The prison officer wiped the sweat from his forehead as he gave his crop of new inmates a blunt piece of advice. “There are not enough of us guards to protect you guys here,” he admitted. “So find someone to make you a knife. If someone tries to hurt you or take advantage of you—you know what I mean—kill him as fast as you can. Chances are no one will ever inform on you, and you'll establish respect so you don't get messed with again.”
Standing nearby was a seasoned inmate who nodded his head. The newcomers could not help noticing, however, that the inmate openly carried a weapon. He had been deputized as a guard to help control his fellow prisoners, even though he was as guilty of serious crimes as they. In the minds of the prison bosses, this was all part of normal operations—plus it saved money by not having to hire so many legitimate correctional staff.
This was a sprawling maximum-security complex along the banks of a winding river, with more than 5,000 inmates. Most had arrived with a no-parole life sentence, meaning they would spend the rest of their days here in the single-story, cinder block buildings that ranged across the flat, humid landscape. Those days might easily be cut short, however, by the flash of a knife, the blast of a rifle, or even the flick of a cigarette lighter. “The guards would pay an inmate to take care of anyone they didn't like,” one man recalls. “They'd allow the guy to run into your cell and stab you or set you on fire. The men kept buckets of water under their beds so if someone had gasoline or lighter fluid, they could put out the fire if they got burned.” Hence, the media were not exaggerating by calling this “America's bloodiest prison.”
When an inmate finally died, he often had outlived any family members who still cared to arrange for a proper funeral. So he was buried inside the walls, surrounded even in death by barbed wire. The prison management—again, to save money—bought the cheapest caskets they could find on the market, made of cardboard. One rainy afternoon, the ultimate indignity occurred when the soggy bottom fell out of a casket just as it was being lifted into place at the open grave. Fellow inmate mourners gasped as the dead body tumbled into the hole. A guard simply motioned for the workmen to dump the rest of the casket onto the body and then proceed to shovel the dirt back into place, covering up the whole mess as quickly as possible.
In contrast, I well remember the visit Carol and I made with the Brooklyn Tabernacle Singers in 2005 to a prison that could not have been more different. Guards carried no weapons at all, not even nightsticks. Inmates belonged to some thirty different clubs that encouraged everything from public speaking to hobbies. Education classes were in full swing. One group of inmates was repairing and refurbishing 160 broken wheelchairs a month as part of Joni Eareckson Tada's “Wheels for the World” program, providing free mobility to the disabled in foreign countries.
Five different congregations worshiped together, and not just on Sunday mornings. Weeknight services were common, attended by large crowds of men. Inmate bands led the music, and even the preaching was often done by inmates who had received training through a nearby seminary that brought its classes and full degree programs to the penitentiary. Baptisms were frequent; more than a thousand men were said to be devout Christians. Some of the worship and preaching teams were even allowed to travel to outside bookings, ministering in churches and conferences across the state. They were accompanied by only a single guard, unarmed.
I was often amazed at the spiritual depth of some of the men I spoke to. They may have been serving a double life sentence plus ninety-nine extra years, but their eyes were filled with purpose and joy. In the meetings, the surge of praise and prayer from hundreds of voices lifted together was genuine. I felt it a high privilege to be among them.
One Man's Crusade
Now here is the surprise: Both of these accounts describe the same prison. I am speaking of the 18,000-acre Louisiana State Penitentiary sixty miles northwest of Baton Rouge, commonly known as “Angola.” It has a well-documented history of abuse and brutality. Food and medical treatment in the late 1800s were hardly enough to keep the inmates alive. Many died at the hands of fellow prisoners. Those who were put to work building levees to control the Mississippi River knew that any inmate who died would simply be dropped into the growing mounds of dirt. After all, it would save the trouble of hauling wheelbarrows of extra dirt.
So what happened to change the culture of this dreadful place?
A short, silver-haired warden named Burl Cain arrived in early 1995. His predecessor had told him he would last no more than five years. Another person claimed there were demons over the place. Cain's response? “I'm going to run them off, with God's help.”
Burl Cain established from the first day that he would treat inmates with respect. He shocked some by sitting down to eat with them in the dining hall. There he was appalled at the poor quality of food and quickly ordered the kitchen staff to do better. It did not matter to him whether the prisoners were white, like him, or of some other race. He became a walking demonstration of the Golden Rule: “Do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:12). He put himself in the place of one who had made a big mistake in life and been sentenced to Angola. How would he want to be treated? As a human being, or a dangerous animal?
