Contented and Prosperous
Scripture Reading: Daniel 4

Today’s Treasure: “I, Nebuchadnezzar, was at home in my palace, contented and prosperous” (Daniel 4:4).

Contented and prosperous.  Who could ask for anything more?  In Babylon, life doesn’t get any better than that.  Nor does it for most Americans, for that matter.  Daniel 4 tells us that King Nebuchadnezzar was at home in his palace, feeling fat and sassy, napping in the lap of luxury. 

As addictive as cocaine, one little snort of luxury and we decide we were born for it.  Princesses at heart.  Actually, those of us in Christ are princesses at heart but not in the kingdoms of this world.  The kingdom we call home is coming to earth with a smiting Rock not cut by human hands.  (See Dan. 2.)  Until then, if we’re not careful, we can confuse the pursuit of life with the pursuit of luxury.  We develop a taste for it quickly and when it’s withheld, we cry foul.

In our own Babylon, some of us are wrapped in such luxury, we think a chemical peel is a fiery trial.  Babylon’s heads of state stomp their feet and cry, “Give me luxury or give me death!” 

In relative terms, most of us reading this are counted among the prosperous on planet Earth.  Many of us have tasted luxury at one time or another, even if it was as a visitor on someone else’s turf.  Some of us don’t just visit luxury.  We live at its address.  One way or the other, we Westerners live on what is arguably the most lavish soil in the world.  And we have some stuff, don’t we?  I laughed as I heard my friend Lucy Swindoll describe her move into a new home and the insurmountable number of boxes she’d simply labeled as “stuff.”  Most of us can totally relate, but here’s the question on the table today: is it just stuff?

On a scale of one to ten, how important is our stuff?  Could we take it or leave it?  Release it without a fit if we had to?  Or has it corrupted us?  Addicted us?  In twenty years of speaking, I’ve stayed in every kind of lodging from roach motels to citadels.  Every now and then I’ve laughed and thought to myself, “Now, this is living!”  But I know better.  And so do you.  The question is, what is real living? 

Let’s conclude by looking at an ironic blessing Nebuchadnezzar spoke over his audience in verse 1, “May you prosper greatly!”  And yet he began the testimony of his cataclysmic descent with the words, “I, Nebuchadnezzar, was at home in my palace, contented and prosperous.”  God unapologetically desires to prosper His children spiritually (John 15:8), but today’s lesson throws the spotlight on the temporal kind. 

You and I naturally want the best for our loved ones.  We pray for them to excel, to win, to succeed, to prosper, to be kept from difficulty, and certainly pain.  Yet, if God answered our every prayer for their ease, could they handle it?  Would their lives ever mean—as my grandmother would say—a hill of beans? 

More than anything else, O God, we pray that You would prosper our loved ones with an abundance of You!  If they can handle some ease and earthly success in the process, so be it!  But whatever you do, O God, insist that they live.  Really live.  “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: [You have] come that [we] might have life, and that [we] might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10, KJV).  O Lord, make us courageous enough to pray that no earthly luxury would ever cheat us of true prosperity. 

Adapted from Daniel, by Beth Moore, page 75-78. Nashville: LifeWay Press, 200.  Used by permission.