On the Book of Daniel 📖 Daniel 6 Work and Faith: Holding Both What Daniel’s work and his presence with God can teach us 7 min read I have been spending time in the book of Daniel, and a verse stopped me that I think most of us read past on our way to the lions. Daniel 6:4. “At this, the administrators and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his conduct of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him, because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent.” — Daniel 6:4 (NIV) Trustworthy. Not corrupt. Not negligent. The first two land easily on Christian ears. We talk about trustworthiness all the time. We talk about integrity, about not being corrupt. Believers nod. Yes, of course. We are called to be trustworthy. We are called to be people of integrity who refuse to take what is not ours. But that third word is the one that has stayed with me. Not negligent. What does that even mean? When am I being negligent? When am I being faithful? Especially when the work in front of me is what some would call “secular,” and what I really want to be doing is sitting at the feet of Jesus. A Question I Cannot Cleanly Answer I want to tell you about a season I lived through, because the question of negligence is not as clean as it sounds. When I was a young adult, I was part of a wonderful group. We were all in roughly the same place in life. Most of us had just graduated from college or university, or were in the final stretch of our studies. Some of us were already in the position where we should have been looking for a job. Others were just about to start thinking about internships and what came next. Then a revival fire touched our group. Many of us started experiencing the Lord, His presence, His leading, in ways we never had before. It was real. It was beautiful. And all we wanted to do was stay in the presence of the Lord. We prayed at all times. We shared the gospel. We attended Bible studies. We stayed with the brothers and sisters as long as we could. The careers we had been studying for, or the jobs we should have been pursuing, began to feel small next to what God was doing in our hearts. Some of us dropped out of school. Others never really put in the effort to look for a job. Many felt called to full-time ministry, partly because full-time ministry felt like the only way to never have to leave the presence of God for something secular. It created a lot of tension with our families. They could not understand what we were doing or why. They saw years of education, money, and effort being left behind for what looked, from the outside, like nothing. Were we negligent? I cannot give you a clean answer. I have sat with that question for years, and I am not sure I will ever fully resolve it. I know God was real to us. I know He was doing something. I also know that, in hindsight, some choices made in that season had real consequences that took years to work through. What I can do is keep reading Daniel. And what I find when I keep reading Daniel is a young man who shows me that the question may not be as binary as I once thought it was. The Two Worked Together Daniel was consecrated. We saw that in chapter 1. He refused the king’s food, he sought God before he sought favor, he made his commitment to God known and held it publicly. There was no hiding what he was about. But Daniel was also not negligent in his work. He was a high official in a pagan empire. He had real responsibilities. Government affairs. Administration. Reports to the king. Decisions that affected the lives of others. And by chapter 6, his enemies were so desperate to find a way to bring him down that they searched his conduct of government affairs looking for anything. A misplaced document. A bribe. A late report. A sloppy decision. Anything. They found nothing. He was trustworthy. He was not corrupt. He was not negligent. The text is careful with us in verse 5. His enemies, having failed to find anything in his work, said to each other: “We will never find any basis for charges against this man Daniel unless it has something to do with the law of his God.” — Daniel 6:5 (NIV) Read that slowly. The only place they could find vulnerability was his consecration. Not his work. Not his diligence. His faith. I want to sit on this because I think we miss it. Daniel did not have to choose between being a man of God and being good at his job. He was both. And the two were not in competition. They protected each other. His diligence at work shielded him from earthly accusations. His consecration to God shielded him from the spiritual ones. When the lions came, they came because of his prayer life, not because he had been sloppy at the office. And when his prayer life made him a target, his record at work meant his enemies had to engineer an entirely new law just to trap him. That is a kind of integrity I want. This is what gives me peace. I can be diligent at my work and fully consecrated to God. I do not have to fear that one will cost me the other. I do not have to pick between sitting at His feet and showing up for the things He has given me to do. God knows what is coming. He prepares. He adjusts. He reorganizes the field around a faithful person so that His name is glorified through what they do. That does not give me a clean answer to the question I started with. I still do not know whether all the choices we made in that revival season were faithful or negligent. Some were probably both. Some were probably neither. But I know this. I no longer believe the question was either God or my work. I think the better question is whether the Daniel pattern is forming in me. Whether I am becoming someone consecrated enough to be in His presence and diligent enough to be trusted with what is in front of me. Because Daniel did not choose between the two. He held them together. And so can we. Scripture quotations from the Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV).
