1166. My Journey to Grace Relations

Welcome to The Daily Platform. Our program features sermons from chapel services at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Today on The Daily Platform, we're continuing a series called Grace Relations. Today's message will be preached by Dr. Charles Ware who serves at the College of Biblical Studies in Indianapolis, Indiana. Dr. Steve Pettit will introduce him. Well, as we planned this semester and we began to work around the theme of refresh, I knew that I thought it would be really important that we have a week that we focus on the concept of race and grace together.

And how does that work, especially in the world we're living in today? We are so honored this morning to have with us speaking today and tomorrow in chapel Dr. Charles Ware. Dr. Ware is the executive director of Grace Relations that is located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Before that, he served as the president of Crossroads Bible College.

He has been a church planter and served up in the Midwest. He is the founder of Grace Relations Network. He speaks in venues and serves as a consultant on racial reconciliation and leadership. His ministry is dedicated to his ministry is received well by audiences from various ethnic groups. He has authored, co-authored, and edited several books. One of them is the book where he co-authored with Dr. Ken Ham, One Race and One Blood.

He speaks for the BJU Press in various locations around the country. So we are so delighted to have him here today to speak and please give him a warm welcome as he comes to speak at Bob Jones University. Well, thank you indeed. It is a privilege to be here with you and appreciate that kind introduction. I am here today and I'm going to be sharing with you my journey to grace relations.

Tell you a little bit about my story. I am what I am by the grace of God. I am excited that I've been saved. I tell people I'm nothing but a servant of God who's been redeemed by the death, burial, and resurrection of the Son of God. Been dwelt by the Spirit of God, guided by the Word of God, laboring with the people of God to advance the kingdom of God for the glory of God. That's why I'm here today. That's my journey.

Praise God. I want to talk about my wife just a little bit. Dr. Pettig gave an introduction of her, but I do want you to pray for her. In 2010, she had a stroke. It left her reading at my third grade level. She's a woman who loves the Bible and she used to teach Bible studies and things like that. She's not really studying anymore, but even more pressing upon our family right now. About two years ago, she was diagnosed with a very rare brain disease.

She would get up in the morning sometimes and not know how to make a cup of tea or how to put toast in the toaster. And then, so we're just seeing what God's going to do, how He's going to lead, but we're together as long as God would have us. We're going to serve Him in the best way that we can. You are all aware of the facts and the stats that are out that, technically, our country is changing.

This survey said by 2050, minorities will be a majority. Ken Davis, who's with me, he's a graduate from Bob Jones University, he's one of the gentlemen with me. He's a missiologist, so to speak, speaks to that all the time.

He says, no, it's about 2042 now. I tell him I don't get too hung up in the stats, I just want to be what Jesus wants me to be right now, OK? Grace relations, I like to talk grace especially to the people of God because grace is an acronym. It stands for God's reconciliation at Christ's expense. I'm not here trying to reconcile with you. If you are born again, I have been reconciled with you. My job is, according to Ephesians 4, is to walk worthy of that and to live that out.

I want to talk to you as believers in Jesus Christ. We have something the world does not have. The world is not born again by the Spirit of God. The world is not indwelt by the Spirit of God. The world is not submitted to the Word of God. The world is not united as one family, but we are. Therefore, we do not take our marching orders from the world.

We show them something that they can't produce. And what I'm talking about is I don't want to just be cursing the darkness. I want to be creating communities of light. I want to see communities of grace where God has saved us, united us, and knitted our hearts together, and we are living together for His glory.

That's what grace relations is all about. This College of Biblical Studies where grace relations is the ministry of it, our president is Dr. William Blocker, visionary, great man. Our mission statement is that the College of Biblical Studies exists to glorify God by educating and equipping multi-ethnic Christian leaders to impact the world for Christ. Not follow the world, but impact the world for Christ. We try to live out our mission statement. Our opposite shows that we are 45% African American, 29% Latino, 17% white, and the rest of other ethnic groups, but we try to live out the message that God has given us.

I have a thing called a dream, but I won't go over that this morning with you, but I will tell you what am I. People say, what do you seek to do through grace relation? What are you trying to accomplish? Well, what I'm trying to accomplish is the things you see up here. Number one is discipleship. I believe that you and I as Christians, the number one thing we should be pursuing is to love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind, and love our neighbor as ourselves.

If we get that down, then the relationships will come together pretty good, but when we are immature and when we are not reaching that goal that God wants for us to love him and love our neighbor, then we don't bring about the relationships that God wants to see done for the glory of God. Second thing I'm trying to do is edification. Listen, so many people, especially those of you who are the light of human, you call yourself white, but so many of you are so paralyzed. You confuse. I don't know what to say. Do I call you African American? Do I call you black? Do I call you what?

I don't know. I don't know what to say. And you're just paralyzed sitting down doing nothing. That's the devil's work.

