There is a curious irony in God’s Providence that only a man who has lost everything can fully appreciate. When your possessions are confiscated, your freedom revoked, your privacy obliterated, and your daily comforts reduced to a bucket of lukewarm water and a stale bread roll, you discover what your faith is actually made of. The spiritual disciplines that were treated as optional in your former life—nice additions to an already comfortable existence—become the very oxygen that keeps your soul alive.

This is not a metaphor. I mean it literally. In the Valparaíso Penitentiary, the choice between maintaining spiritual disciplines and abandoning them was the choice between sanity and madness, between faith and apostasy, between life and a despair so total that it makes death look attractive.

Prayer Without Privacy

Let me state a fact that most Christians have never seriously considered: you cannot pray privately in prison. Your cell is shared. The bathroom is shared. The patio is shared. There is no closet to enter and shut the door behind you, as our Lord instructed (Matthew 6:6). There is no quiet corner where you can pour out your heart to God without being overheard by a cellmate who is watching a pirated movie, listening to regatón at ear-splitting volume, or chatting with his girlfriend on a smuggled cell phone while she takes her clothes off for a video call. There is no Lord’s Day nor true rest from one’s labors wherein one may pray.

I prayed in my bunk with my face to the wall or straight up. I prayed on the patio with my eyes only half-shut, walking the nineteen-step width of the yard. I prayed silently in the dining room while men gambled beside me. I prayed aloud during our worship meetings, conscious that the words I spoke to God were being evaluated by men who alternated between genuine spiritual hunger and cynical calculation.

The absence of privacy forced me to develop a prayer life that was less dependent on external conditions and more rooted in the internal reality of communion with God. This is, upon reflection, a healthier place to be than the comfortable Christianity I had practiced before. How many of us pray only when the conditions are right—when the house is quiet, when the schedule permits, when we feel “ready”? Prison teaches you that if you wait for the right conditions, you will never pray at all. You pray because God commands it, because your soul needs it, and because the alternative is spiritual death. You pray in spite of the noise, the interruptions, the indignity, and the relentless exposure to other human beings and their vices.

The Apostle Paul’s instruction to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) takes on new meaning behind bars. It ceases to be a pious aspiration and becomes a survival strategy. You learn to maintain a running conversation with God throughout the day—not because you have mastered some advanced technique of contemplation, but because without that conversation, the weight of your circumstances would crush you.

Worship with Nothing

Our worship services in módulo 118 were conducted without anything a modern churchgoer would recognize as worship infrastructure. No organ. No guitar. No piano. No hymnals. No overhead projector. No padded pew. No climate-controlled sanctuary. No printed bulletin. No order of service. We sought the shade in the Summer and a porch overhang when it rained. We had voices. We had Scripture. We had prayers. And that, as it turns out, is all you need.

I sang hymns in my cell—in English, since I had not memorized them in Spanish and my cellmates would not have appreciated the content had they understood it. I sang them alone, from memory, because there was no hymnbook. The songs of the faith that I had learned over decades of churchgoing came back to me in the darkness like old friends: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” “Amazing Grace,” “Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted,” “The Solid Rock,” “For All the Saints who from their Labors Rest,” “How Sweet and Awful is the Place,” “Jerusalem the Golden,” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and many others. These hymns, written by men who knew suffering—Luther under the threat of death, Newton from the deck of a slave ship, Watts in chronic illness—carried a weight behind bars that they never carried in the comfort of a suburban sanctuary.

During our group worship, someone preached, someone prayed, and someone coordinated. On Saturdays or other designated days, I would preach from whatever passage I had been studying—James 3, Matthew 10, Proverbs 11, selections from the epistles of Paul. I did a series on key Psalms and several others on key doctrines, such as the Trinity, heaven, hell, what the Gospel entails, repentance, and the resurrection. I preached the Gospel plainly, contrasting godly wisdom with the earthly and demonic varieties, calling on sinners to repent and shun hypocrisy, emphasizing the calling of God on Christians to preach righteousness through faith and thus to offer peace with God, even though that faith would likely lead to persecution. I did not shy from difficult doctrines. In a place where the contrast between light and darkness was so visible, where men who professed Christ on Sunday ran extortion rings on Monday, the need for uncompromising preaching was acute.

