The Church of Eleven22 - S01 E78 - Freedom

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

Hey, church family. My name is Jeff Kopp. I am the prison ministry director here at the Church of 1122. I'm also the Baker and Union campus chaplain. You may ask, what is a campus chaplain? Well, it's kind of like a campus pastor. We do the same thing in prison as we do at our other campuses. A welcome, a benediction, just kind of steering, help steering and guiding the service there, but we are called chaplains there. So, So anyways, I wanted to just first and foremost, thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting the prison ministry here at 1122. Your support, your encouragement. It's unbelievable what we're able to do because of our church family supporting this ministry. As you know, the tithing inside of our prison campuses by design is not very high. There's a lot of sarcasm there,

but we do not take tithing. We just go into the prisons and we set up a campus like we would at 1122. So we bring in cameras and we bring in videos and we bring in sound systems and all that is because of you. So thank you from the bottom of my heart. So I want to just start off by giving you a little bit of a history of how we got into prison ministry. Most people do not know. but if you've ever heard Pastor Jobi preach from the stage when he first started off or was told to go start 1122, it was kind of a, he had no idea what he was doing. And he has used the term pray guests go a lot.

Well, when when Pastor Jobi and the leadership of the church decided to go into prison ministry, I was offered the job to be the director. Now, the funny thing about that is, I have zero experience in prison. ministry, but that's what they wanted. They wanted someone who didn't have any preconceived notions of what prison ministry should look like come in and take their reign. So I was hired as a team of one with support from a bunch of staff. So what did I do? I had no idea what I was doing. I started off just by talking to staff members who had experience with prison ministry, other chaplains, other pastors who had walked with families with people that have been in prison. I talked to members of our church,

you who have had experience with someone, one of the loved ones, a friend or family, with time behind bars. And so I got all those ideas. Then I spoke to some other churches that have prison campuses, and I got to travel to a few. And I really just, I walked in with my hands wide open saying, I have no idea what I'm doing. If 1122 is going to plant a church in a prison campus, how should I do it? And because you've already done it, if you could do five things over again or five things you could tell me never to do, what would you do? And I got, I mean, people were amazing.

They shared all the do's and all the don'ts. And so in emailing, different, kind of like cold emailing people. And I emailed the Department of Corrections for the state of Florida. And I emailed, I was emailing chaplains. Well, I get a return email from the region two, which is our region. It's about 16 or 17 prisons in this region. out towards the Panhandle and back towards Jacksonville and South a little bit, from the Region 2 chaplain Bob Richter.

So I said, Bob, I'd love to take you to lunch. So we went to lunch at Sunny's Barbecue in Stark, Florida, and we just talked about what 1122 were just interested in doing and what would his ideas be. So we just kind of laid it all out. And from the beginning, I just sat down and I said, we just want to share the gospel. And that's all we want to do.

There is no, our guardrails are very, very tight. We want to go in and talk about Jesus, share the gospel, pray for men and the women, and then we leave. And then we just come back and do it a week later. So Chaplain Richter said, I like that idea. So he says, I'm going to set up a meeting for the church at Baker Correctional because Baker Correctional out in Sanderson, Florida, is for men with five years or less on their sentence, and they're coming back to Duval County or surrounding areas. So he had the idea of, well, why don't we go share the gospel with the men who are coming back to our city, and we try and affect change there first? And I said, Chaplain Richter, that's why you're ahead of 16 or 17 prisons.

And so he invited me out to Baker Correctional, and he just wanted to introduce me to the assistant warden, which Chaplaincy falls under programming, and the warden. So I drive out to Sanderson, Florida, Baker Correctional, meet Chaplain Richter in the parking lot, walk in. and I just think I'm going to meet the warden and assistant warden. Well, I walk into a conference room, and there's no less than 25 people in the room, and Chaplain Richter says, well, everybody, this is Chaplain Jeff Coppe. He's with the Church of 1122, and he just points to me, says, Jeff, why don't you tell them what you want to do?

And I kind of look over at Chaplain Richter, and I'm like, I have no notes. I have no PowerPoint presentation. I have not prepared for this at all. So, church family, let me tell you, the Holy Spirit is real. because when I got up there and got to talk to 25 people about what the Church of 1122 wants to do with prison ministry, I had no idea what I was talking about. So the Lord interceded on my behalf. Praise God on that.

