The War for the Reapers

What I found in the valley of dry bones, and why I believe Jesus is making one last call

The band was playing "Highway to Hell" when God found me.

It was New Year's Eve going into 2018, and I was standing at a craps table in a casino with dice in my hand. The countdown hit zero, the room erupted, the music started, and the Spirit of God fell on me right there in the middle of that hellish little party. Tears started running down my face while I was still holding the dice. And I heard Him say, Brad, I have more for you than this. Can you help Me rescue these people who are on a highway to hell?

I loved God with everything in me. I had been on fire for Him. I knew the purpose of God on my life and I had felt it working. And still I had ended up there, because wounds have a way of moving you off course while you are busy telling yourself it does not matter anymore.

That is the part I want you to hear. God is willing to walk into your darkness to get you. He is not afraid of your sin. He died for it, and He defeated it. He will walk right into the cave you are hiding in, even when your cave has a roulette table in it.

I know, because I got up from the craps table and moved to the roulette wheel hoping His voice would not carry that far. It did. Standing there yelling for red twenty-one, I started feeling things I had not felt since I was walking in my purpose. I looked at the dealer and felt his pain. I looked around that room and remembered how real eternity is.

The Valley Is a Real Place

Before that night, I had spent a long season in the valley of dry bones. I want to be plain about what that means, because a lot of us are living there and calling it something else.

You can love God with your whole heart and still feel dry on the inside. You can attend, serve a little, believe every right thing, and still be spiritually inactive. That is where the enemy wants the wounded. He is not confused about what is coming. Scripture is clear that there is a final harvest in the last days, and he knows it, so one of his strategies is to wound as many of the final reapers as he can and leave them lying in a valley, lifeless and out of the field.

He does not have to argue you out of your calling. He just has to hurt you badly enough that you decide to sit down and take care of yourself for a while.

I have been wounded by betrayal. I have been wounded by spiritual manipulation and by people I trusted. My marriage hung by a thread. We walked through infertility. A ministry I had served for fifteen years came apart, and I sat on my couch at forty years old asking God how I got there. We buried our daughter. Wound after wound after wound.

Here is what I have come to believe about that. If the enemy has been coming after your life this hard, it is likely because there is a serious call on your life to bring in souls, and he wants you distracted from it.

Look at Ezekiel. Everyone loves to talk about the end-time war in chapters 38 and 39. Read what happens first. Chapter 37 is the valley of dry bones coming alive. That is a picture of the church in this hour, and it is the order God works in. The bones stand up, and then the army goes to war.

One Obedient Step

People ask me how a person gets out of the valley. The answer is simpler than we want it to be. Obedience to the Holy Spirit. One obedient step, plus one obedient step, plus one obedient step, until you look up and you are somewhere you never imagined standing again.

For me, the first step was going home, and God began restoring my marriage.

The second step was stranger. I was on my knees asking God what He wanted me to do, and He said, “Call Larry Ragland.” I knew who Pastor Larry was. I had never spoken to him in my life and I did not have his number. So I called the church, left a message, sent an email, and told myself that if this was God, he would call me back. Three days later my phone rang.

I sat down in a big comfortable chair across from his desk, and the tears came. Big tears. Trapped pain I did not know was still in me, pain that had been trying to get out for years.

That is the pattern I keep seeing in restoration. Early on, God will tell you to call somebody. He will tell you to get in front of somebody, because healing rarely happens alone. Scripture ties confession and healing together for a reason.

I understand the walls. I understand building them so high that nobody can reach you. The problem with a wall that keeps everyone out is that it also keeps your light in. You cannot help a single person outside of it.

Then God asked for more. He told me to tell my wife, Haley, everything. Not the summary version. Every dollar I had lost, every trip I had hidden. I argued about how that could possibly help. He said that if I wanted to be free, I would confess all of it. Hidden sin leaves a door open in your life. When you expose it yourself, the door closes and the chain has nothing left to hold.

Haley was gracious with me. She told me she thought I could still live there. And the moment I finished confessing, the power of that thing broke.

Aim for Purity

Somewhere along the way, a lot of believers decided that sin has no real cost because heaven is already settled. Heaven is settled. Jesus paid for that, and you are righteous before God because of what He did. Sin costs you something else, and it is more expensive than we admit.

It costs you intimacy with Jesus.

Think of a strong marriage. You are going to have a disagreement at some point. When I do something that wounds Haley, the tension sits there between us until I humble myself and make it right. Sin puts that same tension into your relationship with God. You cannot hear Him as clearly. The oil stops flowing. You start wondering why alignment with His will feels so far out of reach, and the answer has been sitting in the room the whole time.

For thirty years I fought one thing in my life and could not get free of it. Then God told me I was fighting for the wrong reasons. I was trying so I would stop feeling guilty. I was trying so I would not be caught. He told me to want it gone so that I could be pure in His sight when He comes, and so that nothing would sit between us in the meantime. When the motive changed, the thing I had fought for thirty years broke in a moment.

