Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, December 7, 2025
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Your witness to God’s love is, quite literally, miraculous.
This is one of the most classic and beloved visionary accounts in all our canonized scripture. Read in tandem with the New Testament and understood as one part of a pre-Jesus to post-Jesus Biblical arc, it is the most explicit foreshadowing of Jesus’s resurrection work in the world (which explains our accompanying passage from the Gospel of John). This is a miracle story.
But the miracle here isn’t what we might think it is on the surface—that sinew is restored to once-dry bones. That new life ultimately conquers death.
The miracle in this story is that Ezekiel’s faith transforms him into an agent of change. Ezekiel’s willingness to entertain the world as it should be rather than just the world as it is, moves his reality much closer to the former.
Ezekiel tries to abdicate responsibility early in this text. He dodges a tough question and passes off the hard work of instigating change to God, making himself a bystander. But God won’t accept that. God pushes Ezekiel past that. If we had to paraphrase God’s words in this passage, we might recount them like this: “Lead this work, Ezekiel. You need to be the one to prophesy to these bones. Tell them everything you know about me. Tell them everything you know that I can do. It will mean something different coming from you. It will do something different coming from you.”
God is asking Ezekiel to engage in community by speaking to the most baseline thing Ezekiel could ever speak to—what he is experiencing. The sinew and flesh on his body. The animation in his spirit. And that is the same thing that God asks of each of us, today.
If God were to call on you this week, and to ask you, “Where are the places in your life that feel dry? Tired? Hopeless? Dead?” how would you respond? And if God followed up with a command—“Prophesy to these bones”—could you follow through? Are you willing to imagine the kind of love and vitality and thriving you want to see in those places? Unfiltered. Uninhibited. Are you willing to build a vision centered in divine love for yourself and for your community?
Are you willing to try entering your valleys of dry bones carrying that vision? Professing it? Explaining it? Fielding doubts about it? Modeling it? Even if it means feeling timid or skeptical or vulnerable or strange, will you listen to God when God says, “Do it. Prophesy to these bones.”?
Our promise today is that you will not be alone in that work. God delights in guiding it. Sustaining it. Shaping it. Learning from it. God will have your back as this work evolves, forever and ever.
