|
|
Daily Transcripts
|
11/18/2015
|
|
Ezekiel 37:1-38:23 ~ James 1:19-2:17 ~ Psalm 117:1-2 ~ Proverbs 28:1
Today is the 18th of November. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian and it’s great to be here with you today. How are you doing? Everybody good? I’m glad we can have this time together to center ourselves in the scriptures and allow the Holy Spirit to speak to us through the Word of God. We’re reading from the New International Version this week. Today, Ezekiel 37:1 – 38:23.
Commentary
Alright, James is being bold as James is in this letter and just kind of cutting through the trappings and telling it like it is, which is what this letter does. It’s just very, very direct and very clear. You can’t just listen to the Word. Alright? So, this is where rubber meets the road us as a community. You can’t just tune in every day and listen to the Word and then not do what it says. According to James, if you do that, you’re just deceiving yourselves. It won’t work. And he gives this great example of a person who looks in a mirror, looks really good then looks away and forgets what he looks like. I love that example because it’s unbelievably appropriate. Right? I mean we can listen to the Word, hear it, and then by the end of the day completely lose our spiritual orientation. I mean all of the drama of the day and all of the maybe poor decisions that we make can make the end of the day look completely different than the beginning of day, like we forgot who we are.
Can I get an ‘amen’ or a nod up and down? We all know this. And then so when this happens, we need to implant the book of James and this passage into our minds so that it comes up, “Oh, oh I heard the Word, but I don’t think I obeyed the Word. I don’t think I really pressed into walking with God and allowing his Holy Spirit to implant it into my life. I think I heard the Word and then went about my day making all of my own decisions and choices and allowing all of my own character flaws to reveal themselves. And here I am at the end of the day, going like ‘what the heck just happened? Why did I hurt the ones that I love? Why was I so irritable? Why did I make the choices that I made? I’ve lost my identity, again.’”
We can’t just listen to this. We have to live this, which is what brings James into this “faith without works is dead” theme. What good is it, brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but there’s nothing to back it up? Can that kind of faith save you? If a brother and sister is without clothes and you’re just like “Hey, be well. Get warm. Be well fed” and you won’t step in and provide and help and step into that, what good is that? We’d all say, “Yeah, that’s just empty. That’s just cliché.” In the same way, James says that’s what faith is like if that’s all you’ve got. If it’s not accompanied by you actually living into your faith, accompanied by a change in the way that you do what you do, then it’s dead.
So, think of something dead. You drive by and you see the carcass of a dog that’s been hit by a car. Or even a human dead person that has died, somebody you knew. You can still have faith that they exist but they are dead. Faith that hasn’t reached your identity, that isn’t in your heart – just because you believe in something doesn’t mean it’s an “alive” thing. If it’s an “alive” thing inside of you, it is transforming you, actually shaping you, changing the way that you do what you do, which is one of the reframes that we’ve had this year. Believing, having faith in God, that’s not the same as a relationship with God. We believe in a lot of people we are not in a relationship with.
Faith has to be the bridge that leads our hearts across into a first person relationship with God and that should transform life so profoundly that nothing looks the same ever again.
So, may we heed the bluntness of the book of James because he is speaking direct truth into our lives that really is close to the bone, that really is where the rubber meets the road, or at the level of our identity because we can find the contrast between what we are saying and how we are actually living. And when we go to bed at night, we have lived a day that has declared to the world and to ourselves what we really believe about God and our relationship with him.
And then, I can’t just breeze by the fact that we read from Ezekiel 37 today because that has been a profound scripture. The picture of the valley of bones, I mean, old bones – people that once were but have been there so long as dead people slain in battle that they have become skeletons and the skeletons have fallen apart and have baked in the sun, year after year – dry bones strewn all over the valley. What a morbid site this would be to see. And for God to speak to Ezekiel and say, “What do you think? What do you think, Ezekiel? Can these dry bones live again?” Ezekiel says the only thing he could, like, “I don’t know. You would be the only one who could know the answer to that question, Lord.” And God’s response, “Prophesy to these bones because they will live again.” This whole scene of the bones coming back together and being reformed as people and then they’re fully reformed standing there but there is no life in them. So, what a strange site to see bones come back together as people and then sinew and muscle and skin, right? But then they’re just standing there dead. How bizarre! God is saying, “Prophesy. Call the breath of life from the four winds” and him obeying and these dead people who were just skeletons are now back to life again, a resurrection from the dead that is beyond dead, right? Not the recently dead, but the “dead” dead – the long dead – has been brought back to life.
Nobody can do that, only God can do that. And he can do that in our lives because we have some long dead stuff inside of us and some of it needs to be dead, long dead, but some of it needs to come back to life again. And only God can do that.
I mean in my personal life, I named my son this name, Ezekiel, because this book reveals the heart of God to me. It shows so much of his passion for human beings and it reveals that he has feelings, he has emotions, that he’s not aloof, he’s not detached. He’s invested and he’s willing to show the power that only he has, the power of the Almighty, the infinite power of the Eternal One is willing to wield it on behalf of us. So, I mean, I have prayed, “God, let this boy call to the four winds the breath of life and restore what is dead by your power” and that’s my hope for my son, but that’s hope for my own heart and that’s my hope for your heart and that should be our hope for humanity because this is what we need, the breath of life flowing from the four winds into what is long dead, restoring life into what is absolutely impossible.
Song played: “Dry Bones” by Gungor.
|
|
Tamarie 11/19/2015 01:00 |
|
|
