Release to the Captives // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 2

It must be an amazing feeling for a prisoner to be set free after years of incarceration. I wonder when they step out of the prison – what that freedom looks like, tastes like, smells like.

I’m not sure if you every saw that movie in the mid 90’s called The Shawshank Redemption with Morgan Freeman. But it’s about two men essentially who find themselves in jail, one played by Morgan Freeman is there because he committed murder, the other one is there because he’s been framed. Anyhow there’s a scene in the movie where the Morgan Freeman character finally gets parole after decades, and he walks out of the gate, and for the first time in a long time stands as free man. When you think about it that sort of freedom, well, it must be a huge adjustment and certainly it was for this character in the movie. Freedom is something we all want and yet somehow that sense of freedom can be so illusive, like a mirage painted by the advertising industry, you see it but when you get there it’s gone.

Why did Jesus come for you and for me? What’s the relevance of his trip to earth for thirty something years? I mean the real here and now relevance, that’s the question that we’re exploring on A Different Perspective this week. It’s one thing to talk about God, it’s one thing to talk about Jesus, about the cross, about all the things Jesus did, but why did He do them? What was the point? We sometimes have a picture of God which is rules or a stain glass window or being old-fashioned but let’s go straight to the source.

Let’s have a look, as we are right through this week on the program, at what Jesus said about the reason that He came. One of the very first times that He stood up to speak publicly He read from an Old Testament book called the book of Isaiah, and He read this about himself, He said:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he’s anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, he sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind. To release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

Yesterday we looked at the good news for the poor. Today, we’re going to look at the second of the reasons which is, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners. Now that Morgan Freeman character in the Shawshank Redemption, if we put ourselves into his shoes for a minute he spent decades in prison, I can’t begin to comprehend one or two nights in prison, this character spent decades in prison. When you think about it, the walls of that prison, the big grey stone walls, were his world for decades. The advances over ten and twenty and thirty years on the outside in technology and society and just the way we live, you think of the things that have happened just over the last thirty years. Automatic teller machines, the way we do shopping, the way we use credit cards, televisions, DVD’s, video’s, the list goes on it’s just a massive amount of change.

But he could not imagine what was going on in the outside because his world was purely the routine, the politics, everything to do with what was going on inside that prison. You’d loose sight of all of that outside stuff. Life would be dominated just by the guards and the power struggles and the grey walls. And every night when those bars locked closed in the cell and clang closed that would be just a way of life, day after day after day it’s the norm, you’d stop noticing. I mean to maintain your sanity you’d actually have to resign yourself to the fact, just to stay sane. Freedom, well what’s freedom, what does that look like, what’s that like?

What about in our lives? What are the bars, the prison walls, the routine that lock us away from a full rich abundant life? Whether it’s the things we do everyday at work or at school or maybe you’re someone who stays at home, the routine, the humdrum, the relationships that we’re in day after day after day. Maybe the deep sense of our own failures. People have addictions, people have an acute sense of their own limitations.

Before I met this Jesus I had it all. I was so well off with a house and a car and job and a career and future and a family, truly I had it all, but it still felt like a prison. What was it, why, what was going on? It’s not that I was a rotten person but looking back on it now from the outside looking in, it was all about me. And as I reflect on that I discover that ‘I’ was my prison, “I” the “me” was the walls that locked me away from that abundant life.

The ads on TV promise freedom, cars, holidays, but when I drove the car or went on the holiday I didn’t feel free, does that makes sense? My world was inside the bars and the walls of my own selfishness, each wall had “me” written on it, me, me, me, me. And looking at the world from in there, well, what was freedom? What did freedom look like, what did it feel like, what did it taste like? Didn’t matter where I went I didn’t feel free, even though I had everything.

And Jesus comes along and says, “That’s why I came for you, to set the captives free.” Later on he also said, “And when I set you free you’ll really be free, you’ll be free indeed.” And I decided I wanted that ‘indeed kind of freedom’ I wanted that real kind of freedom. I know people who call themselves Christians who believed in Jesus for years who haven’t experienced that sort of freedom. What is it, how do you? It’s so illusive. Well, I can only tell you what happened in my life.

When I entered into a relationship with Jesus, the natural consequence of that was to stop living for me. It’s not something that I really had to decide on, it just seemed obvious to live for Him rather than live for me. And when that started happening, all of a sudden, brick by brick, stone by stone the walls of the prison started crumbling down. The thing that was holding me back, the thing that was my jail, my selfishness my me, me, me attitude, I started to lay those down and the walls started to come down. And what I discovered as I stepped over the rubble on the outside was, it was like that scene where the Morgan Freeman character in the Shawshank Redemption stands outside the prison for the first time.

It was a strange feeling, and it took some getting used to, but it was like going from black and white TV to colour TV. It was like all of a sudden I was still me but there was a vibrancy, there was a life, there was a freedom. When I get up every morning I now feel free, still me, I’m still the same guy with the same talents and with the same weaknesses and I’m still me but I feel free. And it’s an extraordinary freedom, it’s a real freedom, ‘me’ no longer keeps me bound up, I am no longer bound up in me. Jesus said:

I have been anointed, I have been appointed, I have been sent by God to set the captives free.

And when we live in the prison of our own selfishness and our own self we can try as hard as we like to knock the walls down and rattle the bars but it’s not until we lay our lives down for Jesus that the walls come tumbling down. The people who listened to Jesus when He said that rejected Him. We’ve got a choice, we can accept Him or we can reject Him, it’s up to us.