The central message of the Scriptures is the heart of God seeking the lost, a truth pictured in the parables of Luke 15 and the prophecy of Ezekiel 37. This passage of the valley of dry bones holds a dual meaning: it is a literal promise of the future restoration of the nation of Israel, and it is a powerful illustration of each of our own spiritual journeys. God calls us from spiritual death to life, not just to an intellectual belief, but to a personal, saving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, who is present and actively seeking fellowship with us.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] When we have the scriptures, it puts us up to a task of seeking some way to understand them. And although there are many facts which are quite straightforward, written in the scriptures, about the gospel, for example, and how Jesus is the one who was with the Father before time began, and he was the one who is God and yet he’s the Son of God, some of these details may be difficult to comprehend, but they’re very simply stated in the scriptures again and again. Maybe the word simply is perhaps not the best word I might there have used, but nonetheless, very visibly, the burden of what the scriptures have to say is the gospel of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ as God’s eternal Son and as the one who came to suffer on the cross for our sins,

[00:00:59] to rise again and go back to heaven and to be available to be our Saviour. And coming to know him personally as your own Saviour is that which is the most important moment of your life. It doesn’t happen to everybody exactly the same way. There are some people for whom it’s a big struggle and eventually are breaking down and giving in to let God have his way with them. Other people, it’s something they were taught from the smallest years as a child and simply grew up confirming their wish for Jesus to be their Saviour. Other people, it’s a climax of running away from that and eventually finding themselves in a position of really needing God’s help to come back again. Some of my favourite passages are those such as in Luke’s Gospel, chapter 15,

[00:01:56] and there the chapter which is about the things that are lost. And there’s a sheep and there’s a coin and then eventually there’s a son who goes off and wastes his parents’ heritage with prostitutes and sinful living, but then comes to himself. I love the verse in that chapter that says that he came to himself. He recognised what he’d been doing and what he needed to do. And what I also like is the next bit that says that he got up and he went back home. He took a journey. And in the idea of the journey which that young man and Jesus’ storyline took, there is pictured of what often is a task laid on us. If you’re going to know Christ as your Saviour and you find yourself a long, long way away from that, you have a need to get up and go home, as it were. Going home is going to God.

[00:02:55] Going home is going to Christ. And that walk of repentance, pictured in Jesus’ story, of the young man who’s away from his father, away from his proper home, but has to take a journey. And when he gets nearer to the home, the father comes running out and falls on his neck. That’s old-fashioned language for how he hugged him and kissed him, kissed him and welcomed him home and said, this my son was lost but now is found. Can I ask you a question? Has that happened to you? Whether it be something that was just a slow process, something that you were taught from the smallest child age, or whether you were one like the prodigal son who ran away in the opposite direction and God had to, well, in the storyline, he had to be worked on to eventually come to himself. It’s a moment of recognition you’re a sinner,

[00:04:01] recognition you’re away from God and you need to do something about it. And then he takes the journey on, the journey home. Where are you with regard to knowing Christ as your own saviour? Is it something that has happened and you’re secure in? Is it something that’s yet to occur? Is it something that you’ve indeed experienced but you’ve got away from that first love and you may not be a person away from Christ permanently but you may be away from him in fellowship. Jesus talked to the communion as Joey pointed out to us because he expressed how much he wanted to have the fellowship. He doesn’t just want to get us to be saved from hell. Do you understand this? A lot of people think our Christian gospel, they’ve got a very maybe old fashioned and maybe simplistic picture of what the Christian gospel is

[00:05:01] to get saved from hell. That is not incorrect by the way but nonetheless it’s so much less than what the gospel is about. The gospel is about God wanting to bring us to himself. The gospel is about a personal thing that one person God and you the other person and what the God person has done to bring you back to himself. And he finds different people in different places in life. Sometimes there’s a person that’s found a long, long journey away and they come running back. My prayer tonight is that if there’s someone here who’s yet really to close the distance, listen to it, close the distance between you and Christ, you’ll understand Jesus’ wish, his wish to have fellowship with you. He’s wanting to spend time with you, not just in the communion, which is an expression of all of this, but in the depth of reality

[00:06:10] of your being a human being before God. He doesn’t want you to be at distance from him. He wants you and him to be an item. If you’re here tonight and that’s your experience, I want to tell you that there’s something going on in this room. For Jesus said that where two or three meet together in his name, there is he in the midst. And if you look around, you just see us human people, but don’t think that’s all that’s present here. Jesus is here. When I was young, they used to sing a song so simple, I didn’t know why I got included with the singers, but it was simple, Jesus is here. And I thought it was just some, you know, little thing to be sung and said. But it broke in on me one day just how that is true. Where two or more gather together in my name, said Jesus. We’ve actually done that tonight.

