Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:
19Then the king in the dawn arose in the daylight and in haste to the pit of the lions he went. 20And approaching to the pit to Daniel, the king cried in a grieved voice answering and saying to Daniel, “Daniel, servant of the living God, your God whom you serve constantly, was He able to deliver you from the lions?” 21Then Daniel with the king said, “O king, live to ages. 22My God sent His angel and He shut the mouths of the lions and they have not hurt me because before Him innocence was found to me and also before you, O king, I have done no harm.” 23Then the king was very good upon him and he said to take up Daniel from the pit and Daniel was brought up from the pit and all of harm was not found in him because he trusted in his God.
There is tons of encouraging truth to gain from these few simple verses. However, I’d like to inject a little personal anecdote here, in the event my grandchildren ever pick this up and read it. This story—Daniel in the lions’ den—is particularly special to me. When I was probably only four or five years old, my mother sent my brothers and me to a Vacation Bible School that was being held in a little church in the small town where we lived. I remember very little about that week, except that I really enjoyed doing the crafts! In addition to that, I have the briefest memory of a lady standing and teaching us using an old-fashioned flannel board, and she was teaching this very story. I can still see the flannel Daniel character with the flannel lions around him.
There are two things that were highly significant to me. First of all, I just liked the story. There was something about it that “stuck” in my heart. It was a Bible story and I really liked it. The second thing was the lady herself. I very specifically remember that everything about her was love and kindness. There was some kind of glow about her that also “stuck” in my heart. To me, there is no doubt now that glow was Jesus. Whoever she was, that lady knew Jesus and she was there to teach us little tikes because the love of Jesus was in her heart.
I have often lamented that I was 22 years old the first time I ever met a real born-again Christian. However, when I’ve said that, I have been forgetting this one lady whose heart touched me so early in my life. I feel I can’t overstate the significance of that moment when someone imparted to me a love for Bible stories and who lit that little tiny spark of having literally met Jesus. When, at age 22, I met another real Christian, I was seeing a face I’d seen before—and liked.
I really believe that God Himself touched me that day, marked me as His, and began the long process of actually melting my heart and drawing me to Himself. That was an important moment in my life and, because of it, this particular story—Daniel in the lions’ den—has always been very special to me.
If I could inject, could I also say my experience can be enormously encouraging to all of us? What I mean to say is that lady had no idea how God used her that day. She was just teaching another flannel graph lesson to a bunch of little cherub faces. She’d no doubt obtained the flannel sheets, cut out the little characters, prepared herself, prayed, taught the lesson, then put it all away, went home, lived her life, and by now she has certainly gone to glory. She lived her whole life, never even knowing that her simple little effort that day in a little church in a little town touched a little life for all eternity.
And what did she do that had all that impact? She just lived the love of Jesus. She didn’t have a microphone. She wasn’t speaking to thousands in a football stadium. She just lived the love of Jesus. I’ve often found it amusing in Matthew 25 where the King says to those on His right, “When I was hungry you fed me, when I was naked you clothed me…,” and the people respond, “When did we do that?” They don’t even know. They did something the King of kings noticed and they didn’t even know it. If they knew it at all, they’ve forgotten it completely. No doubt when that lady met Jesus in glory, He thanked her for touching that little boy’s heart and she replied, “When did I do that?”
Oh, may you and I realize that’s all it takes. If we enjoy the presence of Jesus in our hearts, all God asks of us is that we let it shine. “Love God, love people.” It’s that simple. He’ll do the rest. We ourselves will only find out in glory the good we did—not because we were “trying” so much as that we simply touched our world with Jesus. Only then will we find out how much it meant to someone just to see our smile, to hear our kind words, to sense our sincere sympathy in their difficulties.
“For God so loved the world, He gave His Son.” May we pass Him on!
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