Has God ever spoken to you while you’re cleaning your kitchen? Specifically while wiping down your microwave? That happened to me today. I was cleaning and praying and reflecting on the very first post of this series, The Breath of Life, and I asked God to take me deeper. He said, “You were dead and I gave you CPR.” My mind then instantly when to the scripture in 2 Kings where Elisha laid himself upon the son of the Shunammite woman, and in 2 Ephesians that starts out saying we used to be dead because of our sins.
In the movie The Green Mile, when one of the inmates made the walk from his cell to the electric chair, the guard would say “Dead man walking, we got a dead man walking here!” So, it is with us before Jesus. We walk this earth as dead men and women lost in our life of sin. 2 Ephesians 1:5 reads: 1 You used to be dead because of your sins and acts of disobedience. 2 you walked in the ways of the ‘olam hazeh ( this world, this age) and obeyed the Ruler of the Powers of the Air, who is still at work among the disobedient. 3 Indeed, we all once lived this way - we followed the passions of our old nature and obeyed the wishes of our old nature and our own thoughts. In our natural condition we were headed for God’s wrath, just like everyone else. 4 But God is so rich in mercy and loves us with such an intense love 5 that, even when we were dead because of our acts of disobedience, he brought us to life along with the Messiah Yeshua (Jesus) - it is by grace that you have been delivered.
No matter the altar that you came to at the time of your salvation, the altar at a church, your bedroom, your car, a jail cell, it doesn’t matter, we were lying dead in our sins and he gave us CPR (Christ’s Presence Resuscitates) and breathed grace into our lungs. In that instant we are alive in Him and dead to our sins.
When the prophet Elisha passed through Shuneum, there was woman who would open her house to him, feed him and even had her husband build a little room for him on the roof of their house. She knew he was a man of God And provided him food, shelter and a place to pray and seek God. Because of her hospitality, the Lod blessed her with a son. When the boy was old enough, he went to the fields with his father and suddenly cried out that his head hurt. He was taken to his mother, where he died in her lap. Without hesitation, she took him and laid him upon the bed in the room they made for Elisha, then she went to seek Elisha herself. She didn’t send her husband, she didn’t send a servant, she sought out the man of God for herself. When they got to the house, and he saw the boy was dead, he closed himself in the room with the child and prayed. The next part of the story has always astounded me. The verse says: Then he got up on the bed and lay on top of the child, putting his mouth on his mouth, his eyes on his eyes and his hands on his hands As he streched himself out in the child, its flesh began to grow warm. 2 Kings 4: 34 He then left the room and walked around for a while, went back up and repeated this a second time and the boy sneezed seven times and then opened his eyes.
The prophet was the mouthpiece of God, and was used in an astounding way to bring life back to this child. I can only imagine what Elisha was thinking when God told him to lay upon the child with his mouth on the boy’s mouth. His breath entered into that child not once, but twice. My takeaway from this story is this: God will breathe life into us twice. Once when we are born into this world and a second time when we let Him bring us to life and out of our sin. He will press His eyes to ours so that we may see clearly the way of the Lord. He will press hands to ours so that we are able to do the work of the Lord, and he will press his mouth to ours, giving us life from death, and writing the Word on our lips so that we may speak the Word of God.
We are given a beautiful promise in 2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is united with the Messiah, he is a new creation - the old has passed; look what has become fresh and new! He doesn’t just breath life anew into us, He creates us anew. We are born again, from the breath of life of our amazing, heavenly Father.
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