Good morning.
Father, we just praise You, Lord, for You know us, and yet You love us. You know us, and You made a way for us, Lord. You know us, and You want us to be Your friends—Your friend, Lord. Praise You for Your lovingkindness to us.
Father, as I stand up here to speak this morning, I just pray that the words I speak would be just Your words, Lord, and not my own. I pray that this would be from You and not from my flesh. I pray this in Christ’s holy and precious name. Amen.
I wanted to start off with a little joke, which is how you’re supposed to start off, you know, speaking. So here’s the story.
There was this preacher, and he got up one Sunday and preached this wonderful, eloquent message. The people were blessed, and it was truly a good message. The next Sunday came, and the preacher stood up and gave the exact same message, word for word. He went right through it—the exact same thing.
The people were puzzled. The preacher was doing the traditional preacher thing of shaking hands as they left, and one lady came up and said, “Preacher, do you realize that was the exact same message that you preached last Sunday?”
The preacher said, “Yes. If it’s worth saying once, it’s worth saying twice.”
Well, I tell that story because I was supposed to speak last Sunday, but Brother Stephen said he would like to speak, so I gladly stepped aside. Not knowing what he was going to speak about, it was basically what I’m going to speak about this morning.
So, there are a lot of things in common between what he said last week and what I’m going to say this week. Just bear with me. Hopefully, having a slightly different angle on it will shed a little more light on the subject.
I also want to give my standard disclaimer as I get up here to speak this morning: please don’t take this as me saying that I have these concepts all worked out in my life, because I don’t. What I’m here to say is really what the Lord is working with me on. It is not that He has it worked out in my life, but He has shown me these things, and He is working in me on them.
Back a couple of months ago, I was reading the book of Ephesians—Ephesians 4—and a little phrase in Ephesians 4 just jumped out at me. When Stephen, or when Jim, spoke on Ephesians 4 last week, he completely skipped over this phrase, which I was happy for. I think three times would be a little much.
I’ve learned over the years that when a phrase jumps off the page at me in my quiet time, I need to step back and take a deeper look at it and see what the Lord has to say about that phrase. I am here today to report what the Lord has been showing me about this little phrase in Ephesians 4.
The phrase in Ephesians 4 is: “the prisoner of Christ.”
It is found several times—actually, five times—in the New Testament, and Paul uses it each time. I want to quickly go over those five instances. I will read the passages and tell you what they are, but you do not have to turn to them because they are pretty short.
Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, beseech you to walk worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called.
—Ephesians 4:1
For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus in behalf of you Gentiles—
—Ephesians 3:1
Be not ashamed therefore of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me His prisoner: but suffer hardship with the gospel according to the power of God.
—2 Timothy 1:8
Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, unto Philemon our beloved and fellow-worker.
—Philemon 1:1
Yet for love’s sake I rather beseech, being such a one as Paul the aged, and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus.
—Philemon 1:9
When Paul talks about being a prisoner, I think he is speaking to us on two different levels. One is a physical level, and then there is a spiritual level—two different dimensions of this. What I want to talk about mostly today is the spiritual dimension of Paul being a prisoner of Christ, and how that can also be reflected in our lives today.
Just to give an overview of prisoners in Scripture, there are really three different types of spiritual prisoners. I want to talk about those three and give you an overview of them.
First is a prisoner to sin, or a prisoner of the world. This is how we all start off life: as prisoners of sin, captive to our own desires. It is the natural state of man. Everybody starts this way, whether they are aware of it or not, whether they are a good person or not, whether they are born into a good family or not. We are all prisoners of this world.
As prisoners of this world, we may not realize this, but we are really in solitary confinement. Everybody else in the world is a prisoner too, and everybody who is in prison in the world is trying to be in control of his own situation. They all have an agenda.
So there is nobody you can trust, nobody you can confide in, and really nobody you can let guide you, because everybody has his own agenda. We are all on our own. Everybody is struggling to climb to the top of whatever garbage heap they are trying to rule.
