Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, Thomas Jefferson penned
the famous phrase, we hold these truths to be self evident,
that all men are created equal. But where did that
idea come from? And how did that idea launch a
little known group in America to fight slavery when the
world was absolutely against them. That's today.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Thanks for listening to this edition of Living on the
Edge with Chipping Grow. We are an international teaching and
discipleship ministry that motivates Christians to live like Christians. We're
grateful you've joined us today. As our guest teacher, John
Dickerson shares the second half of his talk, Jesus You
and the Fight for Human Rights. But before we get going,
(00:57):
if you want to go back and listen to the
first half of John's Smith or is it any other
part of our Dealing with Doubt series, check out the
chip Ingram Math. So if you're ready, John begins by
describing how the equality and freedoms we enjoy today are
the result of the Christians who fought for them throughout history.
Let's dive in.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
As ye would that men should do to you, do
ye also to them? Likewise, that was the Quaker's mantra.
We call it the Golden rule today, and in modern
English it sounds more like this, do unto others as
you would have them do to you, or at an
elementary level, treat others.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
The way you want to be treated.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
That was their whole thesis, and the Quaker Christians within
the United States started this spread of people who could
read the Bible for themselves becoming convinced that even if
I don't have slaves, I need to be an activist
in ending slavery as a whole. The Quaker Christians knew
that the largest slave empire at that time was the
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British Empire, because Britain at that time controlled Australia, South Africa,
colonies all around the world, including parts of North America.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
And so the.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Quakers started to create, at great expense to themselves these
propaganda coins anti slavery propaganda.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
Coins with scripture on them.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
On the left, you see a slave kneeling and he says,
am I not a man and a brother. That is
a Bible verse from the Book of Phi Lehman, verse sixteen.
On the right side you see their Quaker mantra, whatever
ye would that men should do to you do.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
Ye to them.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Also, in fact, the Quakers sent so much literature and
so many activists over to England and to the British
territories to petition against slavery, that we have a modern
term that was coined by their huge propaganda push to
end slavery. And it's the term campaign when someone campaigns
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for office, or if you campaign for a cause. That
term was coined by the Quakers campaigning to end slavery.
Here's that verse, Philelyman one sixteen. This is all the
way back about thirty years after Jesus rose from the
dead and ascended into heaven in the New Testament Church.
New Testament Church was this first ever in history where
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you had men and women worshiping openly together, where you
had all the different races in an incredibly racially divided
world gathering together. Paul the Apostle would write things like
here in the church there is not male or female, Barbarian, Sythyan,
slave or free, but Christ is all and in all.
This was revolutionary two thousand years ago. And within that context,
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Paul the Apostle wrote to a man who had a
slave who had become a Christian, and he says this,
he is no longer a slave to you. He's now
a beloved brother, especially to me. Now he will mean
much more to you. In other words, keep taking care
of him physically. But he's not your slave now, he's
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your brother. He's a man made in the image of God,
and a brother in the Lord. These are the kind
of passages the Quaker Christians would quote well. As the
Quakers campaigned and sent their literature to the British Empire,
a young man there named William Wilberforce, who had been
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fairly wealthy and a lawmaker and didn't really care about
the cause to end slavery because he had constituents who
were making money off of it. William Wilberforce became a
born again believer, a follower of Jesus, and it so
changed him that he looked at the nation around him.
He said, people, you can't call yourself a Christian unless
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you're actually reading the words of Jesus and doing what
he said. And so he wrote a book called Real Christianity.
In that book, over about thirty years, swayed the entire
population there in England to overthrow slavery, to make it illegal.
Not only in England, but in all of the British territories.
(05:12):
William Wilberforce, after he became a believer in Jesus, got
exposed to that Quaker propaganda, if you will, the campaigning
against slavery. Okay, So now slavery's outlawed in a good
part of the world where the British Empire is, but
here in the United States it still exists.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
We're into about the eighteen.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Hundreds now, and in the eighteen hundreds we know exactly
who the people are who led the charge to end slavery.
We know it because their publications and books still exist today.
You can go to university libraries and you can see
original copies of these documents that I'm showing you. For example,
the Declaration of the Anti Slavery Convention, so a group
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of thought leaders who gathered and said we're going to
give our lives to end slavery.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
It's about thirty years before the Civil War.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Now we know everyone who signed this document because within
it they wrote we know we might get killed for this,
we know it might cost us our fortunes and our homes,
but we are so convinced that this is God's will,
and we fear God more than man, that if we
die as martyrs, we die as martyrs, we're going to
end slavery in the land that we call home. We
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know exactly who signed it, because their names are still
on there, and if you were to survey those names,
you'd find more than half. In fact, the majority say reverend.
