Revival in the Valley

Can These Bones Live?

“Can these bones live?” God asked the prophet Ezekiel.

This week I read about a Man that was training to be a minister. Right before he was called into the ministry after years of training, his city was invaded by a foreign ruler. This ruler raided the city and took all the all the best and brightest that the city had. And unfortunately, this minister was one of those that was torn from his city. He was forced to leave behind the only land he had ever known. He was forced to leave behind his place of worship. He was forced into service of this new ruler. He was forced to move over 700 miles way from his home land.

But God was Gracious and called him to minister to those in exile. He called this man to preach the grace, mercy, love and judgment of God to all those that were with him and to those who enslaved him. Although he was faithful to God and to his word, his people despised him. They hated him and they hated what he was saying. He eventually gets word that his wife dies. While he is separated from her and the land he calls home. After over a decade of living in this foreign land. Staying faithful to his calling. This man gets word that his entire city has been leveled. There is nothing left but ruins. Everything he knows, loves, and hopes to return to has been destroyed. Life seems hopeless. That man, is who we are going to look at this morning in our text of Scripture. His name is Ezekiel. He was a prophet of God who saw some miraculous visions.

The world, our lives, may have become very much like these ruins, the world was different twenty or fifty years ago, we know that, we know that as time passes it seems as if the world just becomes darker and darker, the news we hear about something happening here or around the world probably doesn’t even surprise that much anymore because we are getting used to bad and ugly things happening. We get used to evil showing itself in every way that it can, we get used to the sin that is around us, in us, the sin that we engage in and it desensitizes us to some degree. We don’t really mind the everyday sin, it’s not that bad, I mean there are much worse things going on in the world today than just what I’m doing, right?

Wrong. When we get to the point where we expect a certain level of sin that becomes normal then it becomes acceptable and we allow it, then we allow other things and more things until we get to the point where the place we are doesn’t even look familiar any longer. We begin opening this gap between us and God, it moves slowly but it does move, it’s moving right now. As that gap widens so does our acceptance of a world that we weren’t not meant to live in, a life we weren’t supposed to experience and God begins to fade away, until we find ourselves standing in a valley looking at all the death and carnage that sin and evil has caused.

But there are some other things that can send us into this valley, some other bones if you will:

• What about the kid who just shot up his school ever be saved and rehabilitated? • The abusive husband ever become a gentle loving husband? • The hate-filled racist white man and the bigoted black woman ever sit down together and share a meal? • Can Palestinians and Jews ever live in peace? • Can a cure for cancer ever be found? • Can hunger and homelessness ever be eradicated? • Can the world ever learn to speak one language of understanding and acceptance?

“Can these bones live?” God asked the prophet this question and he replied with the only answer he knew, “O Lord God, you know.” What about the dry bones we experience, losing our jobs, having too many bills and not enough money, problems in marriages, relationships with family and children, going through life with our own chip on our shoulder and entitled outlook on life. Can these bones live?

We see what is left of the bodies of people like us, of what becomes of the hurt and pain, those we love, some we never knew but people we are still supposed to love. What happened to them? What has caused this? Maybe us, maybe life, we may never know why some things happen, we may have problems that all the kings horses and all the kings men can’t put back together again. But we don’t have kings. But we do have a God that can, He can put things in order, a God that can heal.

Ezekiel is standing in the valley of dry bones, what was left of Israel after they had fallen away from God, worshipped everything but him, they were invaded, lost the war, twice and now there is nothing. God promised them if you just listen to me, follow me, I will save you, fight for you but they just couldn’t listen and didn’t believe that God is enough, to realize their dependence on him and they opened that gap of doubt and faith, didn’t obey and they experienced the only thing they could, death.

The bones represent the Israelites in exile. They have been there for more than ten years now, and what glimmerings of hope they had when first they arrived have now been altogether extinguished. Their hope was lost: as bones, they were very dry.

John B. Taylor

We have that same valley today, it looks a little differently but it’s still just as real. When we push God out of our life we lose hope, lose our faith and everything that grounds us in who we are, who we were created to be and thank God, we have a creator that hasn’t forgotten us, that is still standing there with us. When we have lost all that we know, become a modern day Job, we know what that valley looks like, we stand there wandering what happened, and we usually know, we just stand there in self pity, blaming someone else, crying out to God, “where were you?” We have a God that created everything, everyplace and everyone he knows where we are and how we got there. Maybe he has gone ahead of us to wait for us to show up in all of our sorrow and pain and he waits. You see, God has a plan, he’s used it before and it worked and he’s sure it will work this time too, now I want you to think about that for a minute, way back in Genesis what God created and how He did it.

