Well, Pastor John was recently in prison to preach, and not for the first time, hopefully not for the last time either, but you may recall in 2009, Pastor John preached inside Angola prison in Louisiana, a notorious maximum security facility, a place where most inmates will live out the rest of their

lives. In such a sobering context, Pastor John, of all these things you could have preached,

you were moved to urge these 800 inmates from John 6 to convey the point that our Savior,

Jesus Christ, did not come into the world to be useful by fulfilling the worldly desires that we have

inherently, but he came to be precious, to be our all-satisfying bread of life.

You walked us through that decision to urge these men to treasure Christ above all else,

declaring that Angola was not their final chapter, but eternity was.

They had this eternal hope to look forward to, even if they were never going to be released

from this prison. It was a powerful message and a powerful trip that we've talked about on the

podcast in the past. But that trip is on my mind today because of a question we've gotten

the whole lifespan of this podcast. How do you decide, Pastor John, what to preach in a context

like Angola or like this one that you just did recently to preach one sermon in a prison?

No redos, no do-overs. You get one shot. And I ask because you just preached recently again in a prison, a local prison.

Now, obviously, expositional preaching through books of the Bible is your norm.

And that norm comes with a script.

Literally, you move passage by passage, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but always along a clear path forward through a book of the Bible.

But not all ministry fits this predictable flow.

You've got funerals that shift the demands with every situation, depending on the spiritual

condition of the person who died. The spiritual health are the people who are grieving in the room,

how well you know the family. Those are factors that will come into play. Or maybe you're asked

to pray at a sports event or to preach inside of a prison to a room full of unfamiliar faces, so in a one-time opportunity. So when these opportunities arise that break from the script, when there's no sermon series to follow, how do you discern God's will and his leading and deciding in those contexts what to preach.

In order for my response to that question to make sense, I think our listeners need to know

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