You're Not as Trapped as You Think | At The Movies Season 2 | Week 4

We began this series at the movies by pointing out that the best stories, books, movies, cause the one reading or watching the story kind of be played out to find themselves in the story asking questions like, have I ever felt like that? And what would I do if I found myself in the same type of situation? There's a reason Shawshank Redemption consistently ranks as one of the greatest films ever made. Because deep down, every human being understands what it feels like to be trapped. The Bible repeatedly uses metaphors of prison and chains, even slavery. Jesus said in John 8, 34, that everyone who sins is a slave to sin, like it owns you. It's your master. By definition, sin is anything that disagrees with what God says is true and what he wants to be true for you. But we all know that feeling of looking around at our lives and discovering that we have rejected what Jesus has said is true, and we've chosen something else. We've all done that. That's bad enough, but eventually we have the, maybe the greater realization that what we thought that we had chosen now owns us, like runs us, tells us what to do, threatens us if we try to escape. That by definition is prison, slavery.

We were created for freedom, right? Galatians 5, 1 says, for freedom, Christ set you free. Stand firm then and do not go back to the old ways of slavery. A day comes when you look around at your life and realize that the life of freedom that you thought you were gonna have has been replaced by something else. That moment hits our main character as the main gates close behind them. Over the next days and weeks and eventually months and years, Andy begins to experience what life without freedom, life in prison feels like, what it costs, what it takes from you, what it tries to do. See, prison claims that the goal is rehabilitation, to retrain the prisoner back into a good person who can contribute to society, but the way this typically happens is never for the good of or the improvement of the prisoner. Prison tries to define or redefine the man or woman into something that obeys, does what the master commands, moves when the master says move, jump when the master says jump, stop when the master says stop, and if you don't obey, there'll be consequences. You'll be punished. The prison's goal is for the prisoner to serve the prison. The best way to control and conform the man who walks into the prison

into becoming what the prison has decided he should be is to take away hope. If the master or the warden, or how about this, if the devil can convince you, even if he has to beat it into you, that there is no hope, that there is no escape, that this is all that you are, this is all that you have, this is the way it is and the way it is always gonna be, eventually, you give up hope. You surrender because after enough moments of disappointment, getting your hopes up again, only to have them smashed and taken away, when that feels more painful than just surrendering and accepting, this is all there is. You give up hope. Don't expect anything to change. Shawshank Redemption is more than a movie about prison. It's the story of a man who's clinging to hope in spite of years and years of injustice, brutality, pain, abuse, betrayal, and loss. Can they break him? Or will his hope of something better sustain him? I think that's the reason that if you were to sit down and watch this entire movie, you'll sit in your chair and it is very possible that you'll begin to look at what's happening on the screen kind of as a mirror to your own life. I think that prison, chained, trapped explains how many of us view all or parts of our lives.

There are many of us sitting here right now that look very successful and happy. We have the appearance of living free on the outside, but we know on the inside, we are incarcerated. We're locked up. I'm trapped in a job I hate. I'm enslaved to debt. I'm trapped in a marriage that is not what I thought I signed up for. I'm trapped by secret sin that owns me. I'm trapped by addiction. I'm trapped in a body that feels like a prison cell. I'm trapped by, like I'm chained to it. I drag it around all the time. It owns me, shame, fear, bitterness, anger, failure, disappointment, memories. These prisons don't have bars, but they might as well have walls and cells and chains because the thought of anything changing, let alone escaping, well, others have tried it and I don't know anybody who's made it. In other words, let go of hope. This is a life sentence. I think that red nails what many of our lives have become or are on their way to becoming. Our sin, our chains, our fear, bitterness, anger have been a part of our lives for so long. that, and this might be the most dangerous prison, is the one where sin and slavery starts feeling normal. We are living lives of institutionalized slavery, sin.