Every decision has to be made on our own. There is nobody out there who can guide us, who can lead us, because everybody is untrustworthy. We are all prisoners in the world. This is before we are set free by Christ.
Because the world is trapped, and people kind of know that the buck always stops with them, the world has developed a system that says, “No, you’re really not responsible. It is always somebody else’s fault—society’s fault, your wife’s fault, your mother’s fault. It is someone else’s fault.”
Anything to relieve that sense of guilt that comes from being ultimately responsible for your own fate.
There are others who are prisoners of the world who see it as a paradise. They can do whatever they want to do. There is really no rule. Actually, there is one rule: if it feels good, do it.
It seems like that old folk song, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” That is how some prisoners of the world view life, but it is actually just death. It is emptiness. There is nothing there.
In my first year of college, I was enticed by the world, enticed by the fun that could be had by forsaking Christ and going off and doing whatever I wanted to do. But praise the Lord, He also enticed me. He won me with the true joy that comes from following Him, and not from following my own cravings.
Prisoners of the world may not even realize that they are prisoners. The enemy deludes prisoners into thinking that they are free, that they can have whatever fun they want, that they can do whatever they want, and that they are masters of their own domain. But they are not really free. They are just stumbling around.
I think the enemy does not want his prisoners to know that they are prisoners, so he does not give them too hard a time. They can kind of muddle through life. Everything is going okay: “I’ve got my nice car. I’ve got a nice job. Things are going fine.”
So the enemy tries to keep their life from being too disturbed, so they do not start looking for a way out. But occasionally, the enemy does like to torment them—to poke them, drag them through the mud, drag them across a board of chains, or put them on a bed of nails, or whatever—just for the fun of it. But not enough to have them really start looking for a way out.
There is a second type of prisoner discussed in Scripture. I really was not aware of this until I started looking into the concept of being a prisoner. This is found in Colossians 2.
Take heed lest there shall be any one that maketh spoil of you through his philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
—Colossians 2:8
Then, skipping down to the end of the chapter:
If ye died with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, do ye subject yourselves to ordinances,
Handle not, nor taste, nor touch
(all which things are to perish with the using), after the precepts and doctrines of men?
Which things have indeed a show of wisdom in will-worship, and humility, and severity to the body; but are not of any value against the indulgence of the flesh.
—Colossians 2:20-23
This captive—the captive of elementary principles—appears to be somebody with a religious bent. They are a very religious person, but it is really just a religious façade over the captivity of sin.
The captive of sin is engaging his lustful desires, the lustful desires of the flesh. But the captive of elementary principles is really engaging the soul—the unredeemed soul. That ends up in pride about how well they can control themselves and how well they can run their own affairs.
If you look at the world’s religious systems, I think they can pretty much all be categorized as elementary principles of the world. You look at Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Eastern religions, Native American religions, and all these things. They have this principle in common: you work hard to satisfy God.
You work hard to satisfy God, and if you are good enough, you get to go to heaven eventually—maybe someday. If you are a Hindu, it is after many, many lives that you may eventually get to go to heaven.
But when you boil all these systems down, what you really get is a minimization of the impact of sin. They are saying that sin is something you can get rid of, something you can wipe away with enough hard work.
It also says that you are not that different from God—that with a little spit and polish, a little buffing, you can fellowship with God. You can be like Him.
Sadly to say, many people who follow Christ, or who are trying to follow Christ, are captivated by nothing more than the elementary principles of the world. You have a lot of rules: “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch.” Paul calls these simply the teachings of men.
It is our flesh trying to shape our own flesh into something that our flesh thinks is acceptable to God.
It is not until we finally admit that there is nothing we can do to satisfy God that we can step out of that captivity—the elementary principles—and step into captivity to Christ.
That is the third type of prisoner: the prisoner of Christ. Paul called himself this five times in Scripture. A prisoner of Christ, as Paul sees it, has been bought from the world, has been freed from the world, and is now the possession of Christ.
Christ owns him, and Christ has bought him. But unlike a prisoner of the world, who has a cruel, harsh, evil captor, as prisoners of Christ we have a kind and compassionate Captor.
