A Suggestion For My Black and Brown Brothers In Christ

AD Robles

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Hello, my name is Adam Robles, and I'm going to offer in this video an unsolicited suggestion for my black and brown brothers and sisters in Christ.

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You know, these days we hear a lot about white evangelicalism and the white church. And usually when people are talking about these things, it's in a negative light, let's just be honest.

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You know, we've seen in the news recently Lecrae saying that he's going to divorce the white evangelicalism and he's going to, you know, he's going to distance himself from the white church.

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I've seen magazines whose entire cover story is about how whiteness is killing the church.

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And you know, that definitely elicits a certain kind of response from people. And I think a lot of that, a lot, a lot of white people feel attacked by that kind of stuff.

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And I think the reason is because nobody really knows what these people mean by white evangelicalism or the white church.

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You know, these terms aren't found in the Bible. And so, you know, people interpret them whatever way they want to.

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And so sometimes people can feel attacked even if your intention isn't to attack them. And so my suggestion is that if you want to be understood more, and I'm assuming that's what you want,

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I think, you know, you're most of you have your hearts in the right place. You want to improve the church of Jesus Christ from where it is right now and to move it forward into sanctification.

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And so if you want to be understood and you want to be respectful and you want to be biblical, my suggestion is to throw away some of those terms, right?

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Because you know, whiteness as a technical term and white supremacy, these are terms that aren't biblical.

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They aren't found in scripture. If you look in the Bible, you're not going to find the word racism in it.

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You're not going to find ethnic discrimination, that kind of a term in the

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Bible. You're not going to find white church in the Bible because we all agree that there's one church in the

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Bible, the church of Jesus Christ. And that church is made up of different ethnicities, every tribe, every tongue, every nation.

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And so my suggestion is that we start using biblical terms. And when you think about it, when you take a step back, foundationally, what is the sin of racism?

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What is the sin of white supremacy? It's partiality. The Bible has a lot to say about partiality and a lot to say about social justice, but it's a real social justice, right?

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It's not the fake secular bootleg kind of social justice. It's all over the

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Bible, in the book of James chapter two, a lot of us are very familiar with that passage. James says, the brother of Jesus Christ, James says, my brothers show no partiality as you hold to the faith in our

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Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. And what James is doing there is he's drawing from the old

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Testament law, where it talks a lot about showing partiality. You know, God cares about social justice.

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Don't let anyone ever tell you that the gospel isn't about social justice because it is.

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You see, we look forward to the time when justice will roll down like water. You see, God and his law cares about this stuff.

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In Exodus, when he's giving the law to the Israelites, in chapter 23, it says, you shall not pervert justice due to the poor in his lawsuit.

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You see, just because somebody's poor doesn't mean that you shouldn't hear them out. Justice applies to them as well.

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But in that same chapter, if you look, God says, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit.

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So it doesn't matter if he's rich or poor. It doesn't matter if he has power or he has no power.

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You shall not be partial to anybody. You shall judge rightly. And so I think that if we use terms like partiality, it's a very specific, biblically defined term.

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And we can move this conversation forward when we do that. Instead of saying there's these really vague white supremacist systems and there's these vague white privilege, you know, that churches have in their structures and the systems.

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And you know, these things aren't really ever defined and there's really never specific examples and evidences of it.

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Instead, we can talk about partiality. And if you're accusing a brother of partiality, that's serious. And we need to make sure that we take it seriously.

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So we need to have a biblical standard for that. You know, Deuteronomy says, you shall not be partial in judgment.

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You shall hear the great and small alike. And so we better make sure that if we're going to be accusing brothers and sisters of partiality, that we have specific examples and that we use a standard of justice and a standard of evidence that's biblical.

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It's got to be corroborated. It's got to be real evidence. It can't just be an accusation, which I see a lot of that as well, where a brother will make an accusation and say, you know, this white church does this or white churches do

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X and there's really no evidence of it. And so that's my suggestion. I say we discard using the world's terms.

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I say we discard using manmade terms. And I think we'll get a lot farther in this conversation if we use biblically defined parameters.

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And so let's start talking about partiality instead of white supremacy. Anyway, that's my suggestion.