8.18-Racism, There must be good laws, but the answer must go deeper than laws.

8.18--Racism, There must be good laws, but the answer must go deeper than laws.

We must go when we feel weary.

John 4.

; ⁶ and Jacob’s well was there. So Jesus, being wearied from His journey, was sitting thus by the well.

We must ask for help.

We must ask for help of all kinds of people.  Men and women.  Old and young.  Black, white Hispanic, Jew and Gentile and mixed race people.

We must not expect any answer to work except the work of God and His living water.

“Removing a statue and changing a name are ways of addressing the symptoms of a much deeper problem, the problem of racism.  And the crucial question as I see it, is, how do we address this deeper problem?  How do we put an end to racism?”

We must not quench the wrong thirst and overlook the deeper thirst.

John 4.

¹² You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well, and drank of it himself and his sons and his cattle?” ¹³ Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”

Love cannot be created by the enactment of statutes requiring people to display comradeship toward each other.   No such statute has been promulgated in the history of humanity…. The law can set bounds, but it cannot set an example… The passage of civil rights laws in America has given African American citizens greatly needed help… by clarifying their legal status and giving them a fuller possession of their national birthright.  Yet the civil rights laws have not increased in the slightest the respect and affection between people of different races in our society; and respect and affection are the very qualities that are supremely needed to ease the existing tensions.  Experts in race relations are surprised to find tensions in parts of America worsening rather than lessening.  The Christian is not surprised for the Christian knows what legislation can and cannot do.  A sociologist was astonished to find that after teaching a course on racial prejudice, some of his students were more prejudiced at the end than at the beginning.  The Christian is not astonished, for the Christian understands that the answer is not education alone. (82-83)

“And that’s the critical truth here this morning, the “take-away” – as Christians we are supposed to “forgive each other just as God in Christ has forgiven us.” You see, it’s about the Gospel, it’s all about how God, deeply offended by the rebellion of our sin, by the ways that we have been hostile to who He is and indifferent to what He wants, nevertheless chose to cross over the bridge of mercy to reconcile Himself with us.  God didn’t withdraw to lick the wounds that we inflicted on His heart, or to nurse the grudge that He justly felt.  No, God consciously chose to cross over to us in Jesus Christ to repair the damage that we had done, and to restore the relationship that we had trashed.”

Douglas Skinner Blog, 8.13.17