Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Well, hey, friends, here's one of the things that people never tells you about identity. You can know exactly who you are in Christ. You can believe it, you can claim it, you can build your theology around it. And still slowly, quietly, and almost imperceptibly start living like somebody else.
[00:00:24] Because you decided to not. Not because something dramatic happened. Just because life got busy and you got comfortable and the voices around you were consistent. And one day you look up, and the version of yourself that's been showing up to your own life doesn't look like the person you said you were going to be. And the name for that is drift. And it is the thing that Babylon was actually counting on with Daniel. So when you think about his story, and I think this part of the story gets underplayed, Nebuchadnezzar doesn't throw Daniel into a dungeon. He doesn't mistreat him. He invites him into opportunity. Best food, best school, best career prospects in the most powerful nation of the earth in three years of gradual, daily, completely unviolent replacement. New language, new literature, new diet, new name, until one day what you have is a young man from Jerusalem who thinks and speaks and eats like a Babylonian. The goal was never to break him. It was to absorb him slowly enough that he might not even notice. Daniel 1:5 says it plainly. The king appointed for them a daily ration from the king's choice food and from the wine which he drank. And he appointed that they should be educated for three years, and at the end of which, they would enter the king's personal service. Three years, slow, systematic, completely comfortable program of becoming someone else. And if we're not paying attention, if we're not anchored to something real, the same thing can happen to us. Not three years, necessarily, sometimes in 30. But the mechanism is the same. A little more image management here, a little compromise here. You start performing the version of yourself that gets the best response in the room. You curate what people say you optimize for approval. And gradually, the version of you that shows up in the world starts looking a lot more like the culture you're living in than the God who you say you belong to. And so here's the honest question for today.
[00:02:14] Where have you been drifting? Not dramatically, not in a way that anybody would notice from the outside, but quietly, slowly, in the direction of something that isn't actually what you want to be.
[00:02:25] Maybe it's in how you talk about people when they're not in the room. Maybe it's in how tightly you're holding money right now. Maybe it's in how long it's been since you actually let God into the real stuff. Not the Sunday stuff, the real stuff. Drift doesn't announce itself. It happens. And the only thing that stops this thing is to be honest enough to actually name it. Now, Daniel noticed the drift before it became his whole life. He made a choice. A specific, intentional, countercultural choice to stay anchored to who he actually was. We'll talk about that choice tomorrow. But today, just ask the question. Where have you been drifting? Where have you been drifting? Because Babylon doesn't break you. It absorbs you slowly enough that you might not even notice. Have a great day, Sa.