[00:07:11] This meeting was introduced with prayer in Jesus’ name. We’ve been rehearsing who is Jesus. This is a Christian service and he is here. We could sing that old song, Jesus is here. We’re actually just saying the very truth. Realise it now, he’s here. Why is he here? Well, as Joey mentioned in the communion service, he’s here to remind you to have fellowship with him. The whole purpose of the Christianity is about you and him. That’s why sometimes he sets up special circumstances that we get the message. And when you get that message, the Bible has a warning. It says, while you can hear his voice, don’t harden your heart. When you can hear his voice, don’t harden your heart. There is a time, I believe, on the stage of every person’s presentation of this life where the lines that count are the lines when you suddenly wake up

[00:08:27] to the fact that Jesus is calling and Jesus is present and that he wants you to make a step toward him. Just as the Lord back when he was ministering on earth told the stories as in Luke 15 and talked about the prodigal son and talked about the lost sheep, talked about the lost coin and that chapter is such a beautiful chapter because it pictures in three different scenarios someone that’s concerned for the lost. It’s the father of the lost son. It’s the woman that lost the precious coin and sweeps out the whole house until she finds it. It’s the shepherd who’s got a whole flock of sheep that he knows are safe enough and he leaves them to go and he goes looking for it until there comes a moment where he finds the lost sheep. And it’s just, look it up when you get home, this Luke 15 passage.

[00:09:25] And it has a little phrase in there. It’s one of these spots in the Bible that gets to me. It’s the spot where it simply says about the shepherd going, until he find it, because there’s one sheep lost and he keeps searching, until he find it. And Jesus is the one who told those stories and I’m sure he knew what he was doing when he made up that little bit about the shepherd who goes and searches and searches until he find it. Because that’s how much it matters to him if we get ourselves stuck in some spot that’s really lost and he’s busy seeking to get to us and to bring us back to himself. I think what I’ve been speaking of here really represents what is the heart of the whole Bible. If you’re looking for some unifying theme in the scriptures, I think it is the heart of God looking for the rest,

[00:10:29] looking for the lost and not having any rest until he find it. Start in the book of Genesis and there you find in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve first seen our forebears launched the whole human race into lostness and then they are guilty and they go and hide themselves and then it pictures God coming and walking when it says God it’s talking as it were of an apparition of God and the one who often represents the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is Jesus I can’t say for certain that that verse in the early chapters of Genesis is trying to give a hint that it’s actually the Word of God it’s actually the second person of the Trinity the Father is the first Jesus is the second the Holy Spirit is called the third person they’re just our enumerations of 1, 2 and 3 but it’s when Jesus really is the one

[00:11:27] a pre-incarnate Christ he doesn’t have a body yet that’s to happen later in history but he comes at that moment in the Garden of Eden and why does he come? he comes and is looking for the lost Adam and Eve and he calls and says Adam where are you? they’re hiding behind bushes as if you could hide from God he knows where you are but Jesus a bit of a gentleman like sometimes he is doesn’t always show that he knows where they are but he calls out and he says Adam where are you? Adam Where are you? And they come out from behind some bushes. It’s actually quite a pathetic scene when you think about God and us. He knows where you’re at. And he comes and he gives to you, your personage, a sort of acknowledgement that he doesn’t, Jesus didn’t walk over to the bush and pull away and leave and say, Ah, I found you.

