If you've been in town long at all for many 4th of July's you know that it's kind of the Jones family It's more than a celebration, it's the festival of the year. It is our just true experiencing everything it means to be just a redneck from Tennessee. And we spend just a gross amount of money on fireworks and we shoot them off and we run around. And it's very, very possible that my final day will be a 4th of July and my final words will be, I wonder what this is going to do. I mean, that's possible. And I'd be OK with that. So anyway, that's how we celebrate. But you probably don't know the history of why we celebrate it here the way we do. The reason we started celebrating the 4th of July here, because it is the beginning of my vacation season, and you would think I'd want to get out of town, and my family is still in Tennessee, and you'd think I'd want to go over there and spend that traditional holiday with them, and we did for a long time, until 2008, when my brother was killed in August in a car wreck. And 4th of July was his. And he he had the big grill and he had his swimming pool open and he pulled out the 50 foot long, eight foot wide length of visqueen and rolled it down his hill and put the water hose on it and a whole bottle of dong liquid and made it into the biggest, fastest slip and slide you've ever seen. The Fourth of July was his. He he fed us all day. We got there by 11. We didn't leave till dark. And when we did leave, we went to see the only firework display in three counties, and it was his. And when I lost him, I just couldn't go back. It wasn't right. And so we started celebrating it here. And I'll never forget the last 4th of July I got to spend with Tommy. I had to take some stuff over to his house and drop it off before I hit the road to go to the next place. And we were talking about one of my cousins who's been hooked by drug use since a very young age. And I don't know what point I was trying to make, but the words that came out of my mouth were, it just feels like he's beyond hope. And Tommy would have none of that. And he said, there's nobody beyond hope. There is nothing beyond hope. If God is alive, if God can save me, then no one is beyond hope. It's impossible to be beyond God's grasp. There is nothing beyond hope. That was the last conversation I ever had with him. And those words have stuck with me. And these words will stand out to you, that will stand out to you as we read this text of Ezekiel standing over a valley, not of dead bodies, not of empty skeletons, but of disconnected, dry bones. Beyond hope. Israel has been destroyed. The temple's been destroyed. Jerusalem has fallen. The Israelites have been taken out to a refugee camp. It is beyond hope. You've got friends who are just, man, they're just self-destructive. And you want so bad for them to stop doing that, to stop being the alcoholic or the drug addict or the gambling addict or the sex addict, to quit sabotaging their own lives. And you ask me, what can I do? And I tell you the answer, the true answer that you did not want to hear, which is nothing. You can pray for them. That's it. but they are not beyond hope. Things at your job have absolutely collapsed. It is as bad as it can possibly be. You're about to get fired for the very first time. Everything that you spent your life pouring yourself into is about to become a heap of rubbish. And you can look at that and say, I wonder what God's gonna do with that now. You can look at it with expectation. Look at it with expectation because nothing is beyond hope. We are resurrection people. We are resurrection people. We know that death has to come before resurrection. And we know that what Jesus is going to do on the other side of it is going to be more beautiful, more profound, deeper, richer than anything we could have had without that death. Because no one is beyond hope. What I want you to see in this text is that if the resurrection has happened to you spiritually, if it has happened inside of you, then you can look at the worst situations in your life with great expectation. And you can look to your future eternity with just with true dreams that far go beyond any imagination. Please stand as we see that what it means to be resurrection people. The word of the Lord, this is the encouragement after Ezekiel's, he's poured out the judgment on them, right? He's told them why you're in refugee camps and what God's going to do. He's left. God's left. And why he did it. And now he's gonna tell them what's coming. The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley. It was full of bones. And he led me around them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley. And behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, oh Lord God, you know. Then he said to me, prophesy over these bones and say to them, oh 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 will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you and you shall live and you shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had come upon them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, thus says the Lord God, come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet an exceedingly great army. Then he said to me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say our bones are dried up and our hope is lost, and we are indeed cut off. therefore prophesy and say to them thus says the Lord God behold I will open your graves and raise you from your graves oh my people and I will bring you into the land of Israel and you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and raise you from your graves oh my people and I will put my spirit within you and you shall live and I will place in you in your own land and then you