Tony Evans - Unity in the Church and the Culture

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Our chapel speaker today is doctor Tony Evans. Doctor Evans
is the founder and senior pastor of oak Cliffe Bible
Fellowship here in Dallas. He's founder and president of the
Urban Alternative, former chaplain of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and
also the Dallas Cowboys, and author of over one hundred
and twenty five books, booklets and Bible studies. He is

(00:29):
the first African American to earn a doctorate here from
Dallas Theological Seminary. He has been named one of the
twelve most effective preachers in the English speaking world by
Baylor University. Doctor Evans also holds the honor of writing
and publishing the first full Bible commentary and study Bible

(00:49):
by an African American. His radio broadcast, The Alternative with
Doctor Tony Evans, can be heard on more than fourteen
hundred US outlets daily and in more than one hundred
and thirty countries. Doctor Evans launched the Tony Evans Training
Center in twenty seventeen, an online learning platform providing quality,

(01:11):
seminary style courses for a fraction of the cost to
any person in any place. The TETC. As it's known,
currently has over forty courses to choose from and has
a student population of over two thousand. Doctor Tony Evans
was married to Lois, his wife and ministry partner of

(01:32):
over fifty years until Lois transitioned to Glory in late
twenty nineteen. They are the proud parents of four, grandparents
of thirteen, and great grandparents of three. Would you join
me in welcoming doctor Tony Evans to our pulpit this morning.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Well, good morning to you, and I am delighted. I'm
honored each time that I am asked to come to
my alma mater here at DTS and be able to
minister and to share God's truth from God's Word with
the student body at that time. So I'm honored to
be with you. And it is an honor and a

(02:22):
privilege to have been given that opportunity to get a
awesome foundation and build on that foundation of understanding God's
truth as incorporated in his words. So it's a privilege
for me to be here. It's easy to.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Retreat from the.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
Unity you thought you had when there's pressure that comes
at you that's culturally or racially or socially driven. With
the killing of George Floydo in May of twenty twenty,
the racial upheaval that has always been there boiled over,

(03:10):
and we saw this reemergence of public racial animis leading
to massive cultural conflict.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Out of this.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
Upheaval, systems began to be developed to begin to address it,
creating more controversy in the culture. One was critical race theory,
the postulation that the laws that were unrighteous and unjust

(03:47):
that were established and that were placed inside the structures
of America so embedded themselves that even when the laws
were changed, the influence of those laws remained, and therefore
structural systemic racism still exists because of the embedded nature

(04:11):
of those laws. Black Lives Matter came to the floor
forefront in the midst of this that this group of
people is being unjustly continuously treated as a history and
as a lifestyle, and in the same way that the

(04:32):
lives of the unborn matter, that the lives of black
people in general and black men in particular, are being
unjustly treated. Sixteen nineteen rose to the forefront was the
thesis that America was not established in seventeen seventy six,

(04:58):
but in sixteen nineteen for the express purpose of retaining
slavery for economic reasons, and on and on. The battle
continues to wage. But this is not merely a battle
within the culture. It is a battle within the church.

(05:20):
It has been said often that eleven o'clock on Sunday
morning has consistently been one of the most segregated hours
in America. People will do drugs together, play ball together,
get high together, but at Sunday morning they split up
and go back to their tribes.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
And I, coming out.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Of this matrix of chaos and confusion, began to be
called on a regular basis to speak into this reality.
When Michael Brown lost his life and Furgus, Missouri, I
was asked to come there and pour the whole community
together because of divisiveness that was taking place and city

(06:10):
after city, And one of the things that became inextricably
clear was that at the forefront of the chaos and
the culture was the division in the church, and that
because there was a divided church, there was not healing
balm in the communities and the cities where these uprisings either.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
Occurred or could occur.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
And somehow the transfer of worshiping God in heaven and
getting along with others on earth had not taken root
across racial and cultural lines.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
It was then that led me to.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
Revisit scriptures that I had visited over and over again.
Since the Bible is so full of issues related to race,
going all the way back to the innerracial marriage of
Moses or the interracial marriage of Joseph. For the presence
of different racial groups in the Bible, it became clear

