Remember the Prisoners

 

I’m Duane Matz and welcome to Today’s Living Word.

 

Heb 13:3 Remember the prisoners as if chained with them--those who are mistreated--since you yourselves are in the body also.

This admonition from the Book of Hebrews is really quite foreign to most “cushy” American Christians. We have freedom of religion as a guarantee in our Constitution and I don’t know about you, but I am not acquainted with any believer who is rotting in an American prison because they profess faith in Jesus Christ or engage in any form of evangelism.

 

Maybe this verse should at the very least prompt a degree of thankfulness from each of us for the freedoms we enjoy in this land. Let us thank God while we can because we can already see rumblings on the horizon, where Christian freedoms to preach, worship,  and live out our biblical values are being curtailed.

 

The Covid crisis of 2020 is a classic example of the freedom to assemble for worship being threatened by the powers that be. Attempts were made to ban public worship and that flies in the face of  Heb 10:24 And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works,

 25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.

In the meantime, Christians in lands that we may not be familiar with are being jailed and mistreated, and though we may not know them by name. They are part of the same Body of Christ that we are……therefore put yourself in their shoes (chain yourself to them) and keep them in your prayers.

 

I’m Duane Matz and that’s Today’s Living Word