These were pastors. These were clergy who were riling up
their entire congregations to say we must overthrow slavery. Now
let me show you on this document just a little
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bit of the scripture. If you look in the highlighting here,
everything that's highlighted there, there are eight different Bible verses.
So on the top half of the declaration to end
slavery in the US, their whole justification is from scripture.
In fact, even that picture in the middle is a
man kind of strangling evil, and under it is this
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quote where Jesus said, my followers, you're gonna go do
greater things. You're gonna tread the serpent underfoot. In other words,
you're gonna extinguish evil, the serpents of picture of Satan.
And these abolitionists, they saw it as a spiritual high calling,
as their eternal destiny to do the work of God
on earth by extinguishing slavery. The signers are a beautiful
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mix of European descended Caucasian Americans and African American Americans
who had been freed from slavery, or who had bought
their freedom, or who had been born in the North.
One of those is the Reverend Theodore Right. Theodore Right
been born in the North, never was a slave himself,
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born into an orphanage run by Quaker Christians, an orphanage
that had a school, so most African Americans didn't know
how to read. But because he'd been born into a
Christian orphanage, he was taught to read, became highly educated
a Presbyterian reverend. He's one of those many signers of
that anti slavery convention. He stood side by side with
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people like Elijah Lovejoy. Elijah Lovejoy was a pastor and
a reverend. He was also a newspaper printer and writer,
and he would often write things like this one Timothy one,
verse nine says, in the Bible, we know that the
law is made for lawbreakers and rebels. What are some
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categories of lawbreakers and rebels? Slave traders and liars? And
so those are contrary to the Gospel. And Elijah Lovejoy,
as a pastor and writer, would take passages like that,
and he would write books and pamphlets that would say,
you can't call yourself a god fearing person and allow slavery.
(09:02):
John Rankin started as a pastor in Kentucky. He got
up in front of his church and he said, slavery's evil.
You all need to set your slaves free, and they
ran him out of town. Harriet Tubman who well documented
as a great hero of the faith, who not only
escaped slavery, but then risked her life to keep going
back in and leading others out. Frederick Douglas, another well
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documented hero who also escaped from slavery, bought his freedom,
but then went back to help others, traveled around the
Northern States as a lecturer and an author, turning the
national will against slavery.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
Well.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
By God's grace, these righteous followers of Jesus and thousands
of others prevailed in the US Civil War and extinguished
at least the open legalized slavery. The beginning of a
journey that continues of true equality in our land, a
journey that, by the way, will be fully completed until
(10:01):
Christ returns. But here's here's what I want you to
zoom out. I know as Americans would get really caught
up on America after the Civil War. In eighteen ninety,
the wealthiest nations in the world, who's that, the US, Britain, France,
mostly Western Europe, they gathered in Brussels to sign the
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eighteen ninety Brussels Act. This is the first time in
all of human history, thousands of years, this was the
only time that the wealthiest nations gathered together and they said,
we declare slavery illegal and evil, and we will not
conduct trade. We will not do business with any country
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that allows open and legalized slavery.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
You're listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram,
and we'll get back to our guest teacher, John Dickerson
in just a minute. But let me quickly ask, do
you know someone who's a skeptic. Maybe it's that close
friend or family member who genuinely doubts the truth of
the Bible or the existence of Jesus. Well, stick around
after the teaching to hear about a resource bundle we've
(11:08):
put together that'll provide answers and direction for that doubter
or in your life, but for now here again as John.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
And as a result of that that many other nations
who were dragging their feet on slavery were more or
less forced to come around. And what you can do
is you can look at those nations in eighteen ninety
who signed that act, and you can look at their populations.
