Class number 12, the book of Ephesians. And we're teaching the book of Ephesians from Greek. But we're talking a lot about the backgrounds, the thoughts and our customs of that time. I'm going to read to you from the Amplified Bible here to get you started. And we're going to read all the way from 11 to 16 or 17 there. Therefore remember that one time you Gentiles by birth, who are called uncircumcision by those who call themselves the circumcision, in itself a mere mark which is made by the flesh by human hands. And that's where I said religion by human hands. Remember that at that time you were separated from Christ, excluded from the relationship with Him, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, with no share in the sacred messianic promise and without knowledge of God's agreements and His covenants, having no hope in His promise, living in a world without God, godless, atheist, but now at this very moment, in Christ Jesus who were once so very far away from God have been brought near by the blood of Jesus Christ. For he himself is our peace, our bond, and the unity. He who made both groups, Jews and Gentiles, into one body and broke down the barrier, the dividing wall of spiritual antagonism and hatred between us, by abolishing his own crucified flesh, with the hostility caused by the law, with its commandments contained in the ordinance which he satisfied, so that in himself he might make the two into one main new man, thereby establishing peace, and that he might reconcile them, both Jew and Gentile, united in one body to God through the cross, thereby putting to death the hostility and all what we might call racial hatred. And he came and preached the good news of peace to you Gentiles who were far, far away, and peace to those Jews who were near. For it is through him that we both have a direct way of approach in one spirit to the Father. What beautiful news. I've said this many times before in teaching. I taught political science and western civilization in the seminary and in college. And when you study history, many times history is written by the victors, so you don't really know what happened. In America, I grew up in a very racially charged country. I'm Native American. My family were in Indian Territory, Oklahoma, what became Oklahoma. They came from Tennessee, they came from Mississippi, and Alabama, and all through what we call the southern states. And they came into Indian Territory, the Choctaws, Chickasaws, the Lakotas later on, Dakotas came there, Cheyenne. and the Chickasaw. My great, great, great grandfather led the Chickasaw from the Chickasaw Trail up here from Mississippi all the way into Falls Valley, Oklahoma. But they gave them the land that they thought was worthless. And it ended up having a lot of coal and oil on it, so they started killing the Indians there, too. My family, my grandfather On my mother's side, my grandfather's father was a Cherokee Indian, full-blood Cherokee. He had signed treaties and he had gone all the way from Arkansas into Texas and then they moved him into Oklahoma. And then he built this little farm and dairy and everything else on it. And in 1905, they decided that he didn't own that land anymore. so that they told him that Mr. Wilburn, you come on to this property anymore, we're going to shoot you for trespassing. This is my land. I'm not going to sign another treaty. That's when the Dole Act came into effect. They took his land away from him, wanted to give him another allotment, and he was an older man and had several kids, and they just couldn't start over again. He said it was too much. So anyway, he He went on to his own land. He took all of his kids in the buckboard, driving them, drove his cattle down, his sheep, his goats. He'd even take his pigs down there and put them out in the pasture. They'd been stealing his chickens and shooting his hogs and butchering them right there in his yard. And he couldn't do anything about it. He couldn't bring any charges against a white man. And he didn't have any say-so in court at all. Anyway, he drove his cattle up to the fence where he had built his fence around this 300 acres or so out there. And he got out of the buck door to open the fence and the guy stood there with a shotgun. He said, you come any closer I'm going to kill you. He said, I'm not starting over again. You guys can find yourselves someplace else. He said, it's my land now. And so they shot him and killed him. And they came out to California to escape the racial problems. They thought they could be mistaken for white Okies, but a lot of the Okies that came to California, Oklahoma people, they were part Indian. Mine were very high Indian. They came in from Falls Valley, the Chickasaws, Santee, Dakota, Ojibwe, Chickasaw, and they came out to California. And I went back to the Midwest one time and I used to have long hair and braids and I went into a restaurant and they never would wait on me at all. They wouldn't wait on me, period. And I sat there for over an hour and I finally had to get up and leave because they weren't going to wait on me. I know what racial, what we call, when you look down upon