Welcome to Ocean Water. We hope you feel refreshed by the living water of Jesus Christ as we help people receive drinking water from the ocean for free. Thanks for joining us for this weekend's message and if you enjoy it, please share it with a friend. Hi, I'm Dr. Ryan Dellamater at Ocean Water. I'm here today at the beach where I live. It's going to be another beautiful day. I'm glad you can join us for this week's beach talk.
We've been spending nine weeks learning from a person named Daniel in the Old Testament. This is week four and we're calling our time together Waves, learning to ride what life brings. Today we're going to talk about the tidal wave. Have you or a friend ever said to you, I need you to do this for me and you go, there's no way I can get this done. I don't have the time, I don't have the money, I don't have the background, I don't have the talent, I don't have the connections.
Many times in our life we'll be faced with an impossible situation. What do you do in that situation? Well Daniel 2 verses 10 and 11 says, nobody can do what you ask, you're asking the impossible. What do you do when you're asked to do the impossible in your life? I've shared in the last couple of weeks that God always tests us before he blesses us. He tests us with stress before he trusts us with success.
Before God gives you blessing, success, power, influence, whatever he wants to give you, he sees first if you're ready to handle it. He tests you before he trusts you with the success. So in this story, in Daniel's life we're looking at the nine major tests that he went through and the ones that we go through. He passed every one of them and we want to pass them as well. Every time you pass a test you get promoted.
When you face an impossible task like a tidal wave, the first thing that you need to do is don't panic or be afraid. In Daniel's case he had a legitimate reason to be worried. If the government sent somebody to assassinate you, you'd probably panic, but he didn't. The Bible says in Daniel 2, 14 when Ariok, the commander of the Kingsguard came to kill him, Daniel handled the situation with wisdom and discretion. Once again Daniel's faith was tested and he passed.
This guy shows up to kill him and he handles the situation with peace and calmness. Not bad for a young guy. He wasn't afraid and he didn't panic. He asked you a question. What are you panicked about right now? Is it your job? Is it money? Is it debt? Is it maybe you're down? Maybe you're feeling really bad? Maybe it's your health? Maybe you're wondering if your life is actually headed in the right direction.
Maybe you're worried about your marriage or your future or that dream you've worked so hard for. Well the second thing you need to do is you need to get the facts. When you're faced with an impossible situation, you need to get all of the facts involved because good information leads to good results. So we have all the motivation to find that out. You see there was an emotion behind what King Nevid Kinezor was asking.
He was furious because no one could answer his dream so he put that pressure on Daniel. He's scared to death now he's vomiting that fear on Daniel and he wants some answers. We've all faced this in life. When people panic and there are crises, they get emotional. Maybe right now with work or with life or with COVID-19 or with finances or all the tension that is in our culture right now, you may feel a lot of pressure. So what's going on here?
Well when people feel pressure, they feel stress, a lot of time they take that out on others. When you're feeling the heat, sometimes it goes to the people that are around you. When you're feeling fear about your job or your life or your company or your business, that can trickle down. But you need to ask why are people doing this? Daniel said, in Daniel 2.15, Daniel asked Ariok the captain, why has the king issued such a harsh decree? Ariok said, well you've got to get the facts.
Proverbs 23.23 says, get the facts at any price, don't make a major decision on emotion. Don't make major decisions just based on the way you feel. You see our feelings lie. We need to get the facts at any price. In this step, you do what you want to do is what you need to know. What do I need to get so that I can get it done? You have to ask yourself the question why and what and what is the reason? What do I need in order to make this decision? What do I need to know?
The third thing you need to do is ask for time to create a solution. The reason why you need to ask for time instead of just immediately going to work on it is because in a crisis, the greatest temptation you have is to be impulsive. It's always more important to make the right decision than to make a fast decision. The wrong decision is the wrong decision no matter how fast or slow you make it.
When you're facing an impossible situation, take time, step back, take a deep breath, calm down, talk to God. Daniel was asking for time here. He said, there's no way I'm going to be able to figure out the king's dream so I need a little bit of time. But maybe I could ask God. He's asking for time to create a solution. He knew he was going to have to spend some time with God to find the answer.