(07:18):
that God is not color blind. He's just not blinded
by color that he recognizes in his creative genius, that
he expected and anticipated and promoted the variances of racial
distinctions and differences that make up our humanity. But at

(07:42):
the very same time, the problems in the culture should
not be the issues in the church, and that the
church should be the first place that people should go
when the culture is in upheaval to find what it
looks like when Biblical unity is at work, modeled and

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manifested by what I call His kingdom citizens.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
And so what I constructed.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
Was what I call kingdom race theology as a response
to critical race theory. Because the Bible only has one subject,
the Bible only talks about one thing, it talks about
it in a multiplicity of ways. It talks about it
with many a variety of expressions through narrative, through doctrine,

(08:35):
through personalities and biographies and prophetic utterances. But it only
talks about one thing, and that is the glory of
God through the advancement of his kingdom. That God wants
his glory to be made manifest and his kingdom to
be expanded, and every doctrine, every personality, every narrative is

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designed to achieve in. We call it the kingdom agenda,
the visible manifestation of the comprehensive rule of God over
every area of life, and that from Genesis to Revelation,
his kingdom rule is his major concern. And when it
comes to this issue of the divisiveness within the people

(09:20):
of God, it is clear that not enough evangelicals have
become kingdomized. They will hold to the doctrinal formulas of
scripture without seeing the responsibility to see its outworking in
the warp and wolfs of our human existence, specifically within

(09:44):
the family of God, but overflowing to the culture. My
favorite book in all of the Bible is the Book
of Ephesians. The reason why Ephesians is my favorite book
is because it is an ecclesiological document of all the
doctrinal categories. Ecclesiology captures my greatest attention the biblical docrine

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of the church. And in every one of the six
chapters of Ephesians you will find the word church or
a synonym for the word church. Because the Book of
Ephesians is not first and foremost primarily concerned with our
individual Christian existence, although that is part and parcel of it,
but he is more concerned with our collective presence and impact.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
It is in chapter two of the Book of.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Ephesians that served as a fundamental foundation for this kingdom
race theology. Paul the Apostle starts off with celebrating grace.
He makes it clear he's writing to a church, the
Church at Ephesus, and he celebrates the great doctrine of grace,

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the inexhaustible goodness of God, where He does for us
what we could never do for ourselves.

Speaker 3 (11:07):
And he says grace.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
Is free, it's not according to works, and it is eternal.
For in the epochs and ages to come, we will
be celebrating grace. He says grace ought to be a
major motivator in verse ten of work. Because he makes
it known in Ephesians to ten, that having been saved

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by grace, eight and nine, that God has created work
for us to do, which he hath created beforehand, that
we should walk in them. So the greater your understanding
of grace, the greater your motivation for work. And to
the degree that you understand and respond to the goodness

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of God deposited in your selvific experience, is to the
degree that you don't have to be begged to work.

Speaker 3 (12:01):
You want to work.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
And when even you want to work, the work that
He wants you to do, He's also already given you
by grace, And so grace leads to work. But then
in verse eleven through verse twenty two, he describes the
first work he wants his people to be engaged with,
because in those verses he brings up the issue of race,

(12:30):
and he brings up the issue of reconciliation. That after
talking about grace, the first subject he wants to discuss
is race, and from verse eleven through verse twenty two
he gives a doctrinal thesis on why this issue is critical. Now,

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of course, the racial divide in his context was jew
and gentile.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
He spends the first three of.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Those verses eleven and twelve and thirteen, discussing there was
this divide, and it had gone on for a long time,
and there was a group that had been excluded, the Gentiles,
from the privileges that belonged to the Jews. And having
talked about this divisiveness, this schism, this fisher that had existed.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
All the time, he utters two words. In verse thirteen.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
He says, but now I know how it's been for
all these years. But now I know you weren't treated
right for all these years. But now I know you
were excluded.

