Speak Life in 2025!

Speak Life in 2025!

So I prophesied as I was commanded. There was a sound when I prophesied – I heard a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to bone. As I watched, I saw tendons on them, then muscles appeared, and skin covered over them from above, but there was no breath in them. He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, – prophesy, son of man – and say to the breath: ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these corpses so that they may live.’”
So I prophesied as I was commanded, and the breath came into them; they lived and stood on their feet, an extremely great army.
(Ezekiel 37:7-10)

If you’re unfamiliar with this Bible story, allow me to provide a little context.

Ezekiel, a prophet in the Bible, is given a vision directly from God. In this vision, he is brought upon a valley filled with dry bones.

Let me reiterate; these aren’t dead bodies or corpses, they are bones.
Not even fresh bones, they’re DRY bones.

In this vision, God asks Ezekiel a powerful and challenging question, and a question which completely changed my life a few years ago when God asked me the same thing.

God asked him, “Can these dry bones live?”

Before I tell you what Ezekiel answered and what God then did, allow me to share the story of when God asked me.

I was walking down the street (I can still point out the exact plant I was looking at in the garden bed) when this question rose in my heart. It wasn’t audible, so the people I walked with didn’t hear the voice. It was “internally audible”, as though I heard it on the inside.

I’d just found out some confronting and awful information in the news about someone. This person had messed up—messed up bad—and it had just been discovered and gone public.

My initial reaction was a sudden compulsion to vomit. Then I was hit with a wave of emotions: anger, disgust, disappointment, shock.

I felt it all.

As I walked along that street—my mind and heart filling with judgement towards this person—God suddenly asked me the question.

“Can these dry bones live?”

Remember how the valley Ezekiel saw wasn’t just filled with corpses, but it was filled with dry bones? This was what God began speaking to me about.

He reminded me that once a body is dead… they’re dead!

Once someone is classified “medically dead” (aka: it’s too late for CPR), their story is over. There’s nothing the world can do. The timeframe of medical death—a day or a decade—alters nothing regarding the impossibility of bringing someone back to life.

So when God asked Ezekiel if the dry bones could live again, He was asking if Ezekiel believed that the same God who healed the sick and who could revive someone several days dead, could He also bring back to life an army that’s now a stack of bones?

That’s exactly what Ezekiel believed! He began speaking life to the dry bones, just as God commanded. The bones came together. Flesh covered them, then God breathed life and the army was revived!

God challenged me to look at the person in the news the same way Ezekiel looked at that valley.

If it’d been a valley of sick people, God could heal them.
If it’d been a valley of newly dead people, God could revive them.
If it was a valley of the driest of dry bones, God could bring them back to life.
If the person in the paper had told a little white lie, God’s grace and forgiveness were enough for them.
If the person in the paper had stolen a car, God’s grace and forgiveness were enough for them.
If the person in the paper had committed a terrible crime, God’s grace and forgiveness were enough for them.

Whether the neighbours in our community are sick, dead or even dry bones, God wants us to be Ezekiels in 2025 who imagine and speak life.

We should speak life into our homeless shelters, our prisons, our palliative care centres, our rehab centres… every valley with a dry bone which the world has given up hope for. We can be the Ezekiel.

That’s my challenge for me and my challenge for you.

Speak Life in 2025!