Dry Bones Live

Dry Bones Live: Ezekiel 37
 
1:1 Now it came to pass in the THIRTIETH YEAR in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the River Chebar that the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God
    1. Ezekiel = God Strengthens Me
    2. One day late in June when I was thirty years old
    3. In Israel one could not enter the Priesthood until they were 30 years old
    4. Ezekiel’s Father Buzi was a priest 
    5. Don’t miss the significance. Ezekiel had planned to be ministering in the great Temple of Solomon at the age of thirty like his father before him. But now, instead of being a priest in Israel, he found himself “among the captives by the river of Chebar”  
    6. He may have thought that he would never be used by the Lord
    7. Sometimes the worst things that happen to you become some of the best things that happen to you
    8. It was there in perhaps his darkest hour when all hope was lost that the word of the Lord came to him
    9. Ezekiel did not have to be in Solomon’s glorious temple to be used by the Lord
    10. Romans 8:28 And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose
       
      37:1 Then the hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the midst of the VALLEY and it was full of bones
    1. Dry bones scattered in piles speaks of the spiritual condition of Israel and how hopeless and impossible the political moral and spiritual situation was as they were slaves in Babylon
    2. The vision if of a graveyard that at one time was a battlefield
    3. If you don’t know Jesus you are already in the graveyard, to become a saint one must see himself a sinner first.  Without Jesus we are nothing but dry bones 
    4. When Jesus was talking to Nicodemus He referred to this passage of Scripture in Ezekiel.  John 3:8 Jesus speaks of the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit when someone accepts Christ and is born again
    5. On the battlefield if there were wounded soldiers there would be some hope that a medic could heal 
    6. On the battlefield if there were skeletons or remains there would be some hope that God could do something
    7. These bones were scattered and dried out Israel’s condition could not be worse
    8. 37:3 And He said to me, Son of Man can these bones live?  So I answered, Oh Lord God You know 
       
      Two ingredients for revival: We must have the WORD and the SPIRIT 
    1. 37:4 Again He said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear THE WORD OF THE LORD 
    2. 37:9 Also He said to me, “Prophesy to the BREATH, prophesy, son of man, and say to the BREATH, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Come from the four winds, O BREATH, and BREATHE on these slain, that they may live
    3. The Word and the Spirit compliment each other
    4. We are not Baptists and we are not Charismaniacs
    5. Without the Spirit there is no life
    6. Without the Spirit there is no supernatural
    7. Without the Word there is no order
    8. You cannot have too much Word or too much Spirit however we cannot have one without the other
       
      There will be a resurrection from the dead
    1. 37:7 So I prophesied as I was commanded and as I prophesied there was a noise and suddenly a rattling and the bones came together bone to bone
    2. Can the Lord raise the Dead even if one has been cremated
    3. Three resurrections:
    4. 1. Individually From Spiritual Death to Spiritual Life in Christ here and now
    5. From death to revival on a national basis
    6. 2.  From the physical death of the body to life in a glorified body