March 22, 2026 | Can Dry Bones Live?

This is the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John.

Glory to you, Lord Christ.

Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him.

When the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there.

Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.

And he said, Where have you laid him?

They said to him, Lord, come and see.

Jesus wept.

So the Jews said, See how he loved him.

But some of them said, Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?

Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb.

It was a cave, and a stone lay against it.

Jesus said, Take away the stone.

Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead for four days.

Jesus said to her, Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?

So they took away the stone, and Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, Father, I thank you that you have heard me.

I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.

When he said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, Lazarus, come out.

The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth.

Jesus said to them, Unbind him and let him go.

The gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, Lord Christ.

Please pray with me.

Father, we thank you for the gift of life given to us in your Son Jesus Christ.

A fullness of life, the kind of life that we were created for.

We thank you for that awesome gift, and we pray that by the power and person of the Holy Spirit, you would bring us to life this morning in areas of our lives that are dead, that need your life-giving word.

Let us have open, soft hearts to receive that word.

In Jesus' mighty name we pray.

Amen.

You can be seated.

Good morning.

What a beautiful day.

Thanks be to God.

We're going to talk about this passage from Ezekiel this morning.

I think it's helpful to give a little bit of a backstory leading up to this incredible and fantastic vision that Ezekiel has of these dry bones in a valley.

This is in that part of the Bible called the Old Testament, a lot of which focuses on the story of God's relationship with this people called Israel, that he had called through Abraham and then through each and every one of his descendants to be set apart, to have a relationship with the living God, that he would use these people to bring about his redemptive plan to the whole world, not just to the nation of Israel, but to every nation, tribe, and tongue.

Now, the sad part of the story is that these folks, Israel, they had a hard time staying in relationship with God.

As much as God did everything he could to win the hearts of his people, they turned away from him again and again and again.

They turned to other gods and other solutions and other ways of doing life.

They wanted to be God themselves.

They thought they could be pretty good at that job.

The rest of the Old Testament shows us that they weren't.

The idea of us ruling and reigning and running things doesn't go very well.

And it didn't go well for the Israelites.

Eventually, they experienced the judgment of God that was promised if they turned away from Him.

If they forsook the relationship, that central and life-getting relationship with God, it would end in judgment.

And so after hundreds of years and attempts through different prophets like Ezekiel to turn his people back to him, to turn their hearts towards him, they finally experienced the judgment of God, which looked like the Babylonian Empire coming into Jerusalem and taking away at first people like Ezekiel into exile and eventually, years later, destroying Jerusalem completely.

This is the context in which Ezekiel has this phenomenal experience with God.

He's been called as a prophet.

A prophet is a messenger of God.

In other words, he's God's spokesperson.

His job is to reveal the heart, the mind, and the will of God to his people.

And that's what he's called to in this moment here in Ezekiel, where God lays his hand upon the prophet and carries him into this valley that is filled and littered with dry, dead bones in every direction that he looks.

And it's kind of vision where he's not just seeing it kind of like we would watch a movie on a screen.

He's in the movie.

He's looking around.

He's walking around as God leads him through the valley and is showing him these dry bones.

Can you imagine what that would have been like?

In the midst of all these dry bones, God then asks Ezekiel a question.

Pretty simple, straightforward question.

Son of man, can these dry bones live?

Can these dry bones live?

Would anybody like to take a stab at answering that question?

Do we have any doctors here with medical expertise?

Can dry bones live?

I don't think so.

Even for Ezekiel, who lived 2,500 years ago, I think he pretty much knew the answer to that question.

No, dry bones cannot live.

That is a sign that people are dead.

Very dead.

He even remarks that these bones are very dry.

They've been dead a long time.

So you would expect Ezekiel to say, no, they can't live.

But that's not what he says.

What does he say?

It's kind of peculiar the way that he responds to God's question.

He says, Oh Lord God, you know.

Oh Lord God, you know.

Maybe Ezekiel at this point has learned a thing or two about relationship with God.