He confuses you and paralyzes you. God didn't give you the spirit of fear but of love and power and a sound mind. And what I'm trying to do is encourage us as Christian to have us and us conversations and to unite together to preach the gospel to people who are going to hell. You and I are God's people. We are one group. We are one race. And I'm trying to encourage us. Let's get together. Let's work together. Let's stop these conversations of them and us, and let's have some us and us conversations to be what God wants us to do.

The third thing I'm trying to do is manifestation. Jesus said, by this shall all men know that you are my disciples in that you have loved one for another. That's my sermon for tomorrow. Color me love. Color me love. That's what I want to be known for.

The character. Color me love. You have marketing tools out here, but I want to tell you the greatest marketing tool to an unsaved world is when they see people from different ethnic groups come together because of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And somehow we love one another, get along with one another, and unite together to take the word of God into our society.

That's what I'm trying to do. Then the next thing I'm trying to do is depopulate hell. That's evangelization. I don't care whether you're black, white, or polka dot. I don't care whether you're educated, uneducated, suburban or urban. I don't care whether you're rich or poor.

If you die without Christ, you will spend eternity in hell. And listen, there's a virus all around the world, the COVID virus. It's killing people. Well, I want to tell you something. The greatest virus that is the killing people is the virus of sin.

It has a hundred percent death rate. And you and I have the cure. His name is Jesus Christ.

And we need to get it out there. The government's not going to preach Christ. Secular schools are not going to preach Christ. You and I are the people who have that message, and we walk in the midst of a people who are dying and going to hell.

And we're arguing and cussing the darkness instead of giving them the light. The last thing I want to do is I want to glorify God in everything I do. I want to glorify Him. I want to ask you a question. You're Bible believers, and you're going to agree when I say, you know, the gospel is the answer. We need to preach the gospel.

You are going to agree with that. Jesus is the answer. I want to ask you a question. If Jesus is the answer, why is the church so segregated? You and I are trying to tell the world we've got the answer, but they're looking to us to figure out why is the church so segregated. A survey has been done that pastors are more reluctant to speak about race these days than they were in 2016. Another survey, a lot of pastors, especially those of Lyda Hughes, says there's no race problem.

I like what Dr. Tony Evans had to say. He said, it is my contention that the fundamental cause of racial problems in America lies squarely with the church's failure to come to grips with this issue. Now notice, from a biblical perspective, and that's what I'm concerned about. Sound doctrine. Sound doctrine. 2 Timothy chapter 4 talks about preaching the word. Preach the word.

When a society has gone astray, what do you do? Preach the word. The end of our doctrine, the goal of our doctrine is love.

Now here's what I want to challenge you with as you're in this school. I want to just ask you this question. As a Christian, do we dare to dream that the church can move beyond the division of race relations to the unity of grace relations? Now I'm not talking about the world right now. I'm talking about the church. I'm talking about born again believers. I'm talking about those of us who by grace have been united as one. Do we dare to dream that God is big enough, the gospel is powerful enough? Not only to save us and take us from going to hell to heaven, but to bring us into relationship with one another. That's what I want to challenge you with.

I'm going to give you my little journey real quickly here and why that question is so important to me. March of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. has been assassinated. Racial riots and protests are going on across our country. Places have been burned down.

Relationships are bad. Vietnam War is going on. It was in March of 1968 that two white men came to my house on a Monday night. They asked me the question, if you die tonight, where would you spend eternity? I looked them square in their eyes and I said, if God is just, I'd go to hell. They said, have you ever heard that you, they were shocked. They said, have you ever heard you can know you're going to heaven? I had heard that actually from one of the young men that was there that night. His father taught a Sunday school class when I was in seventh grade. He taught from 1 John chapter 5, these things are written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God that you might know that you have eternal life. Well, I listened to that message.

I rejected that message. I said, nobody can know that they're going to heaven until they die. And God would judge your good against your bad. And if you're good, outweigh your bad. You're going to heaven. If you're bad, outweigh your good.

You're going to hell. And I actually changed my life as a seventh grader. Some things I thought was sin I got rid of. Other things that was too good to get rid of, I decided to hang on to those.

But my senior year in high school, I decided being good doesn't make me happy. So I've sinned and broke my own, my own standard. So when they asked me that question, I was ready. They said, if we could show you from the word of God, would you believe? Well, yeah, if you could show me from the word of God, I believe. And so they came into my living room and they opened the Bible to me, Romans 3 23, for all of sin and come short of the glory of God. I had no problems with that at that particular time because I knew I was a sinner. I knew I'd come short of the glory of God. And I love what the Bible says, all of sin, black, white, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, uneducated, urban, suburban.