And the best part is I sat there and I was stone-faced and I just said, well, at the Church of 1122, we're a movement for all people to discover and deepen a relationship with Jesus Christ. And we think all means all and all means sharing the gospel with the men and women that are wearing blue, that are incarcerated. And it just went like that. And then 20 minutes later, the warden says, well, Chaplain Richter, let's get it going. I had no idea what that means. And so Chaplain Richter just looked at me and he gave me a thumbs up. And I walked out with him, he says, I think you got a church in a prison campus. I had no idea what to do. So I am on the way back and I'm calling Pastor Jobian, Pastor Britt and Pastor Stone. I was like, hey, I don't know what just

happen, but are you guys ready to plan a church in a prison campus? And of course, as we are, we were all in, full speed ahead, and we got a campus planted about a year and a half before we ever thought it was going to happen. So when we say pray, guests, go, we really, really mean it. So as you know, when we say we're a movement for all people to discover and deepen a relationship with Jesus Christ, all means all. So did you know that when we meet at our Baker, our Baker campus, it is a weekly thing. So I thought as we navigate through COVID, we have not been able to go to our prison campus. We've been there twice since the middle of March.

So they're not allowed to have church services. They're not allowed to gather. So they're allowed to gather in their dorm and do prayer on their own. And at Baker Correctional, there are six dorm. and most of them are divided into two. So you'll have anywhere from 150 men to 75 men in a group. Some of them are like army-style barracks, and others are what you would think typical prison,

two men in a cell and a closed door. But since we started our services two years ago, the Lord has done amazing things and it moved in incredible ways in and through the men at our Baker and Union camps. We've had over 200 salvations, and last year, the church staff and I, Pastor Jobby and I got to get in a tub, and we baptized 67 men.

As the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 828, you hear this a lot here, and we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. All things, all people. Notice, it doesn't just say, it doesn't say, you're happy, joy-filled moments of your life. It says all things. So what I mean that means, you mean through pain, yes. You mean through addiction, yes. You mean through health scares, cancer, yes. You mean through broken relationships, depression, incarceration? Yes, all things means all things. You see, God is not waiting for you to get all your things together, attend church for a few weeks, then he'll walk alongside of you. God will meet you right where you're at and walk with you.

You see, sometimes God does his biggest miracles when you're walking through your biggest mess. Sometimes when everything is taken away from you, you may hear God the best. And so I heard John Piper did a sermon. He was in Angola, it's a maximum security prison in Louisiana. And he said that maybe, just maybe, that the men and women that are behind bars that are incarcerated, behind the razor wire that are wearing in the state of Florida, they all wear the same color blue, maybe just maybe,

they are in a position to hear the Lord better than us because everything's been stripped away from them. So when we talk about, I like to call that, I call it noise. So there's a lot of noise in this world between your family, your job, your hobbies, the ultimate distraction, your phone. That's a lot of noise. And so when, with everything competing for your attention all the time, there's a lot of noise out there. So how do you make room for the Lord when all of the noise is going on?

So that's what Pastor Piper was talking about was, is thinking about if everything, if all the noise is stripped away from you and you were put into a situation where, well, you're not worried about your job. your family is is still out there, but they're not there. Your hobbies are taken away from you, and you're just, you're put in this daily routine of doing the same thing. Just maybe you're in position to hear the Lord a little better. Less distractions, less stuff, less noise, more time for the Lord. And I've witnessed it in our prisons. I've seen some of the freest men I've ever meant inside the prison walls, as opposed to

here at some of our campuses. And that has landed on me like a ton of bricks, very, very heavy moments when you see an incarcerated free man and a person in their own personal prison out here. I got really, really neat stories. During COVID, I got cleared to go in and visit. I am a chaplain for the Department of Corrections, and so I get to go in and do visits with men, and then I got clearance from Baker Correctional, and I got to go during COVID to socially distance and just walk through all the dorms and just see men pray from six feet away from men. And the most incredible thing happened to me while I was there. I had a group of about six men that attend our church, and they came up to me and said,

can we pray for you? And we want to pray for our church. And I said, of course, I would love that. And they started talking about how they knew that there was a lot of, it was, as to quote one of the guys, he says, there's a lot of chaos going on out there in the streets. There's a lot of, there's a lot of stress going on. And we need to pray for you. They talked about the racial tensions that are going on.

