February 17, 2025 Show with Lee Carter on “Racism in the Modern Church”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

The Meaning of Iron Sharpens Iron and the Day’s Prayer Requests

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now here's your host, Chris Arnson.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of ironsharpensironradio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 17th day of February 2025.

And before I introduce my guest today, I have a very urgent prayer request. Many of you have been already praying for my sister Mary, who just had her leg amputated last week and is recovering in a rehabilitation facility.

Well, now I'm adding my brother Andy to that list, who many of you have prayed for in the past. He resides in a local nursing home here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Well, he was rushed to the hospital late last night.

It was, I think, technically early, early this morning because of his inability to breathe and extremely dangerously low oxygen levels. Well, I was informed by his doctor that although he was in critical condition, he is thankfully in stable condition, but he is on a ventilator, and he is sedated and unconscious, and they intend to keep him on the ventilator for at least three days right now and take him off the ventilator after that point.

I am praying, and I hope you join me in praying, that he will regain consciousness and that he will have at least several more years of life on this earth. Please continue to pray for him, not only physically, but spiritually.

I have always had difficulty discerning whether his profession of faith in Christ is credible, and so I would ask of you that the Lord save him if he is not already born again, and that the Lord makes it very clearly evident to me that his salvation is authentic.

So I will keep you updated on not only my sister Mary, but my brother Andy, in the days and weeks to come. But today on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, we have a guest who very generously donated to this program, and sometimes I discover a supporter of this program who has a fascinating story to tell, and today's guest is no exception.

His name is Lee Carter. He is an entrepreneur, and he is the founder of Sleep Essentials. We'll have him give a summary description of exactly what that business is all about, and today we are going to be addressing true racism that exists in modern Christianity, but welcome for the very first time ever to.

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Lee Carter. Well, thank you, Chris, for having me on your show, and that's a very generous introduction. I didn't realize you would bring up the, you know, the entrepreneurial side of my life, so.

Thank you very much for that. Why don't you give a summary description of Sleep.

Essentials for our listeners? Well, people have often asked me, you know, why did you start a mattress business, and my answer has always been because I'm 50 crazy. I started that business 21 years ago as a, just a regular mattress store selling big brand-name mattresses, and as an honest man, I learned very quickly.

I had never worked in the mattress business before. As an honest man, I learned very, very quickly that the mattress industry is a very dishonest business, and what I mean by that is that, you know, when I sold mattresses, I would repeat the sales points that the manufacturer's reps would teach me, and it primarily lies, and when I learned that they were lies, I realized I can't keep doing this.

This is dishonest. This is a dishonest business, so in order to be honest, I had to start making my own mattresses. Everything in the mattress industry today, really terribly, is they make you an inferior product and spin it to you through slick marketing, slick marketing lies as if they are a superior product, and so as the old, as the old saying goes, if you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself, so I started making my own mattresses.

That way, I could sell them. Fleet Essentials is a retail business, primarily internet business, but not, not exclusively, but we make our own mattresses and sell them all.

Over the country. And from what I recall from our conversation months ago, by law, mattresses that are purchased require a fire-resistant chemical to be used on them, and very often, these fire-resistant chemicals are created in China and other places overseas, and they are believed by you and others to be dangerous to the health of those sleeping with their faces pressed against these mattresses pretty much every night, and so you developed a way to get around that.

Am I, am I.

Correct in that description? Yes, I dance around the regulations. I started this business, my retail business, in 2004. By 2006, I started making my own mattresses. In July of 2007, the Consumer Product Safety Commission began requiring all mattresses sold in the United States must be flame-retardant, and the only way to make a mattress flame-retardant is either with a plethora of toxic fire-retardant chemicals.

Now, the chemicals the Consumer Product Safety Commission admits are toxic, so don't take my word for it. The Consumer Product Safety Commission says that in their own risk assessment that they're toxic, and, or using glass fibers or silica.