people. I know what that feels like, but that I lived it. And I know that a lot of the Indian people became wards of the state and just were absolutely, as far as working, worthless. But my family always worked hard. All of them. Well, they came out to California. I remember when the Mexican people were coming into California, they just began to go there. Most of the Oklahoma people were working on farms and they were fruit farmers, but I can guarantee you one thing, when I'm out there picking cotton, I've learned to walk in a cotton field. I learned to talk in a cotton field, yes. I learned how to sing in a cotton field. But we didn't have any, we carried our own water, we didn't have any shade, you worked from before daylight till you couldn't see what you were doing. That was every day. We lived in a shack with a dirt floor and one little screen for a window. We'd put a board over it in the wintertime and a flap for a door. It was like a teepee flap. It was hard life, but you know what? What we had there, we thought we could keep. They came out there so they thought they could own the land and people would leave them alone. so they could do whatever. And that's what the first thing they did. My grandmother and grandfather, when they came to California, she was Chickasaw in Santee, Dakota, and he was Cherokee, and they bought a piece of acre of ground, and all the people, all the family came out there, and we had a little Indian village. But they all went out, they ended up buying homes, they got jobs, whatever. Now, if you go back to the period of time here in the first century, And even before that, the Jews thought their national treasure was God. And they would bring some proselytes in, of course. And the proselytes, when they would be indoctrinated at the synagogues, they would be baptized and they would die to their old national background and be raised anew. In John the 3rd chapter, it tells us there, let's go to John chapter 3 for just a moment. I love the Gospel according to John. I think everybody does, it's saved anyway. It's a beautiful book. John the 3rd chapter, Jesus is talking to Nicodemus. Now I know a lot of you have heard many, many messages on John the 3rd chapter, but most of it is arrayed. It's not what's going on there. Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. He was not sneaking in there. He had a entourage with him, a bodyguard, because it was unsafe. He came there as a representative of the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin court. Now he got converted. But now I want you to understand now, every proselyte had to be baptized, they shaved him off, they cut his fingernails back as far as they go, they shaved his hair off and everything, just like a newborn baby. And so they'd be born again, and that was the term, you needed to be born again, and so the Gentiles would be born into the Jewish people. And we had a lot of proselytes there at the crucifixion. When Christ was crucified, there was a lot of proselytes from all over, all over the country. Now there was a certain man named Nicodemus, a Pharisee, a ruler, and a member of the Sanhedrin among the Jews, who came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, teacher, we, you see that plural? That's first person plural, we, we who? We the Sanhedrin, we the Pharisees, know without any doubt that you have come from God as a teacher. For no man can do these signs, these wonders, and attest these miracles that you do unless God is with him. And Jesus answered him, I assure you, singular now, he's talking to him, not the whole group. Now you can take this back with you if you want to, Nicodemus, but I'm talking to you. I assure you and most solemnly say to you, unless a person is born again from above, Nicodemus, you've baptized many proselytes, you need to go through the same process now. You are no longer, God is no longer a national treasure of your nation. It's going to come to all men. Now you're going to have to be spiritually born again. Spiritually transformed and renewed and sanctified, he cannot ever see and experience the Kingdom of God. And I'm speaking from here, from the Amplified Bible. Nicodemus said to him, how can a man be born again when he's old? He cannot enter into his mother's womb a second time and be born, can he? Now, he's making kind of an arithmetic. He knew what being born again was. He knew it. And then he's throwing this curve at Jesus. Jesus said, I assure you, and most solemnly swear to you, unless one is born of the water, now that's when he's born into the world from his mother, and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, that physical is merely physical, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be surprised that I told you you must be born again, reborn from above and spiritually transformed, renewed and sanctified. A trouselite had to go to the synagogue and he had to read the scriptures. He had to memorize the scriptures. And then he had to come and he had to submit himself to the rulers of the synagogue. The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it is coming from and where it is going. So is that everyone