Speaker 3 (13:41):
But now.

Speaker 2 (13:43):
While Paul spends a couple of verses talking about how
bad it was back then, he now spends his time
talking about how good it can be now, And he
makes a distinction from the pain of yesterday to the
purpose of the present to accomplish God's kingdom goal for

(14:04):
the future. In other words, he says, as bad as
your racial history has been between you and Gentile, if
I can get you to operate on the now, we
can overcome yesterday and we can go to a better tomorrow.
What the enemy has done has gotten us so locked

(14:26):
into the past that we miss the button. Now we've
turned rearview mirrors into windshields, and as a result, we
are able to look back with big size. But then
when it comes to where we should go, we see
very little. When he speaks of this call to unity,

(14:51):
he centers it in one thing. He centers it in
the immosifier, now emosification. When my wife was here and
she would fix sandwiches for me, that would always be mayonnaise,
because I'm not a mustard kind of guy, so it

(15:11):
would always be mayonnaise. Now, mayonnaise is made up of
things that don't get along, oil and water. You can't
mix them because as soon as you try to get
them to get along, they're gonna go back to that corners.
Because that's the way mayonnaise works until you introduce egg.
When you introduce egg to the oil in the water,

(15:33):
the egg grabs the oil. The egg grabs the water.
So I can get my ham sandwich because now I
got mayonnaise.

Speaker 3 (15:41):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
Paul does not deny the historical reality of the divide.
He spends time talking about how things used to be.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
But he says, now.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
Because of the cross, who was separated Verse twelve excluded strangers,
But now you've been brought nearby the blood. And then
over and over and over. In this passage, he uses

(16:17):
a word that has enormous theo theological consequence.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
He says in verse.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
Fourteen, both groups into one, verse fifteen one new Man,
verse sixteen one body, verse eighteen one Spirit. He talks
about verse twenty one together verse twenty two together. What

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is missing in our theology is a comprehensive understanding of
the importance of unity to the program of God and
to the work of his Spirit. Because he says in
verse twenty two, in whom you also being built together
into a dwelling place in the spirit. He ties the

(17:13):
togetherness and the oneness to the dwelling place where the
Spirit of God hangs out. Our problem is the Spirit
of God is not free to hang out in the
Church of Jesus Christ because the disunity is too bad.
The oneness that God demands and expects Our God, one
God composed the three coequal persons, who is one in

(17:36):
essence while simultaneously being distinct in personality. The triune God
like a prenzel with three holes. The first hole is
not the second hold, and second hold is not the
third hole, but they all tie together by the same dough.
So the Father son, and spirit are all tied together
by divine nature. They bear the attributes of deity. While
being distinct as persons, they are one. God can only

(18:03):
express his fullness where he can be comfortable. And since
he is a unified being, whenever he is asked to
come into a disunified environment, he retracts and recoils along
with his spirit. Illegitimate disunity will keep God outside of

(18:26):
the doors of the church. And one of the reasons
we can have all these churches on all these corners,
with all these preachers and all these deacons, and all
these elders, and all these members and all these programs
that still have all this mess is there's a dead
monkey on the line somewhere. And at the heart of
that is a failure to understand the emosifying power of

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the cross. He says that the blood of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
Has brought you near.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
It's abolished, it's abolished the enmity through his flesh, and.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
His unity shows up. It says, it brings peace.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
I love the word John seventeen, says it John seventeen,
where he uses one ten times in the first twenty
four verses. In verses twenty three to twenty five, He says, Lord,
make them one, and then he says, so they may
see my glory. In other words, they won't see me
show up if they're illegitimately divided. He won't even show

(19:26):
up in a marriage. He says in one Peter three
seven that the husbands are to dwell with their wives
and if as a week of vessel, and if they
fail to do so, their prayers will be hindered. Disunity
in the family will keep God away. Disunity in his
family the church will keep him away. So God is
not nearly as near to the Church in America as