[00:12:27] He called and said, Where are you? Because that’s the calling of God he does to give some opportunity for response. Where are you? It was a call that enabled them to come out from behind where they’re hiding and begin the conversation where he talked about their problem and their sin and the consequence of it. And God wants to do that with us when we get away from him. He’s in the business of coming to us and seeking us to call us into accounts, not in an angry way as much as in a loving way, to help restore us to belong to him and he to us. That’s what the Bible’s all about. It’s the chief thing of the Scriptures. It’s its central message, every part of it, one way or another. Now I’ve given you this little rather lengthy introduction

[00:13:20] because I want us to look at a passage where it has two understandings. It has two ways to understand it. One which is, just as I’ve been talking, about those central idea of the gospel. And another one which has to do with future history and to how God is going to do some very remarkable things in the future. It is in Ezekiel and chapter 37. And what we’re going to discover in this passage in chapter 37 of Ezekiel is someone who is used of God in order to picture a prophecy of how God is going to do something in the future for his people, the Jewish people, and how also there is written within the storyline lessons for you and me today as to how we can be spiritual. So I’m suggesting to us that there are two levels of interpretation to be found here. That’s often the case with prophecy.

[00:14:22] And we in the Christian church or we as ones who seek to interpret the Bible can latch on to one and have a truth that’s real without necessarily understanding the other one that’s there as well. And it doesn’t make the first one incorrect. It is the case that both are right that there is an immediate application here to a literal explanation as to what the words mean that is to the people of Israel and how one day they are going to come back to their own land. That promise, by the way, has been fulfilled. And we in this era, the last 50 years or so, or maybe a little bit more, have seen this happen with the return of Jewish people to the land of Israel and the set-up of the nation again in what had been the original land that God gave them.

[00:15:15] That’s the literal fulfilment, future from when the Scriptures were first written, that is a part of what is meant by these verses. We’ll read through. In the hand of the Lord, this is Ezekiel 37. If you want to look it up in your own Bible and you’re using the one in front of you, then we’re looking here at page, what was it, Ezekiel, page 724. So if you want to look up and see the words, I sometimes find it to help to look at the actual written writing, but it’s page 724 in Ezekiel 37, 1 to 14. The hand of the Lord was upon me and he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord, I’ll comment on that in a moment, and sent me down in the middle of the valley. It was full of bones and led me around among them and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley and behold, they were very dry.

[00:16:14] And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? now this picture needs an interpretation that you can’t actually know that you’re getting it exactly correct when it says he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and it’s either that there is an actual valley and Ezekiel got lifted up by the spirit of the Lord and taken there don’t poo-poo such a possibility because that did happen in the New Testament and the Old Testament that people were lifted up by the spirit and taken places and when there are revivals as in the revival in Indonesia at one time there were Christian people who were walking along a track and got lifted up and taken places to preach the gospel and this has been documented by people more scholarly who like to document things and the fact of God being able to do that

[00:17:11] in special times of the Holy Spirit being at work and no doubt this was a special time with the prophet Ezekiel and he was lifted up and he could have been actually taken to a valley prepared by God to make the whole scene or on the other hand this is a statement about something happen in the spirit of things with Ezekiel and so it’s a reality but not a reality that is a physical reality but a spiritual reality which doesn’t make it any less real and I don’t know how to So what actually is the case, I can’t say, either are possible. But he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and he sent me down in the middle of the valley. And the whole valley might be something not physically a place but something that was in the visionary experience that Ezekiel had. We don’t know.

[00:18:02] Now the first thing I want to say about this is that something is happening in the spirit and there is a vision that’s been given to him. And Christianity does involve at times, not necessarily every day or not necessarily experienced by every single Christian all the time. Sometimes these are rare events but there’s sufficiently been documented down through the years and the centuries for there to be no doubt about the facts that there are times when Christians have spiritual moments that cannot be explained any other way than that God stepped in and did something with them and to them and for them. And this is one. And I want to say that God is in the business of giving to Christians spiritual experiences. Not always as dramatic as we read here. But nonetheless, being a Christian is not something

[00:18:53] just to do with having intellectual beliefs along a certain way concerning the deity. In fact, you can be a person who believes about God and what that makes you is a theist. A theist is a person who believes in God but it doesn’t make you a Christian. You can believe a lot of good things that are true but it won’t make you a Christian because to become a Christian requires, according to the Gospel, not only a spiritual moment happening to you which makes for your conversion to Christ but it needs you to have a special relationship with Jesus, a relationship of faith in Christ. There is nothing that you can have happen to you that will make you a Christian, no matter how dramatic it is, if it doesn’t also accompany you taking a step of trust and belief in Jesus

