Ezekiel 37:4 Then he said to me, “prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones hear the word of the Lord!’
The key to releasing the power of God into your life is declaring the Word of God through your tongue.
God illustrates this through the story of the valley of dry bones.
God commands Ezekiel to speak to those 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 ‘dead’ or ‘buried’ in our lives – it might be a dream, a marriage, a career, a ministry, your spiritual life. And God says the same thing to you and me when it comes to these things – stop talking about the problem and start talking to the problem.
“Faith doesn’t talk about what it sees, faith talks to what it sees.”
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 describe what you see, I want you to declare 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, hyper-extending my right knee. I felt all the force of my body coming upon that 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 about 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 had a battle that I had to contend with. It was the battlefield of the mind that was saying this will never get better. The only thing that kept me in faith was my daily declaration. 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 start declaring God’s Word over that knee. I did that for 12 months! And the circumstances of that knee changed to line up with my daily declaration.
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 that might surround you, and to step out in faith and declare God’s Promises over them!