“I will pour out my Spirit on all people … your young men will see visions … and your old men will dream.” Acts 2:17
We live in a rapidly changing world of inequality. This inequality is based on religion, race, gender and social status. The result of this inequality is social injustice, racism, discrimination, wars and genocide. This is NOT God’s kingdom!
But God’s kingdom is coming! When it fully arrives, there will be no inequality in it. For in God’s kingdom there will be social justice and equality for all! This is the kind of dream God gave Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for our nation. It is the same dream that God wants like followers to have. This is why Christ’s followers persistently and continually pray and ask for God’s kingdom to come! “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Followers of Christ are not only praying for God’s kingdom to come, but His followers are also living now for social justice and equality. His followers are empowered and enabled because a deposit of God’s kingdom has been placed within each of us. And with this deposit of God’s kingdom within us, we become ONE.
Every person in the world has this opportunity! It is an opportunity that we must all live and proclaim. It’s the opportunity of the cross that allows individuals to be born into God’s family regardless of who their parents are, where they are born or their gender. This opportunity is not just for the rich or the poor, the educated or the uneducated. This opportunity is for all!
Christ died for all! The reason that Christ died for all is because God loves all people. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world — that He gave His one and only Son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Dr. King willingly shared his dream with this nation. He won the bus battle, the Civil Rights Act and the Nobel Peace Prize. But the basic battles for liberation, justice, freedom and peace continue yet today. This could cause one to fear that we are losing our collective national dreams or that we are losing our dreams and visions for a great and imaginative nation.
Without a dream, life withers and dies. Only a dream can bring a person back from death’s door. And only great dreams, and the sacrificial energy to achieve them, can restore our nation back to good health. We need to ask ourselves as a nation: “What is your dream?”
A person and a nation thrive on a vision and the possibility and not on fear, negativity and violence. This is why Acts 2:17 is so important. It says, “I will pour out my Spirit on all people … your young men will see visions, your old men will dream.”
Dr. King invites us to a dream of national healing. This will help keep Dr. King’s dream alive! The Bible says, “That the young and the old shall dream dreams.” And when we do, we all can cry out: “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last!”
Rev. Marion J. Miller is senior pastor of Wesley United Methodist Church, Jeffersonville. Contact her at 812-283-3747 or wesley1201@sbcglobal.net.