[00:19:46] because that’s the only thing that turns you into a Christian. And there are many people who do go through spiritual-like experiences, especially if they’re emotional ones, going along to a church and someone relates to them and gets through to them and they weep a bit and they think, oh, I’ve become a Christian. But I want to tell you that our human emotions and the experiences that we may have at religious wives or at church aren’t necessarily that which would turn you into a Christian. Becoming a Christian is a lot more about your relationship with God where it gets repaired by your repentance and your faith. It’s a step of trust. In fact, the early Christians in trying to explain what it was to become a Christian actually did a bit of violence to the grammar to set up a special way of talking

[00:20:37] that changed the normal to express that there’s something extra than just giving mental belief or just having a new way of thinking. And so they took the word for believing which normally required a Greek case added to the end as the dative case and they changed it and they put in belief and they made it into what’s called the accusative case, don’t worry if you don’t know all that case business but the accusative case has the idea of action toward or action into so instead of just believing about Jesus they expressed it to become a Christian you believe into Jesus which was to give the idea of your personal commitment to Christ and trust in him in that sense and that was how the Bible has expressed what makes you actually get

[00:21:27] converted is not just when you believe about Christ. I think believing about Christ is like a start but it is when your belief in him brings to you the understanding that you need to have the forgiveness of sins and you need to have that reconciliation with God. You need just as in the Garden of Eden when God called Jesus the pre-incarnate Christ. We don’t really know what to say but when he walked in the Garden, that’s what makes me think it was the pre-incarnate Christ because he’s walking in the Garden, not necessarily, I won’t go on, but he calls, Adam where are you? And when you get a call from God that’s what actually starts the event of you’re getting properly converted, there’s a call. It’s not necessarily that you hear voices from behind

[00:22:19] the bush you walked by or it’s not necessarily that you’re in church and somehow you heard your name happen or, you know, there are people who give testimonies that that sort of thing does occur but it’s not necessarily what has to happen. It’s a call because spiritually, in the spirituality of it, something happens and you hear from God and the call puts you on the spot. When you’re a preacher you know about this because you watch the people and sometimes when you’re in the church they don’t know you don’t know how much I can see or how you’re reacting and you get people who suddenly grab the seat in front of them you see their knuckles go white you know they’re jolly well under a bit of conviction and you get other people who get angry and stomp out it’s amazing, you should remember this

[00:23:06] that from the front you see an awful lot more than people know you do and it shows the fact that God comes into Christian meetings and I know as a preacher I can’t make that happen. I have one church where the people who didn’t like my preaching said it’s because he studied psychology and he knows how to get at us or something. They had some crazy explanation as to why people got converted but if they only knew I’ve studied psychology and I don’t know any way that you can get it to happen all I know is that if you deliver the gospel God makes it happen. He’s the one who sometimes and you can’t make it happen either you can’t say Lord today you go ahead and do it so I’m telling you the orders Lord. You don’t tell him the orders. You find out what orders he’s given you and it’s his business to call people

[00:24:00] and he does that and he does it in churches and it’s amazing where people come to church in one mind and then God calls them. And the Bible encourages us that while you can hear his call, come and receive him and respond to him. Well, anyway, this is what happens when someone gets properly converted. And so there is something more going on when you learn from a passage of the scriptures and there can be two levels. One, the informational level that you’re being taught and the other, this spiritual thing happening. And I want to say that that’s the nature of the Bible. It is the book of God through whom he loves to do spiritual things and he loves to speak to people and there is something more than just the intellectual concepts you gain. And when you’re a young Christian and you’ve come to Christ

[00:24:54] and someone teaches you you need to read the Bible a lot or they give you little follow-up tracks so that it helps you to understand. If you keep doing that, there’s a spiritual growth that occurs because the Bible and you have got a great spiritual connection and spiritual tonic that’s available there. And now we have this passage which shows that for our person, Ezekiel, there’s a spiritual moment and that’s the nature of the Bible. The Bible can suddenly turn to have a spiritual dynamic any time God chooses to use it. He doesn’t have to. There’s times where he just lets us learn the concepts and you get a nice commentary and understand a bit of the background. all of that’s quite normal but it doesn’t leave out the fact that there can come a spiritual moment just as it does with people like Ezekiel