He does not place us in solitary confinement. We are no longer all by ourselves. He is there. He has placed His Spirit within us to lead us and guide us. We do not have to depend on ourselves. We do not have to depend on another man. We can depend completely—and we should depend completely—on Him.
He wants us to depend completely on Him as our Captor. But He does not desire to hold us against our will. His desire is that we yearn for His captivity, that we yearn to be in His possession.
He wants us to seek what His bounds are, to seek direction from Him. He wants us to desire to stay in His prison.
Christ Himself was the ultimate example of being a prisoner. He was a prisoner to His Father. He did not desire to do anything outside of what His Father desired for Him. He was content, to the point of death, to stay within the bounds that His Father placed on Him.
From the outside, being a prisoner of Christ may look similar to being captive to elementary principles. You know, we are not out chasing the next fun thing. But from the inside, there is a vast difference between our life as prisoners of Christ and the life of someone imprisoned by elementary principles of the world.
As prisoners of Christ, our life is a life of forgiveness and dependence. We admit that we do not know everything that we need to do all the time. We are leaning upon the Lord for direction. We have the joy of His forgiveness and the joy of His love.
Someone captive to elementary principles is fearful of the next step he may take. Maybe it will be the wrong one, and he will step off the cliff and into the wrath of God. Whereas, as prisoners of Christ, we may make a mistake—and we probably will make a mistake, perhaps before we get home today—but we know that Christ will forgive us and welcome us back in.
I have this handy-dandy pocket guide, kind of summarizing what the three different lives are like as prisoners.
A prisoner of sin hopes that tomorrow feels better than today. He seeks after whatever feels good. When it comes down to it, if he believed in something, he would recognize that his lifestyle is not worth living. Therefore, he must not believe in anything. He believes in nothing other than what feels good.
The whole purpose of his life is not to get caught. By that I mean avoiding any kind of lasting repercussions from what he is doing today. His daily walk is simply one of chasing pleasure—perhaps having a midlife crisis and finding a nice fast car. What feels good is what he wants to do today.
Somebody who is a prisoner of elementary principles hopes that he is good enough. The only one he really has faith in is himself. If he had faith in Christ, then he would probably recognize that Christ has done it, and there is no need to depend upon himself.
The purpose in life is to measure up to some criteria, and that criteria may be changing from day to day. When it comes down to his daily walk, he is avoiding pleasure and avoiding anything that may bring meaning.
Somebody following very strict laws of “Don’t do this, don’t do that. Do this, do that,” seems to find meaning in obeying laws. If he really sat down and said, “Okay, why does God want me to do this? What is the benefit to God for me living this way?” there is no real answer to that.
Why does God want us to shape ourselves? He does not want that. He wants to shape us into His image.
The prisoner of Christ has hope in Christ, and faith in Christ. His purpose, as he goes through life, is to be conformed to the image of Christ. His daily walk is one of dependence upon the Lord.
So when Paul talks about being a prisoner of Christ, what is he really saying? He is describing two dimensions: a physical realm and a spiritual realm. They do overlap some, and they do impact one another. We will talk about that a little later.
In the physical realm, Paul was a physical prisoner. He was being held captive by the government of Rome. You probably remember that he was on trial before Festus, a governor. Festus was about to release him, and Paul said, “I appeal to Caesar.” So he was held captive until he could be brought before Caesar, before the emperor, to plead his case.
So Paul was not free. He was not free to go about the ministry that would seem right for him, given his potential and capability. None of us here are currently imprisoned because of our faith, so we do not have a lot in common with Paul being a prisoner of the government of Rome.
But there are physical situations in this world in which we can find ourselves prisoners. A lot of them may revolve around serving the body of Christ.
Serving the body of Christ can be a tough, arduous thing, where people get on our nerves. Their personalities grind on us. What they do bothers us. Their behavior bothers us. It is like, “If I have to deal with that brother one more time, if I have to hear his complaint one more time, I am out of here.”
