MLK’s Most Powerful Words
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00:00:05.000 | Happy Friday everyone. Today we wrap up a little four-part series on race.
00:00:10.000 | Pastor John, you've been talking about race in America over the last 50 years,
00:00:13.000 | and often you speak with serious appreciation and even admiration for Martin Luther King Jr.
00:00:19.000 | Is there anything that stands out to you above other things as to what moved you most about this man's life?
00:00:25.000 | Yes, and what I want to do, Tony, is just let the listener today hear King speak what, for me,
00:00:37.000 | was the most moving thing he ever said or ever wrote.
00:00:41.000 | A lot of people think the most moving thing he ever said was the "I Have a Dream" speech on the Washington Mall.
00:00:48.000 | Well, that was powerful and it's famous, but it's not the most moving thing.
00:00:54.000 | For this racist sinner of the 1950s and 60s, it's not the most powerful thing he ever said.
00:01:01.000 | The most powerful thing he ever wrote were, I'll read this paragraph from a letter from a Birmingham jail.
00:01:11.000 | He wrote this 1963, April 16, while he was in jail, and accused of being precipitous and impatient in making demands in a peaceful, nonviolent way.
00:01:27.000 | This is what he wrote, and if you were like me and you grew up in this,
00:01:32.000 | this would probably have the same effect on you that it did on me, and maybe it will.
00:01:38.000 | This is what he said. "Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the sting, the darts of segregation, to say 'wait.'
00:01:50.000 | But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim,
00:01:59.000 | when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters,
00:02:07.000 | when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society,
00:02:16.000 | when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter
00:02:24.000 | why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television
00:02:30.000 | and see tears welling up in her eyes when she's told that Funtown is closed to colored children
00:02:36.000 | and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky
00:02:41.000 | and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people,
00:02:47.000 | when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who's asking, 'Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?'
00:02:56.000 | when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you,
00:03:06.000 | when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored,'
00:03:13.000 | when your first name becomes 'Nigger,' your middle name becomes 'Boy,' however old you are,
00:03:19.000 | your last name becomes 'John,' and your wife and mother are never given the respected title 'Mrs.'
00:03:25.000 | when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro,
00:03:32.000 | living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next,
00:03:37.000 | and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments,
00:03:40.000 | when you are ever fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness,
00:03:45.000 | then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
00:03:51.000 | There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over,
00:03:59.000 | and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.
00:04:05.000 | I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."
00:04:14.000 | So that kind of writing landed on me late, very late, not when it needed to,
00:04:24.000 | but when it did, my sense of the historic significance of Martin Luther King
00:04:33.000 | has never gone down because he didn't—it's really quite a matter of indifference
00:04:40.000 | whether King was biblical, evangelical, or whether he was morally upright.
00:04:46.000 | The issue here is, did he rescue America from two things?
00:04:52.000 | One, the injustices that he just described with painful accuracy, according to my life and experience,
00:05:01.000 | and two, from a conflagration that had another strategy, namely of violence,
00:05:08.000 | violence being pursued would have caused this country to go up in flames, a kind of second Civil War.
00:05:14.000 | I really do believe God used him to rescue us on both counts.
00:05:20.000 | In other words, the civil rights successes were largely owing to his voice,
00:05:24.000 | and the prevention of a worse kind of reaction through violence was prevented.
00:05:33.000 | So I would encourage people to get a copy of "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and read the whole thing.
00:05:44.000 | If that was moving to them as it is to me, then my guess is the whole thing could be life-changing.
00:05:51.000 | Thank you for that, Pastor John.
00:05:53.000 | And you can read all of Dr. King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" right now by Googling the title.
00:05:58.000 | You can find the full text of the letter online, and you can read it in about 30 minutes or so.
00:06:02.000 | Also, I want to reiterate the new book "Letters to a Birmingham Jail,"
00:06:07.000 | a response to the words and dreams of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
00:06:10.000 | which was edited by Brian Luritz and was recently published by Moody.
00:06:14.000 | Pastor John wrote chapter 2 in that book, which is titled "Waiting for and Hastening the Day of Multi-Ethnic Beauty."
00:06:21.000 | We return on Monday to talk about the joy of Jesus.
00:06:25.000 | Specifically, if Jesus is infinitely satisfied in the fellowship of the Trinity with perfect joy,
00:06:30.000 | in what sense did he endure the cross for the joy set before him?
00:06:34.000 | I'm your host Tony Reinke. Have a great weekend!
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