05.23.2021 - Pentecost - Can These Bones Yet Live?

Scripture: Ezekiel 37:1-14

Ezekiel 37:1–14 NLT

The Lord took hold of me, and I was carried away by the Spirit of the Lord to a valley filled with bones. He led me all around among the bones that covered the valley floor. They were scattered everywhere across the ground and were completely dried out. Then he asked me, “Son of man, can these bones become living people again?” “O Sovereign Lord,” I replied, “you alone know the answer to that.” Then he said to me, “Speak a prophetic message to these bones and say, ‘Dry bones, listen to the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Look! I am going to put breath into you and make you live again! I will put flesh and muscles on you and cover you with skin. I will put breath into you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’ ” So I spoke this message, just as he told me. Suddenly as I spoke, there was a rattling noise all across the valley. The bones of each body came together and attached themselves as complete skeletons. Then as I watched, muscles and flesh formed over the bones. Then skin formed to cover their bodies, but they still had no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Speak a prophetic message to the winds, son of man. Speak a prophetic message and say, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, O breath, from the four winds! Breathe into these dead bodies so they may live again.’ ” So I spoke the message as he commanded me, and breath came into their bodies. They all came to life and stood up on their feet—a great army. Then he said to me, “Son of man, these bones represent the people of Israel. They are saying, ‘We have become old, dry bones—all hope is gone. Our nation is finished.’ Therefore, prophesy to them and say, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: O my people, I will open your graves of exile and cause you to rise again. Then I will bring you back to the land of Israel. When this happens, O my people, you will know that I am the Lord. I will put my Spirit in you, and you will live again and return home to your own land. Then you will know that I, the Lord, have spoken, and I have done what I said. Yes, the Lord has spoken!’ ”

Can These Bones Yet Live?

“Can These Bones Yet Live?” God asks the prophet Ezekiel in his vision of the valley of dry bones.

“Only You know,” Ezekiel responds back to God.

Ezekiel had served God as a temple all of his early life. God chose him to be “the Watchman” over Jerusalem and Judea and he had warned them of their destruction from Babylon. Their hope that treaties with Egypt would protect them did not pan out and Babylon seiged the city and took 10,000 people, including Ezekiel, back as captives in Exile. It was at that point that Ezekiel became a prophet of the exiles in Bayblon.

Ezekiel shared prophecies that foretold the movement of God’s Spirit across the world, and some bible scholars suggest that the Apostle Paul may have meditated on one of Ezekiel’s prophecies when God struck him blind on the road to Damascus. But his people did not listen to him during his lifetime. The kinds of ideas he proposed, such as God leaving the Temple and raising up people all over the world, were too foreign for many of them.

He saw revivial early in his ministry, as the people removed the idols from the Temple. He watched them bring them back in years later. He saw the destruction and followed his people into exile, preaching and teaching faith and obedience to God all the way.

Among all the visions God gave him, wild and weird as many were, this Valley of Dry bones probably made perfect sense to Ezekiel. He knew God’s people had dwindled to nothing.

And less than nothing. The bodies of the dead were sacred to the Jews. They were careful to preserve and protect those odies because they believed that God would bring them back to life in the end. What Ezekiel saw in this vision though was a battlefield graveyard, with bones thrown about, gnawed apart by animals, unable to be pulled together to make a full person anymore.

For God’s people, this vision was a worst-case scenario. They were Decimated, Humiliated, and Desecrated; and the Jews felt and acknowledged this truth. They themselves said, ‘We have become old, dry bones—all hope is gone. Our nation is finished.’

This is what hopelessness looked like.

So, when God asked Ezekiel if these bones could yet live, Ezekiel answered Him with all the reverence he could muster, “Sovereign Lord, only You know.”

Thesis: God takes responsibility to build the Body, which is the Church. It is our job to be the Body He has created us to be.

Bones

Connection

The immediate and urgent problem with God’s people was that they were scattered and disconnected. They were a bunch of individual bones struggling to survive on their own. God started by bringing them together. The bones came together in response to God’s command, and attached to each other as complete skeletons.

Structure

The human body begins with over 300 bones and ends up with about 206 in an adult body. Having enough bones is important, but making sure they are structured together correctly is equally important. If they are not connected together in the right way and in the right places, you don’t have a complete body.

Our skeleton gives us shape and defines who we are

It’s not multiple choice either. We don’t choose our physical bodies. We are given them, and we either learn to grow into and learn to love them well, or we do not, and we fall apart.

When those connection points in a body are not kept up well, you experience pain - joint pain, which you either deaden with pain killers or you get fixed. A disjointed, disconnected skeleton cannot stand, it just sits in a pile of pain and the same goes for the Church.