Or, “That sister, she is just so dominating. She sits in the Bible study, she dominates, and I am just not going to go there anymore because she really bothers me.” You feel like a prisoner, bound up with these other believers and having to serve these people who sometimes really get on your nerves.
It can be a prison of physical illness, where you feel, “Lord, I just can’t take this anymore. I am sick all the time. I just want to get out of it.”
It can be a coworker who is impossible to work with, who is a vile, reprehensible person, and you really hate working with him. It is a bad situation, and you just want to get out and go somewhere else. Or it could be a boss who is the same way.
There are many types of tough situations that the Lord will place us in, and they are unpleasant. But when He places us in those situations, He has a purpose for us being there. At the time, it can seem like death; it can seem like drudgery. But He has placed us there for a purpose.
As prisoners of Christ, our life is not our own. We cannot just decide willy-nilly what we want to do today. We cannot decide that we just want to go through life with a minimum of discomfort and a minimum of trouble.
He has a purpose for us, and accomplishing that purpose is the utmost thing on His mind. It is not our comfort that is on His mind. It is His purpose.
Just a little aside about Paul’s physical imprisonment: it may seem very distant and very unthinkable that any of us would ever be imprisoned for our faith. But I have this feeling that the time is coming when we will be faced with that choice—where either we follow Christ fully, and so we are imprisoned or persecuted because of Him.
I cannot point to any hard evidence. There are no laws being passed, and no one is being persecuted now, but I just feel like there is this shadow gathering on the horizon, waiting to engulf our society.
There is an attitude, with the war on terrorism, that the problem is not Islam, but that the problem is any religion that holds an absolute truth. It feels like that is building to the point where, if we stand up and hold an absolute truth, we will be breaking the law and subjecting ourselves to imprisonment.
I think we need to prepare ourselves for that eventuality: that being a Christian and claiming to be a Christian will be a disreputable thing. I think we need to train our children that imprisonment, torture, or death is a small price to pay for the forgiveness and love of Christ.
I do not know how to do that. I am pretty sure I have not done that in my children. But I think the time is coming when we will need to make that choice, and they will need to make that choice.
Okay, enough of that.
In the spiritual realm, Paul is speaking about being a prisoner of Christ in a spiritual sense. Paul was fully owned by Christ, and Paul recognized that. Christ had captured Paul, and Paul saw that there was nothing he could do about it. There was no way that he could wrest himself from Christ’s control.
Christ had purchased him and was not going to let him go. If we have placed our faith in Christ, we are in that same situation. Christ has a grip on us, and He is not going to let us go.
But it is not a grip that forces us to do His will. It is a grip that welcomes us, beckons us, into more and more obedience with Him.
He wants us to become captivated by Him—not just captured by Him, but captivated by Him—as we become more and more attracted to Him. As He draws us in, we can look back and see the things that captivated us before and see how empty and hollow they were.
We can look back and see what He has freed us from. We can look back and see how He has changed us and how He is conforming us to His image. As we look back and see how He is working in us, it deepens our captivation to Him.
He may place us into what seem like earthly prisons—bad situations, tough situations, illness, bad work situations—but it is all for a purpose. That purpose is to conform us into His image and to teach us dependence on Him.
This is where physical captivity crosses over into spiritual captivity: He uses the circumstances of the world, the physical circumstances in our life, to teach us spiritual dependence upon Him. He uses the physical and the spiritual to sanctify the soul.
How do we end up as prisoners of Christ? I want to give a quick discussion of another type—a fourth type—of prison that I did not really talk about. There is a debtor’s prison mentioned in Scripture.
The old thing was that you got in debt, and the person you owed money to could throw you in prison. Well, we were all born in the debtor’s prison. When we were born into this world, we had a debt of sin that we had no means of paying.
To get out of debtor’s prison, you had to have somebody come along and pay your way out. They had to basically loan you money to buy your way out of prison. The problem with us in our spiritual debtor’s prison is that everybody around us is equally in debt. Nobody has any money. Nobody can buy us out of this spiritual debtor’s prison, so we are all stuck.