And a few of them actually took blame for their communities because they'd been in prison the majority of their lives and their sons did not have fathers. And they said, if we were there as a father figure for our son, our son would not be out in the street doing what he's doing. So he said, that's on us. And for me to have these men pray for us as a church out here in the free world because of COVID and racial tensions and protests and everything that's going on with the economy, that was incredibly empowering to me. You know, the funny thing is that there's no disillusion in prison that everything is going great. You're in prison. And so it's kind of understood there's been some mistakes. that have been made and you don't have this disillusion that, oh, everything's fine. Well,

if you come to any one of our campus, you can, you can have the dissolution that everything's fine in your life when everything is falling apart and you're not free at all. You've created your own prison that you're in right now, but you want to put up the front that everything's okay. So you're living in this dissolution. We don't have that in our prison campuses. So it's just it's a very freeing thing to go into an unfree place behind razor wire. So as most of you know, I'm going to start to get into, we're going to be in Acts 16 today. And most of you know that the Apostle Paul wrote four of his books from prison. They're called the Prison Epistles.

The Apostle Paul, he wrote Philippians, Ephesians, Colossians, and I call it Philemon. It's just easy for me to say, all while in Roman prison. So we're going to look at Acts chapter 16 and we're going to see examples of how the Lord is working through all things. So we're going to start in Acts 16, 16, but I'm going to go back. There's what happens in Acts 16 is there's three conversions. And we're going to focus on the last conversion, which is the conversion of a jailer, a guy who works in a jail. But if we back up a little bit, first there was a conversion of Lydia. and Lydia was a powerful woman.

She was a boss. And Paul and Silas witnessed to her, and she received the Lord. And so we're going to pick it up in Acts chapter 16, verse 16. And it says, as we are going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gained by fortune-telling. So when we say we talk about a slave girl and we talk about a spirit of divination,

basically they're saying this is a demon-possessed girl who basically was making money for her owners by fortune-telling. But when we say demon-possessed and we say slave girl, you've got to think she is the lowest or low, battered, bruised, beaten, probably abused. But the funny thing is, is, do you know who always recognized Jesus first? It was the demons. The Pharisees' missed him, the religious mistim, but the demons always saw him for who he was. So we pick it up. Back at 16, they were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gained by fortune telling. Verse 17. She followed Paul and us crying out, these men are servants of the Most High God who proclaim to you the way of salvation.

And this she kept doing for many days. Paul having become greatly annoyed, turned and said to the Spirit, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her, and it came out of her that very hour. Let's take a step back. I love the part here where it says Paul became greatly annoyed. If you do not know the history of Paul, all you have to do is go back to Acts chapter 8, and you'll see this really this first introduction of Saul. He was Saul then, then he became Paul.

So in Acts 8.3, Saul was ravaging the church and entering house after house, and he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison. You see, Saul was a pretty big deal. He had a religious pedigree that put him in elite status. He was from the tribe of Bedrimand, which basically means he was from the right side of the tracks. It was the best Jewish heritage. Think high society, right genes type of thing. Saul was Jewish, but he was born in Tarsus, which made him a Roman citizen. So he was educated at the university in Tarsus, which would be the equivalent of a Harvard University here in the United States, the highest, most elite university. He studied under Camille, meaning he was one of the best students in the university, and he was the top of his class. He was powerful, he was a great leader, and he was driven. And he was an incredible, incredible intellect.