It doesn't really matter. All of sin comes short of the glory of God. I didn't argue with that. Then they showed me, but the gift of God is eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ. And that captured my attention. That captured my attention. And then they said, Romans 5 8, but God committed his love toward us while we were yet sinners.

Christ died for us. Now, that really caught my attention because I played three varsity sports as a senior. I lettered in three varsity sports. I had applied to three colleges. I was accepted at three colleges. I was scholarship to three colleges. I was a president of the student council, but all of these things that I once thought would bring me happiness and meaning left me empty.

And I often wondered whether people would love me just because of me. I can remember once walking across the gym floor. There was nothing going on. A gym class had just ended.

This place smelled kind of musty. And I looked up into the rafters and I said, if we were having a game, this place would be packed out. People would be screaming and yelling and shouting and some of them would be calling my name. But then I asked the question, but what if I never could jump? What if I never could play ball? Would they love me anyway?

If I wasn't president of the student council, how many people who want to be my friends now would still want to be my friends? I don't know the real answer to that, but I came to the conclusion that most people wanted to be around me because of what I could do. But here was a God who loves me, even when I was a sinner, had nothing to offer Him. He loved me. And they took me to Romans 10. If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in thy heart that God is raised from the dead, thou shalt be saved. In my living room, it wasn't so much that I didn't want to go to hell, but it was because I wanted real life.

I wanted real peace. And I believed on the Lord Jesus Christ that night. And God miraculously saved me. My life turned 180 degrees.

I was the first person, a black person, to be baptized in that church. My mother said, boy, you look like a fly on a bowl of milk. I told her, Mom, I'm just a drop of chocolate. Give me a little time.

I'll flavor them all. But I got saved, and God saved me, and I had a thirst for the word of God. I just wanted the word of God. Any place they were given the word of God, I started witnessing to the people in my high school, God had radically changed my life. In fact, he so radically changed my life that a guy challenged me to pray about where God wanted me to go to college. Well, I applied to three state schools.

I had my way paid to three state schools, and I picked out one school because my best friend was unsaved. He and I was going to go to college together. We're going to try to lead him to Christ. And this guy wanted me to pray about a Bible college. I thought about that. I prayed about it.

I told him I'd pray about it, and I prayed about it. I'm like, God, this Bible college doesn't even know what a scholarship is. My way is paid to a secular university. I've got scholarships.

The school that I was going to go to was going to pay my room, my board, my tuition, and give me money to spend on the weekends. I said, God, where do you want me to go? This secular college was a few thousand people.

This Bible college was 200 people. I said, God, where do you want me to go? As God was burning my heart and capturing my heart more and more, it came becoming more and more clear to me. He wanted me to go to that Bible college, and I remember getting on my knees and praying, and I was almost crying. And I said to God, are you sure you want me to go to that college? The Ku Klux Klan probably down in them hills. But I'll go. I went down there. There was one African American lady that was there.

She graduated after a year, left me there all alone with a few Jamaicans. I was down there meeting God, and I'm praying, and I'm trying to get the Word of God. They're teaching me the Word of God. They're teaching me. It's inspired.

It's inerrant. You've got to take it literally and in context, and I'm hearing stuff I never heard in my life before. God is transforming my life. But when I got saved and started reaching out to some of my friends, one of them was an extremely good ballplayer. He was an undergraduate to me, and we would go to these youth camps, and all these so-called white girls, the light of hue, they'd come running around him because he was such a great ballplayer. The director of the camp pulled him aside and said, you shouldn't be sitting next to these white girls. He came to me and said, what's this all about? I said, man, I don't know anything about it.

I said, we're not here for girls. We're here for Jesus. Just follow Jesus. Well, he had said that he was going to come to Bible college with me where I went when he graduated, but that summer before he was to come, black power advocates got a hold of him. They told him Christianity was a white man's religion. He reflected on this idea. They didn't want him sitting next to the white girls, so he decided I'm not going to Bible college. I'm going to secular university.

I'm going to play professional ball. He got into college less than a month, broke his foot, couldn't play ball, dropped out, went to the city, got involved with some woman, beat her up and wound up in prison. A friend of mine called me and told me and said, listen, he's in prison.

They're going to let him out. You need to come up here and talk to him. He'll listen to you. Well, he was three hours away.

I didn't have a car, so I decided, no, I can't drive. I wrote him a letter. I don't know if he ever got it. He got out of college. I mean, he got out of jail. He got in an argument with a woman.

A pistol was there. He was shot and he was killed. That broke my heart. My thoughts before then was interracial marriage.

If the Bible says it's wrong, it's wrong. I don't care. I'm going to obey God. I didn't like Jesse Jackson. I didn't like Al Sharpton. I didn't even like Martin Luther King Jr. I was cursing all that darkness because I had Jesus.