Cain began training his staff to stop the insults and name-calling. He opened up new opportunities for study and achievement. He threw his full efforts behind the annual rodeo, where inmates got to perform for the visiting public and also to sell crafts made throughout the year. An arena seating 9,000 was built (with private money); each October it is packed out for the festivities.
But this warden is no soft touch. He knows how to crack down hard—but with fairness—on infractions. He has proved to all concerned that it's not wise to challenge him.
He calls his strategy “moral rehabilitation,” by which he means learning to live peacefully and productively in a prison community. “I realized I could teach them to read and write, could help them learn skills and a trade,” Cain says, “but without moral rehabilitation, I would only be creating a smarter criminal.” That is why his emphasis on spiritual growth has been given such priority. Angola is a place where increasing numbers of prisoners want to do the right thing before God.
As a result, you can walk around the institution and hardly believe you are in a penitentiary. Large numbers of men live not in cells but in open dormitories. They greet their chief with “How ya doin', Warden Cain? Praise the Lord!” They know him as a man who looks for ways to say yes to their requests, rather than always saying no.
The average sentence length at Angola is still eighty-eight years, given this population of murderers, rapists, and repeat violent felons. The tough Louisiana laws and policies are still as tight as ever against granting parole, even to well-behaved prisoners; it seldom happens. Yet hope is alive in this place. The annual capture of contraband weapons each year is down from nearly 800 in the past to fewer than 50 last year.
When a man on Death Row has finished all the legal procedures and comes to the day of execution, he is accompanied every step of the way by Burl Cain. The warden attends the prisoner's final meal and eats with him. He spends hours answering the convicted man's questions, explaining in detail how lethal injection works, going over every step of the coming hours. He then prays with the inmate.
On the way to the death chamber is a reception area with two large murals painted by prisoners. One depicts Elijah in a fiery chariot rising to heaven; the other shows Daniel standing fearlessly in the lion's den. When the fateful hour comes, Burl Cain is present at the gurney. He takes the man's hand, looks into his eyes, and gently offers words of comfort. Only then does he do what the state requires of him: he nods to the executioner to start the flow of toxic drugs into the man's veins.
A few minutes later, Cain stands before the waiting media to make his trademark announcement: “We have now sent [name] to his final judgment.” He deliberately avoids using the words execution or death.
For any funeral on penitentiary grounds, the scene could not be more opposite from the old days of cardboard caskets. The prison's woodworking shop builds exquisite oak coffins, hand-polished to perfection. (They are so impressive that Samaritan's Purse president Franklin Graham bought two of them for the use of his famous parents, Billy and Ruth Graham.) On funeral day, the casket is reverently loaded onto a black antique hearse wagon with glass sides, pulled by two massive Percheron horses. The inmate driver sits high above, wearing a tuxedo with a black top hat.
The procession moves slowly toward the prison's Point Lookout Cemetery. There, whitewashed cement crosses mark each grave. To the very end, those whom society has locked away are treated with dignity and respect. As one of his assistants puts it, “It's one thing to say that inmates are human. It's another to treat them that way. The warden has taught me how to do that.”1
Beyond Categories
When we look at people the way God looks at them, we see value and potential. We go beyond the details of skin color, language, gender, and age to the point of loving the person God created. He would not have given this person divine breath if he had no purpose for their life. He meant for them to be appreciated and developed.
Of all the mottos Burl Cain could have adopted to bring about a revolution at Angola, he could not have chosen a better one than the Golden Rule:
“Do to others what you would have them do to you.”
This simple eleven-word sentence did not just show up in a collection of random sayings somewhere. No less than the Son of God authored it—and he said it “sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 7:12). What an amazing claim!
If you have read the Old Testament, you know that it is lengthy (883 pages in my Bible), complex, and even confusing in places. Some of its laws seem terribly irrelevant. For example, what is so bad about wearing clothes woven of two different materials (Lev. 19:19)? Most of us do it all the time and cannot imagine why we shouldn't. Some Christians have stopped reading the Old Testament altogether (except possibly the book of Psalms). Others, however, have gotten tangled up trying to apply Old Testament practices to New Testament Christianity, trying to “claim the blessings of Abraham” or “restore the tabernacle of David.” They ignore the wise guideline that says if a law or principle goes without reinforcement in the New Testament, it can safely be dismissed. Only the truths repeated under the New Covenant—such as those forbidding murder, adultery, lying, and profanity, to list just a few—are binding upon us as Christian believers. We live in a different age; we breathe different air.