How Christian were they and they're all over seventy percent
(11:36):
Christian nations. Russia at the time, this is before the
Bolshevik Revolution.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
I know I'm getting into history here. Forgive me.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Russia was an orthodox Christian nation at the time. The
Western European nations, they weren't perfect, they were messed up,
but they were trying to do what Jesus said, and
they overthrew slavery. That's why we've been born into a
world this isn't even two hundred years old, where slavery
is assumed to be an evil. And of course, the
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fight for true human rights continues in modern history with
people like the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior, a Baptist pastor,
a seminary graduate who you can go online and you
can listen to his speeches, and what you'll find as
you listen to him is that the majority of them
are sermons, and that the majority of them were delivered
(12:27):
in churches on Sunday mornings. He said things like this,
I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout
this nation that we are Christian people.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
We believe the Christian religion.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Of the entire logic and philosophy, of him giving his
life in uncomfortable ways, being willing to die as a.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
Martyr if necessary.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
He said this, If we are wrong, then Jesus of
Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down
to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie
and love has no meaning. I hope what you don't
hear from me is some kind of assumption that everyone
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who's claimed to be a Christian is perfect.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
They're not. I'm not. We're not.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
But we got to zoom out to realize only one time,
in all the thousands of years of history, his slavery
been completely made illegal and overthrown and then spread globally.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
That's happened one time.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
And we know the people who led the charge, and
we can read their motivations for ourselves. And it's not
atheism or choral marx or Buddhism or these other thought
systems that I'm not here to attack them. But you're
just not going to find that in the logic of
the people who led this charge. Jesus' followers, those who
(13:54):
truly have read his words and said, well, do what
he says, no matter the cost.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Don't worry.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
I'm not going to unpack all this. But I always
want to talk about our world today. How are women's
rights in the world today. I'm not going to open
this wide open. We've got a long ways to go
on all these things because we're born into a world
that's corrupted by sin and evil. Human nature has been corrupted.
Jesus is the only one who can change people's very nature.
(14:21):
So women's rights in the world today aren't where they
need to be. But the World Economic Forum has ranked
countries by their women's rights, and I've got the list
for you here. So I didn't put this together. This
is from the World Economic Forum. And then what I
did is I looked at those countries and I went
to the Pew Research Center, which we've talked about, a
(14:43):
non Christian group that tells you, here's how many people
are Christians in each of these countries. And I put
those lists together and I found that in the top
ten nations for women's rights today, the average population is
seventy five percent Christian. Now I just want to sh
show you the other end of the list. Here are
the ten worst nations for women's rights in the world today, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
These are societies that exist.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Today where if a woman goes outside without her head covered,
she gets beaten with a whip. Where she's not allowed
to drive a car, She's not allowed to have an education,
she's not allowed to vote. Where women are still sold
in marriages, where deals are still made, where says, oh,
you don't have enough money to pay, then I'll take
your sister as payment. The point is this, jesus followers,
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though imperfect, as they have followed him, have become a
light in the world in a way that nothing else
in history ever has. In the bottom line is this,
If you really want to make the world a better place,
we all say we do. If you really want to
make the world a better place, then why not join
the movement that has an irrefutable track record of these
(15:59):
huge break throughs in society. Back two thousand years ago,
John the Disciple wrote this about Jesus in him was life,
and that life was the light of all mankind. The
light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not
overcome the true light that gives light to everyone was
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coming into the world. He was in the world, and
though the world was made through him, He's the creator,
the world did not recognize him. My question for you today,
have you recognized Jesus as the light of the world.
Speaker 4 (16:45):
Have you recognized him?
Speaker 3 (16:46):
Have you invited him to extinguish any darkness or evil
within you, within your family? And then once you have,
will you join us as a movement that says we'll
be sincere followers of Jesus and we're going to live
under a God who is just, who has made all
people equal.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
You're listening to Living on the Edge with ship Ingram.
John Dickerson has been our guest teacher for this program, Jesus,
You and the Fight for Human Rights from our series
Dealing with Doubts. He and Chip will be back in
studio shortly to share their application for this message. If
someone were to ask you, how do you know Jesus
actually lived or can we really trust the Bible? What
(17:30):
would you say? Join Pastor and award winning journalist John
Dickerson as he explores these complex topics, drawing on evidence
from various credible sources and the impact Christians have had
throughout history, John builds a credible case for believing in Jesus.
Our hope is that as you listen, you'll be able
to confidently say Jesus is real, the Bible is true,
(17:52):
and I can prove it. In fact, we have some
valuable tools to back you up. Anytime John or Chip
mentioned a book, podcast, or article in this series, you
can easily find it on our resources page at Livingontheedge
dot org. We want to equip you with practical Bible
centered materials to use personally or share with others, so
(18:14):
check out the resources page at Living on the Edge
dot org. Today. Well, Chip's joined me in studio now
and ship. You know, I'm sure we all know someone
who's cynical of, or even hostile towards the claims of
the Bible. So take a minute, if you would, and
explain how John's testimony in his popular book Jesus Skeptic
will help us better defend our faith.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Well, Dave John comes from a background actually where it
was a very religious background and pretty rigid in some ways.