The Bible says in Daniel 2.16, Daniel went at once to see the king and requested more time so he could tell the king what the dream meant. He's going to give his best shot, just not say it's impossible like the other guys did. Maybe God will tell me, I'm going to give it my best shot. I'm going to die trying if that's what it takes. You see, he went to the king to get a request because he really wanted the right answer. He goes immediately to the source of Nebuchadnezzar's pain.
He doesn't mess around. He doesn't procrastinate. He doesn't delay. He doesn't postpone or get distracted. He faces his fear head on and talks to God about it. What are you procrastinating right now in your life? Something that you've known you've needed to deal with for a long time and you've been putting it off because it's painful. Let me ask you another way. What are you pretending isn't a problem maybe in your marriage or in your company or in your business?
You don't really want to deal with it because you know it's going to erupt like a volcano. There's going to be a lot of fallout from it. Sometimes it's easier to sweep things aside rather than to deal with them head on. Soon that stuff we sweep under the carpet becomes a mound and then you start tripping on it as you walk through your house. What is it that you're pretending isn't a problem in your life? We all do this sometimes. Maybe it's the one thing that you really don't want to do.
You really don't want to deal with. You really don't want to face head on. If we do things over and over again, it can create more problems for us. That's why we want to deal with those things. If you're procrastinating and procrastination only makes problems worse. Procrastination has never solved any problem. Time doesn't make it better. It makes it worse. People say time heals all wounds. That's nonsense. Time doesn't heal all wounds. If you had cancer, time's not going to make it better.
You've got to get a game plan for treatment and execute it ASAP. If time can heal everything, all you would have to do is go sit in a doctor's office and you'd get healed eventually because you're going to wait a long time there. You say, well, I don't have time to sit the doctor. I've just sat here long enough. I'm well. Well, that doesn't work.
We have to get the facts, we have to get them immediately, and then we have to go to the source and ask for time to consider and come up with the game plan to make a really good decision. We have to move against our fears. The only way you get rid of fear is to move against it. You can't argue against it. You can't talk yourself out of it. We have to move against it. It requires action. We have to do the very thing we fear the most to make progress.
The fourth thing that we need to do is enlist people to pray for you. Daniel 2, 17 and 18 says, Daniel went home and told his three friends what happened. Then he said, pray that God who rules from heaven will be merciful and explain this mystery so that we and the other advisors won't be put to death. Do you have any friends who pray for you? If you were in a major crisis, who would be the first people that you would call?
If you don't know who those people are and you haven't lined them up in advance, I recommend that you build a personal prayer team. Everyone needs one because the inevitable crisis has come. If we don't have that team set up, we're going to face it alone. We're going to face impossible situation, dark days. We're going to have information that on a dime turns the direction of our life. Count on it. We know ahead of time who we would call. Daniel knew immediately.
He said, I'm going to go to my friends and I'm going to ask them to start praying. Now you don't need 25 people to pray for you, but you do need a handful, maybe three or four or five people that you know will pick up the phone and immediately start praying. We all need that in our life. So I want you to develop that list today of people you can reach out to right now if you need a prayer. So don't panic. We ask time to create a solution and ask our friends to pray.
And then the fifth thing that we want to do is we want to pray and expect God to give supernatural help. When you're facing an impossible situation in your life, we want to pray and expect God to help us. Now when I say supernatural help, I'm talking about the kind of help that you don't have on your own power, your own logic, your own wisdom, your own talent, your own connections. It's not going to happen unless God does it.
When you don't have the money, when you don't have the resources, God has to show up and do a miracle. God loves to do miracles when we depend completely upon him. God loves it when we say, I'm not smart enough. When we ask him to give us supernatural help. Here's the interesting thing about this. God wants you to do this. God wants you to ask. Over and over again in the Bible, God says, I want you to ask for my help, supernatural help when you're up against impossible odds and problems.
That's when God says, I'm in. Jeremiah 33 says, call to me and I will answer you. I'll show you marvelous and wondrous things that you could never figure out on your own. The Bible says that we have not because we ask not. There are a lot of things in our life that God wants to give, but he's never given them to us because he's waiting for us to ask. You know over 20 times in the New Testament, God says, you're commanded to ask anything in my name and it will be given to you?
