00:01 – Darryl

Well, welcome guys, thank you guys for coming out. We appreciate you guys being here with us today. My name is Darryl, and this is Cody, and we both work in prison. And what we want to talk about today is—number one, we want to talk about race. Number two, we want to talk about prison. And number three, we want to talk about how the Gospel changes everything. Not only those in prison, but also the Gospel changes everything.

00:35 – Cody

Absolutely. Each one of us has this innate sense, deep down inside of us. This thing that’s universal to all people, which is, as we look at the world, we all have this feeling that things aren’t as they ought to be. That something’s gone horribly wrong with the world. Where we often disagree is on what the world ought to be. What it ought to look like. But we all can agree upon is that whatever this is, it isn’t that.

01:10 – Cody

As a Christian, how I understand the world, how I understand my place in it—how I understand where we’ve come from, where we are and where we’re going—is shaped and informed by the Bible. And one of the themes that we see throughout scripture is that God cares deeply about community. And in fact, the Bible begins with a community.

01: 37 – Cody

One of the foundational doctrines of the Christian faith is that of the Trinity. God exists as a Father, as a Son, and the Holy Spirit. That all are God, all are one. One God, three persons. Unity and diversity. So, the story begins with, “In the beginning, God created …”

02:04 – Cody

And so, when God creates the world for His glory, He does so to reflect something of Himself. This unity and diversity would emanate throughout all of creation. And at the high point of this creative act, He makes us. He makes people. He makes a man, and He makes a woman. They’re different, and He intends them to be unified. Not just to reflect that of Him, but He invites them to participate in His life with each other. That God has declared Himself to be a God with us, that we would walk with Him.

02:42 – Cody

And it doesn’t take long in the story until things go wrong. The man and the woman decide that they want to know good and evil, independently of God. Because up until that point, if they wanted to know what was good, they just look to God to know these things. But they, in their infinite wisdom, decided they wanted to be the deciders of these things. And the consequence was the relationship that they were created for, with God, was shattered. And as a result, the relationships that they had with one another changed and were deformed.

03:26 – Cody

See, when God created us, He created us to reflect these characteristics that had always existed within the life of God. And some of those markers were within the Trinity. Each member entrusts themselves to the other. He created us to entrust ourselves to each other. To not fear, but to trust ourselves fully to another person.

03:53 – Cody

And secondly, that these relationships will be marked by a self-giving love, a self-sacrificial love. That we would love others for their own sake, and that we would be loved in return, not expecting anything back, but for its own sake. And as a byproduct of the fall, this trust that we were created for is replaced with fear. And the self-giving love that we are created for is replaced with self-preservation.

04:26 – Cody

So, fear and self-preservation are now the law of the land, and they impact absolutely every relationship that we have. What God created to be this beautiful, unified diversity.  Difference is now suspect. Each one of us was born into this broken world, and it’s in brokenness that we learn to fear. We’re born afraid, and it’s in fear that we learn to hate. To hate God, to hate ourselves, and to hate each other.

05:14 – Darryl

My friend Cody just mentioned the word “hate.” Now, these two individuals, we have Johnny, and we have Dennis. Johnny and Dennis. Both was raised in this environment that shape their belief system. Johnny, white. Dennis—he’s African American. So, we see Johnny and Dennis being raised in this culture. And in the midst of this culture, what was spoken to Johnny and Dennis was, “Do not socialize or be in relationship with anyone outside of your race.”

06:04 – Darryl

Now, Johnny, he’s in a different culture. Dennis, in a different culture. But both of those individuals receive the same information. And so, Johnny and Dennis begin to travel through life, and as a result of them traveling through life, knowing that they should not socialize or be in a relationship with anyone outside of the race because, “if you do, something may happen. So please, Johnny, stick with your race. Please, Dennis, stick with your race.” Because this is what we were taught to do in life.

06:46 – Darryl

But Johnny and Dennis, they found themselves in trouble with the law. Johnny commit crime. Dennis commit crime. So, both of these two individuals commit crime, and they found themselves in this place, which we call prison. Now prison itself is a place where you see this racial division, you see all of these different things that take place in prison, where that when you get in prison, the first thing happen to the individual, the first thing they say, “Well, you need to run with your race.” Or someone may ask the question, “Who are you riding with?”

07:27 – Darryl

Now, if you ride with someone outside of the race then, there’s a problem that you’re going to have when you’re in prison. So, Johnny decided to stick with his race because he didn’t want to have a problem with his race. Dennis decided to stick with his own race because he didn’t want to have that problem with running outside of the race. So, these guys was limiting themselves based on the race that they found themselves sticking to.

