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Sermon on Ezekiel 37:1-14
Title: A Breath of Fresh Life.
Theme: The Holy Spirit brings fresh life.
Goal: to encourage believers that the Holy Spirit brings fresh life to them.
Need: We live a dried out existence that leaves us with out hope for a future.
The Problem Today: We live a dried out existence without hope for a future.
The Problem in Ezekiel’s Day: The People of God are dried up like bones of the young men that went out to fight when Judah was brought into exile.
The Grace of God: The Holy Spirit brings fresh life.
Promised in the days of Ezekiel.
Fulfilled when the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles and everyone personally.
The Grace of God Today: We have the Holy Spirit in us as a guarantee of resurrection.
As the mover toward fresh life.
Sermon:
Parched. Dehydrated.
Bone Dry.
Burned out.
Lifeless.
Pointless.
Hopeless.
Dead.
Which one best describes where you have been lately.
Any of them?
With the direction your life is headed , do you ever ask the question out in the wind like I’ve done before: Who really cares.
What’s the point of this whole church thing?
What’s the point of anything that we have going on?
Who cares about the bread and juice.
Who cares that the Bible says Jesus died for our sins.
What does it matter that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples?
Have you ever sat down with me in the depths of that sort of attitude?
Go ahead pick up a baby bottle.
Fill it with donations for a pregnancy center.
Send oodles of Bibles for missions.
Go ahead give flowers in the neighbourhood.
Go ahead.
But don’t you see it.
The kingdom of God is still losing.
Do you see it out there where the world falls further away from Christ.
Do you see it here where faith can be boiled down to coffee club with songs, sermon and sacrament before we get started?
Do you see it right inside of here.
Deep within you.
Prayer sounds the like yapping of a little lap dog, not complete communion with the creator of the universe.
Being united with Christ means you read the Bible even though it didn’t change a thing about the way you acted today.
Hearing mention of Spiritual Gifts makes you run through your well rehearsed, “I’m too busy excuses.”
We understand all that.
You get it don’t you.
Dehydrated.
Parched.
Burned Out.
Lifeless.
Pointless.
Hopeless.
Bone Dry.
Dead.
Ezekiel’s vision is a metaphor for the state of the people of Israel in his day.
It’s also a picture of how it is today for us.
The feeling is nothing new.
The people of Israel were at that point.
In the passage we are shown their hopelessness.
In that day the survival of your people was the most important.
And the survival of the people chosen by God was even more important.
But in the decade or decades before these visions, God’s very own people have had the door of hope and real life slammed in their face.
The Babylonian armies had come in and taken many of people of the Israel into exile away from the land God promised to them.
War is gruesome and terrible.
We are reminded of that again this week with another repatriation of a soldier that was killed.
The vision Ezekiel sees in the passage is much more gruesome and inhumane and dismal.
Ezekiel 37:1-2 picture it for us.
“1The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.
2He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry.”
What are all these bones doing, laying in this valley?
They are the bones of the young men of Israel that went out to war.
They were the young men that thought they might just stand a chance against the Babylonian armies.
They are the bones of the young men that wondered if they would see their families again and save their homeland.
These are the bones.
Each one with a story to tell.
Together the bones tell a very powerful story.
The bones still lying there mean that Israel’s army has been routed.
They have been so thoroughly defeated that they could not go and bury their dead.
The bodies lay there rotting, flesh eaten by the vultures and scavengers.
The bones left to bake.
There is no hope for Israel.
Their young men are gone.
Their freedom is gone.
Their homeland is gone.
Is there anything left.
Nothing.
Its not just a physical sort of hopelessness either.
Ezekiel has already told the people the reason why they have been brought here to this foreign land and seen their sons killed on the battlefield.
Before Israel was dead and bone dry physically.
They were bone dry spiritually.
They had lost their first love.
They had forgotten that God called them out of slavery once before and told them.
Live right!
Follow my Law!
Obey my commands and you will live long in the land the Lord is giving you!
But instead of a wholehearted life of serving and pleasing God, the died and rotted from the inside out.
God’s law was forgotten.
Other false gods were given a place in Israel.
The people relied on their own strength and the strength of their armies instead of trusting in God.
They didn’t look out for the needs of the powerless like God commanded over and over.
Take care of the widow and the orphan!
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