What MLK Can Teach Us Today

How we are to treat one another is prescribed in the Scriptures, and God gives us the capacity to view others in a loving manner. James 4 states:
10 Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.
11 Do not speak evil of one another, brethren. He who speaks evil of a brother and judges his brother, speaks evil of the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.
12 There is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy. Who are you to judge another?

We have to possess a humble attitude, willing to submit ourselves before a powerful and holy God, who teaches and empowers us how to relate to one another.  We can depend on the Spirit of God to govern how we regard other people and to muzzle our mouths when we are tempted to speak evil or judge the motives of another person.  If we are questioning another's motives, rather than looking into our own hearts, we are pursuing a path of division.

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If we see that the Lord is gracious and have experienced His grace through faith in Christ, we can be people of grace, infused by the Spirit...that is what we can take away from the first five verses of 1st Peter 2:
1 Therefore, laying aside all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all evil speaking,
2 as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby,
3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious.
4 Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious,
5 you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

On this day set aside to recognize the birthday of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I want to pose a question to you.  It's one about which many might have an answer, but walk with me here: what can the teachings of Dr. King say to us today?  In this increasingly polarized society, in which we have faced challenges in the the area of race relations, can we take his faith perspective and views on society and apply them as Christians?

I think we can.  Patrina Mosley of Family Research Council, who has been a guest on my program 
multiple times in the past, wrote several years ago, said that King "...was able to articulate what the real problems were and to cast a unifying vision for all Americans to move forward. Dr. King also called the collection of his brave volunteers an army, but 'an army whose allegiance was to God … it was an army that would sing but not slay … no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.'" She writes that:

Dr. King took universal Christian principles that inherently speak to every human conscience and used them to make a crisis of conscience to promote action. He made sure the world televised his non-violent marches for the enforcement of equal rights, while dogs and water hoses were unleashed on their bodies, knocking them to ground only to be beaten down more with clubs and fists. The world saw the participants of these non-violent marches singing praises to God and stopping together to sink to their knees on the pavement to pray.

The words of the late Dr. King echo through history and can speak powerfully to us today.  Patrina quotes from him, when she says: 

“This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

She adds, "We must be the voice of truth and fill the void. We cannot afford to wait, hoping things will just get better. Our destination should be what it was always meant to be, 'to sit at the table of brotherhood.'" And, Mosley does not undersell the importance of the application of Biblical truth, writing: "any social movement not based on Christian principles cannot be sustained and will fail. Christianity operates in truth and is a benefit to all people, no matter one’s color, gender, or culture."

We need to hear and heed this, in a time in which Christianity is being mischaracterized and the Church is facing unique struggles, coming through a worldwide pandemic and a distinct pattern of disunity over how to transform society.  The Bible, as it was expounded upon by Dr. King, offers us powerful principles for how we are to function in the body of Christ and the human family.

The ministry of FamilyLife ran a piece recently written by one of its staff members, an African-American man named Rodney Adams, and his wife, Lisa.  They write:

The truth is, Dr. King left a legacy from which anyone of any race can benefit.

Even though many people believe Dr. King’s fight was only about Black people, when you take the whole of his discourse, you find it was about all of humanity. While being Black, in an eerily similar time of social unrest like today, was most certainly the catalyst and driving motivation for the movement, he knew, as a man of God, that the struggle was deeper. He knew his dream needed to be understood and embraced by all in order for a real difference to be made in this world.

He was a man who fought for the rights of people, like his four little children, to be seen, respected, and treated as the sons and daughters of God they are.

The Adamses state: "Seeing people the way God sees them is one very important way our family strives to live out Dr. King’s legacy. It makes it much easier to show kindness and have empathy for others. We know all too well when we look at others through our own lens, the view becomes warped, distorted, disproportionate, and unforgiving." They add, "So many are on the receiving end of an unfair glance. Dr. King’s legacy teaches us it doesn’t have to be this way."

I think we can be motivated to move from that unfair glance to a unlimited grace.  As I will share tomorrow, I commonly see on social media a move from the Great Commandment of loving God with all that we are and loving our neighbor to violating the Ninth Commandment and bearing false witness. God's grace enables us to move from slander to seeing people through God's eyes, a principle to which Rodney and Lisa allude.

We can become jaded and bitter, angry and frustrated with the way things are. But Dr. King teaches us that we can change, we can bring about a new perspective - we can move from how things are to how God desires that they should be.  So, in answering the question regarding what Martin Luther King Jr. would teach us today, we have to be willing to adopt God's perspective, see the possibilities, and activate the power of a love that does not come from earth.