07:52 – Darryl

So, in prison you have African Americans, you have Caucasians, you have Hispanics, Latinos, you have Native Americans. You have all of these people inside of this confined space. Day in and day out, struggling within themselves, which way they should turn, knowing that they have to stick with the race. If not, then it may be problems. Johnny and Dennis.

08: 29 – Cody

Much like Johnny and Dennis, throughout the story of the Bible, different forms of division rise up. People are at war with one another. And things seem to be getting from bad to worse, and the sin, these fractured relationships, begin to crush us. We are absolutely helpless to do anything about it.

8:58 – Cody

But God had other plans. God didn’t leave us in this state. The second member of the Trinity, the Son, came to Earth, became one of us, to remove the separation that we had created between us and God. And Jesus experienced the fullness of the separation that we deserved.

09:28 – Cody

See, for all of eternity, He had been completely unified in relation with the Father. And something that had never happened before occurred: Jesus was alone. He experienced a complete separation, and He traded places with us. But the funny thing about trading places is that the unity that He had always known with the Father and the Spirit is now ours. That a way was made for our relationship with the Father, with God, to be restored. And as a consequence of that, putting the world back together in all of its shattered brokenness, God made a way to change everything.

10:25 – Darryl

And so, you see, these two individuals, Johnny and Dennis, struggling through life, in a prison setting. Johnny at one prison, Dennis at another prison, not knowing that these two individuals—they both was going to end up in the same unit at the same time. A place where that they dealt with this wall of separation, this wall of division. They spoke about transformation and how that a person’s life can be transformed through the power of God.

11:02 – Darryl

And we see Johnny accepting the Lord Jesus Christ, and then we see Dennis accepting the Lord Jesus Christ. And as a result of both of those guys accepting God, we see the walls of division begin to come down. So, we see two individuals, Johnny and Dennis, sitting together at this table, having this meal together. We see two guys that, it was told to them that, when they was young, “That you should not socialize with the person outside of your race,” and we see that Johnny and Dennis—they come together, and they sit together inside of a prison system at the table, eating a meal together.

11:46 – Darryl

And we see Johnny say, “Well, man, I wouldn’t have sat with you.” We see Dennis would say, “Man, I wouldn’t have sat with you, but because of the power of God, we both sit here together and having a meal with each other.” And that’s the very thing that God intended for mankind before the foundation of the world. That we, as a people—no matter what race you are, Black or white, African, Hispanic, no matter who you are—God always desired that we come to the table and feast with each other. And Johnny and Dennis experienced that. That which God intended for them to experience before the foundation of the world.

12:39 – Cody

As Darryl mentioned, this unification between Johnny and Dennis being what God had always intended. We began this talk with the Trinity. This community that has existed from eternity past. The Bible’s actually book-ended with communities. The first being the life within God, and the second is this community we see at the end of the Bible—comprised of every nation, tribe, and tongue—coming together in unity in worship of King Jesus.

13:16 – Cody

The nations don’t lose their distinctiveness. Diversity is a part of God’s eternal plan. Our differences are celebrated, and we’re unified because we’re all looking in the same direction, the direction we were always intended to stare. This is the essence of what eternal worship looks like. Us participating in the life of God, together.

13:42 – Cody

And so today, as people who have experienced the transforming power of the Gospel, we are now citizens of that Kingdom, of that eternal community. And we strive, we struggle with one another to live into that. To address anything that stands in the way of us becoming that, just as Jesus prayed, “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” That a way was made for this to actually be possible. And so, we need to cultivate a love for the things that God loves, which is a diverse and unified community that he will dwell with.

14:41 – Darryl

And so, what we have is amazing story of two individuals—Johnny, and we have Dennis. Now, I want to tell you that Johnny and Dennis, they are real people. We’re just not talking about anybody. Because Johnny and Dennis is two individuals I had the opportunity to walk with while they was in prison. And to see these two individuals accept an Almighty God into their life, their life being transformed, out now, in society, living their best life for the Lord Jesus Christ. We see John and Dennis now can understand that “I don’t have to stay in my yard because I’m Black, and my neighbor is White. I can go across into my neighbor’s yard and shake my hand with my neighbor. My neighbor can come and shake my hand, and I can watch his house, and he can watch my house, and we can be a community that God designed from the foundation of the world.” And now we see John and Dennis living their best life for the Lord. Great individuals.

15:52 – Cody

The counter-cultural way that God operates, that we look to prison, not as a place where the problem exists–

16:02 – Darryl

Yes.

16:04 – Cody

–as a place where the solution lives. That God is doing a thing, and it stands as a prophetic monument to each one of us on the outside, of what community can look like, of what that eternal community looks like here on Earth. And as people founded upon, and compelled by the love and power of Jesus Christ, the words “hopeless” and “impossible” are absolutely robbed of all of their meanings.