WWUTT 680 Q&A Responding to MLK50?

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It is a good thing for a church to desire unity, but we cannot manufacture unity.

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It is not man -made. It is given to us by God through the Word of Christ when we understand the text.

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You're listening to When We Understand the Text, an online Bible ministry so that we may know all the riches freely given to us by God.

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For questions and comments, send us an email to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

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Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. It is Friday, and on the Friday edition of the podcast, we respond to questions from listeners.

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You can submit a question to the following email address, whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

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I'm only going to be responding to one question today, because it's going to take me the length of the episode to respond to it.

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This comes from Matt in Illinois. He says, Hey Pastor, are you going to give your thoughts on the

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MLK 50 conference? I don't understand the intent of the conference, but didn't know if I was missing something.

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It seems like a secular thing to do, even though they will most likely proclaim the gospel at some point.

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Should Christians address this issue of the conference, or just let it be? Now, I'm the kind of a person,

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I don't really respond to things right away. If I do, I tend to respond from my flesh. So I like to take some time and meditate on it, read the scriptures, pray about it, see how things unfold, and if necessary,

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I will give a response. And usually it has to do with whether or not it affects my congregation.

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Because my ministry first is my family, and then it's to my church, before it's to the online ministry that I have.

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But members of my congregation have asked about the MLK 50 conference, and I've had conversations with several.

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I've had the chance to listen to some of the sermons that came out of the conference and watch some of the reactions to it.

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And just to give you some background, one month ago, the Gospel Coalition and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the political arm of the

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Southern Baptist Convention, are you keeping up with this? So this is TGC and the

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ERLC, abbreviated, they teamed up for MLK 50, Gospel Reflections from the

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Mountaintop. The purpose of the conference was to reflect on the state of racial unity in the church and the culture, and doing this on the 50th anniversary of the death of Dr.

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Martin Luther King Jr., perennial leader of the Civil Rights Movement. They held the conference in the city where Dr.

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King was assassinated, and that was Memphis, Tennessee. When the conference was first announced,

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I was stunned that these two organizations, with Gospel and Ethics in their names respectively, chose to name the conference after an adulterous heretic.

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As heroic as Dr. King is considered, his doctrine was wrong and his lifestyle was scandalous.

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Even his sincerest apologists acknowledged this. He denied that Jesus is

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God. His closest colleague, Ralph Abernathy, said that he slept with three women the night before his death, and Abernathy went on to say that he had an insatiable appetite for women.

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Multiple sources confirmed that one of those women he slept with was at the hotel where Dr.

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King was assassinated. I always thought that King's beliefs and his lifestyle were a foregone conclusion.

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In my lifetime, I've never heard Dr. King referenced as a credible theologian, only as the civil rights legend that he is.

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Sure, he was a pastor and he preached sermons, but against the Bible he was disqualified.

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So you can understand my shock at hearing the name of the conference. My hopes were not high going into the conference that right doctrine and theology would underscore the conversation on racial reconciliation.

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Going through the list of speakers on the website, some of them came from churches that ordain women ministers.

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And that's against the statement of beliefs that the ERLC holds to.

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And don't get me wrong. I think a conference on addressing matters of prejudice in our churches is a fine idea. Why would a gospel preacher be opposed to that?

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I don't deny that these things happen in the church. Paul confronted a segregation problem in the church in Corinth.

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But social issues regarding race and ethnicity are not more important than sound doctrine and historically biblical orthodoxy.

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Nothing is more important than right theology. That's what we've been talking about as we've been going through 1st and 2nd

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Timothy the last several months. The passage we just read this past week from 2nd Timothy 2 .8,

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remember Jesus Christ risen from the dead, the offspring of David as preached in my gospel for which

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I am suffering. And I expressed concern about MLK 50 when

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I was in 1st Timothy 6 last month and I read starting in verse 3, if anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our

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Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing.

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He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth.

