A Tough Mind and a Warm Heart | MARTIN LUTHER KING JR | Sermon #1

"One of the great tragedies of life is that men rarely bridge the abyss between what they practice and what they profess, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia that leaves many of us tragically divided against ourselves [...]. How often our lives are characterized by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of attitudes! We speak eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, but our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we regrettably practice the opposite of democratic creed. We speak passionately about peace, but at the same time we prepare for war with all dedication. We make fervent promises to walk the high path of justice, and then we follow without hesitation the low path of injustice. This strange dichotomy , this harrowing gulf between what should be and what is, represents the tragic theme of man's pilgrimage on Earth."

No one in American history has more eloquently addressed or more effectively promoted the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality than the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

His decisive impact on law, public discourse, and culture becomes even more impressive when one considers that he was an ordinary citizen, who never ran for public office and never held any official position in government.

Get ready for our series of sermons by one of the greatest North American thinkers of the 21st century, as we bring you the first sermon by preacher Martin Luther King.

We emphasize that this sermon is part of a collection of 12 sermons, all given at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Because the church had to establish itself as the reparative conscience of American churches in relation to racism, what we can call: the original sin of the United States. So when Martin Luther King Jr., America's great preacher, spoke from the Dexter Avenue pulpit during the days of the Montgomery bus boycott, and then alongside his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church,

This yearning for freedom was institutionalized by the independent black church movement of the 18th and 19th centuries and incorporated into the ministries of King's ancestors, to whom he refers in the autobiographical statement cited.

His maternal great-grandfather, Willis Williams, was a preacher during slavery, and may have played a role in establishing an independent local black church. His grandfather, A. D. Williams, the second pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, was an activist preacher who helped create the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and, as its president, led the fight to establish the city's first high school for African-American children. Martin Luther King Jr. and his brothers attended the Booker T. Washington School, which only existed because of his grandfather's activist ministry. Furthermore, few people know that Martin Luther King, King Jr.'s father and Ebenezer's third pastor, led a campaign for voting rights in Atlanta in 1935, thirty years before his son and others created the conditions necessary for the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Right to Vote. Furthermore, “Daddy King,” as he was affectionately called, was already fighting for equal pay for teachers decades before his son and others led a nonviolent war against segregation itself.

In these turbulent days of uncertainty, the evils of war and economic and racial injustice threaten the very survival of the human race. In fact, we are living in a moment of serious crisis. The sermons that we will bring on our channel have the current crisis as a backdrop, and were selected because, in one way or another, they deal with the personal and collective problems that it presents. In them, I sought to express the Christian message about how to deal with social evils.

In today's video we will talk about the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr. Extracted from the first sermon in his book “The Gift of Love”.

We will explain the importance of A STRICT MIND AND A SENSITIVE HEART in Martin's view.

Before we begin, I want you to listen to this phrase taken from the Bible, Matthew 10:16:

"Therefore be wise as serpents

and harmless as doves."

Because it will support today’s ideas. Therefore, subscribe to the channel, and leave your like and comment, this is very important for us to continue bringing valuable content to your day.

According to Martin Luther King Jr, the strong man maintains a lively combination of strongly demarcated opposites. It's not common for men to achieve this balance of opposites. Idealists in general are not realists, and realists in general are not idealists. Militants are not usually known for being passive, nor passive people for being militant. Rarely are humble people assertive or assertive people humble. But the best thing in life is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. The philosopher Hegel said that truth is found neither in the thesis nor in the antithesis, but in a synthesis that reconciles the two.

Thus, Jesus had recognized the need to combine opposites. He knew that his disciples would face a difficult and hostile world, that they would confront the recalcitrance of political rulers and intransigence.

Then he said to them, “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves.” And he provided a formula for action: “Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”

We must combine the prudence of the serpent with the gentleness of the dove, a rigorous mind with a sensitive heart.

For King Jr, we must first consider the need for a rigorous mind, characterized by incisive thinking, realistic evaluation and decisive judgment. A rigorous mind is sharp and penetrating, it breaks through the crust of legends and myths and separates the true from the false. The rigorous-minded individual is cunning and perceptive. He has a strong and austere characteristic, which guarantees firmness of purpose and solid commitment.

Who doubts that this rigor of the mind is one of the greatest human needs? Rarely do we find men who prefer to engage in rigorous and solid thinking. There is an almost universal search for easy answers and hasty solutions. Nothing bothers some people more than having to think.

For him, this predominant tendency towards permissiveness is explained by man's incredible gullibility. Consider our attitude toward advertising. We are easily led to buy a product. Advertisers have long discovered that most people have a permissive mind, and they capitalize on this susceptibility through skillful and effective slogans.

All the time our mind is invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices and false facts.

Permissive individuals tend to believe in all types of superstitions. Your mind is constantly invaded by irrational fears, ranging from the fear of Friday the 13th to the fear of a black cat crossing the street. Some hotels use devices to make people deal with their superstitions by jumping the 13th floor, as people accuse it of bad luck, an irony, behold, although the name changes to comfort the customer, the reality hides the much feared 13th floor, superstition is covered by a thin veil in which we don't even stop to question why there is a need to deceive.

The permissive man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo and has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.

Permissiveness normally permeates religion. This is why religion sometimes rejects a new truth with a dogmatic passion. Through decrees and intimidations, inquisitions and excommunications.

