Ezekiel 37:1-5 “The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ I said, ‘Sovereign Lord, you alone know.’ Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones and say to them, Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.’”

When Ezekiel wrote the words of the 37^th chapter of his book, the people of Israel had reached that point where they were ready to abandon hope for themselves. For almost a thousand years this nation had been “God’s chosen people.” The idea that he would use this nation for the salvation of the entire world was woven into their national identity.

But then their special role and special relationship with God began to unravel. As individuals, more and more people couldn’t care less about their special role or relationship with God. They didn’t like all the restrictions of being his chosen people. The idol religions of their neighbors were less demanding, more exciting, and, frankly, sometimes just more down to earth. They were less focused on some distant Savior and some distant life in heaven. They were more focused on having a good harvest, enjoying a successful business, and building a big, happy family. Gods like Baal and Asherah didn’t so much call people to repent as they promised them pleasure and success. More and more people went through the motions of keeping up the ceremonies and the sacrifices that supported the old religion. They still liked to celebrate the holidays. But each generation saw more and more defections to other gods and other faiths.

The Lord didn’t sit back and let his people slip away without “fighting for this marriage.” As a nation, he let them feel the consequences of their unfaithfulness. Crops failed more often and the weather was less cooperative. National security became an issue. It became more and more difficult to keep foreign invaders out. Their military weakened. Their borders shrank. Their country was divided in two. If only they would turn back to God for help! But for most, that day never came. A little over a hundred years before Ezekiel the Lord let the northern three fourths of the nation fall to the Assyrians. Most of the population was forced to relocate to places hundreds and even thousands away from their homeland. Within a generation or two they had simply vanished as a distinct people.

Now the same thing was happening to the little group left in the south. This time the Empire of Babylon came and resettled the people in other countries. To the little group who remained faithful to the Lord, it looked like hope was lost. They had seen this before. It didn’t end well. “Our bones are dried up,” they said, “and our hope is gone; we are cut off.” As a nation, we are dead. We have lost our land, our king, our institutions. And as a faith, we are dead. Our hearts are empty. Almost no one believes the old promises and keeps the old practices anymore.

So God sent the Prophet Ezekiel and he gave them this vision, this story, about the dry bones coming back to life again. In these verses the Lord’s message is clear. Even though they felt their nation and their faith were a lost cause, God promised help for the hopeless. The nation would survive. Better yet, their faith, and the promises that faith held onto, would survive. Here was hope.

The future often looks bleak for God’s people today. Everywhere it seems like the churches are shrinking. Faith is dying. The Christian hope is coming to an end.

Don’t give up! God’s word has lost none of its power. The promise of forgiveness still brings people from spiritual death to life. It did for us. There never has been much reason to expect good things from the dead or dying people God makes his own. But we don’t rest our faith in these “dry bones.” We place our trust in the one who can make an entire universe out of nothing, who still creates life where there is only death, and one day will restore the dust of our dead bodies to life that never ends. These bones can live!

John 9:4-5 “As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world.”

Jesus wanted his disciples to see the blessed opportunity in a poor man’s blindness. He links the man’s blindness to the truth that Jesus is the light of the world. Like light in a dark place, Jesus is the one who makes it possible for us to see the truth. And the truth is that God doesn’t expect us to grope our own way through the darkness of sin until we die in it. When the light goes on, the darkness disappears. When grace and forgiveness in Jesus goes on, sin and death disappear. They evaporate like the darkness. Life, and love, and heaven become visible. God’s work is to turn that light on in as many hearts as possible before it’s too late.

That light of grace and truth were connected with another work of God, the work of love. “Having said this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. ‘Go,’ he told him, ‘wash in the Pool of Siloam (this word means Sent). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.”

Jesus’ method may seem strange to us, but you can’t argue with the results. His procedure works similar to a sacrament. Is washing off mud the cure for blindness? Not under ordinary circumstances. But when washing it off is connected to Jesus’ command and promise, then yes, it cures blindness. Can plain water wash away sins? Not under ordinary circumstances. But when it is accompanied by commands and promises like “Be baptized and wash your sins away” (Acts 22:16), then yes, there is forgiveness in the water, as strange as the method may seem.

You and I don’t have healing powers like Jesus had. But we can imitate his love for people who suffer. That may be just God’s purpose in allowing their pain or discomfort. He wanted to bring us together. He wanted us to show our love. He wanted us to share our Savior. 

Sometimes, the shoe is on the other foot. We are the ones struggling. We may not be eager to pray, “Lord, make me the person who suffers. Make me the person who needs help.” We don’t need to seek more problems in our lives than we already have. We can trust God to dole them out as he knows is best. When they come, Jesus assures us they have a spiritual purpose. Trust God to do his work, to turn on lights, to build faith in you or the people whose love and help bring you together.