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My concern, as I said a month ago, was that because this conference was centered around a man who was depraved in mind and deprived of the truth.

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It was going to have the aforementioned results, controversy, quarrels about words, evil suspicions of one another, and constant friction within the body of Christ.

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It would not lead to true reconciliation and it hasn't. There's been tons of division and evil suspicions following MLK 50, not the least of which was the

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Beatty's article in which he said your white grandparents were complicit in the murder of Dr.

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Martin Luther King Jr. You cannot manufacture unity just because you want unity.

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It comes only through the sound words of the Lord Jesus Christ. I said

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I was sure the gospel was going to be preached, but it wasn't the main focus. No offense to anyone at TGC or ERLC, I'm sure they meant well, but it's the truth.

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The gospel wasn't the focus. Martin Luther King Jr. was on the banner, not the gospel.

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It's interesting that just this week, Andy Stanley stirred up controversy yet again when he said that unity was more important than being theologically correct.

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On the contrary, there is no unity without right theology. Again, theology is everything.

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Whenever we open our mouths and talk about God, we are being theological.

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If your theology is not grounded in right orthodoxy, you risk being a heretic.

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Even though MLK 50 did not outright say, as Andy Stanley did, that unity was more important than theology, that is what they expressed through this conference.

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Now I've not watched every sermon that was preached at MLK 50, but let me single out one example of the nature of this conference, and that's in the sermon that was preached by Matt Chandler.

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He's a pastor who's meant a lot to me. He's preached the gospel to me. I've used multiple clips from Matt on this podcast.

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When we understand the text exists in part because of Matt Chandler. His sermon,

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God is for God, that he preached at Elevation Church to convict that church for the way

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Stephen Furtick maligned scripture, that was a phenomenal sermon. When he said, you're not

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David and your problems aren't Goliath, it was that point that sparked the idea for the first what video.

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I've been listening to Chandler for years. I went through his series on James a few years ago and listened to his most recent series on Exodus.

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I listen to most of it anyway, not quite all of it, but I believe he is a gospel man and he loves the

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Lord and he loves his church. So please receive this critique with humble concern.

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I'm not saying I'm better than Matt Chandler. I'm not calling him a heretic and I'm not going to stop listening to his sermons and I'm not telling anyone else to have nothing to do with him.

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There are things that I disagree with Chandler on, and this sermon is one of them.

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In fact, I'm going to be flat out blunt with you. This sermon is a train wreck. It's not structured well.

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Chandler sounds not sure of himself most of the time. It's not organized, even though he's clearly following a flow from his tablet when you watch it on the video.

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And as with the rest of the conference, the Bible in this sermon is an afterthought.

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I believe you'll understand why I say that when we get to the sermon here. It's about half an hour long.

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I might clip some parts just for the sake of time, but I'm going to start at the very beginning to, as best as I can, keep all of this in context.

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So here is Matt Chandler introducing the topic, and it's going to be about three minutes in here before I interrupt him to address the first point.

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Well, good morning. Got to kind of settle my soul, watching our crew minister to us like that.

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Anytime you're asked to address an ethnic group, you're forced into some generalizations that I'm not sure ultimately that it's helpful.

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So what I want to do, having gotten... And I remember the emotion I felt when I opened up the email and it just said, hey, we would love for you to discuss, the council is confident in your ability to discuss the inconsistencies in white evangelicals on the issues of race and the way forward.

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Oh, and you have 30 minutes. So here's how I think I can serve us.

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I don't want to talk about fools today. So what I want to do is I want to talk to you about a group of people that God has knit my heart to.

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I am the pastor of the Village Church in Dallas, Texas. And it is a predominantly white congregation situated in a place where more than likely we will always be predominantly white.

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I don't feel an impulse to need to apologize for that or feel bad about that.

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That is the reality of God's call on my life. It's where I've been placed. It's the ministry that God has given me.

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And I deeply love the men and women of the Village Church.

