainwashed. People in China are brainwashed. There's no brainwashing in the Western world. That would be a mistake. We're all subject to this pressure. every one of us on a gigantic scale. It's not crude. It's not obvious. It's subtle. And therefore, it's dangerous. The world is trying every moment and in every way possible to bring us away from God, to wipe out the memory of God from human consciousness. This brainwashing from our culture and our world embraces every sphere of our lives, from sport to religion. It never ceases. It never lets up for a moment. Its propaganda is brilliant. The media in particular are very, very clever at what they do. They know what they're doing. They spare no expense. They do it with great skill. The lies of the world are attractively gift-wrapped and brilliantly presented. The poison is often mixed with what is good and true. so that we will swallow it more easily. The media people, the politicians, the advertisers have as their target audience, especially those who are young and inexperienced and vulnerable. And this project is endorsed and supported by the leaders, the icons, the stars, the heroes of society. Make no mistake, the world is seeking to brainwash us. The world is seeking to capture our children. The world is seeking to take our children away from us and to take them away from God and to manipulate them. And it knows exactly what it's doing and how it means to go about it. a conservative politician of a previous generation, Lord Hailsham, eventually became Lord Chancellor. In the 1950s he wrote something which is more true than when he wrote it. He was a Christian. The Lord Chancellor wrote of Britain, Our country is being destroyed before our eyes by a conspiracy of intellectuals without faith, delinquents without honor, muckrakers without charity or compassion, young men who are incapable of dreaming dreams, and old men who have never known what it is to see visions. The worst thing about it all is its insidiousness. We don't even know what's happening to us. All too often we don't realize what is being done to us and how worldly we are becoming and how we are imperceptibly drifting from God and denying God. We don't understand how the world is altering our perceptions and lowering our standards and weakening our commitment. It's like entering a smoke-filled room. When you go in, if you're not a smoker, the atmosphere is horrible and you're choking and you're gasping and you say, how do people stay in this atmosphere? But stay there for an hour or two. And at the end of that time, you'll not even notice the smoke. You become used to it, habituated to it. It would be an interesting experiment if we could bring back our grandparents or our great-grandparents, Christians, and get them to sit and watch television with us for an evening. What would they think? about what we watch? What would they think about the money we spend? What would they think about the luxuries that we take for granted? What would they think about the books we read? What would they think about the clothes which some Christian young women wear? What would they think about the childishness of some Christian young men in terms of Christian service. There's a massive satanic project going on to brainwash us, to take us away from God. And many Christians have lived so long in this atmosphere that it has ceased to disgust us or shock us. We're like the mythical frog. I don't know whether this experiment was ever done, but the frog, we're told, if it's placed in a saucepan of cold water and the water is slowly heated, the frog will sit in the water until the water boils and it bursts because it's by degrees. It's by degrees. I remember being at a minister's conference in Leicester when a pastor from Eastern Europe spoke to us. This was the days before the Iron Curtain had fallen. And he had been speaking about the persecution and harassment which his church and young people had been facing from the communists. And during his address he said to us, men, some of you have been commiserating with me. You've been saying how terrible this persecution is, how sorry you feel for us. And the pastor said, I fear far more than the persecution, the worldliness that I see in the church in the West. He said, you are in greater danger than we are. The enemy is trying to frighten us. The enemy is trying to seduce you. And he is being more successful in the West than he is in the East. And he actually went so far as to say, in some respects, I fear the coming of Western culture and Western ways into our country because of what it may do to our young people. Brainwashing is one of the devil's most effective tactics. Depressing, isn't it? I'm not going to say too much this evening about the answer, but I'm going to point you to the answer. You probably realize that I only partially quoted the statement of our Lord at the beginning. In this world you will have trouble. The full statement reads, John 16, 33, I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble, but take heart. I have overcome the world. What I am saying, friends, is simply this. that as for Daniel and his friends, the world we are in is an exceedingly dangerous place. And without our Lord Jesus, we haven't a hope of making it. And we need Him. And we need Him for our children. Good advice isn't enough. Good upbringing isn't enough. Good example isn't enough. They need to be in Christ. to have His power dwelling in them. And He has overcome the world. And before we have finished Daniel, we will see that it is possible by God's grace to live in Babylon, to live a godly, obedient, Christ-like life to God's glory. Take heart. I have overcome the world. Let us bow in prayer.