What do you hear when Paul says he is a prisoner for the Lord? He certainly spent plenty of time in jail due to his public ministry professing Jesus Christ as Lord, which neither the Jews nor the Romans were particularly fond of.
But Paul may well have meant more. He is captive to the Lord's love and mercy -- it has captured his heart, and he wants to go nowhere else. He willingly has bound himself to Jesus, no matter where the road may take him, because the sweetness of the Gospel has so overwhelmed him that nothing the world can offer would come close to duplicating the sense of eternal fulfillment that the Gospel offers him.
Meanwhile, I think of the things that hold our attention captive. We become prisoners to our phones and to the television and the narratives they are spinning, often rooted in fear or scarcity. We're spellbound by so many mini-narratives that play out every day, be it relationship or community dramas that matter on an immediate timeframe, but so many of them have little ability to endure. Like a sparkler on a July evening, they flare and burn out in a moment.
But we're moving so fast, we rarely stop and think about how we spend our time and where we give our attention. Often time feels cheap, when in reality it's the most precious resource we have. Paul is calling us to choose wisely how we invest ourselves, and he's reminding us that we're part of an eternal community. Therefore, we ought to treat one another well, to think about the humility and gentleness that Jesus assumed when he walked this earth. He didn't have to be humble and gentle -- he chose to, for a reason. If we want to imitate him, and I struggle to think of reasons why we wouldn't want to imitate the single greatest, wisest, and most powerful person that has ever lived, then shouldn't we strive to be humble and gentle in the world as well? If Christ treated his enemies with grace, then perhaps we should seek to do the same, no matter how hard it might be?
Bearing with one another in love is no easy thing. I think of God speaking to Moses in the wilderness, talking about the Israelites as a group of stiff-necked people. But God loved them through the wilderness, and God loves us through the wildernesses we find ourselves in as well. What a gift that is. Maybe we can engage with the world on the basis of gratitude, spending enough time in God's Word that our own hearts become captive to the Lord, which then transforms the way we treat and serve one another.
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