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I have for 15 years wept with them, buried them, married them.

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They have wept with me. They have visited me in the hospital. I have visited them in the hospital.

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They are my people, and God is our God. That is the context that I find.

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But here's something I noticed, and this gets me into our journey.

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This people I love, this people that support me and applaud me and encourage me and through their tithes and offerings pay my bills, would operate in some inconsistencies that were discombobulating to me.

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If I preached a sermon out of the book of Isaiah on justice, my inbox would fill with their glee that I would broach the subject.

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But if I applied it to the subject of race, then all of a sudden,

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I was a Marxist or I'd been watching too much of the liberal media. If I spoke on abortion,

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I was applauded as courageous and a ferocious man of God. And yet, when

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I would tackle race, I was being too political. If I quoted the great reformer,

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Martin Luther, never, and I've done that hundreds of times over 15 years, never did

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I get an email about his blatant antisemitism. But let me quote the great reformer,

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Martin Luther King, Jr., and watch my inbox fill with people asking me if I'm aware of his moral brokenness.

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Permit me to make three points in response to this point. Number one, when

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Chandler preaches on the subject of abortion, he says that he's heralded as a courageous and a ferocious man of God.

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And indeed, he is. Chandler is magnificent when he preaches on the subject of abortion.

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I don't know if you've ever heard him preach on it before, but if you get the wretched TV series entitled Life is

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Best, you'll hear him preach on this subject. Go to wretched TV and order the

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DVD series Life is Best. It's great. All right. But then Chandler says that whenever he preaches on the subject of race, he's criticized as being too political.

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Let me present it to you this way. What is the definition of abortion? It is the destruction of a pre -born human life.

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Abortion is murder. I think we can all agree on that definition of abortion.

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What is the definition of race? Ah, see, that's a little bit more difficult.

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That's more complicated to define. And we're not all talking about the same thing whenever we talk about race.

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So it's unfair to Chandler's audience hearing this sermon and also unfair to the village church whom he's speaking about whenever he generalizes the issues in this way.

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When I speak about abortion, I'm courageous. But when I speak about race, I'm too political. We're not given any context there and we're not given any clear definitions either.

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So that's point number one that I have in response to that point. Number two, Chandler says that whenever he quotes

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Martin Luther, whenever he has quoted Martin Luther, he has never and he used the word never received an email questioning

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Luther regarding his blatant anti -Semitism. I find that hard to believe because Chandler has a church of over 17 ,000 people,

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I believe is what the number is, stretched over several campuses, and he has never, never received an email questioning

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Martin Luther's legitimacy because of his anti -Semitism. I pastor a church of just over 100 people and I've received emails from members in my congregation asking about Luther's anti -Semitism.

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How can we regard this man as a credible teacher of God when he hated the Jews so much?

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And I don't have time to go into it. But as I was I was talking about this with Stephen Melanson a few weeks ago,

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Stephen pointed out that Luther's frustration was not he didn't hate the Jews for their

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DNA. He was frustrated with their hard heartedness to the gospel. He didn't respond to the

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Jews the same way that that Paul responded with with an aching heart, which he expresses in Romans chapter nine.

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It doesn't mean that the way that Luther responded to it was correct. But if you want more background on this, I would encourage you look up an article about Luther's anti -Semitism from Ligonier .org.

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Look up an article there if you want to read more about it. But again, I've received emails questioning

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Luther's anti -Semitism. I just have a problem believing Chandler when he says that when he says he's never received one criticism about Martin Luther.

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And that's really just a minor point. So here's point number three. Chandler goes on to equate

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Martin Luther as a great reformer with Martin Luther King Jr. as a great reformer.

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The only thing that these two men have in common is the similarity in their names.

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And that's it. Martin Luther King Jr. was very critical of the

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Protestant Reformation in a sermon entitled Answer to a Perplexing Question, which was published in 1963, which

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I have in a book. Here is what Dr. King said about the Protestant Reformation.