“Lord Jesus, when I don’t see the value in life’s hardships, wash the mud out of my eyes, and let me see. Amen.”

John 9:2-3 “’Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ Jesus said, ‘but his happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.’”

Sometimes people suffer because they are victims. Maybe the blind man the disciples noticed was a victim. It was all mom and dad’s fault. Apparently it’s not just a modern tendency to think, “It’s my parents’ fault I turned out this way.”

There are legitimate cases of children being victimized by their parents’ bad behavior, (though maybe not so much as a matter of God’s supernatural intervention as the disciples proposed here). Fetal alcohol syndrome, cocaine babies, and various psychological traumas caused by bad parenting are all real things.

Shall we be careful, however, about needing to make every tragedy someone’s fault? If we do find ourselves a victim, how much do we want to dwell on that? We live in a broken world run by broken people. There are victims in all directions. Feeling sorry for ourselves, throwing a pity party and inviting everyone to come, doesn’t serve a positive purpose. This grows out of the sinful flesh, not the new man of faith. Jesus wants to help us get past the problems and see our circumstances his way.

Here, that meant considering this man’s blindness may have been intended by God to serve a spiritual purpose. “This happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”

Is that possible? Could God have actually willed and caused this man’s blindness for his own purposes? That is what Jesus is saying. This blindness happened for a purpose, and that purpose was so that God could do his work.

Does that comfort or scare you? I once counseled with a couple in which the husband had had a heart attack. Years of heart-health problems followed. They always resisted the idea that this setback in life could have come from God. It felt to them as though that would be accusing him of doing evil. No, the heart attack had to come from the devil.

What they failed to consider were all the good things that had happened in their relationship, their family, and their life of witness to neighbors and medical workers as a result of the health issues. Yes, he suffered as a result of the experience. But God used it to draw husband and wife closer in faith. He used it as a platform from which these godly people could talk about the gospel.

That’s God’s work, his saving work. It fits his gracious promise: “In all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28).

John 9:1-2 “As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’

For Jesus’ disciples, the idea that this man was born blind because someone sinned was not a question. It was an assumption. There only question was, “Who was responsible?” Their first suggestion was the man himself. His blindness made sense to them if he was being punished for something.

Sometimes it works this way. Sometimes people suffer some curse, some burden, because of a specific sin. In the Bible God curses the first murderer, Cain, by making him a “restless wanderer on earth.” After David commits adultery with Bathsheba, God takes the life of the child born to them in its first week.

In our own time, we know some sins have negative consequences that affect the rest of a person’s life: maiming injuries, or incurable diseases that are the direct result of certain kinds of behavior. Jesus’ disciples weren’t completely off base in the question that they asked him.

But there are two important points to note. One is that before we draw any conclusions linking a particular sin to some particular setback in some particular person’s life, we need to be able to draw a clear and indisputable line between these things. If that connection comes as a direct revelation from God, as with Cain or David, then we have a valid conclusion. If that connection is clear as a natural consequence, like an injury suffered in an accident while driving drunk, then we have a valid conclusion, too.

The second thing to note is the difference between punishment and discipline. When sin leads to suffering in an unbeliever’s life, that may be nothing more than a matter of justice. They did the crime. Now they have to do the time.

But when God allows his believing children to suffer setbacks connected to their sins, this is always loving discipline. He isn’t trying to make them pay. He is trying to make them better, helping them to grow spiritually. He is teaching and molding them to believe and live and act more like his own sons and daughters. He wants to draw his people close to offer forgiveness and renew their faith.

Most of the time there is no direct connection between a particular sin and the painful setbacks we suffer. Failing to realize this can lead us into sins of our own. When we are looking at someone else’s problems it leads us to judge them falsely. I can find many people less fortunate than me. They can’t walk, they can’t see, they can’t hear.  They daily deal with pain I can’t imagine. If I assume that they suffer as the result of some personal fault, then I become guilty of exactly the kind of loveless judging Jesus condemns.

If we view our own pain or setbacks this way, it leads to a different kind of sin. We may agonize over some moral failing in our lives that simply doesn’t exist. We may wonder which of our past sins made God so angry with us. This leads us to conclude God is the great punisher, not the great forgiver. Instead of trust we feel dread. We base our relationship on performance instead of grace. This destroys our faith.

Paul reminds us we are all in the same boat when it comes to sin: “There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22-23). He also promises that we share the same forgiving grace: “…and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). Jesus did not come to condemn this blind man. He did not come to condemn you or me. He came to open our eyes to God’s saving love.

