- [Eric] Good evening family of God.
- [Audience] Good evening.
- Oh, you can do better than that. Good evening family of God.
- [Audience] Good evening.
- Amen. Amen. Thank those who brought me here from the ERLC and The
Gospel Coalition. Let's give God a hand of praise for them for putting this on.
Amen. Amen. Turn with me in your Bibles to Ephesians 4.
Stand if you don't mind real quick. I'm reading from the CSV version
of the Bible. I'm not going to wait till you get there. I'm just going
to start reading. Verse 3, and verse 3 alone. "Making every effort
to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace." You may be seated.
I've been given the task of talking about unity. Somebody say, "Unity."
- [Audience] Unity.
- Dr. King made a statement. He says, "In the end, we will remember not the
words of our enemies but the silence of our friends." As I have been in the world
of evangelicalism for over two decades, I learned the word evangelical in my Intro
to Theology class in 1995 on the campus of Dallas Theological Seminary in the Intro
to Theology class and they kept using this word called evangelical.
And I was trying to figure out what in the world is an evangelical?
You have to understand I come from Chocolate City, Washington D.C.
And in light of that, I grew up in a climate
of post-civil rights, post-black power, black bourgeoisie, post-hippie generation
all the way into what we would call the original hip-hop generation.
And so as I grew up in that particular milieu, I did not know what
evangelical was. And being the only black student in class around a myriad
of light-skinneded brothers and sisters, I didn't find myself in careful company
to communicate my ignorance but I went on a research hunt. We didn't have iPhones
and internet back then. So I couldn't just go on real quick,
look it up, and act like I knew what I was talking about like most of us do today.
But what I had to do was I had to go on a search. Somebody say, "A search."
- [Audience] A search.
- Went on a search to look at what evangelicalism is. And as I began to see
what evangelicalism is, all of the things from the historic
Christian faith and its doctrine, all the way into even talking
about justice, I was like, "Boom, I'm cool with that.
I'm down with evangelicalism." And so what I did was I went on a
pilgrimage of going to evangelical schools. I went to pilgrimages embracing
evangelical theology, embracing its pillars,
and embracing every different thing that would make me evangeleticalized,
if you will. And I marinated in evangelical culture,
spoke at any conference that you could think of where leading evangelical
speakers were. I immersed myself in evangelical culture.
But as I began to go on this journey, I began to notice that there were some
diametrical differences between the doctrine and the duty.
And as I begin to see diametric differences between the doctrine and
the duty, I began to do like a few Christians have. My African-Americans,
my Boriqua, my dominicanos, and also some of my woke
white millennials, began to back up from evangelicalism. And the reason being is
because there was a deep inconsistency. So many of us began to say, "Man,
to heck with it. We're falling back from evangelicalism. We love Jesus,
we love the Bible, we love inerrancy, we love justification,
we love sanctification, we love glorification, we love all
of the Solas, we love all of those things. But we don't love the functional
orthopraxical culture that doesn't line up with biblical orthodoxy.
And so as I began in my mind to give up on evangelicalism, I began to read the book
of Ephesians. And the gospel globetrotter himself, Paul, began to walk me
through the corridors of theological excellence. In Chapter 1,
he walked me through the Triune Unity of the Triune clique that rose thick.
He got in the latter part of that chapter and talked about intimacy. Chapter 2,
he talked about how every human being is tore up from the floor up and messed
up and in need of the desperate grace of God. Then he began to talk about,
"By grace are you saved through faith." Then, boom, he fast-forwards
over to Chapter 3 and he begins to talk about the universal mystery of the gospel
as shown in and through the church. And then he put his pen
down parenthetically, I believe, at the end of that chapter to do a
praise break. Because whenever you have proper theology infused into you,
you can't help but lift your hands, you can't help but honor the name
of the Lord. So he said, "Now, unto Him who is able to do exceeding
abundantly above all you ask or think according to the power that is at work
within you." So he got into that and then he got from the orthodoxy
to the orthopraxy. Chapter 1 through 3 is about your doctrine but Chapter 4
through 6 is about your duty and sandwiched between spiritual warfare and
weighty theology is the unity of the church. So we come here to this verse.
And there are unavoidable exegetical items in here that I cannot avoid even
as an African-American. I want to give up and shoot the longest
jumper away from evangelicalism, but the Bible won't let me.
Paul says that he wants us to attain to the unity of the faith later.
What convicted me is he said, "Make every effort."
As I looked at the idea of making every effort, it means be diligent
to preserve something. And making every effort is a present
active participle. Meaning that it's a verbal adjective. It's not just supposed
to be what you do, it's who you are. So making every effort is something
that we, as believers, cannot help but functionally pursue.
But the challenge is, is we're having opportunities and
times where we're getting together where the effort becomes frustrating.
Because even just as far as last week, we had Stephon Clark shot at 20
times in his backyard. And if you know anything about being
in the hood, if somebody's running after you with a gun and says,
"Hold up," you don't care if it's the police, Jojo, Elizabeth, or whoever it is.
You're running because there's a gun. And now, we're not even, as believers,
being on the same page with that and going retroactively back with this reality.
