Nobody Thinks They're in Prison

We began this series At The Movies by pointing out that the best stories — books, movies — cause the one reading or watching to find themselves in the story, asking questions like: Have I ever felt like that? What would I do if I found myself in the same situation?

There's a reason The 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.

Everyone Who Sins Is a Slave

The Bible repeatedly uses metaphors of prison, 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. We all know that feeling of looking around at our lives and discovering that we have rejected what Jesus said is true, and we've chosen something else. We've all done that.

That's bad enough. But eventually we have the greater realization that what we thought we had chosen now owns us. It 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.

For freedom Christ set you free. Stand firm then and do not go back to the old ways of slavery. (Galatians 5:1)

A day comes when you look around at your life and realize that the life of freedom you thought you were going to have has been replaced by something else. That moment hits our main character as the main gates close behind him.

Prison's Goal Is to Take Away Hope

Over the following days, weeks, months, and years, Andy begins to experience what life without freedom feels like — what it costs, what it takes from you, what it tries to do.

Prison claims its 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 the prisoner. Prison tries to redefine the man or woman into something that obeys — moves when the master says move, jumps when the master says jump, stops when the master says stop. And if you don't obey, there will be consequences. 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 is to take away hope. If 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, no escape, that this is all you are and all you have, and this is the way it always will be, eventually you give up hope.

You surrender. Because after enough moments of getting your hopes up only to have them smashed, that feels more painful than just accepting that this is all there is. So you give up. Don't expect anything to change.

The Shawshank Redemption is more than a movie about prison. It's the story of a man clinging to hope in spite of years of injustice, brutality, pain, abuse, betrayal, and loss. Can they break him, or will his hope of something better sustain him?

A Mirror to Our Own Lives

If you were to sit and watch this entire movie, it's very possible you'd begin to see it as a mirror to your own life. Prison — chained and trapped — explains how many of us view all or parts of our lives.

There are many of us who look very successful and happy. We have the appearance of living free on the outside, but we know on the inside we are incarcerated. 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.

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.

The Most Dangerous Prison Is Normal

Red nails what many of our lives have become. Our sin, our chains, our fear, bitterness, and anger have been part of our lives for so long that — and this may be the most dangerous prison of all — sin and slavery start feeling normal.

We are living lives of institutionalized slavery. 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. I'm just an angry person. I'll never beat this addiction. I'm just a bad husband, dad, person.

Whether you put yourself in the prison or somebody else threw you into it without your consent, somewhere along the way you gave up hope and allowed the prison to define your identity.

Brooks is one of the most tragic figures in this story. After 50 years, he gets parole and becomes a free man — but he doesn't know who he is or what to do. For 50 years, somebody told him when to sleep, when to eat, what to do, where to go. It's the muscle memory of his life. Now he's free, 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 read the book of Exodus — the story of Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt after over 400 years of slavery — technically they're free. A straight shot to the promised land would have taken a couple of weeks. But it takes over 40 years of wandering 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. It does me.

We Have Reasons, But No Excuses

When you're in prison, you can blame the prison, the chains, the bad warden, the broken system. You can point at all the injustice you've had to endure and say, This isn't my fault. It's his fault. It's her fault. It's my dad's fault. If my boss would have given me a fair shot. If my husband would just do what he's supposed to do — he made me do this.

Be careful, because usually the next word is sin. "Nobody can blame me when I sin — when I let go of what God says is true and do something else."

Here's a big truth: you can't blame anybody else for your 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.

Sin is not simply bad or wrong behavior. Sin is bondage. And the wages — 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.

Hope and Faith Are Inseparable

We pick up the film after Andy gets out of solitary for playing Mozart through the prison sound system. The way he survived solitary wasn't a record player — it was the music in his mind. Why is that important?

The main theme of Shawshank is hope. Hope gives you the ability to see things that aren't happening yet, 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.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)

Let that sink in. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for — it hasn't happened yet, but I'm sure. I'm going to live my life in full expectation that it's going to happen. And it's the conviction of things not seen — I can't see it right now, but I'm absolutely convinced. You can't talk me out of it. I will see it one day.

So hope and faith are linked, inseparable. You don't need a lot of hope or faith when life is easy and everything's going as planned. You must hang on to hope and faith when life is hard, unfair, unexpected, and painful. That's the difference between life and death. Andy gets it. Red is terrified of it.

