EVIL DESTROYS ITSELF

'...evil carries the seed of its own destruction. In the long run right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore' in The Gift of Love, p.86.

CAESAR VS. CHRIST

'Caesar occupied a palace Christ a cross, but the same Christ so split history into A.D. and B.C. that even the reign of Caesar was subsequently dated by his name.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore' in The Gift of Love, p.81.

THE PRESENCE OF EVIL

'Is anything more obvious that the presence of evil in the universe? Its nagging, prehensile tentacles project into every level of human existence. We may debate the origin of evil, but only a victim of superficial optimism would debate its reality. Evil is stark, grim, and colossally real.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore' in The Gift of Love, p.79.

WORLD TRANSFORMING CHRISTIANITY

'We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world. Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune and life itself on behalf of a cause they knew to be right. Quantitively small, they were qualitatively giants. Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'Transformed Nonconformists' in The Gift of Love, p.16.

WHERE OUR ULTIMATE LOYALTY LIES

'Living in the colony of time, we are ultimately responsible to the empire of eternity. As Christians we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or earth-bound idea, for at the heart of our universe is a higher reality - God and his kingdom of love - to which we must be conformed.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'Transformed Nonconformist' in The Gift of Love, p.12.

UNCHRISTIAN SILENCE

'I have seen religious leaders stand amid the social injustices that pervade our society, mouthing pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. All too often the religious community has been a tailgate instead of a headlight.' 

Martin Luther King Jr. in Timothy Larsen and Keith L Johnson, Balm in Gilead, p.167. p. 100.

WHEN THE CHURCH HAD POWER

'There was a time when the church was very powerful - in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators". But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were a "colony of heaven," called to obey God and not man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it an arch-defender of the status-quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent - and often even vocal - sanction of things as they are.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, p.24. 

THE POWER OF AN INJUSTICE

'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly, affects all indirectly.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, p.2. 

SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS

'There are those who become so involved in looking at the man-made lights of the city that they unconsciously forget to rise up and look at that great cosmic light and think about it - that gets up in the eastern hemisphere every morning and moves across the sky with a kind of symphony of motion and paints its technicolor across the blue - a light that man can never make. They become so involved in looking at the skyscraping buildings of the Loop of Chicago or Empire State Building of New York that they forget to think about the gigantic mountains that kiss the skies as if to bathe their peaks in the lofty blue - something that man could never make. They have become so busy thinking about radar and their television that they unconsciously forget to think about the stars that bedeck the heavens like swinging lanterns of eternity, those stars that appear to be shiny, silvery pins sticking in the magnificent blue pincushion. They become so involved in thinking about man's progress that they forget to think about the need for God's power in history. They end up going days and days not knowing that God is not with them.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.40.

HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE

'And don't forget in doing something for others that you have what you have because of others. Don't forget that. We are tied together in life and in the world. And you may think you got all you got by yourself. But you know, before you got out here to church this morning, you were dependent on more than half of the world. You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and you reach for a bar of soap, and that's handed to you by a Frenchman. You reach over for a sponge, and that's given to you by a Turk. You reach over for a towel, and that comes to your hand from the hands of a Pacific Islander. And then you go on to the kitchen to get your breakfast. You reach over to get a little coffee, and that's poured into your cup by a South American. Or maybe you decide that you want to drink a little tea this morning, only to discover that that's poured into your cup by a Chineses. Or maybe you want a little cocoa, that's poured in your cup by a West African. Then you want a little bread and you reach over to get it, and that's given to you by the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. Before you get through eating breakfast in the morning, you're dependent on more than half the world. That's the way God structured it; that's the way God structured this world. So let us be concerned about others because we are dependent on others.'  

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.40.

THE GREATNESS OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN

'I say to you this morning that the first question that the priest asked was the first question that I asked on that Jericho Road of Atlanta known as Simpson Road. The first question that the Levite asked was, 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But the good Samaritan came by and he reversed the question. Not 'What will happen to me if I stop to help this man?' but 'What will happen to this man if I do not stop to help him?' This was why the man was good and great. He was great because he was willing to take a risk for humanity; he was willing to ask, 'What will happen to this man?' not 'What will happen to me?"

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.40.

A CHRISTIAN APPROACH TO WORK

'...if it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say 'Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.'"

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.36.

KNOW THYSELF

'A Ford car trying to be a Cadillac is absurd, but if a Ford accepts itself as a Ford, it can do many things that A Cadillac could never do: it can get in parking spaces that a Cadillac can never get in. And in life some of us are Fords and some of us are Cadillacs.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.34.

HUMANKIND

'The whole concept of the imago dei, as it is expressed in Latin, the "image of God," is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. Not that they have substantial unity with God, but that every man has the capacity to have fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: there are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God's keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn that. We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every men. That is why we must fight segregation with all of our nonviolent might.'

Martin Luther King Jr. in Timothy Keller, Generous Justice, p.86.