Racial prejudice in the Bible.

Steve Brown:
Racial prejudice in the Bible. Let’s talk about it, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Welcome to Key Life. I’m Matthew executive producer of the program. Our host is Steve Brown. He’s an author and seminary professor who teaches that God’s amazing grace is the key to a life of radical freedom, infectious joy and surprising faithfulness to Christ.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hope you guys had a great weekend and I hope your pastor’s sermon was as good as my pastor’s sermon. If you’re just joining us, we’re studying the book of Acts. And we’re taking our time. We spent a number of weeks up to this point and we’re going to start at the 10th chapter. And we’re going to see something that’s really important and it’s important in our time because it deals with prejudice. No, no, no. The early church had prejudice too, you find that everywhere, in every culture, every place and it’s evil, wherever you find it. But, I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s pray. And then we’ll turn to the text. Father, when we come into your presence, we recognize that some things you’ve told us are not very comfortable. But you start with grace, you started by loving us, you started by saying, I’ll never let you go. You started by saying, you’re forgiven and you always will be forgiven. And because you started there, we can hear everything that you have to say. Father, we praise you and worship you because you’re God, but also because you’re good. And because you’re a God of grace. Father, you know everybody, who’s listening to this broadcast, the hard places and soft places, teach us to run to you in both places. Teach us to lean on you as totally sufficient for our lives. We do praise you. And as always, we pray for the one who teaches, that you would forgive him his sins because they are many. We would see Jesus and him only. And we pray in Jesus name. Amen. As I said, we’re continuing with the book of Acts. And, we’re looking at the 10th chapter of the book of Acts, which has so much teaching for me and for you as we deal with our culture. We’re going through some of the worst times of division and hatred that I’ve ever seen. And some people are getting rich off of it. Some people fan the flames and make it worse. Some people, some people have taken this, run with it to get power. And Christians simply can’t allow that to happen. We have to speak our truth. And the first truth we speak is repentance. The Bible is clear that that’s the life that we as Christians are to live. And I believe that the answer to the racial problems and in fact, the political problems and the social problems and the educational problems in our world comes first with the repentance everywhere. I’ve said it probably before and I’m gonna say it again, when you tear down a statue, whose statue are you going to put up? When you rename a building, what name are you going to put on the building? When you write biographies about famous people and you burn them, who are you going to write the biographies about? The point is, and the Bible is clear about this.

The heart is deceitful above all things, it’s desperately corrupt who can understand it.

The Bible says.

If any man says he sinneth not, he’s a liar. And the truth is not in him.

The Bible says at the right time, Christ died for the good people. Doesn’t say that, he died for the sinners, for those who can’t get it right. And so, the history of the world, as in it, he rose that do amazing things, the history of the world, and I’m a history buff. You ought to see my library, the history books have stories that have amazing courage to them. People who stood when it was difficult, people who even lost their lives, that we might have the freedoms that we have now. And so, we put, we put up statues and we named buildings and highways after them. But the problem is that we have come to this very silly and shallow conclusion that we have people who are good and pure and righteous. And if we find that they’re not good and pure and righteous, and if you’re willing to look enough, you’re going to find they’re not good and righteous and pure because nobody is, we’ve come to this belief that we will cancel anybody who’s a sinner. Now, in order to come to that belief, you have to believe that you’re not. And that brings on the worst of all sin and that’s called self righteousness. And the self righteousness is going to kill us as a nation. The self righteousness is going to destroy all of us, if we don’t get it right. And the Bible gets it right. I said before, and I’m going to say it again. The only person, who knows how to fix all of this stuff that is so bad, is God. And he’s given us some clear instruction and Scriptures on how to go about that, but it begins with repentance and it begins with the church. Now, we’re going to be talking about racial prejudice as we dig into this 10th chapter of Acts. And as we do that, we’re going to listen to what God says about prejudice and hatred and division and how it destroys people. But it all starts with the repentance. Every day of my life, I pray that we have another awakening in America. And by the way, I think we’re sitting on top of one. You know why because it’s gotten that bad. You know they say that a drunk will never get sober until he gets to the end of his road. And there’s no place to go except death. When you get down so bad that there’s no hope, then God does something and that’s what’s happening now. Our problems are beyond us. I heard Bill Bright say one time, and I loved him and I miss him, Bill Bright said.

If you picked the ten wisest, most thoughtful, knowledgeable leaders in America, they would throw up their hands and say, there’s no hope. If repentance took place in our nation, I mean, all of us,. We could pick ten people out of a phone book. And they would then lead us to awakening.

So, I pray for that every day, but the thing I pray for him more is remove the blindness, let us see how bad it is and more important, let us see how bad we are. And there’s no exception. No exception to that, in a nation. You start talking about slavery and you start looking into the history of the nations. You’re going to find that it’s everywhere, that one group of people have enslaved other groups of people, and that includes Americans and it includes American Indians and it includes people in Africa and it even today includes nations where slavery is still going on. War, rumors of war, hatred and division, that’s what it means when you understand the Fall of human beings. One of the most important doctrines in the Bible is the doctrine of the Fall of human beings and the first Adam and the second Adam because the first Adam did something really wrong, as our federalist head, we’ve all been infected with the Fall. The world, nature, human beings, nations have been affected by the Fall. And once you recognize that and you recognize that that’s true of yourself, then that’s the beginning of wisdom. And it’s also the beginning of healing. Now, we’re going to see tomorrow, when we get into this 10th chapter of the book of Acts, some things that are really important about this particular subject, but you’ve got to remember what’s happened here. This is a church, an organization, a group of people, and they are exploding on the face of the earth. I mean, people are coming in droves in the first sermon that was ever preached, 3000 people came to Christ, but these people are people who know first that they deserve nothing, who know first that they are sinners, who know first how important repentance is, that they know first that God is everything and they are nothing. And so, as we read and we’ll start studying it tomorrow, the 10th chapter of Acts, we’ll see stuff that is really relevant to our particular situation. But remember that repentance is the beginning and repentance isn’t even necessarily change. It’s how God changes us. It’s from a Greek word and it’s about an attitude. And it means to agree with God and his assessment of ourselves and the situation. You think about that. Amen.

Matthew Porter:
And that was Steve Brown, continuing to teach us from Acts today, ushering us into chapter 10. And that’s where we will be living for all of this week. Sure hope you’ll join us again starting tomorrow. I believe it was the 20th century poet, philosophers Foreigner who said.

I want to know what love is. I want you to show me.

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