COME FROM THE FOUR WINDS, O BREATH! – Charles Spurgeon
COME FROM THE FOUR WINDS, O BREATH!
“He said to me, Prophesy unto the wind, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus says the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” Ezekiel 37:9. According to some commentators, this vision in the valley of dry bones may refer to three forms of resurrection. Holy Scripture is so marvelously full of meaning that one interpretation seldom exhausts its message to us. The chapter before us is an excellent example of this fact and supplies an illustration of several Scriptural truths. Some think they see here a parable of the resurrection of the dead. Assuredly, Ezekiel’s vision pictures what will happen in the day when, “The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised.” No matter how dry the bones may be, the bodies of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall rise again. That which was sown shall spring up from the grave and in the case of the children of God, it shall wear a new glory. At the word of Christ, it shall come to pass—“For the hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation.” Others see here the resurrection of the almost destroyed host of Israel, which had been divided into two companies and carried away captive into Babylon. Plague and pestilence and the sword of the Chaldean had gone far to cut off the chosen nation, but God promised to restore His people, thus mingling mercy with judgment, and again setting in the cloud the bow of His everlasting covenant. A partial fulfillment of this promise was given when, for a while, the Lord set up again the tribes of Israel at Jerusalem and they had a happy rest before the coming of Christ. But Israel’s full restoration is yet to be accomplished. The people shall be gathered out of the graves in which as a nation they have so long lain buried and shall be placed in their own land—and then will come to pass the word of Jehovah—“Then shall you know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, says the Lord.” There are others, who looking beyond the literal for the spiritual teaching, see, and I think rightly see, that here is a picture of the recovery of ungodly men from their spiritual death and corruption—a parable of the way in which sinners are brought up from their hopeless, spiritually dead condition, and made to live by the power of the Holy Spirit. I shall, at any rate, use the text in this sense, for I am not now aiming at the interpretation of prophecy, nor concerned greatly with what is to happen in the future. Neither do I wish to conduct you into the deep things of God, but I am just now thinking of practical uses to which I can put this incident in order to stir up God’s people to deal with the Holy Spirit as He should be dealt with, and to urge the unconverted to seek the Lord in the hope that some of them, as dead and dry as the bones in the valley of vision, may be made to live by His divine power. Nothing gave me greater comfort this week than when I received a note from one saying that last Thursday night, while I was preaching from the text, “Let your soul delight itself in fatness,” she was enabled to lay hold on Christ. I had rather have such tidings than to hear the gladdest news of a worldly kind that could be brought to me. Oh, that now also some poor heart may find rest in Christ while we are talking of that divine Spirit who becomes a Comforter to all those to whom He has been first a Quickener! May He come and cause men to live and then afterwards make them full of gladness! It is His blessed office first to bestow life and then to give light. Living unto God is the earliest experience of the redeemed—afterwards comes joy in God by the Holy Spirit.
I. WE ARE NOTHING WITHOUT THE HOLY SPIRIT
I now speak, my brethren, to you who love the souls of men. I know that there are some among you who preach and teach with all earnestness, with broken-hearted love, and for the glory of Christ you try to bring men to believe in Jesus. In thus endeavoring to save the souls of lost and ruined men, you are engaged in a noble work. But I dare say that you have often felt what I also fully realize, that you have not gone far in your holy service before you are brought face to face with the fact that, in itself, the work you propose to do is an utter impossibility. We begin our labor according to the word of the Lord and we prophesy. God helping us, we can do that and though the burden of the Lord is heavy, yet if we are told to prophesy again, we can by His grace do that also. We can prophesy to dry bones or prophesy to the wind according to God’s commandment. We are not afraid of seeming to be foolish since we know that when “the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” But when we preach the word and as the result of our preaching expect men to be saved—and so saved that we may know it—we come all of a sudden upon an iron-bound coast and can get no further. We find that men are dead—what is wanted is that they shall be quickened—and we cannot quicken them. There are a great many things we can do—and God forbid that we should leave one of them undone! But when we come to the creation of life, we have reached a mysterious region into which we cannot penetrate—we have entered the realm of miracles where Jehovah reigns supreme. The prerogative to give life or to take it away must remain with the Most High. The wit and wisdom of man are altogether powerless to bestow life upon even the tiniest insect. We know of a