Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. (ESV)

Don’t long for “the good old days.” This is not wise. (NLT)

– Ecc 7:10

How to Kill it in a World Gone Mad:

How to Kill it in a World Gone Mad:

1) Relax, God has been, and always will be, in control.

“In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the

“…house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god.”

- Daniel 1:1-2

How to Kill it in a World Gone Mad:

1) Relax, God has been, and always will be, in control.

How to Kill it in a World Gone Mad:

1) Relax, God has been, and always will be, in control.

2) Resolve to swim upstream

But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king’s food, or with the wine that he drank.

- v. 8

How to Kill it in a World Gone Mad:

1) Relax, God has been, and always will be, in control.

2) Resolve to swim upstream

3) Reach people by creating value

“And in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom.”

- v. 20

“Indeed, as late as the middle of the eleventh century, the Muslim writer Nasir-i Khrusau reported, ‘Truly, the scribes here in Syria, as is the case of Egypt, are all Christians…[and] it is most usual for the physicians…to be Christians.’

In Palestine under Muslim rule, according to the monumental history by Moshe Gil, ‘the Christians had immense influence and positions of power, chiefly because of the gifted administrators among them

who occupied government posts despite the ban in Muslim law against employing Christians [in such positions] or who were part of the intelligentsia of the period owing to the fact that they were

outstanding scientists, mathematicians, physicians and so on.”

- Rodney Stark, God's Battalions (p. 61).