“Bring my soul out of prison …” ~ Psalm 142:7aJesus Christ has already led captive, the “captivity” of your selfishness and mine [Eugenia Price, the author’s]. We don’t need to go on being selfish. We can come out of the prison of selfishness. But before we share the practical steps of coming out in His strength, perhaps we should consider a few more prisons by name.
Here is another very crowded prison. Anyone – good or bad – may get into it. But anyone can come out of it too. It is the prison of sorrow and grief.
And days and months and years spent in this dark prison lead to a kind of cold, relentless, rebellion against all of life. Tears can, after a while, freeze inside us and our very souls are made brittle. Natural grief turned hard in the frigid air of self pity. One young woman looked at her husband’s coffin standing at the same altar where thy had stood to be married three years before. She looked and fled, weeping, into the prison of grief, and stayed there, until by her own admission, her friends could no longer bear to visit her. She was a Christian, but she had retreated completely into the prison of grief and sorrow. Her consequent rebellion vanished and she cam out into the clean air of the free life, only when she came to see that He had led her “captivity captive” too! She saw that Christ meant her well. She began to let Him use her tragedy redemptively. And through her, He drew other grieving widows to Himself. When all captivity has been led captive, that includes the captivity of grief and sorrow too.
“… yea, for the rebellious also, that the Lord God might dwell among them.”
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