Our Thursday and Sunday evening meetings with my church, Historic Baptists, connected via Zoom outside the walls—a small lifeline to the broader body of Christ that kept me from the isolation that destroys so many incarcerated believers. I offered longer studies, brief sermons, and commentary from my cell, speaking in normal, preacherly tone into my smuggled phone while my cellmates watched pornography, television, or slept. On more than one occasion, a cellmate complained about the noise. Occasionally, I shortened my contribution to keep the peace. Oftentimes, the people in my cell showed respect or interest. Accordingly, I never entirely stopped preaching and teaching, so long as I had a cell phone, because the worship of God is not negotiable, even when it is costly.

The Providence of Prison: God’s Strange Harvest Field

Here I must pause to address a theological truth that many Christians overlook, and yet it is one of the most stunning demonstrations of God’s sovereignty that I have ever witnessed.

Why does God allow men—many of them unsaved, many of them guilty of terrible crimes—to be sent to prison? The answer that most people give is “justice” or “punishment.” And for some men, that is true. But the biblical answer is far richer and more mysterious.

God uses prison as a harvest field. Consider the men I lived with. A seventy-year-old atheist who murdered the mother of his child—a man who had never darkened the door of a church, who had spent his life accumulating wealth and pursuing pleasure—now sat locked in a cell with nowhere to go and nothing to distract him from the emptiness of his soul, other than to plot his own suicide by ingesting a large handful of high blood pressure medicine. A young drug trafficker who had never opened a Bible in his life found himself sharing a dining table with a man who could explain the doctrines of grace in language he could understand. An ex-policeman who had never heard a coherent presentation of the Gospel found himself in a quarantine cell with a Reformed Baptist who had little to do but talk about Christ and share meals.

These were not coincidences. These were divine appointments. “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will” (Proverbs 21:1). If God directs the hearts of kings, He surely directs the transfer papers that send an inmate from one módulo to another, the quarantine protocols that lock a drug dealer in the same room as a preacher, and the judicial decisions that keep a man behind bars long enough to hear the Word of God.

I preached from James 3:13-18, Matthew 10:24, and Proverbs 11:18-21 on a Saturday morning to twenty-one inmates in módulo 118. Most of these men had never chosen to attend a church service in their lives. But they had little choice now. If they wanted to be on the little yard’s concrete, they recognized their situation as a captive audience in the most literal sense of the word, and that the same God who orchestrated their captivity had placed a preacher in their midst.

One older man I mentioned earlier, Leonardo León Soliz, came regularly for discipleship classes with glee and delight at first. This was not a man who would have walked into a Baptist church on a Sunday morning. He was a Marxist who had been expelled from Chile by the Pinochet government before finishing college. He was in prison for sexually abusing two girls, although his victims extended far beyond them. And in prison, God put a teacher in front of him. He had later returned to Chile and assumed the role of Director of the History Department at the prestigious University of Chile until being caught preying on girls. And there I was, naïvely preparing him for future pastoral and evangelistic ministry—ministry that would itself take place behind bars, in a harvest field that most churches have abandoned. When he finally turned tales years later, I came to the sad realization that I had trained him to walk into any evangelical church and teach Sunday School while he scoped out his next victims.

Think about what is happening here from the standpoint of God’s eternal decree. A man commits a crime—or is falsely accused, or runs afoul of an unjust law—and is taken from his home, his family, his routine, his comfort, his distractions, and placed in a concrete box where he cannot escape the claims of Christ. His pride is broken. His self-sufficiency is exposed. His entertainments are removed. He faces the daily struggle to survive and find his place in terrestrial hell. He has nothing left but time—time to think, time to listen, time to confront the reality of his own depravity and his need for a Savior. And into that void, God sends a man with a Bible and the words of life.

Is this not the pattern of Scripture? Was not the Philippian jailer converted after an earthquake that shattered his world and brought him face to face with Paul and Silas? “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30). He asked that question, the most important question ever asked, because his circumstances left him nowhere else to turn. The earthquake was not an accident. It was Providence. And the same Providence that shook the foundations of the Philippian jail shakes the foundations of men’s lives today through arrest, conviction, and incarceration.

Not all who hear will believe. Most will not. But some will. And for the elect who are saved through the ministry of the Word in prison, the years they spent behind bars will one day be seen—from the vantage point of eternity—not as a tragedy but as the very means God used to bring them from death to life.