King sermon: Loving Your Enemies
Martin Luther King (1929-1968) memorialized in Washington, D.C.
Today is Martin Luther King (1929-1968) day, 2025. He is remembered chiefly for his role in the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. However, perhaps his most influential role in American history is as a Baptist preacher and inspiring speaker. His amazing rhetorical and oratorical skills are on display in perhaps his most famous speech, delivered on August 28, 1963, the stirring “I Have a Dream” sermon, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to thousands of people. It is still inspiring after all of these years! Delivered at a period of profound racial injustice and discrimination and violence, this 17-minute oration is worthy of hearing in its entirety by all people of good will, whatever race or ethnicity.
His leadership was so potent that today we live in a transformed America, that ensures the “riches of freedom and the security of justice” for all people of all races and ethnic backgrounds than ever before. Let us not, he said, quench “our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”
MLK was a powerful and inspiring preacher. He contributed to the transformation of our country.
One of his fine sermons was on the subject of loving our enemies, delivered back in 1957. His words are still inspiring today.
An excerpt:
“I’ve said to you on many occasions that each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality. We’re split up and divided against ourselves. And there is something of a civil war going on within all of our lives. There is a recalcitrant South of our soul revolting against the North of our soul. And there is this continual struggle within the very structure of every individual life. There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with Ovid, the Latin poet, ‘I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do.’ There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with Plato that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions. There is something within each of us that causes us to cry out with Goethe, ‘There is enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue.’ There is something within each of us that causes us to cry out with Apostle Paul: ‘I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do.’
“So somehow the ‘isness’ of our present nature is out of harmony with the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts us. And this simply means this: That within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals. The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls ‘the image of God,’ you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never slough off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.”
Profound words of advice for all believers in Jesus and those seeking to live a good life!
Source. The full text can be read here. The audio of the sermon is here.
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