Matthew 25.36 "I was in prison and you came to visit me."
A number of years ago, I was the guest speaker at the Michigan State Penitentiary in Muskegon, MI. When I got to the prison, the administration held me up for quite 
a while before releasing me to the chapel area. This prison had a dedicated chapel. It was very nice.
In the staging area, the guards took my wallet, keys, coins and cell phone. It was all typical stuff. Then they took my belt, Bible and notes. I would be speaking without notes on this trip. No problem. Finally, they strapped a GPS tracker on me. I said, "Is that so you can find the body?" And one of the guards said, "Yeah, something like that." I was just joking, but he wasn't laughing. Now, I wasn't laughing.
When they opened the door to let me go to the chapel - it actually opened to the prison yard. Hundreds of prisoners immediately turned to see who was coming into the yard. The guard pointed to a building on the other side of the yard and said, "That's where you're speaking." Then, he closed the door behind me and my colleagues.
A couple dozen inmates walked over to me and asked what I was doing there. I told them I was the guest speaker in the chapel, and together we started walking in the chapel direction. They asked me about my story, and I shared it as we walked. Some of them followed me into the service.
I was a good 20 minutes late because of delay at administration, and when I opened the chapel door there were a hundred or more inmates already in the process of having a service. The prisoners were conducting their own service. I arrived during the worship portion. Immediately, I realized that God was doing something special in this institution. They had taken ownership of their relationship with God, and He was moving in their lives. If I hadn't made it to the service, they would have been just fine.
We had a marvelous time. The real excitement for me was seeing that men had come to Christ long before I had gotten there, and they taken ownership of their walk with Him. They had formed their own church, conducted their own worship services and had an outside 
ministry ordain a young man as their pastor who was in for murder without the possibility of parole. They had a permanent pastor. He was amazing.
They didn't need a thing from the outside. God was moving in their midst, and they were serving Him in spite of their circumstances. Prisons can be concrete and steel, or they can be prisons of the heart and head. These men had taken the road to freedom of the heart while still incarcerated physically. How much more should those of us who live in freedom, and profess a living faith, live lives of victory and joy in Christ?
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