Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: It's the principle of scripture that the names and emblems or symbols that God has chosen to reveal Himself through are intended to give us insight into His nature. His basic name is spirit, Holy Spirit, or spiritus is the Latin synonym for the Greek word pneuma or the Hebrew word ruach. The same idea pertains to all of it: air, breath, wind.

And these symbols are helping us to understand the spirit's nature. And Ezekiel's vision in the valley, marvelous story of Ezekiel's vision in the valley, God picks him up and puts him down in his mind in this valley of dead bones, dry bones. And He asks him a question, "Can these bones live?" And Ezekiel says, "Lord, you alone know."

And I'm sure he was thinking to himself, how could any life come into such a place? I've only ever once stood in a boneyard, and that was in Cambodia quite a few years ago. These are the pictures of people, including the father of my interpreter, who were put to death in the prison. But more than that, every village, every city in Cambodia for a terrible, terrible four years had a killing field.

Anyone with glasses was taken there because that meant that they were educated. And the idea was the Khmer Rouge were waging a manic war against anyone who was from the upper classes. When it was over, the killing fields were littered with the bones of those who had perished in the executions and forced marches and slave labor.

And I remember standing in the killing field outside Phnom Penh with this monument with 9,000 skulls in it behind me having to say something to the camera. What do you say? But the thought that came into my mind was, "Can these bones live?" Have you ever seen a situation, have you ever stood literally in a boneyard and looked around at the hopelessness of it and said, "How could anything lively come out of this?"

But we were there for World Relief. We were there in the slums, we were there working with women with small businesses and children who were waiting for their moms to be taught about germs and Jesus, as the kids told us. And we saw churches being planted in those places. And we saw life. One of the little girls who had been lined up with the whole of her family, over 35 people in it, and just killed and shoved into one of those open graves.

It was too dark to cover them over, and this little girl of six crawled out. And people kept her as one of their children and hid her from the Khmer Rouge. She grew up. Her name was Maile. And we visited her church. It's called Grace Church in the middle of this bone field, killing fields. And people are coming to life there, and God's spirit is breathing and God's spirit is blowing in Cambodia today.

Can these bones live? Can God bring life to a boneyard? Yes. Yes, He can because that is the work of the Holy Spirit. And it's very, very relevant for us today to look at this vision in the valley. How is it that so many born-again bones are lying around in visionless valleys, mere shadows of all that they were meant to be? Surely these bones in this vision do not represent people that believe in God.

Well, there are two ways of interpreting this passage of scripture. One is that these were dead bones; they had never come to life, and they needed God to breathe into them for the first time. And the whole world is that valley from east to west and north to south. God has said this world is like a whole massive valley of dead bones, and only God, only God can breathe and bring them to life.

And the other interpretation is, no, no, no, this is the whole house of Israel. The interpretation is this is the house of Israel: people that knew God, that believed in God, that believed all the things we believe about Him. And at one point, Israel had been up on its feet, a mighty great army for God, winning the battle of good against evil. But now they had become spiritually dehydrated, and they had become dry bone, dry bones.

What was wrong with them? They'd lost their vision, they'd lost their passion, they'd lost their mission, apart from other things. They were just the same as the dead bones, both equally useless, equally useless. And whether you're a dry bone listening to me today or a dead bone, somebody that has never once for the first time received the Holy Spirit, it doesn't really make much difference.

We're not getting God's work done, and we need revival. That word means life. Many people may look like all the other bones in church, but you can get dead bones sitting in pews, but they've never been bone-again—excuse the pun. What was wrong with the dry bones? They're brittle. They can't stand weight; they snap easily. They're not supple. And dry disciples are like brittle bones.

They snap easily under pressure. They cannot bear weight of responsibility. Have you ever felt like an old dry bone? Well, God can bring health and wholeness. I talked about our lives being like a watered garden whose waters never fail. Jesus said in you a well, out of you rivers. But if the Holy Spirit is never in us, He cannot heal our spiritual bones.