It looks like this, this is just my life, this is just my marriage, this is just my addiction, this is just who I am and I'm always gonna be. I'm just an angry person. I'll never beat this addiction. I'm just a bad husband, dad, person. Your circumstances, whether you did something and put yourself in the prison or somebody else did something to you and threw you into prison without your consent, but either way, somewhere along the way, you gave up hope and allowed the prison to define your identity, who you are, so give up. This is just the way it's gonna be and the longer you try to fight it, the worse it will be, so don't get your hopes up. This is it. Brooks is one of the most tragic figures in this story because he does eventually get parole after 50 years and he's a free man, but he doesn't know who he is. He doesn't know what to do. For 50 years, somebody told him, this is when you go to sleep, this is when you eat, this is what you do, this is where you go. It's all he knows. It's the muscle memory of his life. Now he's a free man, but he's still thinking like a prisoner so spoiler alert, he takes his own life. The idea of living free is more terrifying than prison. If you were to read the book of Exodus in the Bible,

the story of Moses leading the Hebrew people out of Egypt after over 400 years of slavery, technically they're free and a straight shot to the promised land from Egypt would have taken a couple weeks, but it takes over 40 years of wandering around in the desert before God teaches them to stop their slave thinking and start thinking like free people because every time things got rough, their first response was, I wish I was still a slave. At least back in Egypt, I knew what to expect. Honestly, that describes some of us. I mean, it does me. See, when you're in prison, you can blame the prison, the chains, the bad warden, the broken system. You can point at all the wrong things, the bad things, the injustice that you've had to endure. You can point to them and say, see, this isn't my fault. It's his fault, it's her fault, it's my dad's fault. If he had done better, if my boss would have given me a fair shot, if my husband would just do what he's supposed to do, but he won't, so I really don't have a choice. He or she kind of made me do this. Nobody can blame me when I, time out, be careful, because usually the next word is sin, right? Nobody can blame me when I sin, when I let go of what God says is true and do something else, and here's a big truth for you.

You can't, we can't, I can't blame anybody else for our sin. Not what happened to you, not what should have happened but didn't, not if things were different. We all have reasons for why we do what we do. We just don't have any excuse. See, sin is not simply bad or wrong behaviors. Sin is bondage, and the wage, like the sentence for sin is death. Some of us aren't technically dead yet, but the life we're living already feels like it because we've lost hope, and if hope is dead, then everything else follows. So we pick up the film after Andy gets out of solitary confinement for playing classical music through the prison sound system. The way he made it was by playing Mozart, not on a record player, but in his mind. Why is that important? Watch. Like I said, I think the main theme of Shawshank is all about hope. See, hope has the ability for you to see things that aren't happening, but you're hanging on to the possibility, the chance, maybe even the promise that it will happen. In the book of Hebrews, that sounds very close to the definition of faith. Look at this, Hebrews chapter 11. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for,

there it is, the conviction of things not seen. You gotta let that sink in. I'm gonna say it another way. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, hadn't happened yet, but I'm sure. I'm gonna act and live my life in such a way in full expectation that it's gonna happen. And it's the conviction of things not seen. I can't see it right now, at least from where I am, but I know, I'm absolutely convinced, persuaded. You can't talk me out of it. I will see it one day. So hope and faith are linked, inseparable. See, you don't need a lot of hope or faith when life is easy. Expect it, everything's going as planned. No, no, you must hang on to hope and faith when life is hard and it's unfair and it's unexpected and painful. See, that's the difference between life and death. Andy gets it, Red's terrified of it. Now, there is so much to this movie, there's no way I can give it justice because almost every scene is a teaching moment. But let me skip to the last parts of the story. Andy has decided to get busy living. And over the past 10 years, he has secretly been tunneling through the wall of his cell, planning his escape. See, escape and the thought of freedom,

of making it out of slavery to that beach in Mexico, that's been the anchor, the dream, the goal, the hope that has kept him going. And now the moment comes. There are so many life and spiritual lessons in what it took for Andy to escape from prison and make it to that beach, that hope that he refused to allow to be taken from him. The most obvious one is Andy had to crawl through sewage to make it to freedom. The truth is, and every counselor will tell you the same thing, in order to be free from whatever it is that enslaves you, owns you, wrongly defines your life and your identity, if you wanna be free, you're gonna have to take an honest look and revisit some things in the past that you've tried not to think about. I don't wanna look at that. And the idea of doing that, well, you'd rather crawl through a sewer pipe than take an honest look at the person in the mirror and what happened to you in the past that led you to make the choices you've made. Because until you're ready to do that, nothing's gonna change. See, when you bring secrets, especially sinful, like shameful secrets, when you bring them out of the darkness and into the light,