Well, glass fibers can get out of a mattress if you uncover it, if you, you know, open it and ruin your home. The silica is a non-respiratory irritant that can cause cancer if you inhale enough of it, so there's no way to make a safe flame-retardant mattress.

I've always maintained, and I'm not gonna get into all those details here if anybody happens to be interested in this long story, I've always maintained that the Consumer Product Safety Commission began these regulations to make the chemical industry rich.

Like everything in our government, it's all bought and paid for, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission is a body of unelected people that can be easily bought off. There's really no reason to make a mattress flame-retardant.

You know, prior to 2007, where people just bring themselves up in mattresses left and right, and we got to do something about this? No. And even the argument that the Consumer Product Safety Commission makes for making a mattress flame-retardant doesn't hold water, because they claim by making the mattress flame-retardant, it gives you more time to get out of your house in case of a house fire.

Well, most people die from smoke, so if a fire starts in the basement, in the kitchen, in an electrical source, or a heat source, by the time it spreads to your bedroom, you're dead from the smoke. The flame-retardant mattress is not gonna do a thing for you.

So it's an argument to back up what they're really doing, and that is, they've been, somebody's bought them off to make the chemical industry rich. So Americans are sleeping in toxic chemicals to make the chemical industry rich.

That's what I maintain to be the reality of it, because there's really no reason to have.

A flame-retardant mattress. Okay, well, if anybody wants more details on sleep essentials, go to sleepessentials .com, sleepessentials .com. And, Lee, before I get a start on this disturbing and fascinating conversation about racism in the modern church, I'd like you to give, as I always ask of our first-time guests, I'd like to get from you a summary of your salvation testimony that would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which you were raised, if any, and the kind of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to himself and saved you.

Well, yeah, I hope we've got.

Some time. Yeah, we have plenty of time. I would say that I felt the call of the Holy Spirit when I was at the age of 20. And here it is. Prior to that, I was living a sinful life, as you can imagine a 20 or 19 or 18-year-old boy would be interested in, and I got a conviction upon my heart that that lifestyle is thin, and I got a conviction that that lifestyle leads to a high probability of divorce.

Now, the reason it probably pricked my conscience is because of the background. My parents got divorced when I was 13. I was caught in the middle of their divorce. It was very ugly, and it wreaked havoc on my life.

I was very angry at the world. I got into a lot of fights in school and so forth because of that anger. And when I became an adult at the age of 20, and I think primarily the move of the Holy Spirit convicted me that I didn't want to live that lifestyle, I didn't want to end up divorced, and I recognized, again, I have to give God all the glory, that the lifestyle that I was living was going to lead in that direction.

And I even actually did started doing some research on my own showing that sex outside of the marriage covenant, you know, sex before marriage, leads to very much increased influences upon divorce. And I could get into a lot of details as to why that is, but I was just convicted of that.

And so I changed my lifestyle and started going to church, and didn't seek the young ladies like I had prior, and was convicted that I should get married, you know, get married without having sex before marriage.

And so when I met my wife at age 26, she was one of the few ladies that I had met that didn't throw herself at me. I think that's a real problem in our culture. The women, young women, are not protected by their fathers from sexual predator males, and so a lot of girls today are very sexually active, and that's gonna wreak havoc on their personal life, it's gonna wreak havoc on their married life.

So I was very fortunate that God put a woman in front of me that didn't act like that, and so we got married, and my Christianity has grown greatly over the years. But here is the—and this is a wonderful testimonial of the power of God, because it's easy for someone to say, I believe in God, that's easy.

It's kind of like, do you believe a man can walk a tightrope pushing a wheelbarrow? Well, sure, I believe a man can do that. Faith is getting in the wheelbarrow. And so, wow, from the age of 20 to the age of 27 or 8 or 9, 29, I always believed God and went to church and I read my Bible, but I had never had faith in God.

Now here's the difference. My wife and I tried for six years to have children. We had no success. We went from expert doctor to expert doctor. They all said we were perfectly normal. And of course, when you're going through that, people will say to you, if you'll just forget about it, you'll have a child.