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The Reformation wrongly affirmed that the image of God had been completely erased from man.

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This led to the Calvinistic concept of the total depravity of man and to a resurrection of the terrible idea of infant damnation.

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So depraved is human nature, said the doctrinaire Calvinist, that if a baby dies without baptism, he will burn forever in hell.

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Certainly, this carries the idea of man's sinfulness too far. This lopsided

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Reformation theology has often emphasized a purely otherworldly religion, which stresses the utter hopelessness of this world and calls upon the individual to concentrate on preparing his soul for the world to come.

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By ignoring the need for social reform, religion is divorced from the mainstream of human life, which, by the way, that is not at all.

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The Protestant Reformation that he is describing there, so it's it's a slander against Reformation, but that was what

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Dr. King taught about it. There is no similarities between him and Martin Luther.

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But then Chandler goes on to say that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was guilty of moral brokenness.

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So he defines Martin Luther's sin as being blatant antisemitism.

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But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was guilty of moral brokenness, and that was absolutely stunning to hear that from Matt Chandler, to hear him refer to Dr.

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King's sin. In a very abstract term like that moral brokenness, when

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Chandler I've heard him preach hard on sin, as a matter of fact, in this same sermon.

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He will go on to describe the Samaritan woman in the at the well in John chapter four as a woman who was trading sex for rent like he's he's just outright about this is what this woman's sin was.

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And Jesus shared the gospel with her. But yet when he's referring to Dr. King's sin, he's trying to be so extra polite about it that his approach is incredibly bent.

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He's showing partiality, which he's going to do again later on in this sermon.

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This won't be the first time Dr. King was an adulterer. He abandoned his family.

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This is confirmed. This is a man who fought for the civil rights of black

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Americans. But at what cost? If you sacrifice your family for great social reform, you've achieved nothing.

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You've actually achieved the opposite of what you are trying to accomplish. And it's amazing when

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I have heard Chandler preach hard against men who are shirking on their responsibilities that he gives

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Dr. King a pass as though he's saying it's all right for you to be an adulterer so long as you're fighting for the rights of others.

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But Jesus said, what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world yet loses his own soul?

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So these are the three concerns I have with just the first three minutes of the message here. But these inconsistencies in Chandler's sermon are going to come up again as we go on.

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I want to be careful because these are people that I love. These are people who love the word of God.

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They are crazy. Like if I I finished like a year and a half through the book of Exodus and I did a topical series and I started getting questions about when we're going to start preaching through the books of the

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Bible again. These are people who pray and worship and evangelize and love

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Jesus. OK, so Chandler brought up his series through Exodus. So I want to make a quick point here before we go on.

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Exodus chapter 23 verses two and three say this. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit siding with the many so as to pervert justice, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit.

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So Chandler has preached on this when he was going through Exodus. Romans two eleven says God shows no partiality.

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And yet Chandler is going to show he already has shown and will show partiality as we go on in this sermon.

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And yet there were these inconsistencies around this topic that were confusing to me.

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And again, I'm not talking about fools. Three hundred fools left when we first broached the subject. And there weren't there wasn't any lament in our elder room about that other than the normal lament that you lament concerning a fool.

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So I want to try to explain as best I can the inconsistencies in the white evangelicals that I have been called to lead around race.

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I think there's a cascading effect and it starts with ignorance. And let me chat about ignorance.

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I think what I'm talking about on ignorance is they don't know what they don't know.

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And they are a part of a system that encourages their not knowing. Let me just lay this before you.

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I am a public school kid. My kids are public school kids. And here's here's what

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I've done leading up to this. I have asked 30 white men and women that I know and love to tell me who they learned about during Black History Month.

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Among the 30 plus men and women starting at age 12 all the way up to 60,

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I was given seven names. Harriet Tubman and the

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Underground Railroad, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr.,

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George Washington Carver, Malcolm X. If this is all we know, then intellectual, innovative, creative African -Americans are anomalies.

