Who Is Responsible for Reconciliation? - HB Charles is On Point

AD Robles

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So, I've been reading a book that I picked up a couple months ago called The Biblical Answer for Racial Unity, and what it is is a bunch of sermons or speeches that people gave in written form, and they're all about, obviously, the issue of racial unity.

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And I just got done with a chapter by H. B. Charles, he's a pastor, and the chapter was about how

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Christ is our peace, and Christ is the one who created us as one new man, you know,

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Gentile and Jew, one new man instead of the two. And it's a great sermon, and what

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I found interesting, though, was he actually says a lot of the same things that Dr. Russell Moore said, and actually even some things that Matt Chandler said in his

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ERLC MLK50 speech, but when I read them here, I didn't find them quite as off -putting, and I was trying to think of that as, why is that?

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I mean, do I have some kind of a bias against Matt Chandler or Russell Moore that I have not explored? And I don't think that that is what it is.

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I was trying to be honest with myself and see, why is that? They're saying, he's, brother's saying a lot of the same thing,

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H. B. Charles, he's the one first on the list, saying a lot of the same things, but I'm not reacting the same way.

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And I realized what it was. The reason why, and I'll just use the example of changing our worship styles or accepting different worship music or different preferences in our church in order to have racial unity, because if you remember,

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Russell Moore said that, and I had a lot of problems with it. But here, H. B. Charles says it, and I didn't quite have the same problem, and I think

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I figured out exactly why that is. It's because when Matt Chandler and Russell Moore were addressing their audiences, they weren't particularly addressing white people.

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White pastors, I need to chat with you. There is no way forward if white pulpits won't talk.

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It's not about a group of white folk in English desiring to justify himself.

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My white brothers and sisters, that sentence is huge. Let me say as a white man. They were saying, white people, you need to do this.

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White people need to do this. White do that. You know, and they were specifically addressing whites. In the white

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American Bible Belt, particularly white people's mind, my world has been so white.

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So why is my world so white? So white. So white. So predominantly white.

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So white. If I could be so bold, and I say this respectfully because I love this conference and I've been so impacted by it over the last 10 years, and I'm so honored to be a part of it, but don't we need to at least stop and ask the question, why is this conference so white?

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In contrast to that, when H .B. Charles addresses these people, he addresses both black and white.

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He says that both black and white have responsibility for having this kind of racial unity, having this racial reconciliation.

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So it seems to me that H .B. Charles is saying, look, if you're letting your music or your other kind of preferences at church get in the way of loving your white or black brothers and sisters in Christ, then you need to evaluate that.

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And he recognizes that it can happen from both ways. In fact, there's a story he tells here about,

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I forget what page it's on, but it's a story about a brother who had a ministry taking care of teens.

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And what he found was when they were taking a bus to a certain place where they were going to have an activity, what they did, nobody was forcing it, but what they were doing was all the black kids were sitting on one side of the bus and all the white kids were sitting on the other side of the bus.

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And eventually this guy just got fed up and he said, look, everybody get out of the bus. This is enough. We can't do this anymore.

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We have to be united. We're all the same. And so from now on, there's no black and white. It's just, we're all green. And so it got back onto the bus and he overheard somebody in the backseat, okay, well, dark green on one side of the bus, light green on the other.

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And so it's like he recognized this is a sin issue. This is an issue within the heart and both sides of this are equally capable of the same sins.

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You know, it's very popular to say that black people can't be racist and they define racism in a certain way where black people don't have power, so they can't enforce this racism.

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And really they can only be prejudiced. And some people even say, Dr. Eric Mason said this, that prejudice is really just a preference.

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It's really nothing to be worried about. And I would agree preferences aren't anything to be worried about, but prejudice is if you're going to be partial, you know, with that prejudice.

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And so that's why I think this is a problem. You see, racial reconciliation is no different than any kind of reconciliation, a black and a white person where there's something between them.

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There's some kind of a sin issue between them for them to be reconciled to each other. It's no different than anyone to be reconciled to each other.

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So if you sin against your wife or if there's some kind of a strife within the family, well, both sides need to be willing to set aside their preferences in order for there to be some true reconciliation.

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Because when Dr. Russell Moore says, I address this to you white people, what that automatically does is it tries to put blacks and minorities in a morally superior position.

