“Segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we all have in Christ Jesus.”

MARTIN LUTHER KING

Unless you live under a rock, you are aware that our nation is burning. Literally.

I have spent some of the morning praying for our nation and the people in it.

Not necessarily praying that our nation ‘would turn back to God’, but more specifically that the churches of our nation would turn back to God. That we as believers would submit fully to his leading, that we would seek the face of the one who alone can save, that we would bow in humility and beg God to work in us and through us to speak His truth of Justice to a sick and dying world.

I pray that a mighty revival will occur among us that will reveal Christ and Christ alone as the one that can heal a nations and families one soul at a time.

There are some who mock the idea of prayer – that it is just an impotent superstition that changes nothing.

Yet the greatest civil rights leader heavily promoted the idea.

To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing”

Martin Luther King

Whenever there is racial discord, it is inevitable that Martin Luther King will be quoted. Over the last year this has certainly been the case. As we seek justice, as we seek equality, his name stands out as the great leader who spent a lifetime fighting that battle the right way.

And winning it.

What we so often forget is that King was a seminary graduate and a Pastor at a local church. Everything he did was grounded in the world view of Christianity. So why do we think we can quote King, emulate King, admire King, and somehow separate the man from his faith – the very thing that made him the man he was? The very thing that drove him to know what was good and what was evil and how to act upon it?

“You see, the founding fathers were influenced by the Bible.  The concept of the imago dei (image of God) is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected.  And this gives everyone a uniqueness, a worth, a dignity, and we must never forget this as a nation.  There are no gradations in the image of God.  Every man from a treble white to a bass black are significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because everyone is made in the image of God.”

The American Dream, Martin luther King (1964)

The most famous protest led by King was the Montgomery Bus Boycott. To protest segregated seating on the buses, King’s protest involved…simply not riding the buses. This led to a Supreme Court ruling in 1956 desegregating buses. King’s non-violent boycott based in his approach of faith, prayer, perseverance, love and hope achieved a national, wide-scale, systemic change.

And isn’t that what we are looking for?

Our world is on fire.

Injustice plagues us.

Human slavery exists in greater numbers than at any time in the history of our planet.

We are fighting a battle that we in ourselves are not equipped to win.

Trump is not your problem, nor your solution. Neither is Biden or anyone else.

Our solution, our only solution, is in Christ our redeemer.

Our redeemer died an unjust death as an innocent man.

Our redeemer is concerned with injustice because He himself was victim of it. But the victory came, the hope came, when he conquered the grave and offered true life to all who would seek it. In this, we find the solution to our problems. We find the grace and peace and hope to carry us forward.

Martin Luther King knew this, and his actions reflected it.

May we as believers rise up not in the same tired political jargon, nor the arguments of hate, but as the Bride of Christ, comprised of every nation, tribe and tongue, and in steadfast prayer and unity continue work of the Gospel to change hearts, minds and communities.