who is born of the Spirit. And Nicodemus said to him, how can these things be? Well, they are. To deal today, the Lord is convicting people of sin, righteous, just, and to come. And thank God for the Spirit of God in this age that we live in. You know, the people in the darkest parts of South Africa and Every place that's where there's hardly any civilization, so-called, at all, even down in the Amazon and in Brazil and those great jungles down there, people know that there is a God. They grope at Him through Him darkly, but the Word of God teaches us exactly how to come to Him. This is God's instruction manual for mankind, all mankind. And every man, no matter where you are, when it comes to God, you have no color. You have no color. No matter what, you have no background. You don't have any ethnic background. Your only ethnic background now is God. Period. Now in my life, I've had a lot of black people, a lot of Mexican people that were in my classes and that I pastored. A lot of them. Isn't that right, Marilyn? Yeah. A lot of them. Because I'm not ethnic as far as that goes. I'm from the lowest to the highest as far as if there is no difference between Gentile, between black, white, yellow, green, or red, or whatever. They're all the same. In America, of course now, I'm going to take you back into the church history too, in this, before we even read this, because this is the subject tonight. It's racial backgrounds. There is no such thing. Now, in America, I don't care whether you're a Democrat or Republican, I was a Southern Democrat for many years, you might say. I was a conservative Southern Democrat. You call them Republicans today. At one time America, the conservative America, was the Democrats. Now it's not that way. Things evolved basically after LBJ. Well, the United States was forced to go into a civil war by Abraham Lincoln. They were trying to figure out the slavery problem and everything. They had a whole lot of different things they were going to do. They were going to follow what England did and what any other nation did to abolish slavery. But Lincoln didn't want that. The states were very upset with him, the southern states, and so they began to cede from the Union. And he was doing all kinds of things that really weren't lawful for a president to do. And he would arrest people. Now, he was arresting people in the North, not the South. He has no authority in the South. The South just divorced themselves on it. He's gonna save the Union. What he wanted was the taxes. The South was paying 70% of the whole taxes, the revenue of the United States, 70%. He wasn't gonna turn loose of that money. So he told them, you don't pay your taxes, I'm gonna invade you and I'm gonna work you over. They said, we will pay you for all the military bases, we will do whatever you want, just leave us alone. We'll go on, we'll coexist like this. Well, you know what happened, 750,000 people died and that's a conservative number. Sherman went to the south and Grant and just wiped, scorched the place. Civilians, everything, they just killed everybody. Killed all their animals, killed everything, burned all their buildings down. They attacked the civilians. which is not what you're supposed to do in war. You back the military, not the civilians. But they did. They wanted to totally break the South down. And it took a hundred years or more for the bad feelings to come back because then here in came the carpetbaggers and then the Ku Klux Klan started. And then by the 1930s and 40s in America, we started looking at each other like we're all one people. And that happened until Barack Obama come along. Then Barack Obama started the racial fires again. And he's a black president. I mean, what? We got a black president and we're going to fight racial war again? And that's what's happened ever since the Black Lives Matter and all that. It's all racial. The racial was laid aside. Remember Trump's first term, the blacks were brought up and the Mexicans, whatever, you know, Latinos now they call it. Everybody was on equal ground. If you could do the job, you got the job. They're not going to give you a job because you can't do the job. They're not going to go through college and get a degree and you can't even read and write. That's what's happening now. That's been turned around again. But one thing about right now, there's no color anymore. There's no color. There's no color. And it came from these verses right here, where we are. There's no color anymore. Everybody's all the same. 2.15, ton nomon, ton entelon, en dog masen, kada re asos, hina, tuls deo kathise, en autol, as hina, Kynon, Anthropon, Poyon, Irene. The law on the commandments. Ton, Nomon. Accuses, singular, masculine, indefinite, article. Nomon, same thing. Accuses, singular, masculine. And then we have the entalon, the commandments, the decrees of the commandments in dogma sense. We got a word dogma from this. decrees and statements, endogamous. Endogamous, having abolished. The law doesn't matter anymore. It's finished. It's completed. Now that, uh, qatar, gasas, having been abolished, non-disingular, masculine, first-heirs, participle, active. In