surety, doctrinally, and we know it with equal certainty by experience, that we can do nothing towards the quickening of men apart from the Spirit of God. If He does not come and give life, we may preach till we have not another breath left, but we shall not raise from the tomb of sin even the soul of a little child or bring a single sinner to the feet of Christ. How, then, should this fact affect us? Because of our powerlessness, shall we sit still, doing nothing and caring nothing? Shall we say, “The Spirit of God must do the work, therefore I may fold my arms and take things easily”? Beloved, we cannot do that. Our heart’s desire and prayer for our fellow men is that they might be saved and we have sometimes felt that for their sakes we could almost be willing to be accursed, if we might bring eternal life to them. We cannot sit still. We do not believe that it was God’s intent that any truth should ever lead us into sloth—at any rate, it has not so led us—it has carried us in quite the opposite direction. Let us try to be as practical in this matter as we are in material things. We cannot rule the winds nor create them. A whole parliament of philosophers could not cause a capful of wind to blow. The sailor knows that he can neither stop the tempest nor raise it. What then? Does he sit still? By no means. He has all kinds of sails of different cuts and forms to enable him to use every ounce of wind that comes—and he knows how to reef or furl them in case the tempest becomes too strong for his boat. Though he cannot control the movement of the wind, he can use what it pleases God to send. The miller cannot divert that great stream of water out of its channel, but he knows how to utilize it—he makes it turn his mill-wheel. Though he cannot resist the law of gravitation, for there seems to be an almost omnipotent force in it, yet he uses that law and yokes it to his chariot. Thus, though we cannot command that mighty influence which streams from the omnipotent Spirit of God, though we cannot turn it which way we will, for “the wind blows where it wishes,” yet we can make use of it and in our inability to save men, we turn to God and lay hold of His power.
What, then, are we to do? Face to face with spiritual death. Conscious of the fact that we cannot remove it. And fully aware that only the Holy Spirit can quicken dead souls, what shall we do? There are certain ways and means by which we can act properly towards this divine Person—certain attitudes of heart which it would be well for us to take up—and certain results which will follow from a clear apprehension of the true state of the case. First, by this fact, we must feel deeply humbled, emptied, and cut adrift from self. Look, sir, you may study your sermon. You may examine the original of your text. You may critically follow it out in all its bearings. You may go and preach it with great correctness of expression, but you cannot quicken a soul by that sermon. You may go up into your pulpit. You may illustrate, explain, and enforce the truth. With mighty rhetoric, you may charm your hearers—you may hold them spellbound—but no eloquence of yours can raise the dead. Demosthenes might stand for a century between the jaws of death, but the monster would not be moved by anything he or all human orators might say. Another voice than ours must be heard. Another power than that of thought or persuasion must be brought into the work or it will not be done. You may organize your societies, you may have excellent methods, you may diligently pursue this course and that, but when you have done it all, nothing comes of it if the effort stands by itself. Only as the Spirit of God shall bless men by you, shall they receive a blessing through you. Whatever your ability or experience, it is the Spirit of God who must bless your labor. Therefore, never go to this service with a boast upon your lip of what you can do or with the slightest trace of self-confidence—or else you will go in a spirit which will prevent the Holy Spirit from working with or through you. O brethren, think nothing of us who preach to you! If ever you do, our power will be gone. If you begin to suppose that such and such a minister, having been blessed of God to so many thousands, will necessarily be the means of the conversion of your friend, you are imputing to a son of man what belongs only to the Son of God. And you will assuredly do that pastor or that minister a serious mischief by tolerating in your heart so idolatrous a thought. We are nothing. You are nothing. “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of Hosts,” is a message that should make us lie in the dust and utterly despair of doing anything in and of ourselves, seeing that all the power is of God alone. It will do us good to be very empty, to be very weak, to be very distrustful of self—and so to go about our Master’s work. Next, because of our absolute need of the Holy Spirit, we must give ourselves to prayer before our work and after our work. A man who believes that, do what he may, no soul will be quickened apart from the work of the Spirit of God—a man who has a longing desire that he may save souls will not venture to his pulpit without prayer. He will not deliver his message without a thousand groans and cries to God for help in every sentence that he utters. And when the sermon is done, his work will not be done—it will have scarcely begun—his sermons will be but a text for long-continued prayer. He will be crying to God continually to anoint him with the heavenly oil.
