Remembering Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. today.
Aaron Campbell, one of our Executive Team Leaders, has written an article titled, “Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Serving Christ.”
Here is a sermon by Dr. King titled:
“Loving Your Enemies”
Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
Montgomery, Alabama, 17 November 1957.
“‘ You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust”
(Matthew 5:43-45, NKJV).
“‘Love your enemies.’ Now let me hasten to say that Jesus was very serious when he gave this command; he wasn’t playing. He realized that it’s hard to love your enemies. He realized that it’s difficult to love those persons who seek to defeat you, those persons who say evil things about you. He realized that it was painfully hard, pressingly hard. But he wasn’t playing. And we cannot dismiss this passage as just another example of Oriental hyperbole, just a sort of exaggeration to get over the point. This is a basic philosophy of all that we hear coming from the lips of our Master. Because Jesus wasn’t playing; because he was serious. We have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command.” – Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