[00:25:43] who is taken in the spirit I’ve just elaborated from one little verse I don’t know how long this sermon is going to go I don’t mean to worry you but that’s point one and anyway what does he say and I’m reading here you can look on the screen and the Lord asks a question in verse 3 he said to me son of man can these bones live? can these bones live? and he doesn’t know what to say and he says oh Lord you know and I think it’s a good thing for us to be like Ezekiel to recognise when we don’t really know everything about what’s going on and there’s a humility that you need to have to be on the successful receiving end of when God deals with you and talks with you oh Lord God you know and then the Lord says prophesy over these bones and say to them oh dry bones hear the word of the Lord thus saith the Lord God to these bones

[00:26:48] behold I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live and I’ll lay sinews upon you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you and you shall live and you shall know that I am the Lord. Now, the moment we’re reading here, it isn’t only that this passage could be used to show us that there’s a spirituality of the whole Christian business. This is actually a good passage to do what I’ve been doing thus far and that is speaking about the spirituality of what Christianity is all about. but also in this passage he is talking about something quite literal as a prophecy for the future and the fact that the scriptures can have multi levels of meaning one that is to the spirituality of the moment you can be blessed in reading this

[00:27:39] I actually have two sermons from this passage and one has to do with just as you’re hearing me about the spirituality of how the Bible gets to you but the other one is about the content of what God said to Ezekiel and what this prophecy actually is all about, literally. And when I say literally it’s because in this case this isn’t just a spiritual lesson. It is God teaching something that’s going to happen to the people of Israel. And it’s a fascinating thing because it’s teaching about the fact that one day after they’d all been separated, you know when Jesus died on the cross and the Romans came and destroyed the city and Jewishness got spread around all the nations and so the Jewish people became people spread all over the world. There’s a bit more that went on in history. I’m summarising very quickly.

[00:28:30] But with the Jewish people, they ended up not being in Palestine. Why there’s all these struggles that go on presently as to who has the right to own that area of Palestine and around Jerusalem, who’s one people who should own it? And why there is that struggle is because the Jews got taken all away. They lost their heritage because they didn’t live in their own land anymore. But this is a prophecy that was coming to them that one day God was going to do something for them and make them live again as the nation they had been. And the picture is of a whole lot of bones that are dry and the emphasis in the description is of how dead they are and they’ve just got no breath in them and their bones are dry. But the prophecy is that they’re going to come back to life again.

[00:29:23] It’s a picture of dead, something happening to them that’s impossible other than a miracle but they’re going to be raised to life. And as you continue following the description it says that God will bring them back to their own land. And this promise that one day the Jewish people who’d been sent, they were described by many as the wandering nation. They wandered amongst the nations of the world. They were just scattered all around the world. There probably wasn’t anywhere that you couldn’t find some Jewish people and usually they were getting persecuted there. They were a people who lost their presence in their own land so much so that there are others who think they have a greater claim to that land even today. but this promise is saying that God was going to bring them

[00:30:09] back to their own land, it continues with that sort of thing and as we keep reading so I prophesied as I was commanded and as I prophesied there was a sound and behold a rattling and the bones came together we’ll keep reading, bone to its bone and I looked and behold there were sinews on them and flesh had come upon them and skin covered them but there was no breath in them So we notice that there’s two steps in this fulfilment of the promise to bring God’s people back to the homeland. One was the physicality that he would bring the Jewish people, the historic Jewish people, back to the land of Israel. But the other to be that there was going to be, for them, a spiritual conversion where they would come back to having an understanding of God. And so the first part is that all the bones get drawn together.

[00:30:59] It’s a rather fantastic scene. if you could make a film of this it would be rather dramatic well the bones come and they’re rattling together and there’s skin jumping on them but when it’s all done Ezekiel looks they’re all dead they’re still dead there’s no breath in them so verse 10 I prophesied as he commanded me and the breath came into them it’s a second step and they lived and they stood upon their feet an exceedingly great army this is a fantastic promise that God was not only going to bring the Jews back to their promised land but they were going to have a moment of Christian conversion Christian that they’ll come to believe in the God of the Bible even more than they have and but in the Christ of the New Testament that they haven’t had and there is going on within Jerusalem and within the land of Israel

[00:31:57] just such things and there’s something that’s happening within them you’ve probably heard me tell the story when I studied psychology I had a tutor who used to get annoyed at me because I shared my faith and he’s what he was annoyed at he says you’re so certain why do you think you’re so right and anyway one day I had an assignment laid and I was taking it to his office to give it in at last and he wasn’t there but his wife was and she gave away more information than he ever did. I didn’t know he was a Jew or she a Jewess but she told me the full story and she said, we’re just going back to Israel soon. She didn’t know why. It’s a funny scene because when she said she didn’t know why I said, but I know why. And I told her I had the opportunity to tell of what the Bible says