II. WE MAY SO ACT AS TO HAVE THE HOLY SPIRIT
When he first saw the dry bones, there was no wind nor breath, yet obeying the voice of the Lord in the vision, the breath came and life followed. How, then, shall we act? I will only give you in brief a few of the conditions to be observed by us. If we want the Holy Spirit to be surely with us, to give us a blessing, we must, in the power of the Spirit, realize the scene in which we are to labor. In this case, the Holy Spirit took the prophet and carried him out and set him down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones. This is just a type of what will happen to every man whom the Spirit means to use. Do you want to save people in the slums? Then, you must go into the slums. Do you want to save sinners broken down under a sense of sin? You must be broken down. At least you must get near to them in their brokenness of heart and be able to sympathize with them. I believe that no man will command power over a people whom he does not understand. If you have never been to a certain place, you do not know the road, but if you have been there yourself and you come upon a person who has lost his way, you are the man to direct him. When you have been through the same perplexities that trouble others, you can say to them, “I have been there myself. I know all about it. By God’s blessing, I can conduct you out of this maze.” Dear friend, we must have greater sympathy with sinners. You cannot pluck the brand out of the burning if you are afraid of being singed. You must be willing to dirty your fingers on the bars of the grate if you would do it. If there is a diamond dropped into a ditch, you must thrust your arm up to your elbow in the mud, or else you cannot expect to pick the jewel out of the mire. The Holy Spirit, when He blesses a man, sets him down in the midst of the valley full of bones and causes him to pass by them round about until he fully comprehends the greatness and the difficulty of the work to be accomplished, even as the prophet said, “Behold, there were very many in the open valley; and lo, they were very dry.”
Next, if the Holy Spirit is to be with us, we must speak in the power of faith. If Ezekiel had not had faith, he certainly would not have preached to dry bones—they made a wretched congregation. And he certainly would not have preached to the wind, for it must have been but a fickle listener. Who but a fool would behave in this manner unless faith entered into action? If preaching is not a supernatural exercise, it is a useless procedure. God the Holy Spirit must be with us, or else we might as well go and stand on the tops of the hills of Scotland and shout to the east wind. There is nothing in all our eloquence unless we believe in the Holy Spirit making use of the truth which we preach for the quickening of the souls of men. Our prophesying must be an act of faith. We must preach by faith as much as Noah built the ark by faith and just as the walls of Jericho were brought down by faith, men’s hearts are to be broken by faithful preaching, that is, preaching full of faith. In addition to this, if we desire to have the Spirit of God with us, we must prophesy according to God’s command. By prophesying, I do not mean foretelling future events, but simply uttering the message which we have received from the Lord, proclaiming it aloud so that all may hear. You will notice how it is twice said, in almost the same words, “So I prophesied as He commanded me.” God will bless the prophesying that He commands, and not any other. So we must keep clear of that which is contrary to His word and speak the truth that He gives to us to declare. As Jonah, the second time he was told to go to Nineveh, was told by the Lord to “preach unto it the preaching that I bid you,” so must we do if we would have our word believed even as his was. Our message is received when it is the Word of God through us. When the Lord describes the blessing that comes upon the earth by the rain and snow from heaven, he says, “So shall My word be that goes forth out of My mouth.” Let us see to it that before a word goes forth out of our mouth, we have received it from the mouth of God. Then we may hope and expect that the people will also receive it from us. The Spirit of God, that is, the breath of God, goes with the Word of God and with that alone.
III. HOPE FOR THE UNCONVERTED
You who are not yet quickened by the divine life, or are afraid you are not, we would exhort you to hear the Word of the Lord. Though you feel that you are as dead as these dry bones, yet if you want to be saved, be frequent in hearing the Word of God. “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” If you wish to find the divine life, thank God that you have that wish—and frequent those houses where Christ is much spoken of—and where the way of eternal life is very plainly set forth. When you mingle with the worshippers, listen with both your ears—try to remember what you hear and pray all the while that God will bless it to you. “O you dry bones, hear the Word of the Lord!” Next, we would remind you of your absolute need of life from the Spirit of God. Put it in what shape you like, you cannot be saved unless you are born again. And the new birth is not a matter within your own power. “You must be born again”—“from above,” as the margin reads, in the third chapter of John’s Gospel. All the religion of which you are capable will not save you, do what you will. Strive as you may with outward ceremonies, or religious observances, there is no hope for you but in the Holy Spirit. There is something to be done for you which you cannot do for yourself. We will not water down that truth, but give it to you just as it stands in the Scriptures—we want you to feel its power.
