Greetings my dear friend. I pray that as you read my blog for this month, you find yourself experiencing the love and joy of the Lord in your life in a powerful way!

My lovely wife Gail, of almost 37 years has made sure that as a family, we always eat well-balanced meals at suppertime. Don’t get me wrong there have been a few times I have convinced her to stray from her routine and eat some junk food but for the most part she has always tried to make sure we ate good healthy meals. One food essential my wife has made sure was introduced to almost all of our meals was that we always ate a good salad. As a young man having a salad to eat at our evening meals was pretty much non-existent. If we ever did eat a salad it pretty much consisted on some lettuce and maybe a tomato.

An essential item that had to be at our dinner table for me to enjoy my salad was that I had my favorite salad dressing to pour over my salad once I finished creating it. I remember one evening as I sat down to eat my supper, I finished creating this beautiful salad and I could hardly wait to dig in and enjoy it. After we blessed our food, I reached across the table and grabbed for my favorite salad dressing and poured it on my beautiful salad. I grabbed my fork and dug into my beautiful salad and took a big bite only to discover a very oily taste in my mouth. I told my wife that something must be horribly wrong with the salad dressing for it just ruined my beautiful salad. My wife smiled and said, ‘Honey, you need to shake up the dressing real good, before you pour it over your salad, otherwise all you get is the oil that had risen to the top from the last time we used it.’ Call me stupid, but I didn’t know that you had to shake up the salad dressing every time you wanted to use it so you would get the best taste.

Sometimes that is the way it is in our walk with the Lord. Too often, because we periodically fail to ask the Holy Spirit to shake things up in our Christian walk, we find have settled for a not so pleasant, bitter-tasting, uneventful Christian life. In Revelation 3:14-16 we read where the Lord sent a letter to the church at Laodicea saying that they were neither hot nor cold; though the Lord wished that they were either one or the other. So because they were lukewarm, neither nor cold, He was about to spit them out of His mouth. Hear me my dear brother and sister, that is not something we want the Lord to ever say about us personally or about our church. Yet if we are honest with ourselves, we all come into those dry times in our life; personally and as a church; so what are we to do.

In Ezekiel 37 we read where the prophet Ezekiel was brought out by the Lord to a valley of dry bones; which symbolized Israel’s hopeless condition in exile. The Lord told Ezekiel to prophesy to these dry bones saying ‘I the Lord will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.’ As Ezekiel was prophesying to these dry bones, he heard a noise, a rattling sound as these once dry bones suddenly came together, bone by bone. Ezekiel also saw that tendons and flesh appeared on these dry bones as well as skin but there was no breath in them. Then the Lord said, ‘Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’ When that was done, they came to life and stood up, a vast army. The breath of God’s Spirit in our midst is the ‘key’ to spiritual renewal. It ‘reunites people’ and ‘rekindles purpose’.

In Ephesians 5:18 the Apostle Paul writes to the church, “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, ‘be filled’ with the Spirit.” In essence, what Paul was saying to the church at Ephesus as well as to the church today, is to throw our hearts open to the Holy Spirit, so that He may come and fill them. Hear me my brother my sister, it was never meant for us, the mighty army of the Living God, to settle for dryness or being lukewarm in our walk with the Lord. When dryness comes, and it will, we are to cry out for a ‘fresh infilling’ of the Holy Spirit to come into our hearts; so just as Israel did in Ezekiel 37, we can stand up as a vast mighty army of warriors for the Lord’s kingdom!

I ask you my brother my sister, have you been feeling a bit dry as of late? If that is the case, cry out for a fresh infilling of the Holy Spirit to come into your heart and  listen for rattling of your once dry bones to come together. Then stand up the mighty warrior that you are and fight the good fight of faith. Be richly blessed 🙂