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Whatever the cost



Daniel 11:33

Those who are wise will instruct many, though for a time they will fall by the sword or be burned or captured or plundered.


Thought for the day – Whatever the cost

That’s a perky little verse to start our day with isn’t it?

This verse is part of Daniel is famously dense — kings of the North and South marching back and forth across centuries. But right in the middle of it, something remarkable happens.


In the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, when the temple was desecrated and faithfulness to God became a genuinely dangerous thing to practise, a group of ordinary believers kept teaching anyway. They had an understanding of who God was and what he'd promised and instead of hoarding it for safety, they gave it away. To many. Knowing full well it would cost them. But have you ever noticed how faithfulness and cost tend to travel together?


We'd love a version of discipleship where wisdom earns applause instead of some sort of persecution. But Daniel doesn't offer us that. He offers us something more honest: people who kept teaching truth even while paying for it in real, physical ways.

And here's the thing worth paying attention to this morning; their suffering wasn't meaningless. Read on a few verses, and we're told some of them " will stumble, so that they may be refined, purified and made spotless." God wasn't absent from the flames. He was doing something in them, even there.


So maybe the question for you today isn't "will this cost me?" It probably will, in some shape or size. The question is whether you'll keep giving away understanding anyway.

This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This blog post is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 


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