shall know I am the Lord I've spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord. Thus ends the reading of God's Word. All men are like grass, and all of our glory is like the flowers of the field, and the grass withers. The flowers die, but not God's Word. God's Word stands forever. Amen. You may be seated. If the resurrection has happened to you, inside of you, then you can live your life expectantly knowing that there is nothing beyond hope. There is nothing beyond hope. What does Ezekiel see? God brings him into a valley and he sees a valley of dry bones, utter hopelessness, not dying people, he sees dead people. And that is a spiritual truth. God is using this as a parable, as a metaphor to really tell us what he is going to do throughout the rest of world history. He looks upon us, and if you are alive and you've ever been a minister, then you know what it looks like to look at people and say, I see dead people. And they don't know they're dead because they only hear what they want to hear. They only see what they want to see. dry bones dry bones and God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to dry bones and this is a very common experience for most ministers definitely for every campus minister I mean if you've ever been asked to come give the the devotional for the ka house then you know what it means to prophesy over dry bones you're looking at people there's no life there they want you to hurry up and say amen that is it there's nothing there there's no life And that's how we live our lives. We only see what we want to see. And sometimes we look and go, there's no way that this or this person or this situation or my soul can be fixed. That's the way it was with Israel. That's the way it is for us. Israel had lost their faith. Israel had not listened to, ignored and actually stoned and killed the prophets. And so God made true of them physically what was already true of them spiritually. They had been, they'd cut themselves off from God. So God said, okay, I will show you what it's like to be cut off. And so now Israel's in a refugee camp and they're crying out, lo, we have been cut off. And they were right. And if you go back and you read through Deuteronomy, you'll see that that was the punishment for not keeping their covenant. God says, if you do not keep these commands that I'm teaching you, you will be cut off. You'll be cut off. And they were. It wasn't an exaggeration. And what did Ezekiel do? I love the way he says this. He says, I did what I was commanded. That is the right answer. That is the right answer. You do what you do. You're gonna get up in the morning and you're gonna do what God commands you to do. You're gonna go to work. You're gonna take care of your family. You're going to trust him to do beyond, far beyond anything you could imagine. But you're going to do what he commands you to do. You're gonna say what he commands you to say. And Ezekiel, he just starts prophesying. It's just basically another word for preaching. Proclaiming the gospel over these dry bones. And he starts to hear this rattling. And lo and behold, the foot bones connected to the leg bone, and the leg bones connected to the hip bone, and the hip bones connected to the back bone, and the back bone connected to the shoulder bones, and the hand bones are connected to the arm bones, and the arm bones are connected to the shoulder bones, and the head bones connected to the neck bone. Y'all remember that song? How many of you remember that song? How many of you know that that was a Negro spiritual based on this text? A few of you, not many. You probably just assumed it was some white dude trying to teach anatomy. I don't know. Yeah, we always assume things are white dudes. Oh, it's based on this text. It's a song of hope that the absolute hopeless would sing to each other. And they stood up in front of him a bunch of skeletons. And that would be terrifying. He just kept prophesying and he kept telling them the gospel and flesh just comes out of nowhere and enfleshes these skeletons. And so now they stand in front of him, fully formed humans with no breath. They're dead. They're like zombies. And that will be terrifying. And then he says, prophesy to the wind. Now, what you need to know is there is no difference. There is one word, one Hebrew word for wind, for breath, and for spirit. It's all the same word. It's your choice of which one you want to use. Creation, Genesis 1, you can say the wind hovered over the water or you can say the Spirit hovered over the water. When Noah's ark, when the flood had finally subsided, you can say God sent a wind or you can say God sent the Spirit. It's both. It's God's breath. And God sends His breath to animate these bodies and they're alive. And that is what Ezekiel is looking forward to. And he, I guess he's probably thinking God's going to remake Israel. And he kind of did. Cyrus sent the people back and they rebuilt this little bitty temple. The Holy Spirit never really came and filled it. But they rebuilt their temple and they had their little walls and they were, you know, servant state of Persia and then of Greece and then of Rome. But they were never the nation that they thought they were gonna be. And then we see the first resurrection. first resurrection Jesus comes to earth God himself takes on human flesh he takes on human flesh the Holy Spirit animates this baby this inside of Mary's womb and and and he it's God's life in human flesh it's it's both fully human and fully man and nobody understands that and Jesus recapitulates the life of Israel. He lives the entire life of Israel over. Now, if you've never heard that before, that's fine, it's not a huge point, but it is important. Like, when you see kind of weird