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They are not normal. These brothers and sisters are outliers. They are not what

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I should come to expect in my interactions with African -Americans.

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There's nothing about the Great Migration. How can you understand the layout of the United States of America without knowing about the

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Great Migration? How can you understand ghettos without understanding the Great Migration? Nothing.

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I mean, nothing about Benjamin Banneker, who laid out Washington, D .C.

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I don't need to keep going here, but the list is long and extensive and we don't know it. I don't know any white guys who have laid out a city before, and I'm supposed to know who

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Benjamin Banneker is. Now, admittedly, when I listened to this sermon the first time,

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I looked up Benjamin Banneker and I like history and I found it rather fascinating. But I was not at all convinced that my not previously knowing who he was was indicative of some sort of systemic problem.

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It's unfair of Chandler to say that he interviewed 30 white people about who they learned about in public school during Black History Month when he could have interviewed any number of black students in public school and they couldn't have given him any more names than that.

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And some people might say, well, yeah, that was Chandler's point. Was it then? Why was he only interviewing white people with that question?

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If you were to go to someone black or white and you were to ask them who

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Sojourner Truth is or who Thurgood Marshall was, they probably wouldn't be able to tell you.

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But if you named Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali, they would know instantly who that is. If you were to ask someone who

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Lemuel Haynes is or Francis Grimke, they probably would not be able to tell you, but name

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Jimi Hendrix and Tina Turner and they would know right away. The point that I'm making here is it doesn't matter your skin color, black or white, people are equally ignorant about these issues.

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We've all watched videos, whether it's on YouTube or late night talk shows where somebody walks up to someone else on the street and they can't identify a picture of Joe Biden.

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Or you watch Ray Comfort's movie 180 when he's asking people about Hitler and what

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Hitler did and they can't tell him this is common stuff. No matter the color of your skin, it is not indicative of a race problem.

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And this is Marxist, by the way. This is exactly what Marxist ideology is.

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It's when he lumps all black people together in one group and all white people together in one group and all white person's experiences are the same and all black person's experiences are the same.

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That's Marxism. It is very ungracious. It is not caring of individuals.

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And ironically enough, it's racist. What what does this have to do with the church?

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I mean, the things that he's talking about, this is stuff that you would raise at a PTA meeting.

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If you have a problem with the way that the public school system is teaching Black History Month, talk to your public school about it.

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What does this have to do with the church? Notice that we haven't even gotten to scripture yet.

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That's still a ways off. We don't know about housing disparity because we're snuggled in affluent suburbs where no one will lay that data in front of us.

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And even if that data is in front of us, our education has taught us that's not on us. That's on y 'all being careful because I love these people.

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Then as we move to world history, I am taught nothing of Africa.

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They would lead me to believe that Africans were not just running around the jungle with no homes, houses, cities, architecture or culture.

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They are wearing leaves. They have spears. They are basic and uneducated.

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I am not taught about their architecture or engineering, although I will be taught about the pyramids, but we want to make sure that Northern Africa is not the same thing as Africa.

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I am not taught that in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, there are massive stone complexes that were hubs of great cities and civilizations.

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I know nothing of a 270 -yard -long, 15 ,000 -ton curved granite wall.

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I know nothing of architecture. I know nothing of system. I don't know that math was birthed in Africa.

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So there is now nothing in how the majority of white men and women are educated that would lead us to believe that Africans and African -Americans are intellectual, innovative, or creative, except a couple of y 'all in sports and entertainment.

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I'm also taught that racism is unleashing dogs and spraying with hoses, so I certainly cannot be a racist.

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There is a seed of doubt sown in the mind of whites that blacks have a work ethic or the capacity to help us.

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It's why even when white men and women of good heart engage, it can oftentimes come across as paternalistic, that y 'all need our help.

