Happy Friday everyone. Today we wrap up a little four-part series on race. Pastor John, you've been talking about race in America over the last 50 years, and often you speak with serious appreciation and even admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. Is there anything that stands out to you above other things as to what moved you most about this man's life?

Yes, and what I want to do, Tony, is just let the listener today hear King speak what, for me, was the most moving thing he ever said or ever wrote. A lot of people think the most moving thing he ever said was the "I Have a Dream" speech on the Washington Mall.

Well, that was powerful and it's famous, but it's not the most moving thing. For this racist sinner of the 1950s and 60s, it's not the most powerful thing he ever said. The most powerful thing he ever wrote were, I'll read this paragraph from a letter from a Birmingham jail.

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. This is what he wrote, and if you were like me and you grew up in this, this would probably have the same effect on you that it did on me, and maybe it will.

This is what he said. "Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the sting, the darts of segregation, to say 'wait.' But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim, when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters, 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, when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television and see tears welling up in her eyes when she's told that Funtown is closed to colored children and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people, 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?' 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, when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored,' when your first name becomes 'Nigger,' your middle name becomes 'Boy,' however old you are, your last name becomes 'John,' and your wife and mother are never given the respected title 'Mrs.' when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments, when you are ever fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness, then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience." So that kind of writing landed on me late, very late, not when it needed to, but when it did, my sense of the historic significance of Martin Luther King has never gone down because he didn't—it's really quite a matter of indifference whether King was biblical, evangelical, or whether he was morally upright.

The issue here is, did he rescue America from two things? One, the injustices that he just described with painful accuracy, according to my life and experience, and two, from a conflagration that had another strategy, namely of violence, violence being pursued would have caused this country to go up in flames, a kind of second Civil War.

I really do believe God used him to rescue us on both counts. In other words, the civil rights successes were largely owing to his voice, and the prevention of a worse kind of reaction through violence was prevented. So I would encourage people to get a copy of "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and read the whole thing.

If that was moving to them as it is to me, then my guess is the whole thing could be life-changing. Thank you for that, Pastor John. And you can read all of Dr. King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" right now by Googling the title. You can find the full text of the letter online, and you can read it in about 30 minutes or so.

Also, I want to reiterate the new book "Letters to a Birmingham Jail," a response to the words and dreams of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which was edited by Brian Luritz and was recently published by Moody. Pastor John wrote chapter 2 in that book, which is titled "Waiting for and Hastening the Day of Multi-Ethnic Beauty." We return on Monday to talk about the joy of Jesus.

Specifically, if Jesus is infinitely satisfied in the fellowship of the Trinity with perfect joy, in what sense did he endure the cross for the joy set before him? I'm your host Tony Reinke. Have a great weekend!