But we would have you note what the Holy Spirit has done for others. There are some of your friends who have been born again. They were as hopeless as you are, but they are now saved. You know they are, for you have seen their lives. Take note of them, for what the Holy Spirit can work in one, He can work in another. Let the grace of God in others comfort you concerning yourself, especially when you hear of great drunks, or great swearers, or very vicious persons who have been transformed into saints. Say to yourself, “If the Holy Spirit could make a saint out of such a sinner as that, surely He can make a saint out of me.” As you see the flesh and sinews on others who were once as dry as bare bones, be encouraged to hope that it may be even so with you before long. May I go a little further and say that we would have you observe carefully what is done in yourself? I think I am speaking to some here who have already undergone a remarkable change. You cannot say that you have spiritual life—you are afraid that you have not. Still, you are not what you used to be. You have put away many things from you that were once a pleasure to you—and now you take delight in many things which you once despised. There is some hope in that, though it may be nothing more than the sinews coming on the bones and the flesh upon the sinews. Yet I notice that, where the Holy Spirit begins, He does not leave off till He has finished His work. God takes such a delight in His work, that, having begun it, He completes it. Well did Job say, “You will have a desire to the work of Your hands.” Now, what He has already done for you, encourages me and should encourage you to hope that He will yet do much more, continuing His gracious work until life eternal is bestowed upon you.
Furthermore, we would remind you that faith in Jesus is a sign of life. If in your heart you can trust yourself to Christ and believe in Him that He can save you, you already have eternal life. “He that believes on the Son has everlasting life.” If you can now, though it is for the first time, trust yourself on Christ alone, faith is the surest evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit. You “have passed from death unto life” already. You cannot see the Spirit any more than you can see the wind, but if you have faith, that is a blessed vane that turns in the way the Spirit of God blows. “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” If you believe, this is true of you and if you cast yourself wholly upon Christ, remember that it is written, “He that believes on Him is not condemned.” Therefore be of good cheer. We beg you not to be led aside to the discussion of difficulties. There are a great many difficulties. To tell dry bones to live is a very unreasonable sort of thing when tried by rules of logic. And for me to tell you, a dead sinner, to believe in Christ, may seem perfectly unjustifiable by the same rule. But I do not need to justify it. If I find it in God’s word, that is quite enough for me. And if the preacher does not feel any difficulty in the matter, why should you? There is a difficulty, but you have nothing to do with it. There are difficulties everywhere. There is a difficulty in explaining how it is that bread sustains your body and how that bread, sustaining your body, can be the means of prolonging your life. We cannot understand how the material can impinge upon the spiritual. And there are difficulties in almost everything connected with life. If a man will not do anything till he has solved every difficulty, we had better dig his grave. And you will be in hell if you will not go to heaven without having every difficulty solved for you. Forget the difficulties—there will be time enough to settle them when we get to heaven. Meanwhile, if life comes through Jesus Christ, let us have it and have done with nursing our doubts.
Further, we would have you long for the visitation of God, the Holy Spirit. Join with us in the prayer, “Come Holy Spirit, come with all Your power. Come from the four winds, O breath!” One wind will not do it—it must come from all quarters. Your heart, filled with all sorts of evil, needs breaking—it needs throwing down like the house of Job’s son when Job’s children were in it—and “There came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell.” Oh, for a wind from the four quarters of heaven to smite the four corners of the house of your sin and lay it low! “Come from the four winds, O breath!” As the poet sings—
“Lifeless in the valley,
Come, O breath, and breathe!
New-create and rally!
Come, O breath, and breathe!
Blowing where you wish,
You the word assist,
You death’s power resist,
Come, O breath, and breathe!”
Be willing to have the Holy Spirit as He wills to come. Let Him come as a north wind, cold and cutting, or as a south wind, sweet and melting. Say, “Come, from any of the four winds, O breath! Only come.” He can come unexpectedly upon you in the pew during these five minutes that remain. You are, perhaps, thinking about whether you can catch an early train and get home. May the Holy Spirit lay hold of you before you leave the building and get you home in real earnest to your God and to your Father! He can come very mightily. There is a great deal about you that would shut Him out—but it is hard to keep wind out when it blows in the fullness of its strength—you may fill up the crevices of the door as you please, but still the wind gets in. Thus, too, is it with the Spirit of God—He comes in might, but He can also come very sweetly. Be not afraid of the Holy Spirit. He can charm you to Christ, as well as drive you to Christ. May He enter your heart even now! We yearn to see all of you thus made to live. I am praying in my very soul that He would come to every one of you. I do not read that Ezekiel saw part of the valley of dry bones live and the rest remain dry bones, but that they all lived and stood upon their feet—an exceedingly great army. I long to see you all blessed at this service. Why should it not be so? Oh, that the Spirit of God would come and touch every one of us! Many of you are alive already, blessed be His name! Well, you can have more life, for Christ has come not only that you might have life, but that you “might have it more abundantly.” I beseech you, let the blessed Spirit enter into greater fullness. But pray mightily that every soul here that is dead may now feel the sacred breath and begin to live. Then I shall not only hear of one, as last Thursday, but news shall be brought of many upon whom the divine Spirit has sweetly come and led them to Jesus to be saved now and to be saved forever. God grant it! Amen.