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That's straight out of critical theory, by the way. And no, minorities are not an automatically morally superior position.

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There is lots of anti -white prejudice out there and anti -white rhetoric. I mean, we even saw

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Dr. Eric Mason talk about it as if it was an insult saying, well, that guy's black on the outside, but angloid on the inside.

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And you're wondering why multi -ethnicity isn't happening at your church. It's because you have a person that's black on the outside, but angloid on the inside.

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There's a racial animus there. And I think Dr. Eric Mason would recognize that in himself. He even talks about how he tries to war against letting his frustration and his anger against white people get come out because he feels like he has that in his heart.

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And I could see that come out at some point. And so we have to recognize that when the

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Bible talks about reconciliation, the Bible talks about sin and being united to your brother.

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There's responsibility on both sides because no matter how hard somebody tries to be united, if the other person is not interested, well, that's just going to be a problem.

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What I mean is that it takes two to tango. In other words, if you want to be reconciled to someone that you've sinned against and that person is unwilling to talk to you, well, there's obviously not going to be reconciliation there.

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If you're apologizing, you're repenting, you've taken steps towards repairing the relationship and the other person is unwilling to forgive you, there obviously won't be reconciliation there.

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Just like if you're not willing to repent of sins that you've personally done, then there won't be reconciliation there.

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And so what I mean is there's responsibility on both sides. Do you really think that you're being a forgiving person?

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Imagine if your spouse or something, you offended your spouse and you repented and you apologized and you're taking steps to change the behavior and your spouse says, oh,

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I forgive you. And then every chance they get, they're constantly bringing up your sins, your problem, your issues of the past that you've already repented of.

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Is that real forgiveness? I don't think anyone would say that that is. And so it's the same in this situation.

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There obviously has been progress made between the racial tensions in our communities. There's no question about that.

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Anyone who would deny that I think is lying. But let's just not pretend like, you know, the people that are in the minority are like these innocent doves.

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I mean, no, you have to forgive your white brothers and sisters in Christ. You have to forgive them. You can't just say, well,

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I forgive you, but then constantly bring up all of the evil that their grandparents did. It doesn't work that way.

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That's why the Bible says, as long as it, as far as it depends on you, live in harmony with everybody.

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Because the Bible's, it's not ignorant. God is not ignorant. He knows sometimes it doesn't depend on you.

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Sometimes you're trying to reconcile and the other person is not interested. And so that's why I think,

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I think, you know, when, when we try to separate these things out and say, well, white people, you have a disproportionate responsibility.

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No, no, no, they don't. The offending party has a disproportionate responsibility, but there's responsibility on both sides.

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And we can't just say the white race is the offending party. That's not how biblical law and biblical justice works.

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You can't just use what the white race as a proxy. Hey, look, if somebody of a different ethnicity does something to you, yeah, they, they need to come and repent and, and take steps into fixing it.

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But this is not what's really being called for here. There's, instead, there's sort of like a, sort of a general call for all white people to do, you know, we don't even really know what, because it's never really defined.

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Anyway, again, there is a blame and there's effort required on every side.

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If we're going to be united in Christ, look, we're, we're united in Christ already. That's already happened. That's another thing that this brother said, that's already happened.

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And now we need to start acting like it. And there's enough responsibility on both sides of this for both sides to start acting like it.

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You know, when we say things like we're looking for a, a, a pastor, that's a POC, a person of color, and we want to exclude pastors or exclude churches that have a white, that are white, that have the wrong skin color, we got to realize that we're not working for unity there.

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We're, we're, we're actually working for disunity there. Those kinds of things don't work. Like the Women of Color Conference at the

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Gospel Coalition, like that's, the reason why people have such a problem with that is because it goes against your stated goals.

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You're talking about how we need to be united in Christ and then segregating for a couple hours for your fellowship event. It doesn't work that way.

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Those women are responsible for that decision and that decision went against unity. There's no question about that.

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All you have to do is look at the backlash. And so, again, there's responsibility for both sides and both sides have to really look within their souls and make sure that they're putting aside any kind of animus based on race that they have towards the other side.

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Because both sides are capable of it, regardless of what Dr. Eris Mason and other people like him say.