The Dry Bones Praise

What does it take to bring a person back from the dead? It’s not enough to jumpstart the synapses in the brain so they fire and snap once again, nor is it sufficient to wake the silent heart so that it begins pumping blood through coarse and dried arteries. It isn’t simply a matter of inflating lungs and reanimating cells either. To make a dead soul alive, it needs the Spirit of God.

The prophet Ezekiel saw this process unfold before his eyes when, in a vision, God brought him out into the middle of a morbid valley filled with dry bones. The people of Israel were like those bones—beyond dead with no hope of restoration. The citizens of the Northern Kingdom had been taken captive by the Assyrians and spread far and wide, in large measure becoming indistinguishable from their pagan neighbors. More than a century later, the people in the south were taken into Babylon. The nation was no more, Jerusalem was toppled, and the temple of God lay in rubble. Worse than that, this calamity was not simply the result of unfolding world events; it was caused by the stubborn, sinful hearts of the people.

God commanded Ezekiel to prophesy, and the bones he saw rattled and clacked into place. Tendons and muscle and skin soon overtook them. Again, Ezekiel prophesied, and the four winds came and filled those bodies with the breath of life. The vision was a promise to Ezekiel. God would bring the dead nation of Israel back to life. The people would be numerous and mighty. And the wind that would fill his people would be the very Spirit of God.

We were once as good as dead because of our sins, but then God came and breathed new life into us. We have been born again, made new, and transferred from the realm of darkness to the kingdom of light by the Holy Spirit.

Never forget that you are a walking miracle, just as unlikely as a valley of brittle bones becoming an army of the living God. The same Spirit who empowered Jesus’ resurrection is at work within you to bring his good plans to pass. He is the reason your future is brighter than your past.

Gracious Lord, my life is yours. I place it in your hands to do with as you please.