Luke 23:39-43 “One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: ‘Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!’ But the other criminal rebuked him. ‘Don’t you fear God,’ he said, ‘since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ Jesus answered him, ‘I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.’”

Sometimes punishment can change us, soften us. My parents’ discipline sometimes transformed my defiance into remorse. But one man hanging on a cross next to Jesus was hardened. He offers no hint of remorse. He only rages against the sentence he serves.

There is an even darker side to his words. Sometimes, when faced with our own shame, we belittle others. There was no sincerity in the man’s plea, “Save yourself and us.” It dripped with sarcasm. It came with the sneer of insult. A fine Messiah and Savior Jesus was going to make…when he was dead!”

The man hanging on the other cross couldn’t be more different. On the outside, he was a carbon copy of the criminal mocking Jesus. He lived the same cut-throat life. He paid the same excruciating penalty.

His question, however, unveils a different heart. “Don’t you fear God?” The question implies that this second criminal did. And we have no reason to doubt his sincerity. This is no jailhouse conversion meant to impress the parole board. It is too late to escape the death sentence. The governor is not going to be issuing a stay of execution. He confesses his guilt and accepts his fate. “We are getting what our deeds deserve.”

But most striking is the faith he places in the one who hangs on the middle cross. Does Jesus look very helpful, or royal, at this moment? Still, this second criminal prays to him, not to be spared from this terrible execution, but for mercy after his death. He recognizes that the next step for Jesus after the cross isn’t just a grave. It is a throne.

Isn’t that an astounding faith in the face of the visible evidence to the contrary? No one ever looked less powerful, less divine, yet this man is trusting Jesus with his eternity.

How many others could see what he saw on this day? The priests, the scribal scholars, the Pharisees all gathered around to see the Savior die, but they mocked him for it. The religious establishment of their day had no faith.

There were twelve men in Jerusalem who had followed Jesus for three years. They knew him like no one else. Ten were hiding. Only one had the courage to show up at the cross. All of them had their faith shattered.

What about us? When does our faith falter when our lives look far less dark than this dying criminal’s? It takes less than a crucifixion to make us doubt.

Jesus’ reply promises salvation to be believing criminal, and they do so immediately. Maybe Jesus never uses the word “forgive”, but there is nothing but forgiveness in his words. This grace comes immediately. “Today you will be with me…” There will be no wait. Hispast is not going to be held against him. There is no purgatory he has to suffer. Paradise starts today.

Jesus promises, “You will be with me in Paradise.” He doesn’t promise the criminal a cold, hard cell in heaven’s dungeon. He doesn’t offer a third class cabin, a middle seat in economy, a one-star room in a one-star hotel. He will be with the King, in the throne room, standing with the saints and angels, under the emerald rainbow, on the sea of glass, holding a golden crown.

He will be with Jesus, in Paradise, and so will we. Jesus’ words promise it. His death makes it real.

Romans 5:3-4 “Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”

Many things about the Christian life and experience are an acquired taste. Getting up and going to church may not have the same appeal as sleeping in or playing golf at first. Singing in heaven’s choir someday, and seeing God face to face, may not sound like a great way to spend all eternity.

Enjoying pain is not a Christian virtue, and it is not an acquired taste of Christian faith and life. But notice that Paul does not say, “we enjoy our sufferings.” He says, “We rejoice in our sufferings.” There is a difference.

Whether it’s physical pain, agonizing failures, dashed dreams, broken relationships, or heartbreaking losses, we Christians feel the same trauma unbelievers do. Faith doesn’t take that part of it away. It does promise us a good outcome in the end.

When I was in high school I ran the mile and the two mile in track. Training consisted either in running much further than my races, say five or even ten miles, to build endurance; or in running much shorter “sprints,” a series of six or eight quarter mile races against other team members, to build speed. Neither one was pleasant. My lungs burned. My joints and muscles ached. My stomach turned. Sometimes I wanted to puke. Even after I got into shape, and the work was easier, I cannot say that I ever enjoyed either approach to training.

But when the day of a track meet rolled around, and I shaved ten seconds off my previous best time, or I even managed to place or win a race, I rejoiced in the results of my suffering. I earned points for my team. I came closer to qualifying for a school letter. I could impress my girlfriend who competed on the girls’ team.

Even non-Christians can see that sometimes their pain ends in good things. Faith in Jesus simply promises that the good things coming from suffering are certain, whether we can see them or not. Paul walks us quickly through this journey of personal growth. A lot like my track experience, suffering produces perseverance, endurance. Each painful episode of life makes us spiritually stronger, and able to hold out longer.

