SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF LIFE

Have you ever seen one of those American westerns where the hero is riding through Death Valley and is running out of water? All around they see the bleached bones of those who ventured into the dryness of the desert and never made it out again. Sometimes life feels just like that, doesn’t it?

Ezekiel 37:1-14 Ezekiel found himself in that place, and amazingly, it was God who took him there. Sometimes when we feel surrounded by desert, we think we have done something wrong to get there, but in Ezekiel’s case, he was there because God wanted him to understand how to change death and barrenness into life and fullness. The place looked god forsaken, but then God asked him the question: Ezekiel, can these bones live?

Ezekiel wasn’t stupid. He knew that when God is asking the question, even when the answer seems obvious, there must be more to it than that, so he answered in faith. You know, Lord.
The Bible says we are formed in the image of God – we are just like him. That doesn’t mean He has two hands and two nostrils and everything else we have, because He is a Spirit and He doesn’t need nostrils to smell with or feet to run with. Our similarity to Him is that we, like Him, are spirit beings and we have the capacity to operate in the spirit realm as He does.

Hebrews 11:3 By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we see now did not come from anything that can be seen.

When God found emptiness and waste in Genesis 1:2, He changed it by speaking the language of life. As spiritual beings, the words we say have great impact into the spiritual realm. Because we are formed in His image, we have the same capacity as He does to frame our worlds.

Sometimes we feel like we are in Death Valley. Maybe we have a bony skeleton of a marriage, or children who are walking away from the purposes of God, or too many bills and too little money…hopes and dreams that seemed to be from God but right now it appears as if they can never come to pass. And God speaks to us in the valley that He has brought us to and asks us: Can these bones live? And we know they can’t…except if He is asking, there must be more to it than we can see. And God commanded Ezekiel to prophesy into his circumstances and command life to come to the place where hitherto, only death and waste reigned.

Hebrews 11:1 What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see.

It’s not easy to learn to speak a new language; even harder to learn to think in that new language, but if we will learn to speak the language of life, which is the language God speaks, we will have the capacity to change our world.

The Church is placed in this world to make a difference – to be the presence of Jesus Christ in the towns and cities we live in. For the Church to do that, it must begin in the individual Christian and we learn how to change the world by learning how to speak life into our own little world. We can’t help someone else to break through in their finances or relationships until we’ve experienced Him doing the same for us…standing with Him in the desert of our experiences and then beginning to prophesy life into the death and seeing it happen.

There is so much more to say on this subject, but for now, begin to practice speaking the language of life and see what God can do. I’ll write more about it next month.

Love and blessings…
Bev

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