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we think he is, because the illegitimate disunity based on
an allegiance to culture over Christ has created a schism
that has kept God away. This is because we have
we have defamed or not the fame that's too strong,

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But we have limited our understanding of the Gospel. The
Gospel is both vertical and horizontal. The vertical aspect of
the Gospel is its narrow content faith alone and the
finished work of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins

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and the gift.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
Of eternal life.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
That's the good news that we proclaim that sins can
be forgiven, and eternal life can be granted not by works,
but by grace. That is the message to make us
reconciled with God. That's the gospel content. But what has
often missed is the gospel's scope. That the gospel narrow

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content has very broad scope, including our racial relationships. I
think of Galations too, where Peter is eating ham sandwiches
with the Gentiles. He found out those folk across the
other side of the railroad tracks knew how to cook,
and so he's now eating ham sandwiches, chidling's hogmalls. I

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mean he's because he's eating with gentiles and they eat pigs.
So he knows that now he can eat stuff. You know,
in the Book of Acts, he looked up to God
when she came down, and he said, I can't eat
that stuff. God says, don't call clean? What unclean? What
I call clean? So now he's fratnizing with the Gentiles.
Beginning in galationis chapter two, verse eleven. While he's eating

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with the Gentiles, some of his boys from the hood
show up. Okay, some of his Jewish brethren show up.
People of his own race show up, and they intimidate him.
They want to know Why past the Peter is eating
with them, because he's a leading, even angelical figure in
the Jerusalem Church. Why is Pastor Peter eating with those people.

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We gotta live with him in heaven. We don't have
the fellowship with him on earth. And so it says
Peter got up. He's eating with the gentiles until his
people show up. When his people show up, he gets up.
When it gets up, it says the rest of the
Jews who were with him got up with him because

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of missing the pulpit is a fog in the pew.
And so because the pulpit had failed Peter, the leaders
who were with him, they got up, leaving the gentiles
still seated. We're told something else in Galatians too. We're
told even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy. Not
my boy, Barney, anybody but Barney. Why does he bring

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out Barnabas his name, because Barnabas is born in Cyprus.
Cyprus is a Gentile, is a Roman Gentile colony, but Barnabas.

Speaker 3 (23:03):
Is a Jew.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
So Barnabas was raised with gentiles, with the school with gentiles,
played ball with gentiles.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
But that's how bad racism is.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
It'll make a good man bad, so that even Barnabas
was carried away by their hypocrisy. The only problem was
Paul showed up for some pig feet too. And it
says when Paul saw what Peter did, he confronted Peter
before them all, and this is what he said, You

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are not acting in concert with the truth of the gospel.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
Wait a minute.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
Peter's already saved, Peter's already on his way to heaven.
Peter's already converted. Peter's already a Christian, Peter's already a saint.
Why do you use the word gospel to Peter who's
already saved. Because Paul is not talking about the content
of the gospel. He's talking about the social scope of
the gospel. And he's says, you're not gospelizing now, Peter

(24:03):
in your relationship with the Gentiles, because you have embarrassed
the truth of the gospel. What is the truth of
the gospel? It is the truth of Ephesians two one
to nine. You get right with God eleven to twenty two,
You better get right with everybody else, so that the
Spirit of God is free to make himself manifest in

(24:23):
and through the Temple, and the Temple is the Church.
I love the way reason that he uses the temple
in verse twenty two because he takes an Old Testament
concepts and brings it into a New Testament reality. The
temple was center of Israel's life. All of Israel's life
revolved around the Temple. But the Temple was not just

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to instruct them about their relationship with God. The Temple
was also designed to instruct them how their relationship in
the community was to be exercised because.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
Of their relationship with God. So when he's talking.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
About temple being embedded by the Spirit of God, he's
not just talking about your personal Christian experience and your
walk in the spirit. He's talking about your social and
interpersonal interconnectivity with others based on it. Which is why
even when Paul talks about the walking in the spirit
in Galatians chapter five, he concludes that in verse twenty