Perseverance, in turn, produces character. Maybe while I am in the middle of suffering and enduring, I am scared out of my wits. Maybe I cry like a baby. Maybe I am anything but a model of manliness and maturity. But when it is all over, I have passed the test. My faith in God has survived, and its value has been made clear. He stuck with me all the way. The next time I will be a little less whiney, a little less scared. Perseverance has built character.

And character teaches me hope. I may not be at the end of my life story yet. There are hard things up ahead, painful stops along the way. But they will not cut my journey short of its goal. I know how this story ends. It doesn’t end in darkness and nothingness. It doesn’t end in fire and torments. It ends in my Father’s house. It ends at a great homecoming feast attended by some of my dearest friends and family, and by countless others who traveled this same road of faith. It ends in the arms of my Savior, whose hands perhaps still show the scars that prove his love.

We aren’t making the journey alone. “And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” All along the way, Faith lives with God’s love for us filling our hearts. He doesn’t give us a little sip here or there. He doesn’t tease us with a little drip on our tongue. He pours our hearts full of his love in making us, redeeming us, winning us, keeping us safe and getting us home. He doesn’t dump this love on us and then leave us to navigate the long, difficult journey home. Through the Holy Spirit, God himself lives in us all the time. And if God is living in us by his Spirit, how can we possibly fail to reach the end?

So we don’t enjoy our sufferings, but we do rejoice in them, because we know how God is using them, and where they are taking us. Only good things are waiting for us in the end.

Romans 5:1 “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Jesus gives us peace with God, our Judge. In court, just because the judge pounds his gavel and declares, “not guilty,” that doesn’t mean that he likes you. He probably isn’t going to have you over for dinner on Friday night. After all that’s been said in the courtroom, he might still regard you as scum.

With Jesus Christ, a “not guilty” verdict does mean that the Judge likes you. In fact, he loves you. He isn’t going to stop at a dinner date. He is going to make you a member of his own family. He isn’t just going to have you over for an evening. He is going to move you into his own home. Jesus has removed all the hostility. We are no longer objects of wrath, inmates on death row. Now we have peace in every way. The Judge has become our new best friend. Our life with God has been transformed in profound ways.

We can say even more about this peace. Peace in the biblical sense involves more than the relationship, more than the end to the hostilities. It embraces all of life. It is living with the peace of mind that everything, everything is “divinely normal.” It is living with the confidence that “God’s got this,” he is in control, even when all our experience seems to say just the opposite. Paul will flesh out what this means for us even more in the second half of these verses.

Because the not guilty verdict means that the Judge is our new best friend, we have access: “through whom (through Jesus) we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand” (Romans 5:2). With the right person, people will pay a lot of money for access. It’s why people give thousands to political candidates and millions to “political action committees.” If the person they support gets elected, they want access. They want an open door that allows them to come and ask for favors from the leader they supported.

Our access, however, comes for free. It’s another bonus of the faith. It is another feature of a transformed life with God. Our access is to God’s grace, the love that lays no conditions on us, that love that forgives us without counting how many times we have fallen or how many times we have needed it.

Our open door is infinitely better than the political supporter’s. For him it may be an occasional thing. It’s a kind of back-up plan or insurance policy. He will use his access if he needs it, but if all goes well, he may never step through that open door.

 Our open door leads to “this grace in which we now stand.” We have all gone through the door, and we never leave. “Grace” becomes our new reality. It’s where we are. It’s where we live.

Maybe you have thought to yourself, “I hope that when I die, I am not in the middle of some sin,” or “When Jesus returns, I hope that I am not in the middle of some sin.” That misunderstands both sin and grace. Sin isn’t just an action. Sin is a condition. It infects everything we do, even after we come to faith. We are sorry for it. We don’t defend or excuse it. But it’s always there. I can guarantee you that we will be in the middle of sin when we breath our last or Jesus appears.

But having faith means that you will also be in the middle of grace. We don’t just come and get some on Sunday mornings. We live in it all week. It’s the spiritual atmosphere we breathe. We go to work in it. We play in it. We sleep in it. Grace is a permanent attitude God takes toward us. Forgiveness is a constant state in which we live.

So enjoy God’s peace, because faith brings us more than a not guilty verdict. It transforms our life with God.

Romans 3:22 “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

Everything interests me. When I was a little kid, put me in a room with a set of World Book Encyclopedias, and I would be entertained for hours. I tried collecting everything from rocks to coins to beer cans. I like sports. I played on football, baseball, basketball and track teams. I took lessons for tennis and dabbled in golf. But I also wanted to play music–I took piano lessons and sang in choirs– and I liked having parts in school plays. My dad was handy–my grandpa always said he should have been a carpenter– and I liked to build stuff in his workshop, and watch him fix cars.