How he works, how he operates.

Maybe in his experience with God up to this point, he realized he shouldn't make presumptions about what is possible and what is not possible.

He can't assume he knows the answer.

Whether or not those dry bones can live.

After he responds in this way, God speaks.

And he says this, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.

Thus says the Lord God to these bones Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live, and I will lay sinews upon you, and I will cause flesh to come around you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.

God speaks first, but his ultimate plan is for his prophet to speak on his behalf to those bones.

He commands Ezekiel to speak to those bones what he has already declared by his word.

Ezekiel is not supposed to come up with something on his own.

He is supposed to declare what God has already spoken.

And he does that in obedience and faith.

He's standing in the middle of death all around him.

And he begins to speak life.

He obeys, he follows the command of God in faith, speaking to a bunch of dry bones.

Have you ever tried that before?

Probably not.

I'm guessing not.

He steps out in faith and he declares what God has already spoken him.

What happens?

Something incredible, something extraordinary.

He hears a sound, and then he begins to hear the rattling of bones all around him.

As bone begins to connect to bone, and bones start to take shape and form like a human being was designed and shaped and formed from the beginning.

And then those bones start to take on cartilage and ligaments and flesh and muscle start to come around that.

Can you imagine that?

Are you with me?

Use your imagination.

This is a pretty spectacular sight.

Until finally skin comes upon these bodies.

But there's something missing.

Something very important that's missing.

And Ezekiel recognizes it.

He says, but there was no breath in them.

They were still dead.

That breath that God had spoken of.

Only through that breath would these dry bones come back to life.

And so he tells Ezekiel, Prophesy to the breath.

Prophesy.

And what does he say?

Say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God, Come from the fore winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.

So he does so.

And what we're just a pile of flesh and bone, beautifully designed and made, actually come to life.

And they stand up.

And it's a sight to behold.

It's a vast multitude, an army of people standing, who were once a pile of dead bones, who are now alive.

Can you imagine what that would have been like?

A jaw-dropping kind of experience, I would imagine.

That he witnessed.

God did the impossible.

He did the impossible.

This is God's end game with us.

What Ezekiel witnessed in a spectacular way is what he desired for each and every one of us who were dead in our trespasses and sins in which we once walked.

We talked about that last week in Ephesians chapter 2.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

God's end game is to bring dead things to life again.

And not just a physical sense, but a spiritual sense because there is a spiritual death that comes with sin in our lives.

That's the problem with this infection and this toxin called sin in our lives.

It kills us from the inside.

We need new life.

And it can't just come through somebody being put back together physically.

It has to come with the breath of God entering the heart of human beings.

It has to be done through a recreation.

And that's what we see in Ezekiel, God recreating what was dead, putting things back together in their proper order and place, as he had originally designed for human beings to function and experience life in relationship with him.

This is what he wants for all of us who are also once dead, lifeless, dry bones.

And then he gives them a picture, he gives Ezekiel a picture of what he will do someday through another Israelite, through his son Jesus.

He says, I will bring you into the land, and you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people.

When he looked around in awe and wonder at what seemed impossible.

What he's done in your life, if you know Jesus, if you stepped into relationship with God through faith in him, a miracle like this has happened.

No less spectacular than what Ezekiel witnessed and saw in that valley.

You are a miracle if you are in Christ.

He has reordered, he's reordering your life.

And not just life in the sense of having a pulse and a functioning body, but life.

The kind of life that Jesus said he came to offer us.

A life of abundance and fullness, of wholeness.

So how do we apply this to our own our own lives?

Just beyond that, that the spiritual realities that I'm describing here, what does that look like in our everyday lives?

Well, I'd say that maybe some of us can identify with where the people of Israel were at that particular point.

When God said, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel.

Behold, they say, Our bones are dried up.

Our hope is lost.

We are indeed cut off.

Have you ever felt the dryness of your bones?

Have you ever felt uh something deep within you crying out for water?

It's dried up.

I don't know from personal experience, but I've heard that it's worse to die of thirst than to die of hunger.