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I have lost count of the number of young, gifted, godly, beautiful African -American,

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Latino, Asian church planters who have tried to partner with white churches, who have tried to do the things that we have heard from this stage and have been treated like children, not co -laborers.

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Now, that is a very significant point, and we're finally getting to something that would be very important for the church.

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But this point is being lost underneath all of this stuff that he's been addressing about the public school system.

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And suddenly, he just kind of drops this thing about the church in there, which he does not stay and reflect upon.

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I believe it's also the only time in his sermon that he will reference a group of people other than blacks and whites.

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And it was just a very quick comment, and he never comes back to it again. Now, I'm grateful that where he goes next is church history.

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But he's going to talk about our ignorance to the influence of blacks in church history when the reality is most

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Christians are ignorant of church history altogether. Thomas C. Oden, I think

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I saw that brother at dinner. I fanboyed out. I couldn't even go introduce myself. He said, cut

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Africa out of the Bible and Christian memory, and you have misplaced many pivotal scenes of salvific history.

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It is the story of the children of Abraham in Africa, Joseph in Africa, Moses in Africa, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus in Africa, and shortly thereafter,

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Mark and Petua and Athanasius and Augustine in Africa. The theological developments in North Africa laid the hermeneutical foundations that brought clarity to the

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Trinity. Martin Luther and the Ethiopian church is just now being dove into.

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To Luther, the church of Ethiopia had more fidelity to Christian tradition than the church in Rome.

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It was his relationship with the deacon Michael of the church in Ethiopia that led to the reformation to begin with.

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This ignorance has led to immaturity and immaturity.

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It talks when it should listen, and it's silent when it should speak.

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Pardon me for being nitpicky, but that's just really confusing. How was that helpful?

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When you want to speak, you need to listen. When you want to listen, you need to speak. All right,

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I mentioned at the start of this that I listened to Chandler go through a series on the book of James a few years ago.

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Here's what we read in James 1, 19 through 21. Know this, my beloved brothers, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

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Therefore, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

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And I struggle in my spirit to listen to this when he has never given us that word.

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This ignorance has led to immaturity. This immaturity has led either to hostility or withdrawal.

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Hostility in that I cannot be a racist because I have not unleashed a dog on you.

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I have not sprayed you with a fire hose, and I am not in any way trying to hold you back from success apart from systems

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I cannot see and a history I do not know. So it makes me angry when you take a knee because you don't have an intellect.

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Play ball, shut up, do what you're paid for, makes me hostile. And then when met with data,

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I get discombobulated, so I withdraw. So where do we go from here?

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And I hardly slept last night, not because I was afraid to give this talk, but because I understood what

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I was going to be asking. White pastors, I need to chat with you. You have got to say something.

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Say what? That the public school system needs to be teaching Black History Month better and I need to be preaching that from the pulpit?

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Why are we only talking about two groups of people here? Why is it only blacks and whites?

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Like I said early on, Chandler just assumes we know what he's talking about when he uses the word race.

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But race is a myth. It doesn't exist. When I see a black man, the only difference between him and me is he's got more melanin in his skin than I have.

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I see another man who is made in the image of God, and I hope that's what he sees when he looks at me.

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If we are both Christians, then I see a brother in the Lord who is being made in the image of Christ, and I hope that's what he sees in me as well.

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And we both can walk together and encourage one another in that work of sanctification. I do not think about race when

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I'm with my brothers and sisters in the Lord. We all have our own individual walks.

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We have our struggles that we go through, and we find ways to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.

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What Chandler is doing here is he's putting all white people in one group, and all their experiences are the same, and all black people in another group, and all their experiences are the same.

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And that's Marxism. It's racist. It doesn't solve anything, and neither did the

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MLK50 conference. Now, I've got to fast forward just for the sake of time, so I'm going to skip ahead a little bit.

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We're not even halfway through the sermon here. Like I said, it was a train wreck of a sermon.

