Come Alive!

Ever bid a wounded animal come to you? When rescued with gentleness an invitation is given to receive loving care. Imagine the response if harshly approached: retreat, avoidance, a defensive snarl or bite, or perhaps in weakness no response at all. What then of people who snarl and snap out of their conditioning or woundedness, push away by association, certain they will be poorly treated or judged no matter how tender the approach?

When God allowed humans free will to choose, our hard-headedness fought, and keeps fighting, to be at the top of the list of ways we push God and others aside, certain we can save ourselves without help, direction, and wisdom beyond our finite minds. Yet mercifully, God still opens Himself to us.

Though the fight or flight mechanism might be life preserving, it can become a barrier to reconciling hurts and differences. Often overlooking the spiritual part of us we miss the deeper message of reconciliation as our hurting souls, so entrapped by our woundedness, stay in a protective mode. “Come alive” is an invitation to change our ways of trying to fix the wrongs of things by listening to God’s higher ways of righting things. To leave old gnarly ways behind and grow into new. It changes my prayer from lament of worry to rejoicing for the good God has given and has in store for all who come to Him. To speak to my own soul to “get up and walk” into learning God’s ways rather than dwelling in my sorry mess.

“Come alive” is a call to come out of those tombs in which we reside. Like Lazarus bound in grave cloths, dead for several days, resurrected when Jesus Christ commanded him to come out from the grave, we, too, are invited to come into the light, leave behind death, lies, and sin that destroy and strangle us. Again and again we are called by the Rescuer. Will we respond? God’s holy, sacrificial, redeeming, transformational grace bids us to come to new existence every day and, like wormy caterpillars emerging from death’s cocoon, learn the freedom of receiving wings to fly!

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LORD, let us hear Your voice calling us to come to life. Thank You that with unfailing love, grace, and mercy You keep reaching out to us to make us new. Help us to be vessels of reconciliation in a world desperately fractured and divided. Heal our wounds as You free us from things that imprison us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

John 11:43-44 NKJV “Now when He had said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!” 44 And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Loose him, and let him go.”

2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.”

Ezekiel 37:5 ‘Thus says the Lord God to these bones: “Surely I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live.”’ (See Ezekiel 37 about the army of dry bones.)

For great inspirational music check out Lauren Daigle’s song “Come Alive (Dry Bones)”.