The only classes I didn’t care for so much in school were math classes, and that was mostly because of the endless repetitions of solving equations after you’ve got the concept. I mean, once you have memorized the quadratic equation, why do you have to work twenty-five examples? It’s just the same thing with different numbers.

Everything interests me. But talent? That’s another matter. There are very good reasons that I am not earning a living as a musician or pro athlete. I probably shouldn’t even be allowed on a golf course. Sometimes I still try to do my own car repairs or home improvement projects, and sometimes it turns out okay. It’s hard to mess up an oil change, and painting isn’t rocket science. But what do you do when you have torn half way through an engine, and then you get stuck, especially when your wife is gone with the other car? Or what do you do when you put it all back together, and you have parts left over? Some things are best left to a professional.

Salvation is one of those things. Everyone is gifted at something, but no one is gifted at dealing with sin and its consequences. Paul spends chapters of his letter to the Romans trying to talk us out of making this a do-it-yourself project. “There is no one righteous, not even one,” he writes. No one has the qualifications. “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his (God’s) sight by observing the law.” Try as hard as you might, trying to be good enough for God to be satisfied never, ever goes well.

Righteousness, you see, isn’t a relative term. It’s like computer code, either a one or a zero, either the switch is on or its off. Either you are, or you aren’t. Misspell what you are searching for on a web page or computer document, and you will never, ever find it, even if it’s just one letter. Commit just one sin, and the whole save-yourself project crashes and comes tumbling down. “There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” After thousands of years of history with no exceptions, neither you nor I are going to be the exception.

So God turns us to the “professional.” There is someone who can fix the sin problem. He can repair the damage it has done, restore us to a right standing with God and spare us from death and hell. “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

Righteousness, you see, is God’s not guilty verdict. Just because we can’t live life so well that we deserve it doesn’t mean that God can’t still give it away. Jesus Christ is the source, the “professional” if you will. Faith is the channel through which he gives us our not guilty verdict, our restored relationship with God. He doesn’t ask us to do something. He simply invites us to trust him.

Why trust Jesus? “He was delivered over to death for our sins, and was raised to life for our justification,” Paul writes at the end of Romans 4. He paid for our guilt so that God could declare us not guilty.             Trust the professional. Trust Jesus Christ. He alone can make people righteous who have been broken by their sin.

John 3:8 “You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

If you watch the weather report any given evening, it may seem that the weatherman is telling you where the wind is coming from and where it is going. You see the fronts on the weather map. You may know that the wind flows clockwise around high pressure systems, and counter clockwise around low pressure systems. That is not the picture Jesus has in mind.

Think of an individual gust of wind on a particular day. Just where did that particular column of air start to move? Where does it die? These are the things you can’t see, and no weatherman can tell you. But you know that the gust of wind was real. You felt it on your face. You heard it rustling through the trees or whistling past your ears. It’s real thing, a real phenomenon, but it’s unseen.

That, Jesus says, is like the people who have been born again. Line up a bunch of randomly selected people, and then tell me which ones are the Christians just by looking at them. You can’t do it. Even if you followed them around for a while you might have difficulty telling them apart, because Christians don’t always act like Christians, and sometimes unbelievers seem to act more Christian than the Christians.

But this new birth, this spiritual life, this relationship with God, this trust in the grace and forgiveness of your King, is a real thing. “You know you’ve changed,” Jesus seems to be telling Nicodemus. “You don’t regard me like the other Pharisees. You hear my words, and it stirs you deep within. It moves you in ways you don’t even understand. Exactly when I became more than just a curiosity to you, and you started to trust me, maybe you can’t even say. But you know that you have changed. You are starting to talk differently. You are starting to think differently about things. You feel guilty about things that never bothered you before. But most of all, you are finding a peace you didn’t have before, because you have found a King who loves you, who will protect you, who will give his life to save you.”

Sound familiar? I could tell you about many modern day Nicodemuses, surprised by their own new birth of faith. Nabeel Qureshi came to the United States from Pakistan to study to be a doctor. For years he dismantled the Christian beliefs of his poorly trained Christian classmates. Then he met a Christian student who knew a thing or two about the Bible. After several years of debate, study, and friendship Nabeel came to the conviction that Jesus is the saving God he claims to be. Before he died of cancer, he became a speaker for a ministry that reaches out to Muslims. Something changed.

You don’t need stories about other people. You have your own. Whether early in life or late, whether by baptism or the word, the Holy Spirit found his way into your heart. Everything changed. You’ve had a new birth. You’ve got a new life. Because of Jesus, that’s no surprise.