PRISON DOORS OPEN FROM OUTSIDE
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, imprisoned by Hitler during World War II, writes to his fiancé about one of the many lessons he learned from life in prison:
“A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, does various unessential things, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside is not a bad picture of Advent.”
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Letters and Papers from Prison; in a letter to his fiancee, Maria von Wedemeyer from Tegel Prison in Germany, November 21, 1943)
When you are in prison, there is nothing you can do to open the door to freedom. Somebody has to open it from the outside. So it is when we are in bondage to our own sin. There is nothing we can do to open the door to freedom. Somebody, and that “somebody” is God, HE has to open the door from the outside.
(From a sermon by C. Philip Green, "Breaking Free")