Friday, October 19th, 2018
With time on their hands, Christian programs that come into the jails, and the quiet of lockdown, inmates have a priceless opportunity to find Jesus or rediscover the Jesus they have lost. These are the ones who come to Sunday afternoon Gideon Bible studies. They are the ones who come to talks I give in county jails throughout Minnesota about How to Stay Out of Jail. They are the ones I meet with one to one as a chaplain.
Too many of them, unfortunately, leave Jesus behind in the jail when they are released. They become the ones Jesus talked about in The Parable of the Sower. Some return to the well-traveled paths of this world, and birds sent by Satan eat them up. Some go back to rocky places without much soil or water, and they wither because they live in an arid wasteland. Some go back to the thorns of this world that choked them in the first place – gangs, dysfunctional families, criminal or addicted friends, and all sorts of situations and conditions that suck the spiritual life right out of them. And some continue being immersed in Jesus Christ and live in good soil when they get out of jail. My purpose in visiting jails and meeting with inmates is to help as many of them as I can fall on good soil in the outside world.
What I tell them is this: “Without the drip, drip, drip of the Holy Spirit, you are an arid and infertile land where the coyotes howl and no good fruit lives.”
I’ll write more about this in next Tuesday’s blog. Right now it’s just a concept, and they need practical guidance as to how to be irrigated by the Holy Spirit on a continuous basis.