A Taste Of The High Life

The king assigned them a daily ration of food and wine from his own kitchens. They were to be trained for three years, and then they would enter the royal service.   Daniel 1:5

This was heady stuff for high schoolers, eating from the same menu as the king of Babylon. The message was getting through: “The king’s palace is the place to be. This is where the doors of opportunity are.” The king knew that once they got a taste for the high life, it would be hard to settle for anything else.

Daniel decided not to eat from the king’s table. He resolved not to defile himself with the royal food (see Daniel 1:8). In addition to the potential scruples of conscience, I believe he abstained because he was realistic about the pressures of the culture. He would live, serve, and prosper there, but he would never allow Babylon to consume him. He would remember that he served a greater king.

Daniel needed some way of keeping that fixed in his mind, so he established a discipline for himself. He turned down the offer of a daily visit to the top restaurant in town and ate a brown-bag lunch instead. He didn’t do this to keep an external law, but to sustain an internal desire. It was a voluntary discipline, designed to remind him of his distinctive calling and to increase his spiritual strength.

Daniel knew if he didn’t exercise some restraint, he would eventually be consumed by the values of the culture. He determined not to get hooked on the things of this world, because then he would lose his freedom to be an effective servant of God.

Are you being realistic about the pressures that the world places on you? Every day you are bombarded by a view of life that is self-centered and has no room for God. “Nothing matters more than you do, so pursue your own pleasure,” our culture seems to say. Once you identify the pressures you’re facing, it’s time to develop a strategy for resistance.

For further reading, see 2 Timothy 3