texts, sometimes you look at what Matthew is saying and you think, that's not really what that verse is about. Like, he'll pull an Old Testament verse out of nowhere, right? And, you know, Mary and Joseph took Jesus off to Egypt to escape the Holocaust that Herod had ordered. And Matthew just kind of throws a verse in there, out of Egypt I've called my son. You're like, wait a minute, that was about the nation of Israel, that wasn't talking about this. No, no, no, no, you're wrong. And then he goes into the wilderness, remember the 40 days to recapitulate the 40 years of walking around in the wilderness, and he eats nothing, and he overcomes the temptations of Satan, and he comes out, and he begins to teach. and he obeys God's law, and he teaches people what God's law means, and he corrects their ridiculous misunderstandings of God's law, and he shows them what they really were intended to be, and he keeps it perfectly, and he lives a life of service, and then God puts our sin upon him, and Jesus suffers the penalty for our sin. He was cut off. He was cut off from the land of the living. That's what Isaiah 53 said was going to happen, and that is what happened. He was cut off. Three days later, three days later, he was resurrected. And he went to his disciples, and he told them he would be with them throughout the ends of the age. And right before He ascended into heaven, what did He do? He breathed on them. He gave them the Spirit. He breathed on them and gave them this prophetic breath. He filled them with His own Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and they were alive. And all of a sudden, all those things that they ridiculously misunderstood, they saw it and they went to preach it. Now, that resurrection changes everything. And some of you I don't know. Some of you I do know. I don't know what's going on inside your heads and your hearts. And some of you are just dying to get home and wondering why you're here. And some of you are really angry that it's so warm in here. And some of you are just hanging on every word. And some of you are online, sitting on a bean bag, eating Cheetos. And I don't know who you are or what you believe, but I'm telling you this. You can say that creation stuff's for children, and I don't believe it. And you can say that Noah's Ark story's kind of terrifying and pretty ridiculous, and I don't believe it. And you can say that virgin birth story, that's just for a bunch of prudes who think sex is dirty, and I don't believe it. If you don't believe anything else, please believe this. Jesus, the son of Mary and Joseph, a carpenter who worked in Nazareth and died in Jerusalem, on Sunday morning, He took a breath three days after they had killed him. And he unwrapped all those mummified galls bandages, and he took the shroud that they laid up on him, and he folded it neatly, and he set it down on the bench where they had laid him because he wasn't going to need it anymore. And he walked out of that tomb. It happened. Physically happened. You could have hugged him. You could touch him. That's what all the disciples did. That's what he kept telling them to do. If you don't believe, touch me. And if that happened and it did. Then you have hope. You have hope for everybody. You have hope for everything. You have hope for yourself, for all of eternity, because death is not the end, and God is not leaving us to just What? We're all like grass. The grass withers and the flowers fade. But he's not letting that be the end of the story. The end of the story is resurrection. It is life everlasting. It's rebuilding his garden. And that means that we can look forward to a bright hope for tomorrow and an infinite hope for all of eternity because we have received the second resurrection. We've already received it. It's inside of you. This is kind of how it works, right? You're sitting next to Jordan at the KA house. Some doofus comes in there to prophesy over you. You're like, come on, stop. You don't even hear him. And something makes sense. Bones begin to connect. The dots begin to connect. And then you think, maybe there's something to God's Word. And this is probably where most of you grew up. I mean, you probably grew up in the church thinking, I guess there's something to this. And maybe you tried really hard. Maybe you grew up in a church that stressed the obedience but didn't tell you the gospel, and so everything was about what you do, and fear of death, and fear of a torturous hell. And if you grew up believing those things, I am so sorry. I want you to know that God, the true God is not trying to devise some torturous hell to make you scared into obedience. That's not him. That's the God of somebody's making because they wanted to be able to manipulate the people in his church. I'm sorry. and you're walking around trying, but it doesn't feel right. You don't look right. It's not you. You look like you look like what back in the seventies and eighties European basketball teams used to look like, you know, because they were clearly athletic people, but they didn't grow up playing basketball. And so it just always looked off. You know, they look like somebody who was an adult before they learned how to dribble, right? And there's kind of And it was just off. It wasn't natural at all. And that's kind of how the Christian life is for you. It's like, I guess I'll get up and read the Bible. Man, I'm glad that's over. I guess I got to go to the Bible study. I don't know. Ricky says I'm supposed to hang out with these people. They're nice. I guess I'll eat their food, but it's just not natural. And then one day the Spirit comes. The Spirit comes. And everything looks different. And everything feels different. And you're alive now. And the main