Sermon: Forgiveness Comes Through Revival

Sometimes God gives you a sermon to deliver where you know the Holy Spirit is talking to you…the preacher. This sermon, “Revival Calls for Forgiveness”, was that type of sermon for me.

I used Ezekiel 37:9-10 as my scriptural base. In this passage, God is speaking to the prophet Ezekiel instructing him to prophesy to the dead bones in the valley, to tell the bones that God will breathe on them to restore them back to life. God tells Ezekiel to say to these dry bones, “Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’”

We all have a valley of dry bones in our lives. That’s where we keep all of our disappointments, our heartaches, our resentments and our pain. God wants to revive us, and restore us, but God can’t do that if we refuse to forgive ourselves and others.

I am so grateful for this word. I am so grateful that the Holy Spirit stood up within me to share it with the congregation at Gethsemane African Methodist Episcopal Church.

In this moment, I prophesy over us saying, “Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe” into the dead parts of us so we may live!

Candance Greene

Rev. Candance L. Greene is an ordained Itinerant Deacon in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She is the 2023-2024 Hooper-Keefe Preaching Award recipient. Chosen by the faculty at Fuller Theology Seminary, this award is given to students who have shown an outstanding giftedness in Homiletics (preaching).

Rev. Candance is a published writer, podcaster and the founder of Cherishedflight, a ministry dedicated to helping people realign with the peace of God. She has produced over 100 episodes of Cherishedflight the Podcast where she shares biblical steps her listeners can take to implement the peace of God in their lives on a daily basis.

Candance is a graduate of Paine College where she earned a BA in English, and Goucher College where she earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing. She has been published in a variety of anthologies, scholarly books, and journals including: Bittersweet: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry; Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction; Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir; and the Huffington Post. A native of Nashville, Candance now resides in Baltimore with her husband and three children.