-Strength for Today- "The Great Awakening Need for America." - Deuteronomy 32:28-29.

  Southside Baptist Church is a “biblical multi-ethnic” ministry, and none of the persons among us dominate the other. We’re all created by the “Three Person God,” the “United in One God,” is mentioned in the first verse on Genesis chapter 1:1, and in the second chapter of Genesis, where God said, “Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness...” -verse 26. The words, “Let us” and “Our image,” are plural. So, every “black,” “brown,” “red,” “yellow,” or white” body in the world is created in God’s image. These Scriptures provides the necessary insight needed for us today as we look at what’s been going on across our nation and the “inequalities” that’re so “blatantly apparent.” 

     And just as you would hope that I’d listen respectfully to what you have to say about important issues, I hope that you’ll return the favor. Most of all, I hope that this message today will be the beginning, not the end, of a “long,” and “fruitful” “healing process,” needed here in these “United States of America.” 

  Today, there’re “two viruses” shutting down and affecting our nation and taking lives:  

        1. Coronavirus,” and 

        2. Structural racism. 

  Coronavirus has taken more that 400,000 American lives. Whereas “structural racism” has taken “countless lives” over more than three centuries. So. in order to “minimize” the deadly effects of Covid-19, “medical,” and “science” teams together and are taking “extreme measures” to halt this “deadly virus.” Coronavirus is a “pulmonary disease” that affects the lungs. Whereas “structural racism,” is a “heart disease” of which no “medical,” of “science” team can heal. “Because “from within the heart of men, evil intentions come” -Mark 7:21.  

   So, being a nation “supposedly” built on “Christian principles,” it’s time for the American church to wake up, and realize that “racism is satanic.” Because whenever “hatred” is put in place of “love,” it “grieves the heart of God.” And to suggest that “any group of people” is in some way is “inferior or sub-human" is to speak “irreverently,” about the God who created them. It degrades His image. Because to believe that “one group of people” has more “value than another” is the “spirit of antichrist.”  

1 John 4:7 says, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.”  So, America, we need to wake up, and focus on the “good news of the scriptures,” rather being “stimulated with the world’s “secular grievances, which stresses “hatred "and “pride.” But I want to caution you, that we should be “sobered” by the reminder that each of us is “capable of this kind of evil.” 

Jesus always called humans to choose the way of love. It takes courage to choose this way. Because only a weak person will choose hatred over love. Hatred is of Satan, because his great dislike for God’s righteousness. But when we seek and find love with the creator of the universe, we find a “perfect” and “selfless love” that’s everlasting. The God who created us, is also the God who saved us from all of our sin and pain. And that love is available to you. Today.  

  So, beware of allowing your anger to “stir in you” a “sense of your own righteousness.” Because if you wind up thinking that you’re in some way “superior to the racists who were protesting,” you’re not bring guided by the love of God, and if not “spiritually checked,” you’ll find yourself falling into the same sin of “superiority” that they were “satanically manifesting.” 

And with that thought, I’ll close with the words that Abraham Lincoln wrote  at his inauguration a few weeks before the Union victory in the Civil War: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.” 

 Author: Plez Lovelady, Jr., PhD