difference is all those things that you were trying to do that felt so unnatural, felt like it was a suit put upon you, like you're walking around in a suit of armor, now they feel natural. You want to do them. The biggest change in you is that now, not only do you believe in this big invisible friend that people call Jesus, but you love him. You love Him. And that's called being born again. And you know when you're born again, you do. And I promise if you ask for it, God will do it. And if it hasn't happened to you yet, ask Him. Ask Him. And you know, and you're still clumsy, you're still, you know, fumbling around, and you don't really understand what God wants you to do, and loving your neighbor, you're kind of doing it all wrong, and you assume that loving your neighbor means doing to them what you'd want to do to you, someone to do to you, so you walk up to them and say, hey, that dress looks stupid. And then you find out that's not the way. You know, you're like, but you're different now. Now you're like a cult. Your legs are too long. Your body's too thin. Your feet are too big. You're clumsy. But everybody who sees you can tell that you are born to be a thoroughbred. And you will be beautiful and strong, fast, sleek. And every day, even though you don't feel it, everybody around you sees it. And you're growing into that. And you're becoming that. And that's what's going on inside you. And God does that. It's funny, the reason why I keep talking about the KAA houses, I really did do that a lot when I was at Delta State. And I didn't really think anything about it, and then I had a friend of mine, Ben, come stay with me this January when we had John Lynch in town and I was talking to people about how clumsily I tried to share the gospel with Ben and I got it all wrong. And Ben said, but what Ricky doesn't tell you is there was a small revival in that K house. And I started thinking about it. I was like, well, there was Ben and there was Brad. Brad brought Ben and then Ben brought Frank. And then Ben and Frank brought Timmy and Vance and Michael and Austin. Michael and Ben are in the ministry now. And Josh, Josh is a missionary to the United Arab Emirates. And it just kept growing. Two years after I left Delta State, honestly believing that God had not blessed my ministry, I get a call. Guy says, hey, this is Brock. You remember me? Of course I remember you. I wanna treat you to a round of golf, where do I go? Beat him on the putting green, he's there waiting for me, and he says, hey, I just, I want you to know I was converted last week, it finally fell into place, it finally made sense. And I just, I wanted you to be the first person I told. It finally makes sense, the coin finally drops. And once that becomes your reality, then it changes how you see life. You really do see it expectantly. You look at small things like a windstorm. Everybody knew we were going to have power in a week. It wasn't a disaster. But it was a pain in the neck. And you look at that expectantly. I wonder what's going to happen. I guarantee you'll look back and you'll tell stories next year and go, that was kind of fun. Remember when we went and lived with our friends? That was kind of fun. Remember when we had a big cookout? because the meat was all thawed out. It was kind of fun. You can look at life expectantly. You can look over this rubbish of what used to be your job and go, man, I can't wait to see what God does with this. Because what God loves to do is bring resurrection and beautify scars. Jesus was still scarred after the resurrection, but he showed them off. He wasn't ashamed of them. He said, this is how much I love my babies. He showed his scars off. And God's gonna beautify your scars and beautify your disasters and your deaths. And He has given you hope for your family. What do you do when you're watching someone, your entire life is watching someone sabotage themselves? What do you do? You prophesy over them. When you get the chance, you just speak words of encouragement. Hope is real and hope is for you. And this is what I think you're going to become. Nobody was ever scolded into the kingdom and nobody was ever threatened into the kingdom. But millions have been promised into the kingdom and hoped into the kingdom. This is what I see you becoming. You pray for that. You pray for them beautiful and healed and at peace. And God's going to do it. He's going to do it. And then we have infinite hope beyond imagination for ourselves, confident expectation, confident expectation that we will rise again, and we will have our bodies, and we will hug, and we will embrace, and we will live forever with the Lord. What did God promise Israel? He said, after this resurrection, you're gonna come home. I'm gonna bring you home. You know where home is? I figured this out. Took me a long time, but I finally figured out where home is. Home is where your mom sleeps at night. And we're going home. We are going home. Can these dry bones live? Yeah, you bet. They can, amen, let's pray. Father in heaven, we look around us and we see dry bones. And that makes us excited. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? Lord, I pray that you give us the words to prophesy over these bones and to give them hope. And I pray that you'd use them. Father, we long to see them raised up and become more than skeletons. more than zombies, but living images of you. And Father, we bring to you the wreckages in our lives, and we give you all the broken parts, and we cannot wait to see what you're gonna build out of this junk heap that we call life. because you Lord are the God of resurrection because we are resurrection people we pray with all the confidence in the name of our precious powerful living Savior