Ezekiel 37:4 Then he said to me, “prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones hear the word of the Lord!’
God commands Ezekiel to speak to a valley of dry bones. If he was anything like you or me, he might feel pretty silly. There he is, standing in the middle of a valley surrounded by skeletons, and God says “start speaking to them!”
This valley of dry bones represents everything that is bad or broken, dead, or buried in our lives. And God says the same thing to you and me when it comes to these things – stop talking about them and start talking to them.
Faith doesn’t “talk about” what you see, faith “talks to” what you see.”
One of the biggest hindrances of faith is we spend too much time talking about what surrounds us instead of talking to what surrounds us. We are very good at describing all the problems in our lives.
But God says: “I don’t want you to speak about what you see, I want you to speak about what I say.
I remember a time when I sustained a very serious football injury. I leaped into the air to grab the football but came crashing down to earth landing on one leg. I felt all the force of my body crashing down upon my hyper-extending knee, and it crumbled.
I spent the next day on the operating table hobbling out of the hospital on crutches with several three-inch screws holding that knee together. I knew I’d be out of action for at least three months but after six months, still on crutches, still in pain, I knew something was not good.
Going to work every day on crutches was difficult and painful. Every day I was battling with pain, discomfort, and inconvenience. But the real battlefield was in my mind which was saying this will never get better. The only thing that kept me looking to the healing grace of God was my daily meditation. I would rise early, head off to the ocean pools in Sydney’s northern beaches where I could wade in waist-deep water without crutches and declare God’s Word over that knee. And the circumstances of that knee changed to line up with my daily declaration. It didn't happen overnight, but it did happen!
We all have a choice to make – are we going to let the circumstances change our lives or are we going to change our circumstances. This was the decision Ezekiel had to make in the valley of dry bones, and it’s the decision you have to make in your “Valleys.”
“Are you going to speak about it, or are you going to speak to it?”
Let me encourage you every day to resist the temptation to describe the problems you are going through, and to step out in faith and meditating God’s truth over your life.
This is what real faith is. It is seeing the goodness and grace of God through His Word. When you see God’s grace, He sees your faith. That’s when miracles will manifest in your life!
God bless you!