Freedom Requires Crawling Through the Sewer

Almost every scene in this movie is a teaching moment, but let me skip to the last parts. Andy has decided to get busy living. Over ten years, he has secretly been tunneling through the wall of his cell. Escape — the thought of freedom, of that beach in Mexico — has been the anchor, the dream, the hope that kept him going.

There are so many spiritual lessons in what it took for Andy to escape. The most obvious: Andy had to crawl through sewage to make it to freedom.

Every counselor will tell you the same thing. In order to be free from whatever enslaves you, owns you, and wrongly defines your identity, you're going to have to take an honest look and revisit some things in the past that you've tried not to think about. The idea of doing that feels so awful that you'd rather crawl through a sewer pipe than take an honest look at the person in the mirror.

But until you're ready to do that, nothing is going to change. When you bring secrets — especially sinful and shameful secrets — out of the darkness and into the light, I don't know how it happens, but those things lose their power.

For some of us, the idea of admitting some things, let alone confessing them out loud to another person, seems terrifying. So we make a choice: If that's what it takes to be free, I'll stay here in this cell. 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 for, and then name your sin and how you got there.

The other obvious metaphor: when Andy emerges from that sewage pipe covered in filth, he's plunged into a river and washed clean. If that isn't a picture of what Jesus does for us, symbolized by baptism, I don't know what is.

Freedom Comes One Spoonful at a Time

Here's one more lesson that's often overlooked. Andy didn't escape by using dynamite to blow a hole in the wall in one dramatic moment. He was already free in his mind and heart because he held onto hope. But the way he actually got there wasn't one big moment — it was ten years of scraping stone and mortar away, one pocketful at a time, inch by inch, day by day, thousands of days in a row.

Here's my point. Being saved, forgiven, and set free by Jesus is a moment in your life. Jesus went to a cross, became your sin, paid for it by dying, paid the life sentence you and I were guilty of. He rose from the dead and now offers us eternal life as a gift by faith in Him. That's an event. When you put your faith in Jesus, you are saved. It is finished. There's nothing you can add to your salvation.

But listen closely. Jesus didn't come just to forgive you or just to get you out of hell. Jesus came to transform you. He came to give you abundant life that starts today. He forgives and He transforms.

As you read the stories of Jesus, you see Him healing people in a moment. He touched a blind man and he could see. He told a lame man to get up and walk, and he did. He raised Lazarus on the spot. But you know what Jesus never healed in a moment? Character.

You never hear Jesus say, "Don't lust," and the man never lusted again. Or "Stop being angry," and the woman was never bitter again. He never put His hand on someone's heart so they never struggled again with greed, pride, selfishness, or unforgiveness.

So when Jesus gives us commands — don't lust, don't be angry, don't be greedy — He knew those inner parts of us can only be changed and healed by the work of the Holy Spirit over time. Kind of like putting a thousand days in a row with a spoon, digging a tunnel out of slavery toward freedom. Growth takes time. So does change — especially if you've been institutionalized, locked up so long it's all you know.

Count It All Joy

Count it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you meet trials of various kinds, 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. (James 1:2-4)

James isn't saying life is going to be fun. He's saying that when life is hard — and it will be — and you're facing battles of all kinds, if you're going to get where you need to go, you have to keep going. Because there is freedom at the other end of the tunnel you find yourself in today.

The moment you stop fighting, stop digging, give up hope and say, It's too much, it's too hard, I can't do it — that's the moment you walk back into that cell, close the door, and the life sentence begins again. And it ends on death row.

Choose Life. Choose Freedom.

Go back to that scene where Andy is at the table talking about what kept him going in the hole. He said it was the music — but what he clarified was that 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.

I would say the same thing. Choose life. Choose freedom. Choose Jesus.

Wouldn't it be crazy if a movie called The Shawshank Redemption became one of those moments where you could say, God spoke to me as only He can — and that was the moment my redemption became real, because I have hope again that I can be free.

So don't stop digging. You've got to keep going.

And I'll leave you with this final scene. Andy has escaped. Red finally gets parole. He goes to the place Andy told him to go if he ever got out. He finds that Andy has left something buried under a fence — an invitation to live free, now that you're free.