Martin Luther King’s Sermon: Unfulfilled Dreams (Civil war within us, Total bent of our lives & Trying)
I came across a speech by Martin Luther King, first an excerpt at Charity Focus and the complete speech\sermon called Unfulfilled Dreams at Stanford’s King Institute.
If you prefer to listen to it, you can download an mp3 from CharityFocus or as a part of an audio book called A Knock at Midnight.
It is sign of a great teacher that he took a verse from Bible to this Sermon.
Some parts specially touched me and I thought of sharing them here. See the complete sermon to find what touches you.
- Civil war within us
And in every one of us this morning, there’s a war going on. It’s a civil war. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care where you live, there is a civil war going on in your life. And every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you, telling you to be evil. It’s going on in your life. Every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate. [...] There’s a tension at the heart of human nature. And whenever we set out to dream our dreams and to build our temples, we must be honest enough to recognize it.
- Total bent of our lives
In the final analysis, God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives. In the final analysis, God knows that his children are weak and they are frail. In the final analysis, what God requires is that your heart is right. Salvation isn’t reaching the destination of absolute morality, but it’s being in the process and on the right road.
- Trying
And the question I want to raise this morning with you: is your heart right? If your heart isn’t right, fix it up today. Get somebody to be able to say about you, “He may not have reached the highest height, he may not have realized all of his dreams, but he tried.” Isn’t that a wonderful thing for somebody to say about you? “He tried to be a good man. He tried to be a just man. He tried to be an honest man. His heart was in the right place.” And I can hear a voice saying, crying out through the eternities, “I accept you. You are a recipient of my grace because it was in your heart. And it is so well that it was within thine heart.”