Spiritual Body Bags

In prayer, an image developed that was shocking, to say the least. It was of a body bag, the kind used by a coroner to transport a dead body from a place of death to a morgue. As I continued to pray, the dead body within the bag began to rustle. Then I began to hear the zipper being moved from the inside, opening the bag. The person inside, who was assumed to be dead, fully unzipped the body bag and sat up.

I believe the Lord revealed the image of a body bag to say something to all of us. No person, group, or situation where spiritual death is obvious is beyond the reach of a resurrection experience.

God is in the resurrection business. Spiritual body bags are our invention, not His. We have entered a time when we will begin to hear the zippers of spiritual body bags being unzipped. What we had wrongly assumed would remain forever dead and closed will begin to open. 

The resurrection authority of Jesus Christ can unzip the tightest and most extreme enclosures of death. These are the places where we have lost hope and considered the contents of the bag, whether a person or a circumstance, to be heading for a morgue to be made ready for burial, not a resurrection. 

Jan and I have been given an assignment from the Lord that contains a word of caution. We are to watch our words. We hold each other accountable to that assignment, not allowing ourselves to get sloppy with our words. We are not allowed to use humor or the excuse of a bad day to form the words we speak. Our speech is the be filled with words of resurrection life, not words of death.

The individual lives, groups, and situations we have written off as dead and beyond the hope are waiting to hear words of faith and hope that will infuse a spiritually dead life with resurrection power allowing them to unzip their place of death and rise again.

“Jesus called out in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’” (John 11:43).

This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Garris Elkins

Featured Image by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash

About the Author

Garris Elkins is a Kingdom Winds Contributor. He and his wife, Jan, serve the global Church through writing, speaking, and mentoring. They live in southern Oregon, tucked away in the foothills of the Rogue Valley. Their shared desire is to have each person learn how to hear the heart of God and become a transforming voice in their culture.

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