But we cannot shelve the Old Testament entirely. Jesus certainly didn't. He came to fulfill the law, in fact. And in a stroke of absolute genius he said, in his Sermon on the Mount, that he could boil down the 883 pages to just one sentence. He could sweep all of “the Law and the Prophets” into a single, compelling directive that would revolutionize society. He could summarize all of Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and the rest in this brilliant guideline.
To please God, we do not have to spend years in theological training. Neither do we have to master some thick rule book that covers each and every situation. What we have to do is remember, every moment of every day, to treat others as we would like to be treated. As the apostle Paul put it, “Love is the fulfillment of the law” (Rom. 13:10). Love is at the core of what a godly life requires.
If we Christians would, through the grace of God, conscientiously obey this one sentence, we would have covered the essence of God's desire for us. What a difference this would make! It would help us grasp that God's greater blessing for each of us is built on a foundation of selfless love. As Jesus said in his sermon, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:43–45).
Apparently that love is meant for all kinds of folks—not just “our kind.” In fact, God's greater future for you and me is quite likely to involve our association with those who are “other” than we are. God did not promise to pour out his goodness or give his gifts just to white males who speak English, like me. For me to realize God's best in my life entails being open and sensitive to the wide variety of his creation, which I am commanded to treat as honorably as I would want to be treated.
The Israelites' journey to the Promised Land gives us an outstanding example of this truth.
Who would have expected that God's strategic plan for the takeover of Jericho would have included a female Canaanite in a less-than-respectable line of work? Her name was Rahab. The two spies Joshua sent to check out the city and identify its weak points opted to stay at her house. This was part of their camouflage, a way to avoid detection by the Jericho police force.
It didn't work, of course. The king of the city found out soon enough. He sent his officers to investigate, and Rahab deliberately threw them off the trail. This woman, who had been used and abused by men throughout her life, apparently felt no loyalty to help the city fathers now. Instead, she sided with the people of God. “I know that the LORD has given this land to you,” Rahab said to the two spies. “ … Now then, please swear to me by the LORD that you will show kindness to my family … and that you will save us from death” (Josh. 2:9, 12–13). The men readily agreed, arranging a signal (a scarlet cord in a window) that would help identify her home during the chaos of battle.
If you have ever taught this story to children in a Sunday school class, you have probably avoided mentioning what Rahab did for a living. She was, in one sense, not exactly an upright and honorable citizen. Yet the New Testament speaks glowingly about her legacy—twice. It includes her in the Faith Hall of Fame in Hebrews 11: “By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies, was not killed with those who were disobedient” (v. 31). She is praised for the attitude of her heart, which identified with God's people.
The apostle James brings up her name and salutes her bold action: “Was not even Rahab the prostitute considered righteous for what she did when she gave lodging to the spies and sent them off in a different direction? As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead” (James 2:25–26).
God sometimes has a role to play for those whom we wouldn't choose. He is the master organizer, pulling together talents and personalities from a wide assortment of humanity. They don't all wear the same uniform. They don't all come from the same heritage. Yet the Lord knows what he is doing, and it is not wise for us to second-guess his personnel selections. If he decides to weave people such as Rahab into his plan for deliverance and expansion, our job is simply to remember the Golden Rule and go along with God's plan.
Another woman whom God used greatly, even in the midst of this male-dominated era, was the judge Deborah. A hundred years or so after the conquest of Canaan, Israel was under the thumb of a cruel king with the latest technology (“nine hundred chariots fitted with iron,” Judg. 4:3) and suffered for twenty years. God intervened at last by raising up Deborah. The Bible says she was a prophet, was a well-respected judge of people's disputes, and also (unlike Rahab) was married. She recruited an army commander named Barak, who would manage the fight for freedom.
These two examples from the time of Joshua and the judges show us that “God does not show favoritism” (Acts 10:34). If we truly accept the prophecy of Joel—“I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy…. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days” (Joel 2:28–29)—then we need to affirm and welcome the ministry of the Deborahs of our time. Thank God that William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, did not tell his wife Catherine to sit down, keep quiet, and just raise their eight children. Instead, while William preached to the poor in the streets of London, Catherine met with the wealthy and raised funds. She eventually began preaching herself and, by all accounts, was more effective than her husband.
The same is true regarding those from different ethnic groups, income levels, education levels, and age categories. God is in the business of building a global church, and all of us who aspire to help him had better accept that his ways and thoughts are not like ours. He is not going to limit himself to “our kind” alone.
