This past week, all of our hearts were saddened when we heard about the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Charleston, South Carolina. This historically black church has a rich, and tragic, history going back to the early 1800s. One of its early pastors planned a slave revolt, which was discovered by authorities and resulted in this pastor’s execution. In the aftermath of this most recent murders, many have wondered about the motivation of this young man who ended the lives of nine people last Wednesday evening. Some have attempted to explain this by attributing Dylann Roof’s motivations to an anti-Christian attitude, but this is not the case. Roof’s actions, by his own apparent admission, were the result of his deep-seated racism, with the desired outcome being a “race war.” Despite the sometimes breathless assertions by some, studies have shown that racist attitudes continue to exist at nearly the same levels in the Millennial Generation as it did in Generation X and the Baby Boomer Generation.
The great Puritan John Owns wrote, “Be killing sin or it will be killing you…Let no man think to kill sin with few, easy, or gentle strokes. He who hath once smitten a serpent, if he follow not on his blow until it be slain, may repent that ever he began the quarrel. And so he who undertakes to deal with sin, and pursues it not constantly to the death.” Brothers and sisters, let us take these words to heart, and search ourselves daily for the those sins “which cling so closely” (Hebrews 12:1) so that we might cast them off by the power of the Holy Spirit in us. Just something to think about…
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