 Hi, my name is David Rosales. I'm the pastor of Calvary Chapel of the Chino Valley, California. There is so much confusion in our world today, and many are growing frustrated. Even the church is filled with confusion, and is once again becoming divided. In a time when we should be joining together to oppose evil, many are giving in to it. As uncomfortable as this may be to hear, racism is not our greatest problem. Sin is. And sin infects every human being regardless of their declared race. As I mentioned recently, I'm of Mexican American heritage. My mother and my father were both first generation Americans. They were both raised to see themselves as Americans first, and that's how they raised me. When I got saved in 1970, I began to see myself as a Christian, first belonging to something greater than a nation or ethnic group. This is not to say that I stopped valuing my country or my heritage, because my country and heritage became even more important. It wasn't that I no longer knew or valued my ethnicity. It is that I came to believe I belonged to something greater. I began to see that I now belong to a family that was bigger than my nationality or ethnicity. I belonged to a family made up of every person who called upon the name of the Lord and was saved. I was a pilgrim, a sojourner, and I was just passing through while on my way to heaven. I belonged to the body of Christ, the family of God. Paul told the Galatians, there's neither Jew nor Greek. There's neither slave nor free. There's neither male nor female. You are all one in Christ Jesus. This means that there is no Jewish church. There's no white church. There's no black church, brown church, Native American church, or Asian church. There's one church, Jesus's church. As Paul told the Ephesians, there's one body. There's one Lord, and there is one faith. We belong together because we, who are Christians, serve the same Jesus, worship the same Father, and are joined together by the same spirit. There is a difference in the way we celebrate our faith and our church gatherings. I appreciate this, and thank God for the diversity that's found in His church. But at the core, we are one, and we need to remember this today. We have different orders of service, different songs that we sing, different styles of preaching, teaching. This is all wonderful. It's great. As long as the center of it all is Jesus and His word. What isn't wonderful and what isn't great is the angering cries of racism that's being stoked by people with bad intentions, and it's dividing the church. We all agree that the death of George Floyd was terrible. Justice must be served. What I have a problem with this, how this terrible event has been used to foment hatred and divide our nation on the basis of emotion. As uncomfortable as it may be for some to hear, perhaps we need to consider some facts. The FBI crime report, as well as the Washington Post, reported that in the year 2019, there were approximately 10 million arrests. Within those arrests, there was 1,004 police shootings of which were 41 shootings of unarmed people. Of those 41 unarmed people who were shot by police, 19 of them were white, nine were black. Where was the outrage? Where were there no riots over this kind of injustice? During the same year, 89 police officers were killed in the line of duty. Nobody seems to care about this. Nobody reports about it. Just last weekend in the span of 48 hours, 82 people were shot in Chicago, resulting in the death of 19 people. Where are the reports and riots over these deaths? The press is remarkably silent because it just doesn't fit in with the current narrative narrative of racism. The church has also grown strangely silent. Perhaps it's because many churches don't teach the whole council of God when you teach the whole council and address the evil in our hearts. We discover that the problem isn't racism or social inequities or financial inequality. The problem at its core is sin. You don't agree. Then remember what Jesus said in Mark chapter seven when he said there's nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him. The things which come out of him, those are the things that defile a man. Jesus said that it's from within the heart of man that evil proceeds and defiles. It is right that we should mourn the death of George Floyd. But who is mourning the death of the over 300,000 babies that were aborted last year through Planned Parenthood? Since Black Lives Matter, and of course they do, where is the outrage over the fact that 36% of all abortions are performed on black women, the highest abortion rate in our nation? What is happening now is the result of rejecting the Christian message. We have sown to the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind. We Christians need to remember that the problem is one of the human nature that the gospel promises a new life. We pastors need to return to preaching the remedy to hate and racism. It's forgiveness. It's love that comes by the spirit of God which is declared in the gospel. We need to remember that when all is said and done, there's one race, the human race. Paul told the intellectuals of Athens that God had made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on the face of the earth. We believers must once again preach the remedy to sin and that is forgiveness through Jesus Christ. Simplistic? Perhaps. Effective? Yes. If we actually do what God says. This is David Rosales, pastor of Calvary Chapel of the Chino Valley, California.