order that, the two, the two what? The two races, We're all back to Adam now, we've got one race, this is it. There's black, white, yellow, green, red, whatever, it doesn't matter anymore. In the decrees, having abolished, in order of that, the two, he might create. Ketisis. Third person singular, first area subjunctive, that is that he might create in him unto one new man. Christ is the peace between all of the races. He is the peace between all races. Men, nations, races, classes. When you become a Jew, proselyte, you had to renounce your old ethnic background. But now it doesn't matter. Everybody's the same. We don't have any races now. We have peace. Our backgrounds are completely dissolved. It doesn't matter anymore. In California, their governor there was going to make restitution for all the black people that could prove that some of their family were slaves. There were never any black slaves in California, but there's a whole lot of Indians there. You know, the Civil War was over in 1865. They were still selling American Indians as slaves at an auction block in Los Angeles in 1869. And they had some of them in slavery on ranches and things in Nevada and Arizona and Utah as late as 1930s. Slavery wasn't abolished. They always looked down. But you know what? There is no racial distinction at all. We are all one race. We're all one people. We're one people. I remember one of my students, one of my black students, Tracy, she died. She was about 35 years old. She had a disease that just overcame her. And in my classes, if she didn't show up, I knew one thing. She's in the hospital. She was a young black girl, a pretty girl. And she had a daughter. Anyway, she died. She wanted me to preach her funeral. Well, her family, and I was at Valley Baptist Church, this great big mega church. We had a great big auditorium and everything, and it'd go to orchestra or whatever we needed. And her family wanted to go over there in what we call the colored town. and go to that church there. Well, the church there, after I got over there, it was a missionary Baptist church, the pastor of that church that basically built the church was one of my students when I was young, teaching Greek and church history and things. Well, they were glad to see me. I'm going to tell you something. There at Valley Baptist Church, we could not have done a spiritual service like they did there. It was so astoundingly beautiful. I could understand. After we had this service there, I told them, now I understand why. There was a little bit of racialness in there, but you know what? They were right. I was glad they were right. That was one of the most wonderful services that I ever was in. And everybody was one color. There was nobody there that was black or white or yellow or green. They had an Indian preaching the service. for this black girl. And there was white people there. And there were Hispanic people there. They were all there, one and all. 2.16 now. Cai apo kata laze, tus amfo terus, in hina somati, to theo dea tu staru. Apo katesnas, tein ekthron auto. This the world needs to hear every day. And that he might reconcile, downloose, actually destroy. Destroy is what it means. Kata, it comes from opo, kata, and liso. It means to dissolve, is what it means to dissolve. That he might or he shall down, loose, reconcile, dissolve, third person singular, first person aristotelic, subjunctive, active, the ones, both, omniphotetoros, the ones, both, in one body. Dissolve all racial backgrounds into one body. Now, you have to realize that these proselytes were all different colors. They were Greeks, they were Romans, they were black people, they were from Africa, they were from everywhere. Arabia, all of them, there were people from all races here. And the ones both in one body, to the God, by the agency of dia, to see you, dia, by the agency of that little preposition there, the cross. That's an old word for impaling. It's an old Assyrian word. It actually means stake, but that term evolved. It went from a stake to an axe, where they'd stretch them out like that. And they kept going to a different form to make them live longer in torture. Finally, they went to the cross. They went to the cross. And they nailed their hands up there, right through the carpal tunnel area here, on both of them stretched out. and they nailed their feet, sometimes one foot on each side of the stake or cross. Having killed off, having assassinated, Apocatenus, nominee singular mask and first Irish participle acting, having killed off, completely destroyed and slain, murdered the enmity in him, having completely destroyed that active hatred that people have for different races. You know, I grew up in a very racially charged area at times. But, you know, being on the other side of the fence, it always tried to make peace. I went to school first time, I was almost 70 years old. And I had been with my grandmother and grandfather and I wasn't around any other kids except for my family all my life. I lived in this little shack and I went out in the cotton patches in the field picking up potatoes and picking cotton and all that. Crawling along