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Speaking Life into Dry Bones

The prophet Ezekiel can be both perplexing and tantalizing simultaneously. Chapter 37 is such. He speaks to his people in their Babylonian exile. 

Dry bones are proof positive of a long passed death anywhere under the Lord's sun. God's people too are represented by dry bones. These are disciples without life, unwashed in the living Holy Spirit.

Then the Lord said to me: ‘Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off”.' (Ezekiel 37:11)

'Dry bones' are a spiritual metaphor for all God's own, some indicators are:

  1. Worship attendance has become a conscious routine many seasons ago (if loyalty was sufficiently strong). A spiritual cane now leans against a pew, while they remain seated, disengaged. Ritual for the Lord has long replaced relationship with the Lord.
  2. Faith is now in a moth-filled wallet, poverty has assailed its riches. Rules are dutifully adhered to, while love has wandered.
  3. Any hunger and thirst for righteousness has been spoilt upon the war-fields of faith, the weeds of the fields, or by the thorns of life. Spiritual ambition has been replaced by a spiritual malaise. Any panting after God has expired.

A.W. Tozer suggested the following causes:

  1. Lack of fervor by the absence of a spirit to worship within.
  2. That logic has become a substitute for life, and doctrine for experience. In fact the truth has become a veil to hide the face of God. Worship is curtained by theology.
  3. Maybe the young aspirations to worship and raise the roof have been dampened down and smothered? As you leapt in celebration to meet God, others kept 'pulling the rug from underneath you'. They did not want new wine in their aged ceremonial church - the old is better. And - you complied.#

Ezekiel spoke life into a valley of dry bones. (Read the full vision in Ezekiel 37:1-14)

Today it is Jesus who drenches Holy Spirit life across dry bones without finding fault or constraint:

... God gives the Spirit without limit. (John 3:34)

The Holy Spirit is Jesus' hand-held hose to water all souls who simply ask.

If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Luke 11:13)

#A.W.Tozer, Keys to the Deeper Life. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House 1984) 28-29

Posted in Worship, Holy Spirit;