What's In Your Bucket?

Daniel 1:1-8
From November 20, 2005

Drop by drop, a bucket gets fuller. Left unattended, the bucket will eventually become full of water, even at, say, a drop a minute. Ironically, if one wants a pail to be fully useful, it must be empty, or at least emptied regularly. A bucket is of no use for catching leaks if it is full, even if it is full of water, the most essential, life-sustaining fluid on the planet.

In today’s passage, we learn that Daniel and his three friends of fiery furnace fame had been selected as men who were young, wise, knowledgeable, quick to understand, able to serve, teachable, and literate. They would undergo a diet and training regimen of three years to prepare for a life of service for King Nebuchadnezzar.

An elite group these were, indeed, the best of the best! On top of their own natural advantages, they would be endowed with more education, preferential treatment, personal attention, and the best food from the king’s very own kitchen. What a deal!

Except for the food part. As fundamental as food is for survival and despite the pleasure found in “finer diner” food, it was a problem. For reasons not fully explained in Scripture, the boys determined that eating the king’s food would defile them. Perhaps it had been offered to the false gods of the Babylonians, thus making it unclean according to Jewish law. In any event, they stuck to their convictions and principles regardless of possible royal retribution.

Perhaps many would have gone along with the food thing but drawn their line-over-which-they-would-not-cross somewhere further along in the journey. Somewhere after the bucket had begun to fill up and, using our analogy above, become less useful for its intended purpose.

Today, it is easier than ever to allow our buckets to become filled with those things that are not beneficial, even though they may be well and good of themselves. Attitudes and points-of-view, and resultantly decisions, actions, and habits can all be tainted by what we allow to fill up our pail, whether we dump in the moral equivalent of raw sewage or simply the allow the foul-smelling trickle of secular philosophy. In either case, emptying and cleansing will need to occur before our bucket is useful again. Like Daniel, we have to decide where God would have our line to be drawn and then draw it--not in the sand but in cement.

To borrow (no pun intended) from Capital One, “What’s in your bucket?”