[00:32:51] that God’s people are going to get taken back to the homeland and then there might come a moment of them becoming spiritually alive. What a fantastic passage. I’m not going to go on expositing this theme but I’m telling you, I’m pointing out to you that there is a double level of meaning here in our Ezekiel passage and one meaning that I’ve just been saying is about how God has a future for Israel. We call the study of the future about the end times the eschaton is the end moment or the eschatah are the end things and eschatology is the study of the end times and eschatology is a part of Christian theology normally in a textbook it’s the last chapter of eschatology. In actual fact, I did one of my theses overseas on this very thing that eschatology is not just the last thing

[00:33:51] that you take on the end of your theology course it’s actually the very centre of the gospel itself the gospel itself is about eschatology as well as us coming to know God there’s a spiritual centre of the Bible as I’ve just previously been saying to you but there’s also an eschatology that runs all the way through the scriptures. It’s not just something in the book of Revelation. It’s something all the way through the scriptures and it is a part of the only way you can fully understand the Bible until you face the facts that it’s talking about the future. There is a heaven and hell. There is a second return of Christ, the chief feature of the eschatological promise. And it’s going to happen. Jesus is coming back again. He’s going to do a lot of things. He’s going to set up the land of Israel

[00:34:47] that has never been able to fully be set up before. All of that is also true and it’s going to happen. It’s all the way through the scriptures. If you tried to weed it out of the scriptures, you’d find nothing left almost. Just the same as the liberal scholars, not politically liberal but the ones that didn’t believe the inspiration of the scriptures. they discovered that when they tried to take out of the gospel the idea of who Jesus is as God as the son of God as God in the flesh is when they tried to take it out they had nothing much left you can’t take the spirituality out and you can’t take the true literalness of what the Bible is all about that God is in control of history and he has a program and that program includes not just the fact that Jesus came for the first advent

[00:35:37] The very fact we call it a first advent is because we know Christianity speaks of a second advent. And the second advent, it means the second coming, is when Jesus returns and he calls time. Just like someone in the pub will say when they want to shut the doors, time please. And everybody has to get ready to go. And that’s going to happen in history. That Jesus Christ is going to call the whole of passing of time and the availability there is for people to come to know him. He’s going to call an end to that opportunity as he comes. And what follows is how the scriptures describe the judgment of Christ. That when he comes he’s going to judge the Christians first of all of how they’ve gone as Christians. And he’s going to judge every person that’s ever lived and those who haven’t come to know him.

[00:36:26] There’s a talk about there being the book of life and every name of a person that’s come to know Christ personally, like I’ve been describing, as their name is written in the book of life and whoever’s name was not found in the book of life is cast into the lake of fire. These are not just ideas of crazy people in churches who are too fanatical about a literal interpretation. Some people think you’ve got to translate the Bible just to get the spiritual ideas out but don’t get wrapped up in too many of these wild details that’s how they think but there’s one person that didn’t do that you know who he was it was Jesus and he’s the one that talked literally about hell he’s the one that spoke about there being the punishment of the lost he’s the one that gave stories about there being a time limit as to how long

[00:37:13] you have to come Jesus is the one who leads the way and interpreting the scriptures as being something that you can trust in and he’s the one that talked about the statements of Moses and he called them Moses’ writings but in another spot he calls the same statements of Moses being the word of God and the nature of the Bible is that it’s something that it is true and it is true you can trust in it to what it’s saying and in cases like this particular chapter yes there is a spirituality that you can learn I love this chapter to learning how to be a spiritual person I haven’t had much of my time bringing out all the details of the spirituality that you could learned from this passage, but it’s also true in terms of what it’s saying about the future of the Jews. And whose side that you are on

[00:38:00] because of the fact of the promise that Jesus the Messiah one day is going to come back. He’s the son of David by the way. And if you go on reading this passage and if you read in Isaiah which is full of things saying about the son of David, it’s talking about the fact of the Messiah coming. That when he comes he’s going to champion the cause of Israel that’s God speaking as to what he’s planning to do and it’s just as true as the statements that you could get from this passage about learning how to be spiritual I’ll have to give it another night what I was going to say about this passage and it gives a wonderful teaching as to how to become a spiritual person and what it means to work by the power of the spirit we’ll get on that another night but for tonight

