Welcome back to
the Liberty Insider.
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Before the break,
I was carrying out
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at some length about the meaning
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of Martin Luther King
and his whole movement.
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Of course, using
that sermon example
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of sleeping
through the revolution.
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It's quite possible
with so many changes afoot,
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and in particular
religious liberty,
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so much the play thing
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of those that would
ultimately destroy it,
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that we might decide,
well, what does it matter?
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It'll pass, I don't
need to do anything.
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That is the worst
attitude anybody can have,
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least of all the Christian.
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Martin Luther King
addressed this actually
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in his very last sermon,
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bare hours before
he was assassinated.
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And he spoke about the
man on the Jericho road,
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the Good Samaritan,
the man that was there,
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wallowing in his
blood, probably dying.
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Because I do
think Jesus was telling
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an actual story He knew about.
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And the Levite
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and the priests they went by.
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They ignored him.
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And Martin Luther
King raises this point,
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he says, the first
question that the priests asked,
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the first question
that the Levite asked was,
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"If I stopped to help this
man, what will happen to me?"
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And that's a
legitimate question nowadays.
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Our world has consequences
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if you stand up even
within a church sometime,
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there's a price to pay,
certainly within civil society,
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you could be seen
as a religious fanatic,
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you could be seen as
raising a false alarm
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or Chicken Little of
civil rights, for example.
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There's a price,
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you could be
ostracized in subtle ways,
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but Martin Luther King took
it in a different direction,
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that is the
appropriate one, I believe.
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He says, but the
Good Samaritan came by
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and Jesus reversed the question.
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And he reversed
the question rather,
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"If I do not
stop to help this man,
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what will happen to him?"
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It goes back to what I think
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I said earlier
that John MacArthur said
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to those theology
students, you know,
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you're not here
to change the world,
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you're here to change lives.
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And if we're concentrated
as Jesus mandated that
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we must be on
reaching out to other people,
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not just to make the
members of the church,
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but as Christians to imbue
them with the mind of Christ,
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with the ideals of Christ,
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with the vision
of living with Christ
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and being one with Christ.
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You know, that
great prayer of Jesus,
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about one this
was not just wordplay,
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it was how it really
must be for the Christian.
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We're seeking a oneness
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with the divine,
not a oneness with,
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you know, a political community.
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We have to deal
with that along the way,
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but we need to keep our sights
fixed on the eternal kingdom.
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And I do believe in this era
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will have very legitimately
social justices rising up
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again as the
unanswered question.
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There is great social
injustice in the world.
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And Seventh-day
Adventists and other Christians
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and other people of faith,
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I think need to show that
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they are
concerned for the community,
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they can't shuttle on by
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or shuffle on by the
distance, not my concern.
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If there's poor in the
world, we should feel poor.
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If there are
those who are abused,
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we should feel abused.
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You know, it
says Jesus was touched
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with the feeling
of our infirmities.
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As followers of
Christ, we cannot help
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but be touched
by what's going on.
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But the solution is
not to make the world as,
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you know, the Rubaiyat of
Omar Khayyam says, you know,
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make the world entire
in a way that we like.
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We can't do that.
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Jesus has promised
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to remake broken
lives here and now,
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and then together,
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the mended
individuals that make up
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the church can move on
to an eternity with Christ.
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It's an interesting
dynamic that we've seen
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worked out very
often through history,
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the great missionary endeavors
that flowed out of England,
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in the Protestant
era that George Whitfield
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and others then
came to the new world,
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the Seventh-day
Adventist Church,
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the Nazarenes, the Methodists,
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these are all
outgrowths of this altruism
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that did change the world,
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but didn't seek to
change the political world,
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but by extension,
it automatically did.
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And if America seeks
godliness in this way,
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if it seeks justice in this way,
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there will be an improvement,
but if we, you know,
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have the
sanctimonious pharisaical
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attitude of religion that,
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you know, the
forms must be followed,
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even as the
disadvantage are ignored.
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I believe we'll head to a
despotism of indifference,
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a despotism of
indifference at a time
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when it's so obvious that
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there are people crying out
as never before for justice.
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Now Martin Luther King said that
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the arm of the
moral universe is wide,
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but it bends toward justice.
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Yes, the bending will
culminate in a new world,
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but in this
present temporal world,
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we need to stick to
the true values, of course,
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of godliness, as far
as the civil society,
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claim unreservedly the
right for religious freedom,
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as far as their
fellows unreservedly
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give them the charity
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and the love
and the concern that
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Jesus asked of all of us,
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and we need to work
to improve their lives,
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and point them toward
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an eternal kingdom of bliss
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and, you know,
fulfillment and a perfection
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that we can only
dream of in this world.
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There are no paradises here,
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but there is a
kingdom to come and to win.
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Jesus before Pilate
was the crucial moment
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of the failed revolution
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if you like that
Judas had started.
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And Jesus said unequivocally
to Pilate, He says,
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"My kingdom is
not of this world.
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If it were, My
followers would fight for Me."
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What did His followers do?
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Either denied him,
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John fled almost
naked into the night.
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And all forsook Him, it said,
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but with the Spirit of God
and an understanding of what
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God was teaching
them, things changed.
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And they did
indeed change the world.
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I hope and pray that today,
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as we enter what is
clearly a revolutionary period,
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in our world's
history, an end time cataclysm,
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if you like, or a cacophony,
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that somehow we will find that
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spirit-filled energy
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to proclaim
God's eternal kingdom,
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to show compassion to
those who are suffering
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under the lash of events,
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and to point all and sundry
and ourselves in our innermost
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being to the coming Kingdom
of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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For Liberty Insider,
this is Lincoln Steed.
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