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We're not halfway through the sermon. We haven't even gotten a scripture yet. He hasn't even given us the word of God, and he's trying to present us with solutions.

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So let me tackle just two more points here. I want to get to a part where he actually does read some scripture, and then

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I want to address one other issue that he gets to toward the end. Luke 10, 25 through 37, and behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test saying, teacher, what shall

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I do to inherit eternal life? And he said to him, what is written in the law? How do you read it?

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And he answered, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

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And he said to him, you have answered correctly. So to Charlie's point, he's got his orthodoxy down.

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Jesus replied, well, actually, but he desiring to justify himself, my white brothers and sisters, that sentence is huge, but desiring to justify himself.

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And Chandler's just throwing rocks there. He doesn't even explain what he means by that. He said to Jesus, and who is my neighbor?

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And Jesus replied, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead.

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Now, by chance, a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

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So likewise, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.

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So now, what's happening in this? You've got this story that's taking place, and you've got kind of the

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Hebrew Mount Rushmore, you've got Hebrew Tom Brady going on right here. What, the

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Levite? Surely the Levite who knows the law is gonna act upon the law. What, the priest? Oh, man, the priest knows what

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God's charged. Surely the priest is gonna, no, look who Jesus makes, the hero.

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But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.

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And he went to him, and he bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.

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And the next day, he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, take care of him, and whatever more you spend,

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I will repay when you come back. Which of these three do you think proved to be the neighbor of the man who fell among robbers?

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And he said, the one who showed him mercy. He wouldn't even say it. He couldn't say, the

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Samaritan. And Jesus said to him, you go and do likewise, and don't let it, don't miss on the fact that the first person that Jesus reveals that he is the son of God to is a

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Samaritan woman at the well who was exchanging sex for rent. Let's not forget that one.

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So, you gotta say something. I wouldn't start with white privilege, but you can start a lot of different places in the word of God.

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You should say something. You'll find if you just stay at the high level of unity, your people will just applaud you.

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You will need to, over a period of time, begin to peel back the layers.

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So, after that first sermon on unity goes so well, take heart, brothers. Fast, pray, gear up, dig some more, lead your people into what is true.

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Now, on that last point that he made right there, I've been through that, and it doesn't even have to do with race.

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I've struggled with issues in our church related to unity, and I've preached on unity, and everybody nods their heads, and then

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I get real specific, and everybody turns on me. Well, not everybody, but you've got those people who get cut to the heart, and they start lashing out.

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So, the point I want to make there is that, yes, churches should address these things as they arise in your specific church.

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This is not an all -Black people versus all -White people issue. This is, as you have those issues arise in your church, you need to address them.

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But Chandler's saying all -White preachers need to do this. No, they don't. No, they do not. And he's not presented anything specific that that pastor is supposed to say, nor has he presented anything specifically that needs to be responded to.

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So, that's the first point. We do need to address these things, but we address them on a case -by -case basis, and according to those issues that arise in our churches when they come up.

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Second point is that Chandler is proof texting here. He has not used the scriptures until like 15 minutes into his 30 -minute sermon, when he should have opened with the

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Bible and taught his people from the Word of God. Instead, he's taken a topic that has been chosen for him and halfway through that sermon then starts going through the scriptures, which he pulls out of context to go with the topic.

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This is eisegetical preaching, and it's something that Chandler has preached against. When we were going through 1

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Timothy chapter 3, or chapter 4 rather, I even used a clip from Chandler in which he preached against eisegetical preaching, but that's exactly what he's doing here.

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And so, as he's proof texting and taking scriptures out of context, he's done the same thing with the story of the

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Good Samaritan. Remember that Jesus presents this parable of the Good Samaritan in response to the question, who is my neighbor?

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And the point Jesus was making was, even a Samaritan knows who his neighbor is, and the

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Samaritan did not even have the full scriptures. They did not accept all the law and the prophets as being from God.