But the death of this young man caused me to do something. I decided to study the Bible on the subject of interracial marriage. I studied the Bible on the subject of interracial marriage. I came to the conclusion the Bible doesn't have anything wrong with that. It's not interracial marriage. It's interfaith marriage. And God helped me see that. This book is named Prejudice in the People of God after the paper I wrote in college called Prejudice in the People of God. It kind of confused me, Lord.

What's going on? I've given up my identity with so-called black people. I've identified myself with so-called Christians.

Many of them whom I around are the light of hue. And they're telling me that I'm all right to be there, but I got to stick with my own. Sharon and I, we got involved and started a church in the inner city of Scranton, Pennsylvania. And when we were feeling God was bringing us together for marriage, it was some students from the college that got us involved in that church. Then they asked me to be the pastor.

So we got involved in that. And then as we were going to get married, she was a year behind me. I graduated before she did. We waited for her to graduate.

And we got married just before our marriage. The administration of the school called all the white students that was members in our church and said to them, if Charles and Sharon get married, you're going to have to choose between the college and the church. To the students' credit, they met together and they said, well, God ordained the local church. He did not ordain a college. This is our local church.

We're not moving. To which the college said, everybody who is a member of the church can remain a member, but nobody new can become a member. Sharon and I got married. I applied to seminary twice and was rejected. That got me very confused. I remember that particular time I broke down in prayer before God and I said to God, I don't understand this.

I don't know what's going on. I said, I know that you saved me and I can't deny you. I got to follow you. I want to do what you want me to do. But what am I supposed to do? Go to a black church and talk about white people, how they're racist and privileged and you can't trust them and just keep my mouth shut?

I should have gone to a white church and hear about blacks. They're lazy. They want to hand out. They're criminal. They're this, they're that. And I just keep my mouth shut. And God made it very clear to me. This is my journey to grace relations when God made it clear to me. You don't follow black. You don't follow white. You follow Jesus.

And that's what I'm trying to do. Jesus Christ is the Lord of my life. Romans 12, one and two. As I was saying, I presented my life as a living sacrifice, holy unto God. I don't bow before a group. I don't bow before a party. I don't bow before a person other than the Lord Jesus Christ. He's the one I got an answer to.

He's the one I'm living for. And God put me on that journey. We started this group called Voice of Biblical Reconciliation back at that time or after that when I went to the DC area.

But God has burned my heart and said, you just keep preaching grace because of the grace of God that saved me. I want you to understand that in this book, this first book I wrote, Bob Jones is in that book. I talk about Bob Jones as being the example of an institution believing that interracial marriage was sin and they are the leaders in this.

But you know what? I'm here today to tell you the grace of God that forgives me and my sin and helps me grow and develop. I'm so happy Bob Jones saw that this is the right way to go. I tell people a misinterpretation of the text led to a misapplication of the text that led to a misdirection of the church.

The way we correct it is not to follow the world, but go back to the text, get a right interpretation of the text and a right application of the text and a right redirection of the church. And that's what Bob Jones is doing. Praise God.

I'm all for that. I said, man, listen, history is still being written by the hand of God. Bob Jones is not bound in its past. You are making history right now. And what you want to be able to do is talk about the past and talk about the grace of God that transformed you and demonstrate something so different that people just have to say, it was the grace of God. That's why I'm here.

I'm excited about it. God is good. Also, Ken Davis is here. He and I created a course for then Crossroads Bible College. It was called Culture, Race and the Church.

I was troubled by, as I looked at history, the more conservative and Bible believing the group was, the more likely they were to support slavery, to fight integration, to fight civil rights. And I wanted to know why. I wanted to go back to the text and see what was going on. So we created that course together. It now can be taken in a competency-based situation.

It can be taken online and people can take it at their time. But what I'm here to tell you is that I am convinced that the grace of God saved my old sinful soul when I was headed to hell justly. And it was God's love, His unmerited favor, and God has changed my life. And I'm looking for other people who've been changed by the grace of God that we can unite together, being empowered by the Spirit of God, guided by the Word of God, so that we can impact this culture for the glory of God. I'm not following the world. I'm following Christ.

And I want you to know this in my closing. When I was in college, like you were in college, there was racial things going on. There was all these divisions, so on and so forth. But some of us were seeking God to love Him. We were praying.

We were fasting. We were involved in ministry together. And we were eating together, talking together, laughing together. And one of those individuals in my life was Ken Rudolph.

And Ken Rudolph's son, Chris Rudolph, went to our alma mater and put up money to start a scholarship called a Ken Rudolph and Charles Ware Scholarship. Because he said, this is reconciliation that I believe in. That's biblical reconciliation. That's grace relations. And may God help you to live your life in such a way. You've been listening to a sermon preached by Dr. Charles Ware, who serves at the College of Biblical Studies in Indianapolis, Indiana. This was part two of a three-part series called Grace Relations. Listen again tomorrow as we conclude this series on The Daily Platform.