What you experience when you're dying of thirst is so profoundly painful.

Think about these dry buns inside of us.

There's something inside of us that cries out for that life-giving water.

Maybe you've had experiences in your life where you felt the dryness of your bones, where you felt like there wasn't hope for a better future in your life.

And you just you knew it inside of you.

Maybe even you felt like you were cut off, like these Israelites, that God maybe had forsaken you or turned his back on you, and maybe for reasons you you thought were justifiable because you had made a mess of your life by your decisions and your actions.

Your bones were crying out.

I think this morning God might just be rattling some of our bones.

Maybe you've experienced that before.

Maybe you're here today because God rattled your bones a little bit in your life through his spirit at work, speaking to you, the word of God calling you back into relationship, back to your original design of who you were meant to be and how you were meant to live this life.

You know, maybe some of you are looking around in your life right now and you see just a bunch of dry bones.

Maybe it's a particular situation.

Maybe you're you're looking at your marriage as dry bones.

Maybe you're thinking about your career and it looks like dry bones.

Maybe you're enduring a prolonged season of suffering and hardship in your life, and it feels like dry bones, and you're looking at those bones going, can these bones live?

Maybe you presume you know the answer to that question.

No, they can't.

But maybe not.

Maybe God has another answer.

Because he's the one who determines and decides what is possible and what is not possible.

Is God rattling your bones this morning?

Is he wanting to speak a word of life and hope over a situation in your life that seems like a bunch of dry bones?

The last thing I want to consider is the fact that you are that army.

We are that vast army that's been brought from a pile of bones to this great force, a force to be reckoned with in this world.

You're called to go out into the world and represent this Jesus who raises people from the dead by his word, simply by his word.

Because that's what Ezekiel did, right?

He spoke what God had already said.

That's all he did.

We too have the same calling, the same purpose.

We are called to be messengers of God out in the world, speaking to the dry bones around us in other people's lives, declaring the word of God, the promises of God, the hope of God.

I don't know what that looks like for you.

It doesn't have to necessarily mean preaching the gospel.

It doesn't have to necessarily mean quoting Scripture, but it could be communicating the truth of God in Scripture by telling someone, you know, God loves you.

God loves you.

You know what?

I know things seem hopeless right now, but God has not forsaken you.

We do that in faith.

We speak the word of God.

And what happens when we do that?

Miraculous things.

God does his part.

The much more difficult part, he does that by his spirit.

Taking the words that he has already spoken and bringing life to people's hearts.

We are called, just as Ezekiel was, to bring hope.

The hope of Jesus Christ.

The people that are hopeless, that feel cut off, maybe isolated and alone and depressed.

Our words can bring dry bones to life.

When we get in agreement with what God has already spoken, the truth of God.

What opportunities do we have in our life, at work, in our families?

In our neighborhood, to speak the word of God in a way that brings life to some very thirsty bones.

For people that are thirsty for God, that need Jesus more than anything else that they think they need in their life.

In a sense, we're all called to be prophets.

Ever think of yourself as a prophet?

Maybe not.

But we're all called to be messengers.

Bring the word of God to speak it into people's lives with confidence.

Not knowing what God is going to do with it, but that it will result in life.

Let's pray.

We welcome you, Holy Spirit.

You're the only one that can bring life to dry bones.

You're the only one who can truly raise the dead.

You're the only one that can give us a new heart.

Let our bones be rattled this morning.

Let the word of God find its place in us and bear life.

I thank you for bringing hope to the hopeless Holy Spirit.

I thank you for bringing people back to their Father, their Creator.

Miracles are still happening today because of you.

Give us the grace, each one of us, show us what it looks like to speak to the dry bones in other people's lives, to bring the Word of God in a way that's humble and yet confident, that trusts in the power of your word to change people's lives and to bring life out of the ashes, out of the grave.

We thank you, Holy Spirit.

And we look forward to what you're going to do this week.

In Jesus' mighty name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.