 Okay, so let me set the prison scene for you. One guy gets his eye plucked out by another inmate because that inmate was a sex offender who was looking at child porn. Another inmate gets cheese boiled in the microwave and thrown on his face and so his skin just peels off. Another guy, because he's upset with some other guy, puts it in a sock, rolls around and hits the guy on the head with it. Then you've got other guys fighting over who's boyfriend is who. And in the middle of all of that, go live godly. Welcome back to the Smart Christian Channel. My name is Corey Miner and as always, if you have not done so, please hit the subscribe button as well as the little bell so that way you can be notified of any videos that we will put out in the future. If I told you that being in prison was absolutely great for me, that prison was awesome, what would you think? That guy's fried. His brain is through. Or he must be institutionalized. But let me explain for a second. Prison is something else. It's like none of the places you've ever seen or whatever hope to see. Nobody, I don't think probably in the history of the world unless you're just crazy or you just raised wrong, would ever dream of going to prison. It's not a dream destination. It can either be a blessing or it can be a curse. Let me tell you what you can get out of prison and how prison can be great. Now I'm not advocating anyone go, but let me tell you how you can apply some of the things that I've learned and others to your life outside of prison because some of the same things that affect you in prison obviously affect those who are outside of prison. You remember the passage that Jesus talks about, you know the one that no one ever really focuses on when Jesus says that when I was hungry and when I was naked, he throws in there when I was in prison, you didn't come see me. Why? Well, one of the things that you soon find out about prison that's really hard that makes prison so difficult is that you're alone. You're surrounded by thousands of other people, but you feel by yourself and that happens in prison. And there's some lessons that you learn in prison that I just can't believe how much that some of these lessons that we learned as a society are no longer in place that I found out are happening once I got out of prison. When you get to prison, one of the first things you learn is respect. You better not talk to somebody any old sort of way. You better not cut in line depending upon the prison that you go to. People will literally slap you in the mouth. And I'm not saying figuratively, no, they're going to take their hand and slap you in the mouth. Why? Because it's a sign of disrespect. Rather than just punching you, they'd rather just slap you. Why? Because you've disrespected them. And for people who have had their freedom taken away, respect might be the only thing they have. And so you soon learn how to respect people. Well, why is that important, especially as a Christian? Because we have somehow forgotten about respecting others. It shouldn't take someone to have to slap you in the mouth for you decide that I should respect somebody. You should just do it just because it's the right thing to do. To talk down to people because they disagree with you or to make fun of them because of what they have going on. That's just as a kid. That ain't cool. But in prison, you'll find out it ain't not only it's not cool, it's also dangerous. But as believers, we should want to treat people a certain way. As a matter of fact, I think it'd be a good idea if we treat people the way that we would want to be treated ourselves. Somebody ought to put that in the Bible, huh? You can also talk to me a lot about discipline and patience. Discipline because nobody is going to want to see you do well in prison. They don't pay the guards in the BOP to have an interest in your well-being. That's up to you. And there's so much going on, there's so much. You have no idea what life is like inside a prison, how demoralizing it can be, how vile it can be, how rough it can be, how vulgar it can be. There's a lot of things that go in there that you just don't want to see. And so you need to make sure that you don't get caught up in it and you need to develop a routine that's going to get you to where God wants you to be. But then also patience because things don't come quickly. So you need to be patient in terms of seeing things happen in your life, but also patience in the sense that there are a lot of people that are going to try your nerves. There are people that are going to say some things and do some things that's like, what in the world are you talking about? There are even in prison some absolutely hilarious moments that sometimes can end badly. Let me give you a quick story. There were two guys standing in line for microwave and the guy in the back, some of the light was on, but nothing was in there. And so he asked the guy in the front, well, who's stuff is this? Who's got this microwave going? The guy said, it's me. And so when the guy asked him, why is the microwave running while there's nothing in there? The guy in front says, because I am preheating the microwave. Who does that? Well, needless to say, that situation ended up in a fight. That happens a lot. Well, you've got to have patience to deal with people who may not know better. And what prison also taught me was what's important. I had a cellmate who had eight life sentences. I've known other people who've had multiple life sentences, makes you wonder why would you give somebody more than one life sentence? Well, I guess if they died and happen to come back to life, you got to come back and serve the rest of the next sentences. But when someone's got that kind of time, what do you tell them? What do you focus on? The small things don't seem to matter as much because in prison, a lot of guys will miss out on birthdays and graduations. Me and my mother passed away. And so I've missed out on a lot, birth of grandchildren and things like that. And so prison helps you to place in proper perspective what's important and what's not. When they give you, in my case, a 20 year sentence, you start asking God, okay, God, what do you want from me? What's up? What's important? But when you get that kind of time, if you're wise, it'll humble you. And that's one of the other things that I learned in prison, humility, humble. Those are cousins of humiliation. And I don't know if you've ever been shackled, but to literally have chains on you to kind of restrict or constrict your movement, that's hard. And so prison does a very effective job in humbling you. Well, I should say humiliating you, causing you to be humbled. And there's no one there in many cases to count on, but God, which leads to the last thing that I've learned, trusting God, I would have thought before prison would have been easy. But when he takes away everything, when he closes this door and that door and that door and that door, have you ever seen somebody getting a fight and then one guy's just clearly the more powerful person and he puts a guy in a chokehold? Well, imagine God doing that. Now, it doesn't take much for God to kind of put you in a submission hold. But when he does that, what do you do? All you can do is, God, I give up. And you start asking God, what is it that you want me to do? How do you want me to live? God, I'm giving everything over to you. And the one thing that you have to do, and he's going to make you do that, is you've got to give him complete trust. You may not know where he's going, but just know that he's taking you somewhere. So for me, all of my avenues were gone. No more legal avenues left. Well, what happened was, I stopped putting my trust in me and any sort of legal maneuverings and things like that. And I just said, God, I'm yours. Whatever you want me to do, however you want me to live, I'm going to do it. I'm going to be as obedient as I can. I'm going to stop trying to find ways to do things on my own. And so what happens in prison, the lesson that we can all learn is that if you just trust God, you may not get it how you want it or when you want it, but he is going to see you through. Because the benefit of prison is time. The benefit of doing time is you've got time. You've got time to study. You've got time to do all these different things, but you've got a lot of time to spend with God. And I'm very disappointed to see once I got out of prison to see how many people have just gone away from these basic teachings of God. There's no respect for people. There's no discipline or patience. People are no longer, people are not, not only are they not humble, they've gone the opposite way. They want to tell you any and everything about themselves and how smart and how wise they are. And then there's this lack of trust in God. That's been demonstrated no more so than in how we've handled this pandemic. Why don't we behave the way the disciples in the boat with Jesus did not act? Let's trust in him. Let's have faith in him. Amen.