And he actually went through his own season of I
don't know if I can believe all this, and he
happens to be very smart, decided to take up a
life as a journalist and actually won the bro Call Award,
(18:57):
very prestigious of the top invest negative journalist in America.
And it was on that journey that John decided, I'm
not going to take other people's word for things, and
so firsthand research. He doesn't look at the quotes in
the back of books. He goes and reads the very
firsthand research, or he goes to the actual places. And
(19:18):
so I found this young friend who was a millennial,
who was very very smart, who'd done a lot of research.
And what I realized was as I listened to the
world that I'm in, and I go to a church
with a lot of very very young people and I
see their worldview, I recognized John basically is speaking their
language and answering the questions that they have. And some
(19:42):
of our history is just completely buried, or part of
what the Bible says has been really what can I say,
It's been tilted in ways and bent in ways to
make it sound very ugly and very unlike Jesus, and
so my heart's desire was that people would get to
know someone who is smart, who's academic, who's an absolutely
(20:05):
committed Christian, who did the first hand research. And I
will guarantee this, this is the kind of book that
you need to sit down with the younger people in
your life, read together and have a discussion. And I
think all parties concerned, young and old will have a
number of Aha moments and realize the power of love
(20:27):
and truth and justice and compassion that we take for
granted that we're all birthed out of a Christian framework
and worldview.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Well, because we believe so strongly in sharing your faith
with the next generation, we've bundled two of our more
popular resources together to help. The first is this book,
Jesus Skeptic, and the other is Chip's work Why I Believe.
We pray that together these tools will prove that Jesus
is real and the Bible is true and showcase the
profound ways Christianity has shaped our world for the better.
(20:59):
Learn more about this bundle by calling Triple eight three
three three six zero zero three, or by visiting Living
Ontheedge dot org. App Listeners tap special offers. Well, with that,
here again are Chip and John to share a few
final thoughts.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Thanks so much, Dave, Well John, I'm grateful to have
you back again with me in studio today. Today you
wrapped up your talk on the inequality and unfairness and
injustice that we've seen in history and how followers of
Christ have responded to it. Could you fast forward to today?
What wisdom would you give to us right now in
(21:36):
terms of being that kind of witness and dealing with
issues of injustice or inequity. In fact, where do you
see Christians making a positive impact today the way they
did in the past.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Thanks Jim.
Speaker 5 (21:49):
That's such a great question. And the reality is I
see Christians today fighting in justice all around the world.
If you were to travel to Cambodia and Thailand, countries
where human slavery and sex trafficking is still sadly rampant
and regular, and if you were to visit the groups
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that are there ending modern day slavery and sex trafficking,
you would find one after another that they're followers of Jesus.
And this is true also of hospitals and orphanages that
are founded in pioneering areas like Africa and rural parts
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of South America, and medical boats that go up and
down the Amazon River. The reality is followers of Jesus
continue doing this today. Now for those of us in
America who maybe aren't called to go directly to Cambodia
or Thailand or to the Amazon River, how.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
Do we be part of that? How we be part
of that is we.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
Run God's play, God's way. Jesus said, go and make disciples,
baptized them and then teaching them to obey all these things.
When we share Jesus with others and other people repent
and believe, God then transforms their heart. And as we
disciple them to know the truth that sets them free,
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God calls them to go and set other captives free.
And so the best thing you can do as a
follower of Jesus is be part of a vibrant local church,
a body of believers where Jesus is the head, where
his word is taught, where his spirit is alive and working.
And be there and serve and give and be part
of a disciple making movement. Because as you do that,
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God will send out from your church missionaries who will
go to Cambodiar, Thailand or to the Amazon River and
who will also set captives free spiritually and even literally
right here in the US.
Speaker 4 (23:52):
So how do we do it?
Speaker 5 (23:53):
We run God's play, God's way, trusting that when we
do that, He will bring about the results of freedom.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Great word, John. As we close, I'm want to thank
each of you who makes this program possible through your
generous giving. One hundred percent of your gifts go directly
to the ministry to help Christians live like Christians. Now,
if you found this teaching helpful but aren't yet on
the team, consider doing that today. Sending a gift is easy.
Go to Living on the Edge dot org or call
(24:23):
Triple eight three three three six zero zero three. That's
Triple eight three three three six zero zero three, or
visit Living on the Edge dot org. App listeners tap
donate and let me thank you in advance for doing
whatever the Lord leads you to do for Chip, John
and the entire team. This is Dave Druy thanking you
(24:44):
for listening to this edition of Living on the Edge,
and I hope you'll join us again next time.