Well, that's easy. It's a lot easier to say than to do. You want to have children. And so, of course, everybody says, if you'll just forget about it, she'll get pregnant. So as a man, I'm trying to solve the problem.

That's what we men do. We solve problems. I'm gonna solve this problem. And I thought to myself, there's probably something to this. If she'll just forget about it, she'll get pregnant. How can I get her to forget about it?

And of course, at this point, after six years of trying, my wife was like, you know, we're not going to have any kids. We need to do something else. We toyed with the idea of in vitro, but we didn't like the idea of freezing children and throwing them away if you didn't use them.

So we toyed with adoption. But it was always in the back of my mind, wait a minute, the doctors say we're perfectly normal. I'm not really on board with adoption. But I felt like if we start the adoption process, maybe that's some closure for my wife.

And maybe, you know, by the time we get a child, she'll conceive. So I had this all figured out. So I thought, well, you know, when you start the adoption process, it's going to be a year or two before you can actually get a child.

So you go through the the motions, you go through the home studies, you do the classes, you pay a little money, but you don't have to come up with any real big money until they place you with a child.

And of course, in the back of my mind, it's like, why do I want to come up with a bunch of money for somebody else's kid when, you know, I'm still holding on to this idea that we can have our own children because the doctor said we're normal.

Well, a situation came up where a neighbor of mine whose father is a doctor in Mexico who treats women for infertility. I was talking to him one day about it and he says, well, some women build up antibodies from exposure to cats.

And I said, that's it. It's my wife's cat. I was just convinced this is it. We've got to get treated for this. He said, American doctors don't test for this, but my dad can tell me what antibodies are and we'll get her tested for it.

I was like, that's it. That's it. We found the problem. So when I went back to my wife and said to her, I was like, we need to hold off on the adoption. Let's see if we get tested for this. And she said, she says, this is just a delay tactic.

Now, if anybody out there is listening has been through infertility issues, it's a tough time for a married couple. It's a very difficult, strenuous time. And she, she thinks rightly that I wasn't fully on board with adoption because I'm still holding out for this.

You know, we can have our own. But she's a very sweet woman. My wife is the sweetest woman on the face of the earth. She agreed to go through the test. We got her tested for the antibodies and they came back negative.

Now, how does this relate to my faith? Well, when the test came back negative, I had basically gotten to the end of my rope and I got down on my knees and I said, Lord, if it's your will that I be without children, I accept that.

Lord, if it's your will that I be an adoptive father, I accept that. If it's, and I even, I even included in my prayer, if it's your will that I be an adoptive father of a special needs child, I accept whatever you give me.

I'm done with this. I can't fix it. And I got up off my knees and I went to work. And within two hours, the adoption agency called and said, we have a child for you. Yeah, that's the difference in believing in God and having faith.

And the beauty of God's grace is that he forces us to have faith because he has to. And that was my faith moment. There was one thing in getting me the conviction of my sin, and then many years later bringing me into understanding, I.

Have a plan for you. By the way, whatever you did to change the position of your microphone to your face, keep it this way because your audio is much better.

Right now. Okay, good. So that was the difference between, you know, believing in God and stepping out in faith. And I was forced at the end of my rope. And so every time I look at my son, who is now 20, every time I look at my son, I recognize the providence of God in my life.

Now here is the other thing. You know, once I got this child, I fell madly in love with him within days, even though I was like, you know, I wasn't expecting to adopt. I wasn't expecting to, you know, come up with a bunch of money for someone else's child.

It took two days. It didn't matter to me. I was so madly in love with him. He was the most precious thing I've ever laid my eyes on. It almost brings tears to my eyes to even talk about it. But, you know, so much happened at once by the providence in the hand of God.

It's amazing. Well, you know, so we wanted to adopt another child. We didn't want to have another one. I mean, we didn't want to have just one. So we were back in the adoption pool waiting for a child.

