David Wilkerson confesses he spent years as a self-described pessimist looking at life through dark glasses. He then reveals, through the story of the valley of dry bones, that God never resurrects his people just so they can keep talking as if they're still dead, but so that they can walk in the abounding hope that the Holy Ghost was always meant to produce. Preached: June 30, 1996 Main Points: The eye is the light of the body, and a clouded eye fills the whole body with darkness. Many believers are living out every situation, marriage, job, and trial through spiritually dark glasses. They see nothing but hopelessness even though the light inside them was never meant to be clouded.A man told David Wilkerson he had given up on his marriage as hopeless until something shifted: he decided to change himself first, and God used that change to soften his wife's heart. The dark glasses came off, not because circumstances changed first, but because hope came.Isaiah 57 warns that when God's people say "it is hopeless," they stop revering the Lord, turn to the flesh for help, and step entirely outside his will. Hopelessness isn't innocent. Jeremiah calls it a horrible thing, because it leads people to abandon obedience and follow the stubbornness of their own hearts instead.In Ezekiel 37, God raises the dry bones, covers them with flesh, and breathes life into them, yet they still say "our bones are dried, our hope is lost, we are cut off." God never resurrects people to produce a testimony of ongoing death. That's no testimony for the world to see.Fifteen years earlier, David Wilkerson admits he only talked about collapse, ruin, and coming judgment among fellow preachers until a friend asked him plainly, "David, do you have any joy? Let's speak it." From that point on, he made it a rule never to close a hard message without also bringing hope.Believers have been given authority to trample on the power of the enemy according to Luke 10:19, yet many live subjectively, bowing to every circumstance rather than reigning in life as Romans 5:17 promises. That authority isn't hyperbole. It's meant to be walked in daily.God spoke to David Wilkerson in prayer: "If you will continue to seek me with all your heart, your best days are still ahead, and you can't conceive the good that I want to do for you." That promise belongs to every one of God's children, no matter how ordinary or stuck their life currently looks. https://wcmin.us/SS260906c