Aim for purity rather than perfection. Perfection is out of reach and He never asked for it. Purity is preparation, and Revelation says the bride prepares herself.

Forgiveness Is a Journey

I thought I was done with forgiveness three separate times.

The first time, God told me to go to the man who had betrayed me and make the first move. I said that forgiving him would let him off the hook for everything he had done. God said it takes him off my hook and puts him on His hook, and vengeance belongs to Him anyway. I hit every red light on the way there wanting to turn around. When he walked out on the porch, something came over me and I hugged him and told him he had hurt me badly and I had come to forgive him. I walked back to my truck and felt the mercy of God running down over me like oil. That was not me. That was Jesus in me, giving that hug.

About a year later, my brother asked me to cut two yards while he was out of town. One of them backed up to that same man's property, and God told me to cut his grass, too. I decided his grass probably did not need cutting. I drove by. It needed cutting worse than I thought. So I pulled the mower out of the truck in the August heat and went up and down the rows of my enemy's yard, sweat pouring off me, and he was not even home to see it. I asked God why He had me do it. He said, I did not ask you to cut it for him. I asked you to cut it for you. Every bead of sweat that falls in your enemy's grass is more poison leaving your heart.

Five years after that, I was at work and asked God if there was anything He wanted from me that day. He said He wanted me to forgive that man. I got angry. I told Him I was finished with that conversation. He told me that in my heart I was still saying that man owed me an apology, and that if someone still owes you something, you have not fully forgiven them. He reminded me that He died for me while I was still a sinner, and that I had never asked Him to.

It took two or three weeks before I could get on my knees and mean it. That man owes me nothing. He is completely Yours. From that moment, I began hearing the voice of the Lord like I never had before, and assignments started showing up at my door.

King of the Cave

There is one more thing that keeps reapers out of the field, and it is subtle, because it looks like ministry.

David ran from Saul into the cave of Adullam. He was hurt, betrayed by his spiritual leader, and while he was in there, four hundred men gathered around him. Good things happened in that cave. And the whole time, David knew that his destiny was not a cave. He had to decide whether he would be king of Israel or settle for being king of the cave.

I settled for a while. I had thirty people in my home going after God, and it was good, and it was small, and it was not the full assignment. Then Pastor Larry came to speak at my house. He set his notes aside, turned to First Kings, and said the Lord had a message. The message was Elijah in the cave, and the question God asked him there: What are you doing here?

God will send someone into your cave to call you out of it. He sent Gad to David and told him to leave the stronghold. He sent Pastor Larry into my living room.

You were never called to be a candle in a cave. You were called to be a light to the world, and your light reaches only the people standing inside those walls with you until you walk out.

The Last Call

In Matthew 20, the landowner goes out early to hire workers for his vineyard. He goes out again at nine, at noon, at three, and then once more at five o'clock, near the end of the day. He finds people still standing around and asks why they have been there all day doing nothing. They tell him nobody hired them. He sends them into the vineyard anyway. Then evening comes and he tells his foreman to call the workers in.

When I read call the workers, it came off the page and into my chest.

We are in the last hour. The King of Kings is going out one more time, and He is making one last call. He is asking you why you have been standing around doing less than He called you to do, and He is still hiring.

Ephesians says God prepared good works for you in advance. It never promises you will do them. It says He prepared them. That is why alignment matters so much. There are a lot of Christians doing biblical things, and there are far fewer doing the specific thing God asked of them. Jesus said His nourishment came from doing the will of the Father and finishing His work. When you line your life up with what He is building instead of what you are building, the oil comes.

A massive harvest requires a massive enlistment of reapers. If the greatest harvest the world has ever seen is coming, then the most active generation of reapers who ever lived is coming with it.

Coming to church is not the field. Serving is part of the field, and everything you do for the kingdom counts, and still the field is out there where your neighbor and your coworker and the family member you used to pray for are living out the last hours of a decision that lasts forever.

There is a war going on for souls right now. There is also a war going on for the reapers, and you are in it.

So the question for this hour is a personal one. What is keeping you stuck? Unforgiveness, a hidden thing you have never confessed, anger you have been carrying toward God for something the enemy did to you, or a cave you have grown comfortable ruling. Whatever it is, lay it down and get in the field.

Your call still stands. The hour is late, the harvest is here, and no matter where you have been, you can finish in the field.

Brad Graydon is the founder of BGTV Studios in Birmingham, Alabama. In 2023 he began recording in the basement of his home, and by that October he had opened the studio to the community so that people with a message on their heart could get it out to the world. More than fifty podcasters have since come through those rooms, across denominations, races, and generations, and the work has become part of what God is doing to unite the body of Christ in a city long marked by division. Brad and his wife, Haley, make their home in Birmingham. Learn more at bgtvstudios.com.

His book, The Last Call, expands the message in this article. It is written for the reaper who has been wounded and set aside, and it walks through the valley of dry bones, the cost of hidden sin, the long obedience of forgiveness, and the harvest field waiting on the other side of one obedient step. The Last Call is available wherever books are sold.

For speaking engagements and contact information, visit bradgraydon.com.