[Editor’s note: The following article is based on excerpts from a message delivered September, 2005 by Minister Farrakhan at the First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.]
In The Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful.
It is wonderful to be a servant of God and a servant of the people. In the Bible, Jesus said it beautifully: “He who would be chief among you let him be your servant.” Black people have been trained on how to serve the White man, but it takes God to touch our hearts to make us servants of one another.
Our people need service. They do not need masters, they need servers, and I am honored that in my lifetime I am being blessed to see what I have longed to see since I was a little boy: the unity of us, as a people. How joyous my heart is to be with my Christian family. I told White Arabs that I would not jump over one Black Christian to find unity with a White Arab, even though they are Muslims and I am a Muslim.
The church is my family. I had a Christian upbringing; I sang in the choir; I carried the cross; I know all the hymns of my church. Sometimes, on Sunday morning while I am changing channels on my television, I hear some of those hymns that I used to sing and I sing quietly to myself and the tears fall from my eyes, because I remember my church.
There is no power that will separate me from the church. Even though I say that I am a Muslim, without the church our people are lost. The church has been our comfort when we had nothing to hold on to. The corruptors are always busy corrupting the church, mosque and synagogue, so that the house of God is a divided house. Satan is really the master today of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.
We hold up the names of Christ, Muhammad and Moses as a shield for the way we live, which is totally opposite of what these men lived and the life that they taught us to live—which says that Satan caused us to deviate even though we claim the great names of our prophets. So, religion, as Karl Marx said, did become the opiate of the people.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad was the son and grandson of a Baptist preacher. When he would sit in the church in Sandersville, Georgia, listening to his father, he knew that one day he would preach something different, but he did not know what it was. When he met Master Fard Muhammad and heard what Master Fard Muhammad taught, he began preaching what is called “Islam.” His work in setting up mosques was a protest against the church. It was not that Jesus was off the mark; it was that we were off the mark in the name of Jesus.
He taught us wisdom and never allowed music in the temple; the music was to be the Word of God. He cleaned us up by teaching the Bible, not the Holy Qur’an. When we came to him, we were like everybody else—liars, thieves, adulterers, murderers and then some—but he used the Bible to call us to live a righteous life. He called us to live the lives of the prophets whose names we honored with our tongues, but our lives were far removed from them.
When I saw his temple and met Brother Minister Malcolm X, he became my mentor. He was one of the finest examples that I could have ever had in my beginning days in Islam. I never heard him curse. He was never late for an appointment. When I would sleep in his house, he would wake me up at 5 a.m. for Fajr prayer. He was an exceedingly disciplined man under the Teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad never liked whooping in the church, so he made all of his ministers like professors; we had to teach and become lovers of knowledge, because our people are in their condition because of a lack of knowledge. Even though Malcolm X did not go beyond the 8th grade, he had genius sitting in his breast—as genius is in the breast of our people. They just need to be quickened to life. When Malcolm awakened, he began reading everything in the library worth reading, starting with the dictionary, from cover to cover.
Whenever I would sit to be taught by Brother Malcolm, he always broke words down into their meanings; he understood the root of words. He knew that, through words, you can either get tricked or you can be free. The first book he put in my hands was “100 Amazing Facts about the Negro” by J.A. Rogers; then “100 Years of Lynching,” then “17 Million Negroes, 17 Million Dollars.” I had to read all of those books, study my Lessons. Then, I had to read another book by J.A. Rogers, “From Superman to man.” Then, I had to study world history, under his direction. Then, he gave me the Holy Qur’an, the first one that I had ever owned.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad started a revolution in the church from his own rebellion against the way of the church. Because of him, a Black Theology emerged in the Christian house. Before the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the African Methodist Episcopal Church was Black conscious. It was the church of Marcus Garvey and many of the revolutionaries. But when the Honorable Elijah Muhammad started teaching us that Jesus was our Brother because he was a Black man, then all of the White images of him came down and we began taking pride in ourselves.
I am so happy to be on the rostrum of this house of God with the head of the Interdenominational Theological Center, because for years we have been at odds, not because we have really been at odds, but because an enemy wants to keep us at odds. If we ever united, we know that the real revolution will take place.
Jesus was a revolutionary. He laid down the path of revolution, if you really understand him. He was not a milquetoast man who was sweet and nice. How can we represent that great man in a punkish manner? Jesus is the key to the freedom of every human being who lives on this earth.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, is honored in Islam above all women and above the mothers of all other prophets. Why Mary? Her womb was blessed with a world saviour, a child whose destiny was to perfectly reflect the wisdom, mind, spirit and power of the Creator of the heavens and the earth. Jesus was the man who would once again lift the human from his degraded state to the exalted state that God created human beings to be.
We must understand Jesus the revolutionary because, if the Millions More Movement does not reflect Jesus the revolutionary, it will never be the effective tool for the redemption, reconciliation—of not only Black people, but all humanity—back to God.
From the time of the fall of Adam, the world has needed a human being who could connect mankind, or man, again with God. Adam’s death was not physical; it was spiritual. His fall represented the fall of all humanity. When the human falls, that human (male or female) begins to live in the underworld of his desires. When Adam’s eyes came open after his rebellion against God, his eyes became open to the world of passion and appetite from the navel down.