And so now I'm stuck with the tension of standing here wrestling through the fact
that the Bible demands that we pursue unity. As it says we pursue unity,
it asks us to keep or preserve. That means to continue what has already
been secured. So unity is twofold. Actually, threefold.
Unity was secured by Jesus on the cross. Jesus will ultimately come back, wreck shop
and functionally put us in the unity that He bought us in. So the problem isn't the
cross and the resurrection, and the problem isn't the eschatological
reality of our union with one another. It's the dash in the middle.
And in that dash in the middle, we have to wrestle with and fight with the
reality of what in the heck does it mean for particularly black believers and white
believers to fight for unity. I got a couple of things and then I
promise I'm out your way. What unity doesn't look like is, number 1,
ignoring the impact of the past on the present. One of the things as a pastor,
in counseling people as a part of my regular pastoral regimen,
is when they come to meet with me, first question is how did you come to know
the Lord and the second question is talk to me about your family.
And the reason why I talk to them about their family is because I know and many
counselors in here know too well that it's
impossible to deal with the issues in this
person's life unless they're saved and unless you deal with the family history
that put the person that's in front of you in front of you. Black and
white evangelicals, we have to go back to our familial history.
Next year is going to be 400 years from 1619 when the first black slaves made
their way into Jamestown. And what we're going to have
to ask ourselves, the question of, what does our familial past have to do
with our familial present? Some of my white brothers and sisters act
like our family history in the past has nothing to do with our family present.
But I rebuke that in the mighty name of Jesus Christ and I call you to repentance,
to begin to stop asking us to give you books. Stop asking us to do research.
Listen, y'all were able to do mathematic equations through some black women
but then your own stuff and to be able to go to the moon and put a flag in it and
dance around and do the West Coast strut. How in the world can you go from the earth
to the moon and you can't do research on the racial history that we need to fight
in this country? I don't want to be traumatized by teaching you history.
I want you to grow up in your spiritual maturity and grow up in your faith and go
on the sanctifying journey of overriding the patriotic way that we've learned
history in America. We have patriotic and triumphalism in the ways that we've
learned history. And so when you talk to African-Americans now you have
on the one side, you have a white frailty. Then on the other side,
you have blacks who are dealing with race fatigue syndrome. So you got race fatigue
meeting white frailty. White frailty says that,
"I refuse to talk about that." Blacks on the other side,
"I'm sick of going back and forth with you about it." But the question is we have
to begin in our walk with Jesus Christ to say, "I am not going to let the challenges
of what has happened much as I ain't feeling you." Let me tell you right now,
multiplicities of Negroes ain't feeling evangelicalism. But one of the things I've
been...God's been working on me in my heart is that the root of bitterness
sprouting up will defile many. And if I allow myself to stew in my
frustration towards whites, Jesus won't be my center. My hatred will.
But on the other hand, whites have to do this,
assume in Jesus' mighty name, that because there is offense,
an offense that you need to press into that particular offense and begin
to educate yourself on beginning to develop the opportunity to not have
reductionistic ways in which you try to cause racial reconciliation
like through hiring non-qualified African-Americans to be the multi-ethnic
engineers in your local churches. And you know they're not qualified because
blacks haven't hired them.
And it works against unity when you hire
somebody that we not feeling, and you're wondering why multi-ethnicity isn't
happening at your church. It's because you have a person that's
black on the outside but Angloid on the inside. If we're going to do
unity together, we have to have less reductionistic strategies and begin to get
at the table and look at the glory of Christ's commitment to say, "Yes,
we have problems. Yes, we have issues. And yes, we have frustrations."
So every now and then, as these two minutes go past for me
to be done, it makes me go to Revelations 7. And I go to Revelations 7.
And although the j-dubs they stop at verse 8 because they believe the
144,000 ministry. We believe in more than that. Myriads and myriads of believers
are going to be Pentecostalized in the presence of God and in looking like their
ethnic selves, in their different dialects, from Australia to ancient
Kemet to South Africa to Denmark to Greenland to Zambia
to ancient Ethiopia, current Ethiopia, America, Afro-Caribbeans,
all different peoples from all tribes and languages are going to be around the
throne yelling and glorifying the name of Jesus Christ in their tongue.
But all of us are going to have on the same white outfit and we're going
to overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. It reminds me,
as I close, Philadelphia Eagles just won the championship recently.
And I didn't go out in the streets but I looked out in the streets.
One million people Irish, Italian, Boriqua, all different black folk, Niger,
everybody is out there in the streets. One million people tearing the streets
of Philadelphia up about a game that none of them played. They had on the same color
jersey with somebody else's name on the back of it. In all of the differences that
they had and all of the frustrations that they had, because somebody had won
for them, they gathered around the ones who beat the game for them versus fighting
each other. All I want to tell you today is in heaven, we will have on the
same jersey. In heaven, we're going to be have on white robes
and we're going to be saying "glory and honor and dominion and power to the
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." Have mercy God. We bless you, God.
Glory in the highest. Gloria de Dios for unity in the church.