Well, Christ came, and He was not in debtor’s prison. He bought us out of debtor’s prison. When you were purchased out of debtor’s prison, you became a slave of the person who bought you out. You now owed them.
So when Christ came and bought our freedom, He did not buy us and release us. He bought us into captivity to Him. But, as Kenny prayed this morning, He did not buy us as slaves. He bought us as His friends.
No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known unto you.
—John 15:15
The fact that He has called us friends is, I think, key to understanding and rejoicing in these prisons, these tough situations, in which we find ourselves.
As a Friend, He calls us to be bondservants. A bondservant is a servant who has a relationship with the master. They are not equal; they are not on equal footing. There is a master and there is a bondservant. But they have affection for one another, and they have a relationship with one another.
A bondservant has chosen to serve the master. The bondservant could be free, but he prefers to be with his master, and he prefers the service of his master. He prefers that more than he prefers freedom.
Okay, so we are prisoners. If we have trusted in the Lord and put our faith in Him, we are prisoners of Christ. How does this affect my life today? When I walk out of here today, how does it affect me?
First off, I think the major way is that there is no escape from this prison of Christ. There is no escape as a prisoner of Christ. Stephen spoke about this extensively last week: once captured, never free.
Christ bought us. He owns us. There is no place we can go where He does not own us. If we flee from Him, He will pursue us. He will bring us back into His kingdom, into His custody, and He will not stop at anything until His purpose is achieved in us.
It is not a hateful pursuit, not a vengeful pursuit. He is not chasing us down to run over us. He is chasing us down to bring us back, like a shepherd bringing back a lost sheep.
Sometimes, when we flee from Him, we just make things harder on ourselves. Like Jonah: he was given a very distasteful task. He had to go preach to a bunch of people that he did not like, so he fled from the Lord. He tried to escape the prison of the Lord.
Because of that, he got to be swallowed by a whale and spend three days in its stomach. Ugh. Then he got vomited out of the whale, and after that, he had to go back and start over again where he started fleeing. The Lord said, “Okay, now you have to go do what I initially asked you to do.”
So when we flee from Him, He is going to pursue us. We can make things worse, but He is still going to pursue us to bring us back.
If we find ourselves in a tough situation—a bad job, a bad boss, a tough situation in the body of Christ—we should not immediately assume that escaping that tough situation is what the Lord would have us do.
He may have placed us in that situation to conform us into His image and to do something in our lives. There may be a lesson in that tough situation, and that lesson may not be learned by running from it.
Or that tough situation may not be about you. Sometimes the thought does not cross our mind that it is not about us. Christ may have placed us in that tough situation for someone else’s benefit. If we flee that situation, then we are depriving someone else of a blessing.
Christ may have put that bad boss in our life not for us, but for that bad boss, so that he could come to know the Lord. We cannot immediately assume that, because we are in a tough situation, it is our right as children of God to escape that tough situation.
We should never believe that Christ has destined us for a comfortable life. If we start believing that, then we are headed for a world of hurt.
What we should do in that tough situation is depend completely upon Him and seek Him as to how we should act in that situation. Is leaving the situation the right thing to do? Is staying the right thing to do? How do we conduct ourselves if we do stay?
That is where the Lord is working conformity into us by putting us in that tough situation, so that we can depend on Him and not depend on our own understanding. We can depend on Him as to how we should proceed.
If we are in a tough situation, if we are being shaken by something, if something is really bothering us, it may be because of something that we need to let go of.
If we are holding on to something that is not of the Lord, and it is getting shaken, then by the fact that we are holding on to it, we are going to be shaken. The Lord is unshakable. If we are leaning on Him, if we are standing on Him, we are not going to be shaken.
If your job gets bad or you lose your job and you are shaken by it, maybe that is because you were depending on the job instead of relying on the Lord.
If you are shaken by the prospect of this upcoming election, maybe you are holding on to the wrong thing. Maybe you are holding on to the government instead of holding on to Christ.
We cannot be shaken by something we are not holding on to. As an example, I have absolutely no concern over who is going to win the World Series. I do not even know who is playing in the World Series. Who cares?
