Our text for this morning's sermon is from Paul's letter to the Philippians. It's a prison letter. Some of the great literature of the world was written in prison. In this century, most recently, Martin Luther King's Letter From A Birmingham Jail, which turned the tide in the civil rights movement. After that letter was published, the movement gained national support.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor, wrote letters from prison, smuggled out by his guards in Germany. Those letters and notes, some just fragments, ideas, about the Christian life, were published after the war as Letters And Notes From Prison. That little book, perhaps a hundred pages, caused a revolution in the way we understand living as Christians in the modern world.

Dostoyevsky wrote The House of the Dead from pris…