Faith & Prejudice | Restoring OnenessSample

A hard heart is fertile ground for prejudice to take root. I’ve had countless conversations with people over the last year who have said systemic racism isn’t real. People who, when you give them the evidence, the policies, the stories, the data, deny it and explain it away. How is that? The answer is simple. A hard heart. Our passage for today tells us that people are darkened in their understanding due to a hard heart. I have voted across the political spectrum and don’t identify with any political party because politics has a way of distorting your perception of reality by making data fit one narrative or another. No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, however, we all have to work from a shared set of facts. We may arrive at different conclusions from those facts, but a hard heart compels us to use our own facts.

The problem with a hard heart is that it doesn’t care what the facts are. It doesn’t care what the evidence is. A hard heart is emotionally committed to ignorance. When we are emotionally committed to ignorance, it is proof that we have a hard heart and, because we have a hard heart, the Bible says we are alienated from the life of God. What does this mean? God is life. A hard heart separates us from God. It alienates us from God. We may go to church and go through the motions, but when we walk in ignorance, we create distance between us and God.

Dr. King knew this, which is why he said "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” What he meant is that nothing is more dangerous than a person who chooses ignorance when given the option to learn and grow. As Christians, the worst thing we can do is cling to ignorance in the face of God’s gift of wisdom. Prejudice needs the fertile ground of a hard heart to take root and grow. Which is why our faith must inform our prejudice. Our faith in Jesus must make it non-optional to choose truth. Even when we don’t like it. We have to protect our heart at all costs. We have to guard against allowing wrong thoughts, attitudes and beliefs to infiltrate it. As a Christian, we should not be following anyone on social media or otherwise who demeans and degrades our fellow image bearers.

If you follow someone on social who regularly calls your fellow image-bearers morons or stupid or demons or in any way less than who God created them to be, unfollow them. Today. Don't allow Satan to use your heart as a breeding ground for his demonic agenda. Who do you need to close access to your heart from?