with my own little sack picking cotton when I wasn't even able to walk yet. And I saw different kind of people out there. My grandmother was a great singer. She was a natural singer. She was this naturally musically inclined, her father was. He was an Indian in Minnesota, Santee, Dakota. They killed the Indians in Minnesota over this, what's it, the Boyce family back there. One of their boys killed, or really raped an Indian girl, didn't kill her but raped her. She got pregnant. And the family went to his family and said, you know, he raped our daughter. Well, you're nothing but trash. We're not going to marry you. They called them red niggers back then is what they called them. And so we're not going to do that. And they said, well, if you don't do it, we're going to kill him for doing this. This is not according to our law. Well, you're people are nothing. So, they killed the boy. And then we had a war, what they call the Sioux Uprising back there. And they hung 38 Indians over that. That's what Abraham Lincoln decided to do. Gonna hang 38 of those Indians. My grandmother took off, grandfather took off, and went into Indian territory. And he took off with a bunch of black minstrels. black men, they were a group of black people that played instruments and they would sing in carnivals and stuff and he took and he traveled singing all the way back and he taught all of his kids how to play everything. My grandmother, they had her sister Clara, my aunt, they were trying to teach her how to play the piano. And a piano teacher would come over there and then my grandfather He was a teacher also, because he was very musically inclined. My grandmother sat back there and watched all that go on, and she asked her mother, she said, can I play the piano? She said, well, daughter, you haven't learned how to play it. He said, can I play the piano? She went over and played it. Just took off playing that piano. It just astounded them. She naturally played this piano. Then she started playing for the silent movies. She was a natural. And I got to watch her do that. Anyway, it was, he worked his way into Indian Territory. And then he met my great-grandmother, Hattie Jane Paul, in Paul's Valley, Oklahoma, and married that little girl. And had a bunch of kids. But they were all musically inclined like that. My grandmother would get out there in those cotton fields, and there would be a few black people and a few Mexican people, but most of them were Oklahoma Indians. And she's out there singing. When the roll was called up yonder, swing low, sweet chariot, and all this kind of stuff. And I mean, they would just be all singing. And they were singing themselves into glory, because they were all one people. They were all poor. And every one of them, they didn't have toilets set out there to go to. They had to hide. Use newspaper or whatever they had. They had to hide. Hope the cotton was tall, so it'd hide them a little bit. Gary looked around, a little old jug of water wrapped in a burlap bag and wetted down. One people. Out there, one people. You remember when your dad was out there very young in the 1920s, and there was one white guy out there and he boarded his horse with a black snake on him. Remember that, Marilyn? Yeah, my dad wanted to knock him off the horse. Yeah. They were trying to, he was trying to be the big shot. When I went out there, those part Indian people, those Charlie and all of them, Sonny and all of them, and I'd climb up on this tall ladder in this cotton field out there, and I was only about five or six years old, seven years old maybe at that time. I'm climbing up there this ladder and trying to dump my little old cotton sack in there and say, get in there Sonny boy, get in there boy, and stomp that cotton down. And I was scared to death up there on this big wagon with this chicken wire around it. It was not easy. But you know what, he treated us just like that. You didn't leave one piece of cotton in the field, did you, Marilyn? There better not be any white in that field when you get through. You get to go back. But there was no difference. Let's get back again to all the churches. You have churches that are black churches. You have Spanish churches. Why not just have a church? Learn the same language and have a church. Just have it. Everybody's the same. You don't have to have a Spanish church over here, an Arab church over here, or a Greek church over here. You're in this country, learn the language, and preach the gospel. And everybody is one person, one people, one race. All are one people. It doesn't matter anymore. One people. Our Father, we send this message out for your honor and glory. Please use it wherever it goes. Break down the racial barriers. Let people know that in Christ, you're not black, you're not white, you're not red, you're not yellow, you're not anything. In Christ, when you're born again, you're all one people. You're all one family again. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the long life you've given me to preach your word over 50 years now. Help me honor and glorify you with it. Please forgive me where I fail you. In Jesus' name I pray, amen.