Winsome November - Racism Has No Place in the Church, Seriously, None!

AD Robles

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Well, welcome to the first episode of Winsome November, or Wovember, or Winovember, not sure which is which, but it is

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Winsome November and what I'm planning on doing is every week releasing a couple of videos where I have the same content,

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I address the same highly controversial topics, but hopefully I do so in a much more winsome way than I'm known for, typically.

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And so today I wanted to reference a couple of tweets I've seen recently, and really some tweets that I've seen sort of over the course of the last year and a half or so, and I want to start off today by just acknowledging something really important, at least to me, and that is the take that I think is gaining more traction and I'm grateful for it, but the idea that racism has no place in the life of a

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Christian, no place whatsoever. If you're a gospel -believing Christian who seeks to honor

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Christ in everything, racism is unacceptable. And I know that a lot of people, it's very popular to say this kind of thing now, but I think we need to be very careful though, because when we talk about racism, we need to understand that racism, the word racism isn't in the

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Bible, but there is constant references to the sin, the fundamental foundational sin of racism.

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And so we need to be very intentional about how we approach the issue of racism, and we need to be very careful about it because it's a very insidious kind of sin, and we can actually be racist without really thinking that we're racist.

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That's something that's definitely true, and I think we see a lot of people that make the claim of racism kind of willy -nilly and kind of, you know, just everything

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I don't like is racist, and we don't want to go that route, but at the same time, we don't want to be naive and we want to have some gospel intentionality about how we approach the sin of racism.

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And I think at its foundation, the sin of racism is the sin of partiality, partiality.

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It's being partial to someone or against someone based on the color of their skin or based on their ethnicity, and the reality is that this is a very kind of sneaky thing to do.

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What I want to do is I want to unpack one of the ways that this sin can be committed where we might not think it's being committed, and I want to make sure that if you're a preacher, if you're a pastor, if you're someone who cares about this issue, this sin of partiality, and if you're a

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Christian, you should care about this. This is important that we're careful to not fall for this sin in a way that is socially acceptable, but according to God is completely unacceptable.

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One of the things that one of my favorite verses that talks about partiality is Leviticus chapter 19.

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Leviticus chapter 19 is the same passage in the scripture where we get, love your neighbor as yourself. So this is very much still in effect.

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Jesus thought so. Jesus thought that Leviticus 19 was crucial to the lives of his people.

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I mean, Jesus wrote Leviticus 19. I mean, this was God's idea. This was Christ's idea.

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So we need to make sure that we're paying attention to the principles here of Leviticus 19.

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Here's what it says there. This is the Christian standard version. Do not act unjustly when deciding a case.

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Do not be partial to the poor or give preference to the rich. Judge your neighbor fairly.

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So what's interesting about this is that it gives you no quarter for partiality either way, whether it's for a rich person, we can easily understand why someone might show partiality to a rich person, but it also says you shouldn't be partial to the poor.

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So whether the person's poor or rich, whether he's in the overclass or the underclass, whether he's got a lot of power or no power at all, that should have no bearing on how you treat that person.

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Instead, you should treat them fairly according to the law of God is what this is saying. And I think that that makes sense for Christians as well.

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See, we often talk about white racism and white racism has definitely existed and still does currently exist.

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And we obviously wanna call that out whenever we see it. But remember, that's a very socially praiseworthy thing to do.

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I mean, if you ever wanna get a pat on the back, call out white racism, it's very easy to do.

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But if we're not gonna show partiality and not be guilty of the very sin that we want to call out, the sin of partiality based on skin color, we need to treat blacks and Latinos and people of color the same way we treat white people.

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And that means that we should not be partial to them when we're talking about partiality.

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Let me give you an example. I'm not gonna name any names because that's not really what this is about. I'm sure if you follow these issues, you probably know who

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I'm talking about, that's fine. But I wanna talk about these kinds of things. I saw a tweet the other day and basically implied that he's very pleased because he's a black man, have a black doctor and the black doctor is a lot better than the white doctor for him and his family.

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Okay, fine, fine, that's fine. I've seen other tweets that talk about how blacks need to set up their own power structures, their own maybe denominations or leadership councils or seminaries, black seminaries.

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I remember there was a very famous conference group that had a fellowship event, a

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Christian fellowship event that only blacks and Latinos were invited to and they didn't want white people to come to it.

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And I've seen other people that have talked about how they were perturbed that they were the only black person at a movie theater at one point and how that really worried them or they were just upset about it or I don't really know exactly what the point was.

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But the thing is like racist people have always preferred hanging out with their own kind.

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Racist people have always preferred hanging out with their own kind. And just because these are people of color, we need to have, again, some intentionality to this, some gospel intentionality where we're judging by right appearances and we can understand these kinds of tweets as not only divisive, but showing partiality.

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The sin of racism, right? I mean, that's what partiality or racism is. It's the sin of partiality. These people are loudly and proudly saying that we prefer to hang out with our own kind.

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And look, if you're a racist, again, this is something that racists have always preferred.

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They've always preferred hanging out with their own kind. They always think hanging out with their own kind is better for their mental wellbeing and their physical wellbeing.

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And these are not new ideas that people have had. People have talked about how they prefer hanging out with their own kind for all kinds of reasons.

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But if we're gonna be intentional about this, if we're gonna bring the gospel to bear on this issue, we need to be able to call out partiality and wrong thinking when it comes to skin color and ethnicity, regardless of the person who is saying it to us.

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So in other words, if a black person bemoans the fact that there's too many white people around and whatever the situation is, or my doctor's white and whatever the situation is, we need to be able to come alongside that person and say, look, that's actually a sin.

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That attitude is a sin. And you would see it if it was a white person. You see, we can't judge according to what is socially acceptable in our culture, but rather we need to judge fairly with right judgment.

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That's what Leviticus 19 is all about. This passage that I've read, we can't show partiality to the poor or the rich.

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And likewise, we can't show partiality to white people or black people. If they're sinning, we need to come alongside that person and tell them that that is not

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God's best for your life. That kind of partial attitude is damaging to you.

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It's damaging to you and it's damaging to others. And so we need to be able to call out that kind of thing before.

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As I've said, I've heard many white people talk about how they're happier and healthier hanging out with their own kind.

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And we rightly come alongside them and say, well, that's not correct. That's not quite correct.

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But if we're gonna love our black and brown brothers, sisters in Christ, we need to actually do that with them as well, because that's the only way that we can bring the gospel to bear on all of this and not do it in such a way that shows partiality.

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You see, you can't change everybody's heart. You can't change the big systems often. It's very complicated and things like that.

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But what you can do is be faithful with what you've been given. And we've been given an opportunity here, a golden opportunity to fight partiality in all its forms, whether it's a rich person or a poor person.

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Anyway, I hope that you've enjoyed the first episode of Winsome November. I will be launching a companion video to this, which is my normal kind of content and my normal style, kind of related to this topic, really talking about controlling the things that you can control and not worrying about it, but not focusing on those things that you can't control, like the big systems and things like that.

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That's an important thing that I want people to really understand because God wants you to be faithful with what you have, not with what you don't have, if that makes sense.

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We'll talk about that later. I'll see you later in the next video. I hope this has been winsome. I hope this has been helpful.