And, of course, when you go through adoption, the adoption agency doesn't want to give you a child you wouldn't be comfortable with. So, you know, if you only want a boy, they will only give you a boy.

They wouldn't give you a girl. If you only want an infant, they'll only give you an infant. They're not going to give you a two-year-old. So, you know, you have to specify everything, even all the way down to the race.

And, of course, we chose Caucasian. Healthy, infant, Caucasian, boy or girl. Well, the adoption agency called when we were ready for a second child and said that a mother showed up at the hospital. She had no prenatal care.

She never saw the child. She delivered it and wanted to walk out. But we have a child for you if you want it. And, of course, my wife and I, after the first one, were like, yeah, we'll take anything you got.

And so the birth mother was white. When we showed up to the hospital, the baby was two days old. He was pink. The birth mother was Caucasian, but she lied about the birth father's race. And, of course, we really didn't care.

You know, a baby's a baby. And, you know, it sounded like to me it was Caucasian. So we took him home. He was two days old. Every day we had him, he kept getting darker and darker and darker. And you realize, wow, we have a black child.

And, you know, it made me, it reminded me of my prayer. I told God, I said, you know, whatever you have planned for my life, I accept it. And I realized his plan was for us to have this boy. And he's now 17.

He's the absolute joy of my life. But, you know, we have a biracial child. And it has created some dynamics with my extended family. I was not raised as a Christian. My father passed away about two years ago, and my father did not accept a non-Caucasian child ever.

Well, he was always nice to him, what little I was around my father. But, you know, growing up with my dad, I knew how bad of a racist he was. My brother and sister tried to deny that he's a racist. But, you know, some of that's just out of convenience or, you know, a difficult dealing with the reality.

But, yeah, my brother in the last year told me that everyone in my family said that they would not have adopted a black child. In other words, you shouldn't have done that. And, of course, that, you know, it causes problems in a family.

But it doesn't cause a problem with me and my wife and my two boys, because we are a very happy family. So, you know, it's fascinating that growing up in a race-hating, in a family of a race-hating father, that it didn't stick with me.

And that's, again, the providence of God, because, you know, God takes that foolishness out of your heart. You know, because there was a time maybe when I was, you know, 14 or 15 years old, I might have said a racial joke or might have joked racially along those lines.

But, you know, when you become a Christian, you don't see race anymore. You see humans. And, you know, and I see the prayer that I said, God, I'll accept whatever you give me, even if it's a special needs.

I went so far as, you know, because I think a special needs requires, you know, special people to do that. I was accepting of if that's what he gave me. Well, when he showed up and he was, you know, a week later and he's black, it's like, that's what God wanted me to do.

And I couldn't be happier. And now here's what's really fun about this is that when we showed up at the hospital to get him, the nurse said he was born two days ago. I was like, you're kidding me. Two days ago.

She's like, yeah, two days, two days old. I was like, two days ago was my birthday. So my youngest son and I share the same birthday. Oh, praise God. Yeah, it's just I couldn't be happier. But, you know, the racial issue with some people's difficult and it's unfortunate within my family, within my direct family.

Racism, Providence, and Adoption in Lee Carter’s Testimony

Well, we're going to go to our first commercial break and we're going to continue this story, and then we're going to enter into a different element of the story that involves racism in the modern day church.

And I want to give a caveat to this topic. I am fully aware, as my guest is, that in our day and age, leftists hurl around the accusation of racism multiple times a day on every media format, whether it's TV, the Internet and other areas of spreading propaganda, they will declare factually in their minds, that is, that all white people are racist and that we have to repent of even being white.

So we realize that there is a lot of accusations being hurled around that are slanderous and false coming from the left about racism. But we should not react to that very true phenomena by coming to the conclusion that there is no genuine racism in existence, especially in evangelical churches in our modern era.

And that, unfortunately, is hogwash. It does exist. It perhaps does not exist to the magnitude that leftists claim it exists, but it does exist. And that's a big part of the story we're going to be hearing from Lee Carter after these messages from our sponsors.

