Martin Luther King, Jr., John Owen and Being Intentional

Sin will not go away on its own. It won’t leave just because we pretend it isn’t there. And softening our hearts doesn’t just happen one day because we want it to happen. We must be intentional about what we would like to address. We must target it like a sniper targets his enemy and pull the trigger.

In a speech that Martin Luther King Jr. gave titled “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”, (giving in 1959 in Atlanta GA) he said the same thing about the sin of racism. King warned that racism won’t just go way because another generation is alive. Removing personal or corporate sins does not work that way. We must get after our hearts now!

“Let nobody give you the impression that the problem of racial injustice will work itself out. Let nobody give you the impression that only time will solve the problem. That I a myth, and it is a myth because time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I’m absolutely convinced that the people of ill will in our nation – the extreme rightists – the forces committed to negative ends – have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic works and violent actions of the bad people who bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, or shoot down a civil rights worker in Selma, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’ Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.”

If you know you are prone to a particular sin, don’t hope you will grow out of it some day.

Get after it like a rabid, hungry dog. John Owen famously said that we ought to be killing sin or it will be killing us.