[00:38:49] sufficient it is if we can see that the scriptures are both got that central spiritual message and it’s about coming to know God but they also have a lot of prophecy and there’s eschatological parts, study of the end times, that are quite seriously telling you what’s going to happen and you can study it, it’s sometimes difficult, I’ve sat through a couple of home groups that have had a study on the book of Revelation, I don’t know that it was very easy to conclude exactly what the book of Revelation is saying except that you can see so strongly it’s saying something and there is a bit of a hint that when these events begin happening, the fact that they happen gives you the interpretation, just as by the way this passage which is one that’s very clearly about there being the return of the Israeli

[00:39:41] people to Israel, Christian folk often interpret it spiritually and didn’t go any further than that until of course 1947 and 48 happened and because of the decision of the nations to in consequence the outcome of trying to do something about the terror of what happened with Auschwitz and all of those things and the killing of the Jews they allowed Israel to get its own people come back and what started them was part of the fulfilment of this very prophecy so you better recognise history is on the side of underlining how true are these prophecies quite literally you don’t have to find a spiritual explanation so as to not believe the literal one the literal one is being spoken for by history my father had some friends who worked in a ministry to Jewish people I think they were Jewish people

[00:40:40] but they’d get around saying some of the same things you’re hearing from me and these Jewish people had all sorts of information because they’d come back from a trip to Israel and they’d say do you know there’s a valley there that in the Bible prophesies one day will be full of trees orange trees or whatever and here’s a picture they’d go around showing people how the prophecies of the Bible were happening in Israel right now and this was a time soon after this is going back a few decades that the Jews got back and oh how they made a lot of heyday of telling people how it had happened I’ve had friends from my study days who went and made a career of telling Jewish people one’s an Italian bloke and he’s not he’s got no connections with Jewishness but he just wanted to go there to tell Jewish people

[00:41:33] what God says about their country what a mission to have and there are Jewish people all around the world and lots of different organisations you’ve probably heard of several that are about evangelism of Jews where those organisations are finding people that come to Christ so God is at work and we have an example of the spirituality of the Bible is not to replace the literalness of the prophecies that make up for much of the eschatology of the scriptures I think that’s enough for one night that you can trust the Bible but the most important thing I want you to go out the door with is the fact that when God works by his spirit he gets through to whoever he’s working on in a way that’s not just an intellectual thing it’s not just a human thing it’s not because you get a preacher who can have the best stories

[00:42:31] we preachers try and get a few good stories that’s okay but we all know that we are not the ones who convince people we know that what convinces people when that event happens that Jesus makes his presence felt and he calls come unto me all you who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest take my yoke upon you my burden upon you and learn from me for I’m weak and lowly and I’ll give rest to your souls there is a call that Jesus brings and if you don’t know him yet I would not mind guessing I can’t say for sure but I would not mind guessing that some of you have got something happening in your heart and I didn’t cause it I know that whenever this message of the gospel of the love of Jesus that he died for us on the cross that he rose again to be our saviour he’s gone back to heaven to prepare a place for us

[00:43:35] he’s coming back that all of that which is called the gospel is the platform upon which he gives you an offer to come back and get right with him and he calls on you just like Jesus’ story of the prodigal son to come to himself and then to make a journey back to the Father to the Father’s heart come back, find him as your own God by finding Jesus as your Saviour and Lord actually Jesus made a big point of he being the way to the Father he said I am the way, the truth and the life no one comes to the Father but by me when you come to Jesus you come to the very expression of the Trinity that God himself has set up for us to close to him come to Jesus and you find God the Father you also find God the Holy Spirit by the way because they always do things together and you get to become a Christian,

[00:44:38] not just someone who believes a set of ideas but someone that’s come to know the God of those ideas. If that’s you, I hope that’ll happen to you tonight. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for Ezekiel 37. Lord, we’ll have another night perhaps when we can go further into the spirituality of what happens when revival occurs, what happens when the spirit moves and just some of those principles of how the spirit works in us. We’ll get onto that one day. But Lord, we thank you for tonight and I thank you for this passage and I pray, Heavenly Father, that you will be gracious to us to give us a chance to go deeper with you and to give us a chance to come closer to you and personally knowing you, we ask in the Saviour’s name. Amen.