Kie Bowman, pastor of Hyde Park Baptist Church, Austin, Texas, preached the convention sermon from Ezekiel 37, calling on Southern Baptists to ask God to breathe life into families, churches and the Southern Baptist Convention at the annual meeting in Dallas on June 13.
Bowman, this year’s alternate convention sermon preacher, stepped in to give the meeting’s keynote message after Paige Patterson, former president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, withdrew June 8.
During his message, Bowman noted that “Ezekiel was a priest. That means he had spent his entire life ministering around the things of God.
“But in 597 B.C.,” he noted, Ezekiel “was captured as a prisoner of war and taken to a pagan culture, and 10 years later he got word that the temple had been destroyed. That means that everything he’d ever prayed about, everything he’d ever hoped for, everything he’d ever worked for was evaporated in the winds of war.”
‘Army of skeletons’
God led Ezekiel, in a vision, to “the ultimate example of his shattered hopes and the desecration and the devastation of his national dreams — an army of skeletons,” Bowman said. “This once great army was lying scattered on the desert floor.”
The message God gave Ezekiel 2,600 years ago was one of hope and life, he said, and it applies to believers today.
“This message is still a message of hope and life to your situation because our God is a God of life and a God of resurrection, and anything that looks dead to you may be the next God raises back to life,” Bowman said. (BP)
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