And there's a wonderful verse in Isaiah 58:11. Remember, He will strengthen your bones. He will put, as it were, spiritual phosphates in us. That's a strengthening agent, that our bones might be strengthened. And, of course, that He might add meat and sinews and life. No good being a corpse. You know, you can just be eating all this doctrine and hearing all this truth, but what's the difference between a skeleton and a corpse?

The whole issue is life, spiritual life coursing through your spiritual bones, through your soul. These dry bones said, "We are very dry, we're very depressed, we've lost confidence in God, we've lost confidence in our leaders, we've lost confidence in our country." Our country's been looted. We're here by the river of Babylon; we've hung up our harps on the weeping willow tree; we've lost our joy.

There's nothing to sing about anymore. And we're old dry bones, and we feel very dismayed, and we feel very disconnected, very disconnected. Now, there's a whole heap of them. Why would they feel disconnected? They're all together, but they're not connected. Bones need connecting. And it takes the spirit of God to connect the bones.

It's His work, all His work. And I don't know if your nose is out of joint or other things are out of joint, but God can settle that. He can settle it. And if you feel dislocated from the body of Christ, something needs to be done about it. You need to be flat on your face before God and say, "You need to do something with my life. I am contributing to this deadness in my church body, and I don't want to do that anymore."

God doesn't want you to be a skeleton. The bone maker has something different in mind for us. Maybe you feel as though you've got spiritual anorexia. Let me define that for you. Anorexia is starving yourself in the midst of plenty. Anorexia or bulimia is eating but making sure that you purge and don't digest it. Anorexia and anorexics are defiant and stubborn people.

Why will you die? says God in the same passage a little further on. Why will you starve yourself in the midst of plenty? Do you know that we are incredibly resourced? There is no reason any one of us should have spiritual anorexia and die. An anorexic starves themselves to death in the midst of plenty, and there is plenty here. There are Bible studies; there are men's groups.

I remember living at a Bible school for 10 years, and all I had to do was walk up the lane and put myself in the back seat for nothing, no money, and I could have had 10 years of teaching, and I never did it. I was too busy. Busy, busy, busy little bone gyrating all over the place for God. But what happened was I began to develop spiritual anorexia, and I became dry, you see.

And that's not the bone maker's intention. The bone maker wants to breathe into us. The Holy Spirit is the breath of God. Is the breath of God. Remember in Genesis, God breathed on the dust? Bones are made out of dust. He breathed on the dust, and man became a living soul. We are totally dependent on the life of God, on the breath of God.

And what's the breath for? The breath is to use for Him, to preach to the bones and to pray to the wind. That's what the breath's for. Holy Spirit is the outbreathing of God. And God breathed into this clay, and man became a living soul. "Aah," said God, and Adam and Eve came to life. Then sin came, and God in horror, the Holy Spirit was withdrawn, and God went "Hhh" and He inhaled.

Man became like a fish out of water. Ever seen a fish out of water? Gasping for life. And it was only a matter of time. Then God came and walked in the garden, said, "Adam, where are you?" "Hiding," said Adam. And God found him. God found him. And He said, "There will come a day when I will visit this planet. And one day I will breathe again into a sinful human race."

Talked about that to Nicodemus, an old dead bone teaching dead bones in the synagogue. Came to him at night and he said, "Master, I've come to hear your teaching." And Jesus looked at him, said, "Well, you need to be born again." How can a man like me—I'm an old man—enter my mother's womb and be born? No, no, no. We're talking about the spirit, said Jesus.

We can't see the wind, but we can see what it does. We can see the change the wind's made. And that's what the Holy Spirit does: He changes lives, He makes people different people. And Jesus talked to Nicodemus and said, "There is a day coming that Joel talked about. And one day it won't be a gentle breath bringing life to the soul, and it won't be a wind that changes the life altogether. It will be a tempest."

