Once while sitting in English class trying not to think of lunch and concentrate on the strangeness of Percy Bysshe Shelley, our lecturer declared dogmatically, as was his manner, that farmers did not have years of experience. They just had the same experience 60 times.
I had to laugh. Brought up on a farm I had known farmers like that. But I have also known some progressive farmers as well and many ‘same experience people’ who were not farmers. Some of them, I have to say, were church elders. Which reminds me of a quote I found in The Bulletin one Christmas holidays. “Lack of imagination, curiosity and a fear of openness with inflexibility are interpreted by the fearful as fitness to lead.” Sad to say I’ve seen that more than once in churches where those who follow such people slowly die in the name of god and religion and ‘being careful’.
The same experience sixty times. Some of us have a new experience early on in our life but that’s the last one we have. We walk in our own footsteps year by year, repeating the same things over and over again, burdened with rusted on beliefs that time proves to be both erroneous and lifeless. Yet we plod on while our fellowship dissolves around us and we remain strangely unaware and inert to our condition. Like the frog in the bucket of slowly boiling water, we remain captive to our faulty ideas while acclimatizing ourselves to our forthcoming fate. Then it is too late and we are dead. What was once a tender plant becomes an old stump, destined to be burned and torn out of the ground.
Should Jesus be our life we can expect new life each morning and continual freshness to be our lot since Jesus is resurrection and life and He lives in us.
Israel wanted what it knew. But because it found its’ security in its own ideas and chose an identity much smaller than the reality of who they were in God, they circled aimlessly and their bones bleached in the desert.
The law and the Old Covenant cannot impart life. Only Jesus can make clacking rib-cages rise up and become sons of God. Unless we are prepared to die to a religious identity and be resurrected with a new name and a new life in Jesus we can never become spiritual beings or represent the Kingdom of God as His priest-kings. The command of the Father is to live in His Son. The testimony of Jesus is, ‘I AM YOUR LIFE.’ This makes us competent to minister the Kingdom of God.
‘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. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD’ Ezek 37.3-6 NIV.