The Bible says ask and you will have it. Ask and you will find. Knock and the door will be open. Seek and you will find. That's asking. He's just saying the same thing three different ways. Ask, ask, seek, knock. We have not because we ask not. So many things we've already missed out on our lives simply because we've never asked God for it. He wants to give us things. We just have to ask. God is a gentleman. He doesn't force himself upon us. He just asks that we ask him.
God says he'll show you great and wonderful things because there's no way that we can figure it out on our own and then we will know that it was him that did it. I've prayed many times in my life, God I'm not smart enough to do this. I'm asking you today. Here's what I need. I get really specific. This is what Daniel did. He comes and he prays and he says, I can't figure this out on my own. Well, there's one condition. When you pray, you have to expect God. That's faith.
Pray and expect God to give you supernatural help and if you pray and God's going to do anything we pray, we say, I need this, I need this money. I need this person. I need this opportunity. I need health. I need this answer. I need this solution. Specificity gets the answer. He moves when we expect him to. James 1, 5 through 7 says, if any of you needs wisdom, ask God and he will gladly give it.
He won't resent you asking, but when you ask him, be sure that you expect him to answer for a doubtful mind is unsettled as a wave of the sea that is tossed by the wind. People should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. So if you're not going to believe it, if you're not going to expect an answer, then don't pray. What we want to thank God in advance, that's called faith. If you thank God after the fact, after he's given it, that's called gratitude.
God wants us to have both faith and gratitude. God I believe you're going to do this, then when he does it, God I thank you that you did it. Faith and gratitude. Now the sixth thing that you want to do is you want to worship God. What do I mean by that? Explain what that means. A lot of us think worship is music. No, that's one way to worship God. There's actually like a thousand ways. Worship is simply focusing on God. That's all it means.
Anytime I turn my attention to God, that's called worship. When I express my love to God, that's called worship. You can worship God in a car. You can worship him at the beach. You can worship him at In-N-Out Burger, which I did this week. It's three miles from my house. Thank you Jesus. I love that place. So you come to God and you worship God. That's what means is I get the focus off of my problem and I focus on God.
I stop looking at the difficulty, the impossible problem, and I start looking at God and how big he is. This is what Daniel did. After he asks his friends to pray, then he goes and spends all night praying. Daniel 2.19 says this, during the night, God revealed and explained the mystery of the dream to Daniel in a vision. What does that mean? It means he got this picture. God put this picture in his mind. He showed him exactly what he was doing in Nebuchadnezzar's life.
He put that picture in his mind and then he went and shared that picture with Nebuchadnezzar. He said, I know what it means. God just told me. That means that I know more than Nebuchadnezzar because God gave me that information. It all came from God. Daniel could have never gotten that on his own. Then Daniel praised the God of heaven. Have you ever prayed all night about anything? In your life, have you ever stayed up all night because something was so heavy on your heart?
You see, prayer reveals what's important to us. If it's important to you, you'll pray about it. If you're not praying about it, it's probably not that important to you. God says it's obviously important to Daniel and God showed up. Prayer shows you care. Is there anything in your life worth praying for all night? Maybe it's your kids or your business or your marriage or your career. Something that makes you feel like things are on the line. God says, I'm here. Just ask me.
I would love to help you because if you call to me and ask, I will do it. Now the seventh thing you need to do is use what God showed you to serve other people. Use what God showed me, what God gives me to what he's blessed me with to serve others. God wants to save you from an impossible situation so that you can serve other people. Daniel 2.24 says, then he rushed to see Ariok who'd been ordered to execute all the king's advisors. He says, call off the execution.
God's not interested in just saving us. He wants to save others too. This is called witnessing. God wants everyone to be saved, everybody to know him and to love him and to understand the purpose that God has them for, for being here on earth. Christ reached out to us and we're going to keep reaching out. It's why we're praying for Billy Perez as he prays and talks about doing ocean water and ocean beach and Martinez up in Laguna Beach.