I derive no feeling of self-worth from being able to choose the winning team. I know that whoever wins the World Series, it is not going to matter at all to my life. So I am not shaken at all about who is winning or losing in the World Series—not even a slight little tremor.
But, to be honest, I wish I could say the same thing in my life about this election. I know that my citizenship is not of this world, but I cannot help it. I am concerned. I am shaken. I am worried about it.
It is an area of, I think, a lack of faith in mine that I am too concerned about. My concern steps into fear when I think of what is coming for our country.
I do not think the Lord calls us to seek out bad situations. He does not want us in a jam all the time. That is not what He has called us to, either. What He has called us to is to be one hundred percent dependent upon His direction.
I think that is the essence of being conformed to His image. Christ was one hundred percent dependent on His Father. Even though Christ was completely capable of managing His own affairs, He laid that down and was completely dependent upon His Father and completely obedient to His Father.
Another application, another impact on our daily life of being prisoners of Christ, is that this prison sentence is a life term. There is no parole. There are no weekend passes. There is no work release.
We do not step out of this captivity on Monday morning when we step into our job. If anything, on Monday morning when we step into our job, this captivity becomes more defined and more evident.
We cannot step out of it for a quick getaway and say, “I am going to run off and have fun tonight, and tomorrow morning I will have my quiet time again and get back into this prison.”
The prison of Christ is forever. There is no retirement. There are no weekend passes. There is no time off—no time off for good behavior.
We cannot go off on vacation and say, “Well, I am just going to go on vacation now. I am going to forget about the church. I am going to forget about everything. I am just going to go to the beach and have fun for a week.”
As prisoners of Christ, we need to be captivated by Him so that every day is focused on Him and on this life that He has placed us in.
A third application or impact on our life is that, as prisoners, we have only limited interaction with the world outside the prison. We can look out the window and seemingly see the world passing us by, doing so many neat things. You know, there is so much going on.
But we are in this tough situation. We are dealing with something in the church, or dealing with a tough job situation, and the world is passing us by because the Lord is dealing with this. That can be rough.
I know that, for me, that is something I struggle with—probably the thing I struggle with the most. All the things going on in the world seem so interesting. I know up here that they are not for me because I belong to Christ, but for some reason my flesh is still drawn to them and still wants to be involved in those things.
It is a constant struggle and a tugging not to be drawn into the flow of the world, where the world is going.
Also, as prisoners of Christ, thankfully, our Captor provides for all our needs. As prisoners of Christ, we do not have to go around scrounging every day for our daily existence, for our meaning, for spiritual benefit, or for physical needs. He provides for us. He will not let His children starve.
If we flee from Him, step out of His prison, and run from it, I think we are kind of on our own at that point. But He will not let us flounder. He will not let us crash. He may let us learn a hard lesson, but He is not going to let us crash on the rocks.
But all this talk about being a prisoner may make you think about the worship we had an hour ago, where there was a lot of talk about being free. We are saved into freedom. Christ did save us into freedom.
For freedom did Christ set us free: stand fast therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage.
—Galatians 5:1
So Christ did free us. We are free from the yoke of sin. But we are set free for a purpose. He did not set us free to run around willy-nilly, doing whatever we wanted or whatever we felt was right. He freed us for a purpose. We are bound to Christ for that purpose.
For when ye were servants of sin, ye were free in regard of righteousness.
What fruit then had ye at that time in the things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death.
But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto sanctification, and the end eternal life.
—Romans 6:20-22
According to Paul in the book of Romans, Christ paid our debt, and we are now enslaved to Him. But that enslavement provides benefit: the benefit of sanctification and the benefit of eternal life.
For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died;
and He died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him Who for their sakes died and rose again.
—2 Corinthians 5:14-15
So He brought us into this life. He paid the price. He bought us into this freedom so that we might live for Him—not for ourselves, not for our own pleasures, but to live for Him.