I don't know how it happens, but those things lose their power. But for some of us, the idea of admitting some things, let alone confessing those things out loud to another person, that seems so terrifying. So we make a choice. If that's what it takes to be free, I'll stay here in this cell because I don't see how that will lead to anything good. It's your choice, but you'll stay in prison. Here's a phrase we've used a lot since Easter. Everybody wants a resurrection, but in order to have a resurrection, you have to have a crucifixion. You can't have one without the other. It's the same with freedom. In order to be free, you have to look at, take responsibility, and then name your sin and how you got there. So Galatians 5.1 already said it. So we don't go back again to the old life of slavery. The other obvious metaphor in that scene is when Andy emerges from that sewage pipe covered in filth. He's plunged into a river and he's washed clean. I mean, if that isn't a great picture of what Jesus does for us, symbolized by baptism, I don't know what is. But let me give you one more that I think is overlooked in this journey from slavery to freedom. Andy didn't escape from prison by using dynamite

and blowing a hole in the prison wall in one big dramatic moment. Andy was already free in his mind and in his heart because he held on to hope, to faith, that a life of freedom was possible. But the way he eventually got there wasn't in one big moment. It was 10 years of scraping stone and mortar and rock away, one pocketful at a time, inch by inch, day by day, thousands of days in a row. And here's my point. Being saved, forgiven, set free by Jesus is a moment in your life when you put your faith in what Jesus did for you on a day in history. Jesus went to a cross, became your sin, paid for your sin by dying for it, paid the life sentence, the death penalty that you and I were guilty of. He died, he rose from the dead, and now offers us eternal life as a gift by having faith in him and what he did for you. That's an event. When you put your faith in Jesus, you are saved. It is finished. There's nothing you can do to add to that or contribute to your salvation. But I want you to listen closely to this. Jesus didn't come to just forgive you, just to get you out of hell. Jesus came to transform you.

He came not just so that you don't go to hell after you die. He came to give you abundant life that starts in this life like today. He forgives and he transforms. Now stay with me, all right? As you read the stories of Jesus, interacting with people, teaching people, demonstrating what God is really like, you will see Jesus healing people like in a moment. He healed a blind man. He just touched him and he could see in a moment. He spoke to a man who couldn't walk and told him to get up and walk, and he did it. Like in a moment, he cured diseases in a moment. He raised Lazarus from the dead like on the spot. But you know what Jesus never healed or fixed or changed in a moment? Character. You never hear Jesus simply saying, don't lust and the man never lusted again or stop being angry and the woman was never angry or bitter again. You never hear Jesus putting his hand on a person's heart and from that point on, they never struggled. again with greed or pride or selfishness or unforgiveness. No, no, no. See, when Jesus gives us commands like don't lust, don't be angry, don't be greedy, he knew that those inner parts of us can only be changed and healed

by the work of the Holy Spirit, ready, over time. Kind of like, and all metaphors fall apart at some point, but it's kind of like putting 1,000 days in a row with a spoon and digging a tunnel out of slavery towards freedom. Growth takes time and so does change, especially if you have stuff going on in your life that has been institutionalized. Like you've been locked up in a prison for a long time and it's all you know. It's gonna take some time. One final verse in James chapter one, he says this, he says, count it all joy, my brothers, my sisters, when you meet trials of various kind. Here's why, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness and let steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. Now James is saying this, not that life is gonna be fun, oh yeah, another bad day, no, he's saying when life is hard, and it will be, and you're facing trials, battles of all kinds, if you're gonna get to where you want and need to go, you have to see these hard times, especially when it involves the most important parts of your life that need to be set free, you're able to experience the life that God wants you to have, you have to keep going, because there is freedom at the other end of the tunnel

that you find yourself in today, and the moment that you stop fighting, stop digging, give up hope and say, it's just too much, it's too hard, it's too far, I can't do it, that's the moment that you walk back into that cell, close the door behind you, and the life sentence begins again, and it ends on death row. So let me leave you with this, and again, there are tons of verses I could point to on hope and faith and being set free from chains of slavery, but go back to that scene when Andy's sitting at the table talking about what kept him going when he was in the hole, and he said it was the music, but what he clarified was, it wasn't the music, it was hope, in here and in here, and they can't take that from me, but he was sitting at a table of men who'd given their hope away, so he said, it's time to start living, or it's time to start dying. And I would say the same thing, choose life, choose freedom, choose Jesus. Wouldn't it be crazy that a movie called Shawshank Redemption is one of those moments that you can point to and say, God spoke to me as only he can do, and that was the moment that my redemption became real, because I have hope again, that I can be free. So don't stop digging, you gotta keep going, and I'll leave you with this final scene,

Andy has escaped, Red finally gets parole, he goes to the place that Andy has told him to go to, if he ever gets out, he finds Andy has left something buried under a fence. It's an invitation to live free, now that you're free.