When you think he was a, so Saul was a Pharisee, but he would be considered a Pharisee of Pharisees. His father was a Pharisee. His grandfather was a Pharisee. So he could not be in any more elite status. One thing I want to point out. So we talk about when we come back to Acts 16 that Paul was greatly annoyed. And the reason that I want to focus on him being greatly annoyed is just because you've to see who he was. He was a religious terrorist persecuting Christians before he met Jesus on the

road to Damascus. And that's when, if the story goes back and you read in Acts chapter 9, he was riding his horse. He was blinded by a great light. He fell off his horse. And then he didn't eat for many, many days. And then down the road, he, you know, just to simplify the story, he ends up, he ends up becoming saved and then becomes one of the greatest, one of the greatest shares of the gospel in the history. I mean, I think we can all agree, as Pastor Jobi always says, Paul was a pretty, pretty awesome Christian. So let's go back. We'll go back to Acts 16 and verse 18. After Paul becomes greatly annoyed, and he turned and said to the Spirit, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. and it came out that very hour. Freedom again. But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone,

they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers. Verse 20, and when they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, these men are Jews, and they are disturbing our city. They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice. Remember, Paul's a Roman citizen. The crowd joined in attacking them and the magistrates tore the garments off of them and gave orders to beat them with rods. And when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely. Having received this order, the jailer, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet with stocks. So the jailer is ordered to keep them safely.

What does the jailer do? He does not keep them safely. He takes them into the inner prison, which is essentially the basement of the prison, puts them in stocks. They were not ordered to be put in stocks. So stocks then, it was, you would be hung up, not all the way upside down, but you would be hung. And in the basement of the prison would be all the excrement from the city would flow through there. So Paul and Silas are in stocks in the basement. just right above all the extrament of the city.

And so we got to look at why does the jailer not listen to the orders that are given to him? And notice he seems like, and this is, once again, this is pure conjecture of my part, but he seems angry. Seems that there's something not right in his life where he would take them, he would disobey the magistrates, and he would put them. not to keep them safely, he would put them in the bottom of the prison in stocks. So we'll go back here. Verse 24, so he having received this order, he put them in the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks.

Verse 25. About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening. So this is where you see Paul and Silas finding their friends. freedom and joy in Jesus, not in their circumstances. In Philippians 1, 2021, why Paul was in prison, again, he wrote, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or death, for me to live is Christ and to die is gain. Freedom. How are they singing hymns at the bottom of prison while they're in stocks?

It's because they're free. They're not free according to their circumstances. but they are free in Christ Jesus. In Ephesians 620, Paul once again writes, while he's incarcerated, he says that he is an ambassador in chains for the gospel. It's a paraphrase. Freedom, once again, in chains, and he's an ambassador. In Colossians 3, once again, while he's in prison,

the Apostle Paul writes, let the peace of Christ rule your hearts, not the peace of your circumstances, the peace of Christ. Once again, freedom. You see, Paul and Silas' joy comes from knowing Jesus, not their circumstances. Go back to verse 26. And suddenly, there was a great earthquake so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were open and everyone's bonds were unfastened.

When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoner's had escape. So he, the first thing that the jailer does is he's going to draw his sword and he's going to take his own life. So things are spinning out of control. Do you ever feel like you're spinning out of your, things are spinning out of control for you in your life? Yeah, me too. Here's what I would say. Ask for help. Okay. Don't do life alone. You're made for that. You were made for community. Christianity is not a solo sport. Please, please, please, ask for help. We'll finish up here.

Verse 28, but Paul cried with a loud voice. Do not harm yourself? We are all here. And the jailer called for the lights and rushed in and trembling with fear, fell down before Paul and Cyrus. Then he brought them out and said, sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, believe in the Lord, Jesus, and you will be saved.

And your household. The hardened jailer experiences freedom for the first time in his life through Christ Jesus. In Galatians 513, it says, for you were called to freedom brothers, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for flesh, but through love, serve

one another. The Lord wants you to have the freedom that comes through only knowing Christ Jesus. So whether you're in a self-made prison or whether you are incarcerated behind the razor wire, the Lord wants you to experience true freedom that only comes through Christ Jesus.

Jesus. Let me pray for you. Heavenly Father, we just, we love you, we thank you, we thank you for the freedom that you give us that comes only through knowing Christ Jesus. So Father, I just pray for everyone watching this, Father, that if they are in a self-made prison, Father, that you would free them and that they would come to know Jesus, Father. We are thankful for this day, Father, we are thankful for the love that you show us, and we are thankful for your son, Jesus and what he did on the cross for us, as he accounted for every single one of us. Church family, I love you, be free.