Everyone here tonight hope to be released sometime in the future, right?

I don’t know what your background history was before you walked into this place.  But, I can tell you that once you leave, added to it will be EX-OFFENDER or EX-CON.  A label you will be carrying for a long time.  Probably the rest of your life.  And with this comes new struggles with prejudice and stereotyping.  Therefore, I hope that this message tonight will help you deal with these issues.

Prejudice is associated mostly with negative attitudes about a selected group of people and cultures.  And prejudice is alive and well today because there are people out there who insist that they are better than you.

Stereotyping, well that’s an overgeneralization associated with a selected group or culture that goes beyond existing evidence.  Now, each of you are considered to belong to the ex-offender group which evolved from a society of people whose culture was based upon crime.

Not only will you have to overcome this crippling label and reintegrate into so called normal societal living and deal with struggles of maintaining the standards of normalcy; but, some of you mothers will have to start the process of getting your children back also; which, oftentimes can be a difficult and painful process.  I don’t know if you all are aware of this or not, but let tell you something.  When a mother goes to prison, so do her children.

When you leave this place, the transition you must make from prison to freedom/outside life will require you to go through a make over which requires that the Lord increase the anointing that is on your life once you have received Him as your Lord and Savior. This anointing abides in you.  It will teach and lead you into truth.  And you can receive an increase if you ask him sincerely to do so.

1 John 2:20 & 27 says we have an anointing from the Holy one.   The anointing we received from Him abides in us. It is the same one that teaches and leads us into truth.

When you leave this place, you’ll need a mentor and a friend.  Someone who understands where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you’re trying to go.  You need a friend that’s far removed from the one who is still in the place that you were delivered from.  Ladies, you need Jesus. 

What a wonderful friend we have in Jesus.  All our grief and pain he’ll bear.

Jesus can hook you up to job connections.  Jesus can provide structure in your life.  Jesus can Lord over and supervise you.  You’re very vulnerable once you walk out of this prison.  Jesus will provide you with the power and strength you need all around you so that you won’t get blown right back in here.  Don’t leave this place thinking you can rely on yourself alone to make it.  Self-reliance is a fantasy.  And Christ denounced it with a single sentence:  He said, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).   And  the Apostle Paul said, “I can do everything through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:13).  Ladies, so can you.

You’ve been stereotyped as hopeless misfits and menaces to society.  A large part of the population in this society believe that the concept of  rehabilitation is a lie.  That your stay in prison has not rehabilitated you and will never rehabilitate you because you can’t be rehabilitated.

You need a church you can go home to when you need to come in out of the storm and rest a little while.   

So this attitude from so many could actually render you powerless to make it if you lean toward self reliance.  It has already set you up for failure.  But I’m here to tell you tonight that you can succeed.  You can come out of this thing successful.  So this sense of powerlessness that this stereotypical label will leave you with can be turned into a source of power for you.  The Apostle Paul’s sense of powerlessness became his very source of power.  God allowed a “thorn” in his life that was a continual reminder of his need to depend completely on Christ.  (2 Corinthians 12:7).

The Lord gave Paul a powerful revelation.  Paul said, “But, He (the Lord) said to me,”  “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.  That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.  For when I am weak, then I’m strong.  (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).

Paul said, go ahead and abuse me, because the more abuse I take in the name of Jesus, the stronger I become.

Paul outright rejected self-reliance, because God allowed him to come face-to-face with something that was impossible for him to handle.  It was only in his complete reliance on the Lord that he was able to find victory and peace.  Christ wanted Paul to be and to remain dependent on Him.

Don’t be fooled by the devil into believing that you can depend on yourself.  You’d better seek God’s grace and mercy and ask him to allow you to humbly look at yourself and see that you can’t  make it on your own.  You need help.  You need His help to be victorious over all the things that are against you.

Also, don’t allow the devil to take you to the other extreme either and get you to believing that our dependence upon God excuses us from our personal  responsibility to take care of the human side either.    Some of us just sit around waiting for that pot of gold to fall out of the sky from that rainbow and land right in our laps.  We are told to keep in step with the Holy Spirit.  (Galatians 5:25).  We are to work out our own salvation while at the same time recognizing that it is God who works in us “to will and to act according to his good purpose” (Philippians 2:12-13)  This doesn’t mean that  we must work for our eternal salvation which is a free gift from God.  It’s a gift because none of us deserve it and we would never be able to earn it, regardless of what we do.  I’m using salvation here in a non-theological sense.  What Paul is saying is work out solutions to your own daily problems.”

Immediately after you leave prison, the first thing that you are going to do to aid yourself in solving the problems  that will surly come is to go and recruit yourself some help.  Isn’t it good to know that as you face your problems as a born again child of God that He is working in you.  He will show you His will and enable you to act according to His good purpose.

But, you need to look the devil in the eye tonight and say satan you’re a liar.  I’m allowing the Lord to prepare me to leave this place.  And on the anointing that He has placed upon my life and will increase as I need it, I will overcome and I will be successful in living a good, peaceful, and abundant life.

You can’t rely on your own strength, wisdom, and courage, but you are responsible to do the right thing as you are empowered by Christ.  God has anointed  servants out here who have been trained and have spent many sacrificial hours preparing to serve you and help you reintegrate back into society.

Don’t you walk out of this place telling yourself that you don’t need some of these services. If you walk out of this place jobless, God has faithful servants out here who can get you hooked up to a job.  If you walk out of this place homeless.  God has servants out here trained to know where to find you a dwelling place.  If you were a drug addict when you walked in, chances are you’re still a drug addict when you walk out and you better hook up with a servant of God’s trained to counsel you in this area.  God will use servants such as these to empower you.

Throughout the history of mankind, people have tried desperately to rely only on themselves and the results have always been disastrous.

All is not lost yet.  You still have time to get it right.  For as long as there’s breath in your body, there is still hope. 

Don’t ever think that you’ve gone too far to turn around when you’re headed in the wrong direction.  I just thank and praise my Lord tonight, that He doesn’t need anything that you’ve lost to bless you with.  He’ll bless you with what you have left.  I don’t care how little it is.  He can still bless you in a mighty way.  My Lord and Savior took three loaves of bread and two fish and fed five thousand.  And after they had all eaten, there was still twelve basketful left over.  Doesn’t that tell you that He’s able.

Don’t allow the devil to convince you that your sins are too great to be forgiven.  Oh, that would please him so.  He loves to entertain himself by watching his victims burn in the furnace of  deception  and then wallow in the ashes.  But, my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ said, don’t be fooled.  He said to come out of the furnace and give the ashes of your life to Him.  He’ll turn those ashes into something beautiful.

So I say to you ladies, take your shattered lives to the Lord.  And He’ll put the pieces back together again.

Let the Holy Father restore you.

Amen.