Flesh

Flesh can’t stand on it’s own either, without a skeleton giving it shape.

Flesh without skeleton is like people without purpose.

However, when the flesh clings to the bones, it brings strength and balance and allows the Body to stand on something, to stand for something.

It forms a body, and something really beautiful happens here. It creates belonging.

Flesh and Bone together separate one body from another. It distinguishes between your leg and my leg. Our skeletons all look pretty similar, but once you put flesh and skin on them, we start to become individual people.

Flesh creates the possibility of movement

It allows healthy growth to occur.

Having flesh creates a whole world of pain and pleasure to occur. However, when our flesh hurts, it is usually not because something is wrong with us, it is because our flesh is protecting us from outside harm. When our head is attacked our whole body of flesh feels it. When we skin our knees our whole body knows it because our flesh works together as one body to help us live and grow and thrive.

God is such a genius in the way He has created us.

He orchestrates all of this. We don’t have to figure out how to build a body on our own. We simply have to go where He sends us and Be the Body He has created us to be.

By now, you’ve figured out that I’m talking about the Church, not a human body, just as God told Ezekiel He was calling His people out of the dry bones.

Those bones are your disciple-makers and the flesh is disciples, who the disciple-makers draw around them.

Disciples without the Church

The Day of Pentecost shows us that you can’t have Church without disciples, but you can have disciples without the church. That should not be surprising. Jesus had disciples for 3 years without the church. They served Him, learned from Him, made mistakes, questioned Him, decided to obey Him, and then got up and did it all over again the next day for three years.

They were full disciples for three years and an extra fifty days after Jesus rose from the dead, but they were not the Church until they got into the position and place that God asked them to be, and waited for God to breathe life into this new body. Then the Spirit rushed in and brought this dead, mixed up Body to life in a way it had never known life before.

Breath

In the Hebrew language, the language of Ezekiel, the word for Spirit, and wind, and breath, are all the same word. I can preach a sermon on that single word - if you want to hear it, give me a call sometime. That mighty rushing wind that filled those bodies with breath was the same wind that came into the Upper Room with the disciples. It was the Holy Spirit coming to fill the people of God, the Church, with the power, wisdom, life, and love of God. It did not make them superheroes or perfect people, but it changed them forever.

How do we experience that empowerment of the Holy Spirit? How do we become the Church God created us to be?

Let me give you an example from marriage, because as we join together as the church we take vows just like marriage. We promise to hold one another up to God, to disciple others and to be discipled by using whatever gifts God has given us.

Most of us learned a lot about our marriages this past year. Bekah and I spent 9 years fighting for every moment of time we could have together, to suddenly being in the same house and church, to being in lockdown together and making up for the previous decade apart.

Several things happened this weekend - small, normal life stuff - but I saw her walk away briskly with a not-happy look on her face, and I knew I was in trouble. Tail-between my legs, I walked across the house to find her and try to make things right. Now most of you know me enough to know that I am really thick-headed when it comes to reading hints and non-verbal cues. Most of us guys are not as good as ladies, but I have coping skills to help me recognize what is going on in others. I made that walk knowing that there were at least three possibilities of how I had messed up, but not sure what one I needed to apologize for. Not a fun place to be.

Bekah, with all the grace of Jesus, told me it was fine, that she was not happy, but that she would get over it like she always did. She said she was used to it and she hadn’t changed.

I wasn’t expecting her to change though. That wasn’t my problem. My problem was that I wanted to change, and I didn’t know how. The way forward was for me to change.

That’s how we treat Jesus. We are still sinners, and every time we choose ourselves, or someone, or something else over God… every time we sin, we hurt Jesus again. He’s used to it by now. But it hurts every time. He tells us that He is not going to change. The question is: Do you want to change?

If you want to change then do what God is asking you to do, and do it today. Don’t wait for a tomorrow you may not have. As you are going or as you are waiting to hear from God, open your heart and invite Him to remake you in His image. He will let you know what you have to do. He will make and shape us together into the living, breathing, Body of Christ. He will watch how faithful you are with the people He gives to you and, when you have raised them up into disciple-makers themselves, He will multiply you.

It is God’s job to provide the growth. It is our job to Be the Body, to Be the Church He is leading us to be.

Or we can lay down as dry bones in the dust and show God by our actions that we aren’t ready to be the Church and live the life He has ready for us.

CTA

How is God building you up and breathing His life into you today?

Listen to the Spirit of God

Pay attention to where He takes you and who He puts around you

Serve where God is calling you to serve. Lead where God is calling you to lead. Love where God is calling you to love.

Don’t just go to church, Be the Church.