VISION: Transform Our City
In Ezekiel 37, God gives Ezekiel a ghastly vision of a valley of dead, dry bones. Though it seems these corpses are gone and dead for good, God shows Ezekiel that he is powerful to raise them from the dead and breathe new life into them. God then promises that he will do this with the nation of Israel even though their situation seems hopeless. Today, when we look around our city, we see a similar landscape. There is hopelessness and death all around us but God is powerful to raise the dead and breath new life into those we care deeply for.
VISION: Transformed
We begin our Vision series with Ezekiel’s prophetic declaration of the promised transformation to come. That God would take Israel’s hard hearts and give them hearts of flesh instead. While God’s promise to give us his Spirit is a promise to us, it is not ultimately about us. We see in Ezekiel 36 that God is mainly concerned with his own glory and that though God is for us, he is not about us.
May the Grace of Christ Be With You
As Paul closed his letter to the church in Rome, he penned warm greetings to those whom he had previously labored in the Gospel with. We often pay less attention to these greetings in Paul’s letters but to do this will cause us to miss out on something incredibly important. We see here Paul’s affection for those who shared in the mission of God at the church in Rome as he commends them, exhorts them, and worships the eternal God with them.