These dry bones of hurt, broken from the life that feels like we’ve been kicked through, the pain that it causes can have us walking around in a fog, just drifting from place to place emotionally, spiritually, it can cause us to drift away from the promises that God has given us but that is what pain, the world, satan wants us to do. It wants us to concentrate on ourselves and not each other, to not help each other, forget about our place in the Kingdom, the mission that God has given us. It wants us dazed and confused so we don’t know what’s going on and we don’t care anymore. We stop caring about those around us that need us, that needs the church to be the church, to love, preach the Gospel and we listening to God, we stop relying on his mercy.

This is an easy trap to get into, we trap ourselves in our own mind and misery and we stop seeing good in anything. We even stop seeing the bones laying on the ground in front of us, the bones of our neighbors that are hurt, broken and forsaken by this world. The people that others are pointing at, gossiping about, pointing, making fun of, laughing about, maybe never knowing the pain they are causing. Maybe at times in you life you were one of them watching yet doing nothing. Have you ever watched someone, anyone, dealing with a tough moment, dealing with tragedy, heartbreak, pain and if so, what did you do? Did you do anything?

There are churches in the world today that are much like this valley, church’s that is hurting, seeing the issues and problems, in pain, crying out for help and all we do is sit there and watch it. I mean, we talk about it, call each other, maybe fire off some texts but what did we do to help? What is the church doing to help the community where pain comes in every flavor you can think of and church after church sits back wanting to help, saying we should help but just can’t seem to find the need around them. Get in your car and just ride around and look at the homes, the yards, have you ever done that? Turn the radio off, turn the phone off and just look and if you want to know where the church can be the church you will see it. When the church, the christian, moves in such a way, great things can happen because we already have what we need, God gives it to us.

Before Christ sent the church into the world, he sent the Spirit into the church. The same order must be observed today.

John Stott

We have the Holy Spirit when we have lost hope, and we seem to have lost Christ in the world we are in this valley. We see it all around us in the restlessness of the nations, upheavals in culture, the economy, threats of violence and wars, all speak to the fact that people feel hopeless.

We can become spiritually dead which is just as dead as the dry bones Ezekiel is looking at. There is a quote that says, “I see dead people. Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other, they only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re dead.” (Cole Sear, Sixth Sense).

We become the walking dead because we see what we want to see, do you see the bones? Some of those bones are in here. Have you seen the pain, those that have lost hope? When God told Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones that he will bring flesh upon you, put sinews on you, cover you with skin, God isn’t simply putting the bones back together, he isn’t simply restoring them, He isn’t healing the hurt, stopping the pain to put them right back where they were, Ezekiel noticed, there was still something missing, the breath.

God then told then told Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain that they my live.” The breath is the completeness of restoration of God and created order. We’ve seen this before when God breathed life into Adam and raised him up.

Ezekiel knew that without the breath of God, the bones were still just bones, roaming around lifeless and spiritually dead. But God says that “I will put my spirit in you, and you shall live.”

No matter how deep in sin you are, no matter the tragedy that has struck you, regardless of the moment or the reason you find yourself in the valley, God has the remedy to restore us to life by the breath of the Holy Spirit. He gives this breath to all of his people and if you notice what Ezekiel says,

“So I prophesied as He commanded me, and breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great army.”

The New King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982), Eze 37:10.

They weren’t restored, not simply brought back to life, not placed right back into the condition they had been in that brought them into that valley, but through the power of the Holy Spirit, they were raised as a great army, better than they were, stronger and mightier. This is what happens when the people of God call upon the Holy Spirit, and have faith in Christ for Christ to work within us, it unites us into an army of God that nothing manufactured on earth or escape the gates of hell can kill or destroy.

What used to be a valley, your valley of dead men's bones can become, are about to become your testimony before the Lord! What used to be nothing but a heap of bones as dead, lifeless, and paralyzed is about to become your victory in the Lord! Weeping may endure for a night but you’ll start to hear those bones rattling again, maybe for the first time in your life and you will see how just how good our God is and how powerful the army of Christ can be when we offer ourselves to the work of the Holy Spirit.