Ezekiel said, "He picked me up and He carried me and He put me down in the middle of a valley of dry bones." Now, every single one of you can put yourself into my talk at this point because God has picked you up in some way and He has carried you and He's put you down in a particular valley. And it'll be full of dry bones and dead bones.

I remember years and years ago of being picked up from a city where I loved, Manchester, and put down in a country village for 10 years in missions. Stuart took off as an evangelist for that mission. And this was my valley, and I had been captured and carried just like Ezekiel. And God said to me, "Now get to work. Preach the bones and pray to the wind."

And the two things have got to happen. Every single one of us have to preach the bones in our valley and pray to the wind. You say, "No, I'm not a preacher. I'm not a speaker. I'm just a little old bone." Let me take the mystique out of the word preach. It means truth-telling through personality. That's all I'm doing.

God uses who you are. God uses everything you are, just like He uses me and everything I am. My Englishness He uses, my background He uses, my training He uses, my lack of training He uses, my non-Christian background He uses. Everything that makes you "you" will match the valley of dry bones and dead bones that you find yourself in.

So we tell people about Christ, and we explain the Christian gospel, and we take this book and we believe it. And I think there's been a failure of nerve in believing that this is powerful enough to change our world and our valleys and our bones. But we have to tell them what it says. Hear the word of the Lord.

What do I say to my dry bones? You tell them the word of the Lord. Simple as that. You tell them, and then you tell them, and then you tell them what you've told them. You tell them all over again. But you add that, you marry that to praying to the wind. And this is where I think our valleys stay the same, because we do not know what it is to pray with such power that the Holy Spirit blows.

And you know you can work your head off, you can pray, you can cry, you can be on your knees, you can work and work and work, and all the Holy Spirit has to do is breathe, folks. That's all. When I was stuck in Newfoundland with a plane full of people for six days over 9/11, I got to know some of them quite well. And there was a young soldier there.

I said, "Why did you join the army?" She said, "I wanted a good career. It was a good job. They recruited me and said we can give you skills and you'll be able to go out there and just two years and... dah, dah, dah." She joined for all those reasons. And now suddenly 9/11 happens. Suddenly Iraq happens. "I didn't join the army to go to war."

That's what dry bones say. "I didn't sign up to go to war. I became a Christian, I became born again for me and maybe for my family, so I wouldn't go to hell and I could go to heaven, so I'd feel good about myself, so maybe I'd do a little bit of good and put some more money in the offering plate. But I didn't join the army to go to war."

And that's the language of a dry bone. And God wants us up on our feet, a vast army. Just look at these people. Look at them. What could we do? And what should we be doing? And it says to me we're not because the wind isn't blowing. And oh, what a blessing it would be if revival with a capital R came. Why not? Horrifying thing is we have a choice.

In those killing fields, there's a nurse. 15,000 children have come to Christ through her puppet ministry. Can these bones live? Well, 15,000 children are living and will live through all eternity. They'll be in heaven with us, little Cambodian children. One of those kids was abducted by a ring of prostitute seekers. Terrible thing, but they go through the slums and they just abduct children.

The girl's words, 12 years of age or so: "It was like a wind blowing. And as soon as I said amen, another man came into the room and looked at us, and we all began to cry. And he said, 'I'm in the wrong room. What are you doing here and why are you without your clothes?' And he ran and got some towels from the bathroom and he put the towels around the children and he looked this way and that way and took them out a back way and took them back to school and to their families."

And a little 12-year-old believed in Jesus, was born from above and prayed to the winds: "Come from the four corners of the wind, come and help us." And He did. And you can be a little girl of six, you can be a middle-aged person, you can be a student, and you can know the power of the spirit in your life like you've never known it before. Yes, you can.

Can these bones live? I don't know, said Ezekiel, but I will. And that's what you've got to say. "I don't know about all these other people in church. If some of us would stop criticizing all the other dry bones and say, 'Start a revival and start it in me,' He would." And you have to forget about everybody else's dryness and look into your own heart.