We cannot expect to experience the “more” God has for us if we fail to love those whom God loves.
Can God Bless Racism?
I am convinced that one of the main obstacles to spiritual revival in this country is racial prejudice in churches. It gets hidden, of course, behind smokescreens such as attempting to serve a “target group” with the gospel and therefore increase attendance figures. This, however, is often a subtle way to exclude those whose color or ethnicity is not wanted. Others, by their very choice of location, betray the fact that they are not very interested in folks from the “wrong” side of town.
One staff member of a large and wealthy church told me that his congregation was most generous when offerings were taken for the victims of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. People gave abundantly to help those who had been flooded out. Busloads of hurting people ended up coming to resettle in this city.
But then the story took a different twist. A number of the refugees from New Orleans began showing up to attend this church, having heard that the believers there had been stirred to help them. They wanted to show their appreciation. These newcomers were largely African-American. Some of them began to apply for membership—and that's when the true color of people's hearts began to show. Church members started to leave in a steady trickle. Their reason? They were not fond of having to worship with “those kinds of people.”
All this happened even as Christians kept singing about God's love for the whole world. They needed to review what Thomas ö à Kempis, a monk best known for his devotional classic The Imitation of Christ, wrote back in the fifteenth century: “To place yourself lower than all mankind can do you no harm; but much harm may be done by preferring yourself to one single individual.”2 Whenever we elevate ourselves above any group of God's people, we remove ourselves from the stream of his blessing.
One of Major League Baseball's greatest pitchers occasionally visits the Brooklyn Tabernacle with his lovely wife and has even given his testimony in a service. They have become good friends of ours over the last few years. We have traveled overseas together to spread the gospel. He came from Central America, and one day sitting in my office, he asked me in all sincerity, “Pastor, why is it that the Yankees are more integrated than the Christian churches in this country?” He talked about how in baseball, nobody cares about your complexion or your last name. All that matters is how you play and support your teammates. He wondered why so many Christians don't think the same way, since we serve a God of love.
I didn't have a good answer for him.
I know of one denomination with extremely strict standards of holiness that they insist are based on the Bible. Unfortunately, those standards have not prevented them from creating a sister denomination, with identical doctrines, for black folks. That way, if one of their white churches is ever visited by a black person, they have a ready referral to put to use. They can just send them down the road to their affiliate group.
These people would not be very comfortable with Burl Cain and the brothers at Angola penitentiary, I can assure you. They are blind to the fact that God's plan for his kingdom on earth is not limited to any one group of people. It reaches literally around the globe. When we gather in heaven, “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, [will be] standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb” (Rev. 7:9). If we are destined to stand shoulder to shoulder on that day, we might as well get used to it now. God help us to mean it when we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Forerunners to Follow
This is not a new or novel concept born out of a desire to be trendy in the twenty-first century. Genuine Christians all through the ages have realized the bigger scope of the family of God. Among those who serve us well as models are the Moravian believers of the 1700s, who left their villages in central Europe (now the Czech Republic) to live out the Golden Rule in faraway places. It was Moravian missionaries, for example, who impressed the young John Wesley on board a ship to America in 1736 with their calmness during a terrible storm. He stayed in touch with their movement over the next few years as he drew ever closer to his own moment of trusting in Christ.
Other missionary movements in subsequent centuries have drawn greater spotlight; however, they all owe a debt to the Moravians. The Moravians' “do unto others” mentality brought thousands to the Savior. Some converts were so filled with the love of Christ that they sold themselves into slavery in order to reach certain slave groups in the Caribbean; it was the only way they could find to connect. In one case, a few Moravians deliberately contracted leprosy so they could work among lepers. Others worked to build Native American settlements, which were later wiped out by American expansionism.
The Moravian reach literally stretched from Greenland to South Africa—from one end of the earth to the other. Although the English Baptist missionary William Carey is often cited today as “the Father of Modern Missions,” he would point instead to the Moravians, whose model he often mentioned in his journal. They faithfully exhibited the love of Jesus to many in need, often at great personal sacrifice.
The gospel of Jesus Christ has everything to do with love. God is love. That is meant to be our banner, our advertisement to the hurting world. Jesus said that would be the way people would recognize us as his followers (John 13:35). Stop and reflect a minute: Would we like to learn that after we left the room, people began talking negatively about us? Then let's not do it ourselves. Would we like to be discriminated against on the basis of our color or gender? Then don't judge others by those criteria. Do we who are fathers like to see other men ogling our teenage daughters? Then let's not look at other men's daughters that way. Real Christianity can be reduced to the Golden Rule in all aspects of our lives.
