Put Some Meat On Your Bones

Leave your mediocrity and dry bones, and move on to maturity and put some meat on your bones.

God grabbed me. God's spirit took me up and set me down in the middle of an open plain strewn with bones. He led me around and among them, a lot of bones. There were bones all over the plain, dry bones bleached by the sun.
He said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? I said Master God, only you know that. He said to me, "prophesy over these bones: "Dry bones listen to the message of God!" God the master told the dry bones, "watch this, I'm bringing the breath of life to you and you'll come to life. I'll attach sinews to you, put meat on your bones, cover you with skin, and breathe life into you. You'll come alive, and you'll realize that I am God." I prophesied just as I'd been commanded. As I prophesied, there was a sound and rustling! The bones moved and came together, bone to bone. I kept watching. Sinews formed, then muscles on the bones, then skin stretched over them, but they had no breath in them. He said to me, "prophesy to the breath, prophesy son of man. Tell the breath, God, the Master says, come from the four winds. Come breath. Breathe on these slain bodies, breathe life!"
Ezekiel 37 (Message translation)
Many skinny people hear the words –"put some meat on your bones."
It's a phrase that is used often when someone is really thin and people are trying to get them to eat. Guys hear it more than girls because in this culture – for them, it is all about being seriously skinny. But to guys there is this idea that they have to "get big" and show their muscles and look all manly – whatever that means??? We are (for sure) a competitive culture with girls fighting each other to be the thinnest and prettiest and guys fighting amongst themselves to be the most muscular and strong.

This is something that a man named Charles Atlas took quite serious. He was the founding father of modern-day body-building and fitness. He was born Oct. 30, 1892. After emigrating with his mom from Italy when he was a boy; he went on to develop his own muscle-building mail order business through the use of advertisements in popular magazines. His most famous ad, a cartoon in which a scrawny young man resolved to bulk up after a bully kicks sand in his face, ran for decades.
I remembered seeing those ads as they ran again in magazines even in the 70's.
So, we can understand the physical aspect of putting some meat on your bones but what can we see about it in the spiritual sense?
Ezekiel 37 starts out with the phrase…God grabbed me. Let me tell you that He has a way of getting our attention. He got my attention in 1993 and I couldn't possibly look away. The very next line in the scripture says that God's spirit took me up and set me down in among them – a lot of bone! There were bones all over the plain, dry bones, bleached by the sun. This is another thing that God does… He doesn't take us to these beautiful fields of flowers and blue skies or even to the living to get our attention to His existence in our lives – He instead takes us to the dead, and to the graveyards. People are always asking "why are there such terrible hurts and pains in this world? Simply, sometimes…It's so we can grasp the brevity of life; because it truly is like a vapor…it's gone in a flash. And we don't know when it all will end.  He makes us aware of our mortality; He brought to my mind; all my fears of dying and made me come face to face with the next question that He asked… "Son of man, can these bones live?"
SO, CAN THEY?
I believe they can. He said to me, "prophesy over these bones; "Dry bones, listen to the Message of God!" Dry bones live by reading and applying the Word of God to their lives. He shows us in this scripture that we need to speak it to have it happen. After God the Master tells the dry bones, "watch this:  I'm bringing the breath of life to you and you'll come to life. I'll attach sinews to you, put meat on your bones, cover you with skin, and breathe life into you. You'll come alive and you'll realize that I am God!" He does this figuratively with all of us that have truly accepted Him.  But this is also a clue to how much power our words have if we truly believe in it. God could have done all this by Himself if He chose to; but He instead puts it in our hands. As you can see, it doesn't actually happen until the next part of the scripture; "I prophesied just as I'd been commanded. As I prophesied, there was a sound and rustling, the bones moved and came together, bone to bone. I kept watching, sinews formed, and then muscles on the bones, then skin stretched over them." Our words have weight when we truly believe them.
I believe that God brought me and my family back from deaths door and I believe that He is a God who can heal bodies and bring people back from the dead still today.  He tells us in Ephesians 5:10 to: Wake up from your sleep, Climb out of your coffins; Christ will show you the light! For those of us who now believe, we recognize that we once used to be asleep and headed for the graveyard… but we allowed God to instead save our souls and now we are able to see the light. He also tells us that even though the bones were joined and there became tendons and muscles that there was still no life in them. So, He then says, "prophesy to the breath, prophesy son of man, tell the breath, "God the Master says, come from the four winds, come breath; breathe on these slain bodies, Breathe life." He wants us to have the Holy Spirit breathed upon each one of us, because that is when we truly start to live. In my opinion, this is when we become interesting to those people who are watching us. "So, I prophesied, just as He commanded me. The breath entered them and they came alive! They stood on their feet, a huge army." You are not really alive until you are spiritually alive; they're just dead men walking. There are people walking this earth today, – some who would EVEN call themselves Christians that only get excited and look alive when they see or talk about their favorite celebrity or ball player. They practice hero worship more than anything else and they would travel to the throes of the world to see those people just to make them feel more alive. Still others get involved with alcohol or drugs to give them excitement and make them feel alive but that too can only last for a short time and then eventually you come back down and come face to face with your deadness again.  Or still others – they just go from one relationship to another hoping against hope that the next person that they get involved with will help them to feel good about themselves and feel alive. Wow, if that's living…then no thanks.
But – I think this generation could be different… I think this is a generation that is looking for a deeper, more meaningful connection with Jesus and I think that just like in Ezekiel 37 that God can put life into dry bones in order to create an army of true followers. It's just all in your vision…it's what you see; you see bones, I see an army. This is a generation that has seen too much, and experienced it too. They have seen things on television and at the movies at a younger age that men in other eras wouldn't have ever seen as grown men, and despite it all OR maybe because of it… they instead have a desire to search for something different.  They are looking for something more. They seem to have passions but their misguided. God wants to wake up those passions to serve Him; because our destiny is revealed in what we are really passionate about. He wants them to love Him; because a lover will always outwork just a worker.  When we love… we give more of ourselves. But before they will love Him, we've got to first convince this generation that they can be brought back to life by His forgiveness; because sadly, they've bought into the lie that life is hopeless, that life is hard and then you die. But just like it is in this scripture we can see that God says "bring on the hopelessness!" The word tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones… He is telling us to preach to this generation; to open our mouths, and no longer stay silent, because we alone, have the message of hope!
If God can raise an entire nation of lost souls after being dead so long… don't you believe that he can still touch those "dead" people that we know and "do life with" still today? The baton's been passed… it's up to you to grab it. Ezekiel was told to take on this call, and now it's our turn.
It is possible to come back to life… if you didn't believe it before – I hope this message gives you some hope. Take a look into a mirror and look at your own reflection. How dry are your bones? Don't be a dead man walking! And for those of you who are made of muscle, blood and sinew; GET BUSY! This is a high calling! Do you hear it? Some of you will and others will not, but at least tonight when I'm doing the same thing that Ezekiel did in those days of old…while I'm prophesying to you…Will you at least give it some thought?