In buying this freedom, He wants us to willingly choose to live for Him. He bought this freedom so that we could turn around and return it to Him. As I said before, He wants us to choose to serve Him, not like a slave, but like a bondservant.
A slave has no choice about who, where, or what he does to serve the master. It is not up to him because he is a slave. But a bondservant has tasted both slavery and freedom. The bondservant has the opportunity to be free. The master sets him free, and he returns. He chooses to live for his master.
Now that Christ has bought our freedom, He desires that we turn around and serve Him. This act of service over freedom, I think, is the hallmark of Christ. It is the hallmark of the image of Christ.
He set aside His freedom, His freedom at the side of the Father, and He came and served the Father, and He served us. He did not count His equality with God as something to be grasped. Instead, He took on the form of a bondservant.
He would have us be conformed to this same image—the image of being a bondservant. We cannot be bondservants unless we are first set free. He bought our freedom. Now we must return and lay that freedom back down at His feet and ask Him to shape us into images worthy of Him as bondservants.
To reinforce this purpose of conformity to His image as bondservants, we can look at the first mention of prison or jail in Scripture. The principle of first mention is that the first time a word or concept is mentioned in Scripture kind of sets the tone for that word or concept throughout Scripture.
Does anybody know when the first mention of prison is in Scripture?
Joseph. Very good. Joseph was the first mention of jail. It is in Genesis 39, beginning with verse 19.
And it came to pass, when his master heard the words of his wife, which she spake unto him, saying, After this manner did thy servant to me; that his wrath was kindled.
And Joseph’s master took him, and put him into the prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were bound: and he was there in the prison.
But the Lord was with Joseph, and showed kindness unto him, and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison.
And the keeper of the prison committed to Joseph’s hand all the prisoners that were in the prison; and whatsoever they did there, he was the doer of it.
The keeper of the prison looked not to anything that was under his hand, because the Lord was with him; and that which he did, the Lord made it to prosper.
—Genesis 39:19-23
Now, it is commonly understood that Joseph is a type of Christ, that there are many similarities and many pictures in Joseph’s life of what Christ did. This is another one: Joseph was unfairly and unjustly imprisoned.
Even though he was unjustly imprisoned, he remained faithful and dependent upon the Lord. Because of Joseph’s faithfulness, Joseph was blessed, the children of Israel were blessed and saved, and the nation of Egypt—the world—was blessed.
All this was because Joseph remained faithful and dependent upon the Lord.
So from this conformity, from Joseph having the image of Christ in his dependence on the Lord, there were three outcomes.
Actually, let me back up there. I stated that wrong. When we are conformed to Christ, when we are prisoners of Christ and are being conformed into His image, there are three outcomes, as we see in Joseph’s life, as we see with Christ, and as we see in the lives of people who are truly prisoners of Christ.
First, they are blessed when they are conformed into the magnificent image of Christ through that captivity. Second, the body of Christ—the church—is blessed through their captivity and through their being conformed to the image of Christ.
Most importantly, Christ is blessed by the prisoner of Christ being conformed into His image and being made into a more perfect bride. All three of these outcomes feed upon one another, with the third outcome being magnified the most as we are conformed to His image through our captivity to Him.
So, just to wrap things up and summarize what I have said: if we have chosen to follow Christ, and we are depending on Him for our righteousness, then we are prisoners of Christ.
Once we are prisoners of Christ, there is no escape. He will pursue us to bring us into a full relationship with Him. He will use tough, hard, intractable situations. He will use good situations. He will use physical problems, and He may even use imprisonment—but all to bring us into a full relationship and conformity with Him.
That full relationship, I believe, is personified by being a bondservant. We are given our freedom, and we return and lay it back down at His feet to serve Him.
When we do that, when we are given our freedom and return it to Him, we are blessed. The church is blessed. But most importantly, Christ is blessed.
So, let’s pray.
Father, we just give these words back to You, Lord. I pray that there would be some blessing from all of my fumbling around, that there would be an encouragement to Your body, Lord.
I pray that these words would go and encourage Your church, Lord. I pray that there would be Your covering and Your blessing over them. I pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.