And I remember coming to that point in my little tiny valley, my sleepy little valley in Capenray in that mission with my husband on the road, three little children under school age, working with kids that I loved. And God said to me, "This is your valley. Now preach the bone and pray to the wind." And I went out with my three little children all in prams and pushchairs and I started knocking on doors.

One with heart trouble had a heart attack within a very short time and hopefully went to heaven. That left me with two. The next one was blind, and she refused to come out at night, which I never understood. What difference did it make? But anyway, now I was left with one little old dry bone, and she was deaf, believe it or not. But this was my valley and these were my bones.

And he started off really enthusiastically, but he became part of the heap within a very short time and he left. But I couldn't leave because this was my valley and these were my bones. And so I did my best with my little deaf lady. I had one bone. And I screamed Bible verses into her ear every week for a long time.

And I began to think, "Is this why we left the business world and teaching? Is this mission?" Well, it was my mission because it was my valley and it was my bone. And God said, "You be faithful and do what you're told: preach the bone." So I preached the bone, preached the bone. And one day she looked at me and I saw she saw me, and I realized she heard me, and so I highered my voice and I screamed louder.

80 little old women. This was not my idea. This was not on my schedule. This was not what I'd left the business world to go into mission for, but that's what God gave me. This was my valley and these were my bones. And now they were preaching to the bones and praying to the wind. And it just grew. And one day one of them said to me, "I wish our kids could hear you, Jill."

But not until I had been faithful in my valley to my one little deaf bone. And that's what it takes to be a blessing bone. To be willing to be a blessing bone to one or to a thousand. That is totally irrelevant. To be captured, gripped, say, "Grip my life, take me, open my eyes to the possibilities in this place." I think that there is an incredible possibility.

The Holy Spirit helps us to know what to pray for, helps us, Romans says. That one word, "help": there's only one other place in the scripture it's used, and it's in an amazing place. It's when Jesus and Mary and Martha are having a meal. Well, Martha's getting it ready; Mary's sitting at Jesus' feet.

Martha gets fed up with her sister doing nothing. She comes in like a tornado and says to the Lord, "Tell her to help me." Tell her to help me. That's where this word is used in Romans where it says the Holy Spirit helps our infirmities or helps us when we don't know how to pray for God's power in our family and our lives or our church.

The Holy Spirit has an end of the task in praying that works, and you have the other end, and we are supposed to help each other. Tell her to help me. Now take that picture: Mary and Martha helping each other get the meal ready. Okay. The spirit of God and us, Mary or Martha, helping to get the meal ready.

He will help us to know what to pray. Have you ever been absolutely out of ideas? Have you ever had a situation in your family that's absolutely breaking your heart? You don't know what to pray. You get down on your knees and say, "Holy Spirit, it's part of your work to show me how to do the work of prayer in this situation. Come, Holy Spirit, breathe."

So why don't we get helpless and start and depend and start and call to the four corners of the world, "Come and breathe upon these bones, the bones of this marriage, the bones of this relationship, the bones of this mess." Can't be worse than the killing fields in Cambodia. And let's see what God can do. Breathe upon these bones and they will live.

Bill Bright, dying of a lung disease, wrote a little booklet, *As Long As I Have Breath*. There in hospital, on an oxygen machine, he said, "No matter what my age, no matter what my health, my loving heavenly Father still has work for me to do, and I will intercede for my world with my last breath. Come from the four corners of the earth, come from the four corners of the earth."

I'm going to say two prayers. We may pray first for those who have never been born from above. As Jesus told Nicodemus he needed to be born from above. We've been in church, we've been active perhaps on committees, but the Holy Spirit has never invaded our life by our invitation. And you can just simply sit there in the pew and forget everybody else and invite Him to do that right now.

Lord God, I thank you that the wind is blowing. I love the clear air of your spirit, dear God. Thank you. And then there are those of us who are dry, who are spiritually dehydrated, and we're depressed and we're down and we're miserable. We know better, and we've tried to get back to you, but we've ended up on the heap. Breathe upon these bones that they may live. Amen.