After sitting through the initial counseling session, the new inmate agreed to accept the regimen and abide by the rules. Indeed, in the days and weeks and years to follow he would prove himself to be a model prisoner. He answered all the roll-calls, exercised when it was his time to do so, worked in the shop, and ate the food offered to him without complaint.

   This man was a "lifer." He was committed to this maximum security facility for the rest of his life. There was no opportunity for rehabilitation, parole or release. It was, as the saying goes, a case where this young man was "locked up, and they threw away the keys." Once incarcerated, always incarcerated!

    Periodically, on the first day of each week, the frocked guard came by each cell to assure the prisoners that all efforts were being made for their safe-keeping and well-being. He uttered ceremonious platitudes encouraging them to accept their situation and the comfort of such security wherein all their needs were taken care of, and cautioned them not to attempt to get out.

   On one occasion the word got out that another "lifer" had escaped the confines of his secure environs by cutting through the barbed-wire fence. The inmates were assembled in the prison-yard, and the guards explained that the escapee had never really been a true "lifer," or he would never have escaped. Such circular logic seems to make sense for those involved in such cerebral "lock-down."

    The minds of many Christians are "securely locked" into a rigid doctrinal position on "eternal security." They are confined and imprisoned in static cells of theological thought. Imprisoned by the bars of their belief-system, they are unable to experience the genuine Christian freedom wherein Christians are to live by the vital dynamic of Christ's life. "It was for freedom that Christ set us free" (Gal. 5:1).

   Security is a basic need of mankind, but it cannot be satisfied by closed-ended theological explanations. The Christian's security is to be "in Christ;" in a dynamic spiritual union with the living Lord Jesus, who indwells us by His Spirit and desires to express His life and character through our behavior. Thus we experience the freedom of functioning as God intended, unto His glory.