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six with talking about the fact that if you're walking
in the spirit, then you're not living in conflict with
other believers. So all of this has to do with
gospelizing our relationships or kingdomizing our understanding of race as
being the scope of the Gospel, not confusing it with

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the social Gospel, but having a clear content that manifests
itself in a clear understanding of our human relationships. What
we are dealing with today is the need for biblical reconciliation.
Biblical reconciliation is not having seminars on why we can't
all get along. Biblical reconciliation is the restoration of relationships

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predicated on the Gospel. And the best way to reconcile
with one another is the way that Jesus.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
Reconciled with us.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Do you know there is no reconciliation with Jesus without
a cross. No cross, no reconciliation. So there is a
price tag to reconciliation where there is an inconvenience tie
to it, where you have to step out of your
comfort zone on both sides of the track. And rather
than spending all of our times like the Lone Ranger

(26:38):
and Tonto being divided, what we're telling we're going across
the country now and we're giving this three point plan
for churches in communities across racial, denominational and cultural lines.
Of course, without compromising any of the essentials of the faith.
The first one is to assemble come together once a
year bring all your congregations together once a year to

(27:00):
invite God's presence back into your community of biblically based,
Kingdom minded churches. Second thing is to address that you
will speak God's perspective on the issues that face your
community as one voice. The third is act. When you act,
that means you do all do the same thing so
that the community sees that they are benefiting Jeremiah twenty

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nine to seven from the people of God in the
community adopt every public school act of kindness.

Speaker 3 (27:29):
Gods.

Speaker 2 (27:29):
Adopt the police precinct and become the bridge between the
community and the police. You become a collective agency. The
only place in the Bible where God commands a blessing
blessings to talk throughout the Bible, but there's only one
place where he commands it, and that is in Psalm
one thirty three, where he says the unity of the brethren.

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From there God commands a blessing. So if Christ comes tomorrow,
we don't have to worry about this. But if he
doesn't come for another one hundred years or two hundred years,
you better worry about this because this is affecting the
environment in which we live, work, play, and worship. It
is absolutely critical today that there is a group of

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Kingdom citizens who understand that unless we reflect the content
of the Gospel in the scope of the Gospel through
what I call a kingdom race theology, rather than merely
having a time once a year when we get along,
but that there is this movement of foot. Not that

(28:33):
everybody will go to the same church, but everybody will
understand we are part of one church, regardless of the
church that we happen to be going to. When you
go to the Book of Revelation, chapter five, verse nine,
Chapter seven, verse nine, you see a worship service of
carry and John says, when I looked up, I saw
people from every nation, every tribe, every kindred and every time.

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Because whatever color you are now will be the color
you are in heaven. Whatever race you are now will
be the race you are in heaven, he said. I
could see the differences because those differences were intentional, but
they were all gathered around one throne, worshiping God. In
movies and in television that advertise a movie coming up,

(29:19):
they show you previews of coming attractions. These are always
the hot clips of the upcoming show. They're gonna always
show you the hot clips of the upcoming show.

Speaker 3 (29:30):
Now, the show may be terrible, but you never know.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
About the clips, because the clips are always the hot
clips that are strung together while my brothers and sisters.
One day there's a big show come into town. God
is the producer, the Holy Spirit of director of Jesus
is the superstar, and that will be a worldwide production.
It's called the Millennial Kingdom, is called the reign of
Jesus Christ on Earth. But until then, he's left you

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and me here as previews of coming attractions. He's supposed
to be the hot clips of the upcoming show. People
are supposed to see the clips of the church at
work and say that clip is hot, that clip is hot,
that clip is hot. And when they see all those
hot clips of the upcoming show, they may want to
buy a ticket. That's what we can tell them. You

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don't have to buy one. The price has already been paid.