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Yet the Jews did. But the Samaritan not having the full scriptures knows who his neighbor is and knows to show kindness to him.

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So why is it that you, who has the completed word of God, does not know who your neighbor is?

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And it was insulting them to say, even the Samaritan knows the answer to this question, and you don't know who your neighbor is?

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That was the point that Jesus was making with the parable of the

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Good Samaritan. That was the answer to the question, who is my neighbor?

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Even the Samaritan knows that and knows to show kindness to a Jew. So you should know the answer to that question as well.

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Now you go and love your neighbor, whatever your skin color is, love your neighbor, whatever their skin color is.

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This is not a story addressing black people or white people. It's addressing all people.

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Okay, I've got one more portion of the sermon that I want to single out here, and this is actually the last point that Chandler makes before going into his closing.

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The Village Church is in the process of rolling off our multi -site campuses to be autonomous churches.

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Another talk for another day, but we feel this has been wrought by the Spirit of God through a lot of prayer and seeking the face of God.

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It's not a slight on that ecclesiology. It's just we feel like the Lord's wanting to do something different with us.

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And we have struggled to find men who can be a campus pastor for a season and lead into being the pastor of an autonomous church down in Dallas and out in Fort Worth.

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And so we've been looking and having conversations, and I have called every African -American man

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I know and went, who you got? Here's what I need. How do I… Help me, right?

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I've got a lot of white friends, a lot of… But what I would love to just say, here's 2 ,000 people in an $11 million building.

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Go lead them. And so one of the firms that's helping us find men said, let me ask you a question,

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Pastor Matt. If we find an Anglo 8 and an

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African -American 7, which one do you want? I said, I want the African -American 7. And he said, what if we find an

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Anglo 8 and an African -American 6? Then I said, then give me the Anglo 8 because the

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African -American 6 will look and feel to our people like the kind of tokenism that I'm preaching against.

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It's another opportunity for us to find and give power away in a way that's not paternalistic.

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But man, we see in you the capacity to lead and love and shape, and we want you to go. This is affirmative action that he's talking about here, showing privilege to the black guy because we believe overall, the black guy has had it harder than the white guy.

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So even though the white guy is more qualified, we think the black guy is more deserving of this particular position.

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What does the script? What did the scriptures say? Romans 2 11, God shows no partiality.

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But Chandler is coming at this as if to say, well, God may show no partiality, but we should. Furthermore, he's saying that we need to raise up solid black men of God to be teaching from our pulpits.

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Yet right behind him is a backdrop of Martin Luther King Jr.,

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who was wrong on the gospel and he abandoned his family.

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This is a man who was depraved in mind and deprived of the truth and following his example will not lead to godly churches.

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MLK 50 will not lead to racial reconciliation. And I do believe there are issues of prejudice in our culture and even in churches that need to be addressed.

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Not all of those issues of prejudice are related to skin color and ethnicity. Some of it has to do with with social class.

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In fact, most of it probably has to do with social class. But MLK 50 was not the way to go about doing those things.

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As a matter of fact, we're not learning from history. We're repeating the failures that Martin Luther King Jr.

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did not get right. And just like Dr. King, the scripture was not leading at MLK 50.

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It was secondary to the cause. We will not achieve unity by attempting to manufacture unity.

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It is only achieved through the word of Christ. Let me read to you here from Titus chapter three.

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Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle and to show perfect courtesy toward all people.

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For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.

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That's all of us. That's who all of us were before verse four. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God, our savior appeared, he saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the

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Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ, our savior.

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So that being justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

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The saying is trustworthy. And I want you to insist on these things so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works.

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These things are excellent and profitable for people, but avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.

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This is When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. There are lots of great Bible teaching programs on the web, and we thank you for selecting ours.

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But this is no replacement for regular fellowship with a church family. Find a good gospel -teaching

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Christ -centered church to worship with this weekend and join us again Monday for more Bible study when we understand the text.