Set Free

Set Free

I went to prison, but I wasn’t forced to go. I traveled there freely with members of my church for a resurrection-week service with the residents of the Jester III unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Upon arrival, I dropped my driver’s license in the red bucket at the guardhouse, passed through three sets of heavy electronic doors, and walked down a long corridor before arriving in the place where we would gather: a wide, hot, cement-floored room filled with three hundred or so men in white. Each of them was free to come and sing and pray, but not a single one was free to leave, as I was, when worship was done. All of us there had once been—or were still—prisoners. All of us had trespassed; all of us had broken rules designed to keep us safe and well; all of us had fallen—one way or another—into the grip of sin.

And some of us had been set free.

By a power greater than self-will or legal wrangling or time served, we’d been severed from our sin and its sentence and gloriously liberated. But the law didn’t set us free. Love did.

Luck can keep a sinner from being caught. For a while. A loophole in the law can keep one from suffering the consequences of his or her sin. For a while. But only love can set a sinner free. Only perfect love can swallow sin whole, die, then live again to tell the tale. Only perfect love can cover our mighty multitude of sins. And only the life-giving Spirit can apply that perfect love to human hearts in a way that sets them free forever.

I left prison and crawled into my own bed later that night, free to sleep without fear and to wake without dread. Some of my nearest friends and neighbors are still prisoners, and some of the men who slept in Jester III that night are just as free as me. Because whomever the Son has set free is free indeed.

God did what the law could not do. He sent his own Son in a body like the bodies we sinners have. And in that body God declared an end to sin’s control over us by giving us his Son as a sacrifice for our sins.

Romans 8:3