The whole point of the well-known 1 Corinthians 13 is that love is more important than mountain-moving faith, benevolent giving, supernatural utterances in other tongues, or even martyrdom; it is “the greatest” (v. 13). And it is significant that this was written to a church known for its various strengths. “You do not lack any spiritual gift,” the apostle wrote (1 Cor. 1:7). He yearned, however, to see them overcome their sectarian competitive attitudes as followers of Paul, of Apollos, of Cephas, and of Christ. He was looking for genuine, wide-ranging love.
One of the greatest spiritual self-deceptions is the idea that we are living close to God even though we care little about the people around us. This simply does not square with 1 John 4:8: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” We can study the Bible as diligently as the Pharisees did; we can boast in our doctrinal statements; we can raise lots of money and build impressive church campuses. But if we are not loving others, including those who are unlike ourselves, we are ignoring the truth of 1 John 4:20, which says, “If we do not love a fellow believer, whom we have seen, we cannot love God, whom we have not seen.” It is as simple as that.
The only measure of our vertical relationship with God is the loving quality of our horizontal relationship with others. We are not truly acquainted with God if we don't love and respect the human beings for whom Christ died. How is it possible to love the Head and be indifferent to his precious Body, which includes believers of every race and background?
A Big Job Ahead
Moving into the promised future God has in mind for us is a very big project indeed. We do it with others who belong to Christ. It requires the energy and gifts of all his people. We do not have the luxury of excluding anyone from the enterprise. Jericho will not be captured without Rahab's contribution. Sisera and his army will not be overthrown without the leadership of Deborah. If we want to see the fullness of God's victory in our lives, we must embrace every brother and sister whom he embraces.
A poignant reminder of this truth came our way in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The Brooklyn Tabernacle lost four people that day—the most of any congregation in the city, so far as I know. One was a police officer. He had been an undercover drug agent, which is the most dangerous assignment in the NYPD. Then he met a young woman in our church, and eventually they got married.
When their first child was on the way, he surprised her one day by saying, “Honey, I've been thinking about the fact that I'm going to be a father. I need to stop doing such dangerous work. I want to be sure I'm here for this child. Guess what—I've found an opening with the Port Authority instead. I'll be stationed in the World Trade Center, where I'll be safe. No more chasing drug dealers down the back alleys.”
His pregnant wife was thrilled, of course.
Then, on that fateful morning, she was working four blocks away … and when the building went down, she knew instinctively that she had lost her beloved husband. She would bear this child alone.
For his funeral, my wife, Carol, got a hundred fifty or so choir members to take off work and come to sing. Mayor Rudy Giuliani showed up as well. When I gave him an opportunity to address the crowd, he took the microphone and said, “Mr. and Mrs. Stuart, I want you to know you had a great son. He was a hero. Thelma, your husband was a hero. All of us are concerned for you today and want to help you anyway we can.”
He leaned into the pulpit as he continued. “You know, people, I've learned something through all this. Let me see if I can express it to you. When everybody was fleeing that building, and the cops and the firefighters and the EMS people were heading up into it, do you think any of them said, ‘I wonder how many blacks are up there for us to save? I wonder what percentage are whites up here? How many Jews are there? Let's see—are these people making $400,000 a year, or $24,000, or—?’
“No, when you're saving lives, they're all precious. And that's how we're supposed to live all the time. How would you want the cops to treat you if you were on the seventy-fifth floor that day? Would you want them to say, ‘Excuse me, but I've got the get the bosses out first?’ Not exactly.
“I confess I haven't always lived this way. But I'm convinced that God wants us to do it. He wants us to value every human life the way he does.”
I sat there thinking, My goodness, the mayor is preaching a truth that has eluded so many of our churches throughout New York and the country! He may have stood for other policies that I could not agree with, but on that day, he was right on the mark. The truth of what he said penetrated my heart.
The world you and I live in is falling apart before our eyes. We are God's only representatives on the planet and simply cannot take time to pick and choose who needs help. They all need help. They all need the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ. They all need to be rescued from the horror of an eternity apart from God. Christ died for each one and wants “everyone to come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9). God cares intensely for every one of them.
Only when we share his heart toward people—and follow through with real, tangible actions of love—can we earn his “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the blessings I have reserved for you.”