Pastor Jon Tyson
Well, good morning. How are you? Good. Good to see you this morning. I didn’t run the marathon. You can probably tell. But, what a great joy to be here in this city. I’m from Australia, originally, those of you who don’t know me. Everywhere I go I bring just a few little reinforcements just to pop those in. They keep it real.
Hey, I really do love your church. I’ve been really impacted by the Reality family of churches. And your pastor, Pastor Dave, is a really good friend of mine. We talk very, very regularly just about life, God, the Church, mission and culture and we have the privilege of doing a couple trips together. So, it is a real honor for me to be here with you this morning and to be able to kick you off in this new series in the book of Daniel.
Now, I just have to give you a heads up. I’m actually not going to teach from the book of Daniel tonight. How many of you, when you go through the Bible, you realize, if you have any sort of study Bible, that at the beginning of the study Bible, there’s a thing called “Intro to the book of” fill in the blank. And how many of you, by default, skip that and just go straight to the book of the Bible? Well, this morning, believe it or not, I’m going to give you one of those. “Intro to the Book of Daniel.”
So, I’m not going to teach from a particular passage. But what I want to do is give you just a little bit of the cultural setting; a theological framework of what’s happening in the book of Daniel. And I want to do that for two reasons. Number one: most of us, when we think of the book of Daniel, are probably haunted by Sunday school songs and one or two events from the book of Daniel that really rob this book of its theological depth and its ethical ramifications. So, we think, “Oh, it’s Daniel in the lion’s den with his three mates. Yeah. I think I understand the book of Daniel.”
Or the back half of it’s filled with prophetic weirdness and you’re like, “I don’t have a clue about any of this.”
Jon Tyson is Pastor at the Church of New York and former Pastor at Reality San Francisco. Check out videos of Jon’s Sermons on YouTube, especially “Living in the Tension” and “The Controversial Jesus”