God is filling his lungs and about to roar! Part 1

I have become obsessed with the first fifteen verses of Ezekiel Chapter 37. If ever a part of the Old Testament belonged especially to The Salvation Army’s western territories then these verses do! I have become so familiar with these 15 verses that I can almost recite them off by heart.

Have our hearts become so calloused, our ears so dull and our eyes so dim that we are unable to receive the hope and glory that this message longs to deliver?

What is the prophet asked to behold? A dead and defeated Army, a despondent army ‘'Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.”. This not some kind of mass desert grave – these bodies decayed where they fell. This mass of dry bones is the evidence of a lost battle. No ceremony or memorial marked the passing of this army other than the memorial of their own corpses! The prophet is made to examine the bones in detail, God wants him to fully appreciate just how dead this Army is – “He 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.”

God asks the prophet - can this Army live again? In his commentary Matthew Henry picks out beautifully and with precise discernment the thinking behind God’s question. "Son of man, can these bones live? Is it a thing likely? Canst thou devise how it should be done? Can thy philosophy reach to put life into dry bones, or thy politics to restore a captive nation?"

How perceptive and prophetic Henry was – how long we have struggled to bring our Army (in the west) back to life, or even worse we have denied it’s dead, or worst of all viewed it’s death as inevitable! We have tried our ‘philosophy’ and our ‘politics’ we have tried to ‘devise how it should be done?’ Stewardship, Church Growth, Planned Giving, Alpha, Structural Reorganisation (all good but all limited in their restorative powers). How long will we persevere before we recognise that we are dry and dead?

We have to own up to the fact (not just intellectually but in the very pit of our souls) that the only person who knows if this Army can live is God! Ezekiel is a wise man, an impulsive prophet would have pre-empted God’s will and said ‘Yes’ in response to God’s question but not Ezekiel – he simply responds with the statement “O Sovereign LORD, you alone know”.

Can our Army live again? There is an admirable impulse within us to cry out an unconditional ‘yes’ but like Ezekiel we must stop and seek out God’s will. Can our Army live again? Let us assume nothing but in humility respond “O Sovereign LORD, you alone know.” If we respond with humility and repentance, if we hand the initiative (even our hope) over to God then he will show us just how much he longs and waits to resurrect this ‘vast army’!

Now is the time for action!!!

What must we do? We must prophesy? We must prophesy via every medium, from every hilltop, we must write articles, we must Blog , we must preach, we must pray and fast. We must band together and encourage each other, we must sharpen each other as ‘iron sharpens iron’. Above all we must prophesy, and prophesy and then prophesy again. To prophesy is different from preaching or teaching. The aim of prophesy is not first and foremost to encourage or chastise although it may do both of these things) to prophesy is to deliver the word of God first hand in a specific and targeted way.(A good contemporary example is the Gerald Coates word for the Army – it wasn’t for the wider church it was for the Army, it was specific.)

Who is our audience? We must prophesy to the dry bones! See Ezekiel 3:4-9

He then said to me: "Son of man, go now to the house of Israel and speak my words to them. You are not being sent to a people of obscure speech and difficult language, but to the house of Israel- not to many peoples of obscure speech and difficult language, whose words you cannot understand. Surely if I had sent you to them, they would have listened to you. But the house of Israel is not willing to listen to you because they are not willing to listen to me, for the whole house of Israel is hardened and obstinate. But I will make you as unyielding and hardened as they are. I will make your forehead like the hardest stone, harder than flint. Do not be afraid of them or terrified by them, though they are a rebellious house.”

What is our message? We are blessed prophets indeed for our message is one of hope, restoration and success.

"Prophesy to these bones and say to them, 'Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.' "

What will happen when we prophesy in this way. God will breathe life into the old, he will bring life to what has been long dead. This is not a new Army, this is an old Army. This is an Army, once proud, a vast Army that died on the field of battle. We must hear the word of the Lord and respond. Our job is to bring to speak life into that which was dead. Ezekiel doesn’t set up a tent on the edge of the desert and put up pictures of Lord Kitchener. He is not called to create a new Army but to raise up an old one.

This is where we must not (but so easily could) go wrong. Sometimes when we think of ‘the old’ we think of externals. We must not focus on externals. “The old” that God wants to restore is internal. It is the ‘old’ commitment, the ‘old’ holiness, the ‘old’ aggressive compassion. This ‘old’ spirit is exemplified in the lives of people like Railton, Cadman, Lawley, Booth-Tucker and a million and one Salvationists who enlisted between 1880 and 1900. What will God resurrect in his Army?

A sacrificial love ( willing to work without pay - living by faith)
A love for the unloved (the paedophile, the single mum who aborted her child, the militant homosexual, the atheist who wants to make religious education a crime)
A practical love (the spirit of the ‘slum and gutter’ brigades)
An aggressive love (‘tear of the bandages and make them look’)
An uncompromising love (that refuses the world’s thirty pieces of silver in order to protect its autonomy)
A courageous love (that buys a quarters ‘within a yard of hell’ and not in the suburbs, a love that lives where the need is and doesn’t commute to the battlefield)
A repentant love (that constantly reviews and checks its motives, a love that will not tolerate ‘sin in the camp’ )
A mobile love (not held in one place by buildings and trappings but a love that can move quickly to the point of need) A constant love (expressed in a ‘living sacrifice’) A HOLY love (totally set apart and reserved for God, a love that drives his agenda, an extreme commitment that scares the uncommitted yet at the same time draws them in)

Continued...