Man, good evening. Welcome. You can be seated. Really looking forward to tonight. I think you know why.

So only the first eight verses, though. What? Really? Well, then you're not going to be too happy on Sunday morning because we start the book of Revelation.

Three verses. So let's just get that out of the way now.

Oh, my goodness, so looking forward to what the Lord has for us have been just really with great anticipation.

Preparing for the teaching of this amazing book, we're in for a tremendous blessing as we embark on a verse by verse study through Daniel.

Daniel has been affectionately referred to as the Old Testament book of Revelation.

And others have commented that you can know better and understand better the book of

revelation if you understand the book of Daniel perhaps better said the book of

Daniel unlocks the book of Revelation.

And as we're going to see in just the first eight verses is how it is and why it is that God uniquely gifts us and positions us in our lives for his glory.

And we're going to get to know this Daniel.

What an amazing man.

He's actually a very young man, as we'll see in a moment.

But he could have never imagined that his life would be this way.

But again, as we're going to see, he sees his life through the Lord's lens, the Lord's way.

Here he is a young man and he finds himself as a captive, one

of the first ones taken captive because, and we'll see this as well, tonight by the way,

they always take the cream of the crop first, the first and the best. And Daniel was outstanding in that

he stood out among all of the Jews that were taken captive by the Babylonians. So here he is,

like Ezekiel, which we just finished last week, a young man at the time,

he was being trained for the priestly service in the temple, except he wouldn't serve

as the priestly service in the temple because there would be no temple for him to serve the

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