Park Hill Church Podcast

Who are you bowing to when the music starts and everyone around you is already on their knees? In Daniel 3, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s golden statue, and the people who turn them in aren’t enemies from outside but coworkers who had been waiting for the chance. This week, David Wade walked through the story in three movements: the quiet confrontation with culture, the truth that Babylon’s friendships last only as long as you stay in line, and why no one is meant to follow Jesus alone. Their “even if he does not” was only possible because they stood side by side, and the fourth figure in the fire shows that God doesn’t always keep his people out of the flames but always walks into them.

What are you worth when you stop being useful? Babylon has an answer, and in Daniel 2 it's rubble or rewards: King Nebuchadnezzar demands the impossible from his advisors, then orders them all killed when they can't deliver. This week in The Book of Daniel, we watched Daniel meet that same logic with tact, patience, and a prayer meeting with his friends, and then tell the most powerful man alive that his power is borrowed. The kingdom Daniel pointed to doesn't measure you by what you produce, because the stone the builders rejected came down to us, was written off as useless, and turned out to be the most useful thing God has ever done.

Babylon didn't just take Daniel's home. It handed him a new name, a new language, and a new menu, and expected him to become someone else. This week, Tim McDonald picked up our Daniel series with a young man who refused to let an empire tell him who he was, without hating the city or hiding from it. Drawing the line at the king's table was never really about food. It was about belonging, and the name God speaks over you outlasts every name the culture hands out.

Jerusalem falls. The temple gold ends up on a shelf in a pagan god's treasury. To everyone watching in 605 BC, the verdict was obvious: Babylon's god won. This week, Evan Wickham launched our new ten-week series through the Book of Daniel, and it starts with the one claim nobody in that room could see: the Lord handed Nebuchadnezzar that victory. For the next ten weeks, alongside our sister churches Neighbors and All Saints, we're asking what it means to live as exiles under a King who is still, actually, on the throne.

Whose Caesar are you actually serving? At House of Learning this week, Preston Sprinkle unpacked a political identity that has nothing to do with picking a side and everything to do with picking a King. Walking through exile, Babylon, and the political shockwave buried inside ordinary words like "gospel" and "Lord," he made the case that every empire — Babylon, Rome, or the one we live in now — runs on the same borrowed power, and every Christian answers to a citizenship that predates all of them. This isn't a call to disengage from the world we're in. It's a call to stop mistaking it for home. Faithfulness in exile was never a private matter, and it was never meant to be figured out alone.