It's why we're going to Bangladesh and Indonesia in 12 months to help people get their water from the ocean for free. Service to others. We always want to keep reaching out. It's in our DNA. You see, it's not just for our benefit. We also want to serve other people. That's called witness, our mission in the world.
You see, when you're in a crisis and you're praying and asking God to give you supernatural help, when you get the answer, you don't take the credit for yourself because you didn't think of the solution. You give it to God. God says, I'm going to give you the solution. I want to get credit for it. I want the glory to go to me, not to you. This is exactly what Daniel does. He gives God all the credit. So here's what Daniel says to the most powerful man in the world at the time.
Daniel 2, 27 through 30. He says, no wise or psychic or fortune teller or astrologer explained to me this. He says, but there's a God in heaven. You know, I'm so grateful for that verse. There's a God in heaven. Things may be falling apart in our life, but there's a God in heaven. Your dream may not be working out the way that you want it to, but there's a God in heaven. You may be experiencing failure, but there's a God in heaven and God gives us hope because God can do what none of us can do.
None of us can solve our problems, but there's a God in heaven who reveals mysteries. He shows us the way forward and the way out. This happened in Nebuchadnezzar and he says, God's revealed this mystery to me, not because I'm cooler or better than anyone else, not because I'm smarter than anybody else, because I'm not. So what does Daniel do? Well, he points people to God. You know, the word evangelism simply means sharing good news in Greek. Evangelism is good news.
Evangelism is simply sharing good news. The good news is that God can help us no matter what we're going through. That's the good news. Here's how this story ends. Daniel 2.48 says, then the king promoted Daniel to a high position and gave him many valuable gifts. He made Daniel ruler over the whole province. Well, what's going on here? Well, this is called a promotion. Every time we pass a test, God makes sure we get promoted.
He made Daniel ruler over the whole province as well as the chief over those wise men. You see, Daniel's humble. He's thinking about his friends while he's getting promoted. He says, well, I'm going to be in charge of all of this stuff. I'm taking my friends with me. That's how we want to be. If you get promoted in life, you take your friends with you. This is just one of nine tests and I really want you to follow us in this whole series.
This was the fourth one because we're going to learn how to get rewarded and get more responsibility. The greater the prize is, the greater the position. That's what we want for our life. Well, let me close with this. What seems impossible in your life right now? What's the thing that's got you panicked? What is it that causes you to stay awake at night? Is it money or work or maybe your marriage and your family? When am I going to have a kid? When am I going to see my dream come true?
When am I going to graduate from the stuff that I've been working on? All of these impossible problems can feel like they're piling up against us. Maybe things aren't going to work out. Well, today we can pray and we can ask for God's help no matter what it is that we're facing. I love that. I do this all the time and I would love to invite you, to ask you to pray with me right now. It's so simple. I do it every day and just expect that God's going to help you out.
In fact, we could do that right now. We could just pray as you're watching this. Just say, God, I admit my life isn't what I want it to be. Jesus, please forgive me of my sins. I ask you to be my friend and my guide in my life. I ask you to help me today. In Jesus' name, amen. If you prayed that today and you meant it, would you just message me at Ocean Water? I have some resources I'd like to get you. I'd like to text you a few things as well, encourage you in your friendship with Jesus.
I want to thank those of you who support Ocean Water. In the next 12 months, we're praying and planning to grow from two locations to six locations. We're currently in San Clemente and Palmercito in El Salvador. Now we're planning to grow to Ocean Beach and Laguna Beach and Mongolia, Bangladesh and Sibirut Island in Indonesia. With more finances, we can go and grow to more places and help more people. Now, the Bible says this is part of our worship.
I'd like you to pray about what you can give as your part of worship. I want you to pray about it. Then I want you to do what God tells you to do and go online at OceanWater.com and include that as part of your worship today. Thank you so much for being with us for this week's Beach Talk. Have a great week. Thanks again for joining us this weekend.
If you'd like more information about Ocean Water Church, how to join us on an upcoming trip, how to be part of one of our Clean Water projects, how to financially support our movement or even information on how you can start an Ocean Water Church yourself, please look us up at OceanWater.com.