The problem with today is that I really had him at heart that I wanted to say something personal today.

And I wanted to say something about what happened in Charleston, South Carolina.

We prayed last week, some of you would not have been here last Sunday, but we prayed as a house together for the city, for that community of faith.

And it was powerful and moving, but it's not enough just for us as Passion City Church to have a moment of prayer for Charleston.

What happened in Charleston was premeditated, it was targeted, it was misinformed, it was hate fueled, it was calculated.

And if I can be as clearly as I want to be today, it was evil, what happened there.

It wasn't just that somebody had gotten tangled up in a viewpoint of hate and carried out an act of violence.

I believe it was actually the fruit of the darkness, and it was evil, what happened there.

It's not isolated, it wasn't a one-off, it wasn't something that happened, you know,

once in our decade and once in the last decade, but it is a part of the fabric of what we're struggling with as a nation.

And I think that we have to talk, I think that we cannot keep silent, we have to be vigilant, and I think that we can be victorious, and we can see harmony and unity come between the races in America.

And I want to speak to that a little bit today. There's a tremendous freedom today for us to come and understand that as a people, the best thing we can do is to ask the Holy Spirit to search our hearts around this question, is there prejudice in my heart?

I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, I was born in Georgia, but I have to hospital most of you knew that, I grew up in the near west side on Marietta Boulevard, and apartments had just got torn down because they needed to be a long time ago.

I didn't really know a lot about racial tension, even though I was born in the 50s and was a little child in the 60s.

I do know there was a lady that came to our house named Ali, she was a very robust, that's a nice way for saying larger black lady.

And my sister and I loved her, my mom worked, so our family could sort of emerge out of lower middle class and the middle class.

And so for a few years of my wife when I was three, four, five, Ali would come to our apartment that we lived in, and she would take care of my sister and I in the afternoon, and I loved everything about her except that when we were having our meals and we wouldn't eat all of our vegetables, she would push the table against my sister and me to where we were pressed and pinned against the wall in our dining room, and she would say nobody's moving until everything on the plate is eaten.

That was the 60s, she would be in prison now if she had done that, but there was a day and age where kids just did what they were told and that was the way it worked.

I never thought much about it, honestly, but I didn't know anybody that had any white mates, but I never really thought about it or connected it.

My family moved when I was six years old up to Smirna, which back then was like moving to another state.

And we grew up in Smirna, really did middle school there. My middle school years, some of you are old enough to remember this, there was a lot of black white violence in my middle school, but I didn't care about it being black white, it was just violence, and I was about the size of the legs on this table.

And I stayed out of the way of all conflict, and when there were two girls or two guys or a fight in the hall, I just was invisible and got out of there.

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