This has also led to a widespread belief that there is a conflict between science and religion. But it's not true. There may be a conflict between permissive religious people and strict scientists, but not between science and religion. Their respective worlds are different, their methods are different. Science investigates; religion interprets. Each one completes itself, by giving man knowledge and peace of mind, by limiting and discussing the ethical limits of discoveries and the future of humanity.

Martin Luther King Jr, also brings an important discussion when he states that: By capitalizing on permissive minds, dictators led men to acts of barbarism and terror unthinkable in a civilized society. Adolf Hitler realized that permissiveness was so prevalent among his followers that he declared: “I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.” In My Struggle, he stated:

"By cunning lies, repeated incessantly, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell — and that hell is heaven […]. The bigger the lie, the more easily it will be believed."

Permissiveness is one of the basic causes of racial prejudice and an evil in contemporary society. .

Racial prejudice is based on unfounded fears, mistrust and misunderstandings. There are those with such permissive minds that they believe in the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of the black race, despite rigorous research by anthropologists that reveals the falsehood of this notion. There are permissive people who argue that racial segregation should perpetuate because blacks fall behind in academic, health, and moral standards. They lack the foresight to realize that these performance standards are the result of segregation and discrimination. They do not recognize that it is rationally unfounded and sociologically unsustainable to use the tragic effects of segregation as an argument for its continuation.

There is little hope for us until we become lucid enough to free ourselves from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths and absolute ignorance. The conditions of the current world do not allow us the luxury of permissiveness. A country or civilization that continues to produce permissive-minded men is buying its own spiritual death in installments.

And we are living in a culture of permissiveness, more and more people are closing themselves into ideological groups and ignoring any encounter with opposing ideas, we are idolizing half-truths, relativizing good and evil, entering into a perverse permissiveness, in which individuals preach the peace in his speech, but he hopes that his fellow man who thinks contrary to him will be brutally hit with the same force that the permissive person claims to fight against. As if evil only existed among the orange team, so if they are the misfortune suffered, everything is fine...

But we should not be content with just cultivating a rigorous mind. The gospel also requires a sensitive heart. Rigor without sensitivity is a cold and distant thing, which keeps life in a perpetual winter, without the warmth of spring and the mild heat of summer.

A person with a hardened heart never truly loves. She engages in a crude utilitarianism, which evaluates others primarily according to their usefulness. She never enjoys the beauty of friendship, as she is too cold to feel affection for others, and too self-centered to share joy and sadness with others. It becomes an isolated island.

The hard-hearted individual never sees people as people, but as mere objects or impersonal cogs in an ever-moving wheel. In the immense wheel of industry, he sees men as labor. In the circle of masses living in a large city, he sees men as digits in a crowd. This individual depersonalizes life.

Therefore, faced with racial segregation in the United States, Martin stated that as black people, in that historical context, we must bring together a rigorous mind and a sensitive heart if we want to move creatively towards the goal of freedom and justice.

Magnificently, King warned that the permissive-minded individuals among us think the only way to deal with oppression is to adjust to it.

They prefer to endure the evils they suffer, as Shakespeare mentioned, rather than run away and face evils they are unaware of. They acquiesce and resign themselves to segregation. They prefer to remain oppressed, like many of the Hebrews who for 40 years feared changing their mentality and facing the desert in search of the promised land.

Furthermore, according to Martin Jr, we must understand that passively accepting an unjust system is cooperating with that system and, therefore, becoming complicit in its harm.

In this type of ideological clash, there are obviously individuals with hardened and bitter hearts who would fight their opponent with physical violence, corroded by hatred. However, violence only generates temporary victories; By creating many more social problems than solutions, violence never results in permanent peace. Therefore he was convinced that if they succumbed to the temptation of resorting to violence in their struggle for freedom, future generations would be the victims of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and thus the main legacy for them would be an endless reign of chaos.

Through non-violent resistance, King Jr believed they were able to oppose the unjust system and at the same time love those who maintain that system. Thus, he states that they should work passionately and tirelessly for full stature as citizens, but let it never be said, that to achieve it they had to use the inferior methods of falsehood, malice, hatred and violence.

In this way, pastor Martin Luther King Jr, proposed a third way in the search for freedom: non-violent resistance, which combines a rigorous mind with a sensitive heart, avoiding the complacency and inaction of permissive minds and the violence and resentment of hardened hearts.

He stated that: God has two outstretched arms. One is strong enough to surround us with his righteousness, and the other generous enough to embrace us with his grace.

And so, he ends by saying:

I am grateful that we worship a God who is both rigorous and sensitive. If God were just strict, he would be a cold, compassionless despot sitting in a distant sky “beholding everything.” But if he had just a sensitive heart, God would be too condescending and sentimental to intervene when things go wrong, and unable to control what he did. God does not have a hard heart or a permissive mind.

When the days grow dark and the nights become dreary, we can thank our God for combining in His nature a creative synthesis of love and justice that will lead us through the dark valleys of life and onto the sunny paths of hope and fulfillment.

We leave it here with our video, I hope you enjoyed these great words of wisdom and were able to reflect on the idea of Martin Luther King Jr, about a more egalitarian society and at the same time looking to the future, to the development of the country as a nation . Mainly, to establish a paradigm shift within racial segregation that for centuries tarnished the ideals of American Freedom, Equality and Justice, and left deep marks on the North American black population. We can go further, and read King's sermons carefully, with a critical look at Brazil and any society in which discrimination is present, as his words speak of respect, love and compassion, it goes beyond the empty speeches we find today, which treat various issues of prejudice more as a form of self-affirmation than cooperation between people.