So if you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com, chrisarnsen at gmail dot com. As always, give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence.

Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. And I could readily understand this topic evoking questions that are personal and private. They perhaps involve the racism of a close family member, or perhaps you are battling with the sin of racism in your own mind and heart.

And once again, I'd like to give another caveat or explanation. I hate the word racism because I believe there's only one race. That's the human race. And if you want to say that there's two races, Adam's race and the race of those born from above by the grace of Jesus Christ.

But that has become a part of the vernacular to use the phrase racism. And so therefore, that's why you will hear it from time to time on this program. But once again, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com.

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So please go to royaldiadem .com and mention Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And we're now back with Lee Carter. He is going to be giving us a testimony of racism in the modern church. And he has already begun the story, and he was talking about how he adopted a child.

The baby, unbeknownst to him, would later prove to be a baby of mixed race, clearly having a black father because he knew that the mother was white. And how folks in his family, especially his father, were very upset by this because his father, as Lee has admitted, was a racist, a bigot.

And it's interesting, Lee, before we go on into the rest of the story, but it's interesting how the left wing is so insane that these days they would think you're a bigot for being white, adopting a black child because you're robbing that child of some kind of racial nurturing in the black tradition or something as ridiculous and asinine as that.

And they come up with all reasons to consider white folk racist. But in fact, even colorblindness now is racist because we're not supposed to be not recognizing and highlighting someone's race or ethnic origin.

That's supposed to be a big part of how we view them and celebrate them. But I'm sure you agree that this is absolute insanity.

Yeah, well, it's fascinating to me, you know, having a black child, you know, you go to Walmart, a grocery store, whatever, and you would see people that would look at your child and look at you and look at your child, look at you.

And, you know, you just wonder what they're wondering. But for the most part, we've never run into, you know, my son's never run into any negative treatment because of his skin color. And the truth is, most people will treat you according to who you are.

Now, there was a time where we treated, we had a culture where we treated black people as inferior. That's a fact. And I have in my family people that would actually say that black people were inferior.

And it's unfortunate. Let me add to this a little piece of information that long before I was married, after I had become a Christian, but long before I was married, never having any idea that I would be an adoptive father, when I was in college, I would have some time down between my studies and I'd go to the library and I would just pick up a book, you know, this looks interesting, and just pick it up and read it.

And one of the books was about race and intelligence. Since, you know, I grew up in an era and a family that would say that black people are inferior, it was interesting to me to read it because it talked about how there is no intellectual difference between the races.

And it documented it scientifically. It's fascinating to me that God was preparing me long before even I was married to adopt a black child, because I came to throw off the idea that my parents' generation was stuck with, and that is that black people are inferior.

You know, and I shook that. I was able to shake that off by the providence of God and found it interesting to read such a book, you know, so that when this child was presented to me, I understood being a Christian and understood the scientific facts.

There's no difference. There is only one race. It's the human race. So I'm with you, Chris. There's only one race. People are only different immaterially. Most of it has to do with whether or not we're sinners.

Some of us are more sinners than others, but we're all sinners and we're equal in that way, too.

Right.

That's true.

So today, it's fascinating. I don't see racism as a bigger problem, you know, because, you know, if you think about my parents' generation, they were segregated. They didn't go to school with black kids.

You know, they even grew up in a time where you didn't drink from the same water fountain as someone who's black. So that puts an impression on you that you're supposed to be separate. You're supposed to be, you know, not together.

And that's unfortunate for that generation. But, you know, my generation, I went to school with black kids. And when you go to school with black kids and you play ball and you play in the park and you play in the backyard with kids of a different race, you very easily recognize they're just like me, you know.

So it doesn't stick in your mind that we're different. To kind of share with you a little bit about my family's background, you know, my parents' generation, my dad lived to be 85. He died about two years ago.

My mother today is 85. You know, they come from a different generation. But my father idolized, is the best way I can describe it, his grandfather, which was his mother's father. His mother's father was a very evil man up until the end of his life.