Once he fell down to live by his appetite, then greed, lust and covetousness began to take hold of the human mind to degrade the human into a being far less than what God created us to be. He created us in His image and after His likeness. The Holy Qur’an says that Allah (God) created us to be Khalifah, to stand in His place as His successor. You cannot succeed God if you are not god.
David the Psalmist said, “Ye are all gods, children of the Most High God.” But you first have to be His child. It is an error for preachers to say that we are all the children of God. We all have the capacity to be the child of God, but that is a decision that we have to make as to whose child we are going to be.
The Bible says, “As by one man sin entered into the world and death came by sin.” All men have sinned, so all are under death. The Bible also says, “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.” What kind of death? Once human beings live in the flesh rather than in the spirit, they become dead to the real power of self. You do not need a television to see or a telephone to hear, when you are alive in the spirit of God as Jesus was, and is.
The Bible says that “Jesus, knowing their thoughts, did” He did not have to have a telephone to listen—like the government uses to listen; they are trying to imitate the natural powers of human beings who live in the spirit of God, but they cannot do it from their minds because they are too wicked.
God allows you to get hints of your powers; sometimes you can see an occurrence before it happens or hear something that you know you were not present to hear. The real ear and eyes are not physical. When your mind is lit with the light of God, you see beyond the eyes and hear beyond the ears. You are naturally endowed with those powers, but those powers have been put to sleep because we are following a people who live diametrically opposed to the way of the Creator.
In the scripture, Jesus says, “As by one man sin entered into the world, and death came by sin.” So by one man should all be made alive.
If you were the devil, the archdeceiver, and knew that Jesus was coming to defeat you and your underworld of transgression, who would you have to deceive the world about? Satan knows that Jesus is the end of his world and the beginning of a new world. Jesus is a door. He said, “If you enter into me, you will be saved.”
Jesus described himself in many ways:
- “I am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman.”
- “I am the bread of life.”
- “I am the light of the world.”
- “I am the way, the truth and the life.”
- “I am the good shepherd.”
The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. A man like that is a man who the whole world needs. A man like that can raise us up out of the condition that we are in and raise us up again to become beings that reflect God. The human being is only a stage of development;
you have to grow from the level of an animal to be a human, which means that you have mentally evolved to be able to put the humus (the earth) under the power of a resurrected mind. But that process of evolution and development does not stop with a human being; it continues until you become a divine being reflecting the perfection of the Creator.
That is why Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am you may be also.” The Bible also says that “they will be changed in the twinkling of an eye” and “they will be like him, Jesus.” The Bible says that Jesus was exalted to the “right hand of God” and given power over everything except God, Himself.
Jesus serves as an example that a human being born of a woman could master the forces of the universe, in order to show us our possibilities, that we should never accept what the world has made us; we must be willing to accept what God wants to make us, through Jesus, a revolutionary.
A real revolution is not with the gun; a real revolution is to overthrow the government in your mind. You must ask yourself, who is the king in your dome? Then, you will know whose children you are. If we are the body of Christ, then our hands do the work of Jesus, our mouths speak the will and the word of Jesus, and our feet walk the path of Jesus. But whose children are we?
Satan has performed a magnificent act of deception. The Bible says he would make himself an angel of light. He knows God, because that is the only way that he can deceive us about God. You can be a dumb devil—and most of us are just dumb devils—but Satan is a devil-maker. He is wise becuase he knows how to manipulate people to make them think that they are on the path of God while they have actually strayed from the straight way. So, the Bible says that, “We war not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness of this world and spiritual wickedness in high places.”
It would take years to fully teach this subject, because Jesus is so dynamic a human being. I walk in the path of Jesus. There is no other path for a true revolutionary. A true revolutionary rises up not necessarily from the finest of circumstances, for Jesus was born in an oxstall, so he was born among animals. I walk the path of Jesus, which is not an easy path. Who is arrayed against me?
We live in a modern Rome. Ancient Rome, Sodom and Gomorrah, Persia and Babylon are nothing compared to this country. The government of the United States has always been looking like Cain, after he slew his brother Abel. He knew that the blood of Abel was crying out for justice, so he said that “Every man who sees me will slay me.” That is the mind of a guilty person.
America has done so much evil that she sees death coming from everywhere. White people do not believe we have a heart for forgiveness because they know, that if they were in our shoes they would be plotting to kill them—like this govenment worked against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While they were talking to him in the White House, they were plotting to kill him.
When God gives you revelation, that is your test. If you use the wisdom of God according to the will of God, then you are a child of God. But if you use it to fatten your pockets, then you are the child of Satan, and maybe Satan himself. In the Bible, Revelations 2:9, it reads, “Those who say they are Jews and are not, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan.” This is referring to a specific group of people who claim to be Jews but they are not because they use the wisdom of God for wicked purposes. And there are Christians and Muslims who also use the wisdom of God for wicked purposes.
So, among all of the monothesistc expressions there is gross hypocrisy. Those who try to do what the prophets say are overshadowed by those who use the names of the prophets to shield unclean practice. In trying to walk this path of Jesus, I have angered that Satanic mind because I am pulling the cover off their deceptive practice.
The scripture says, “Let this mind be in you, the same that was in Christ Jesus.”
“Let” is a verb of permission, which means we have to accept an invitation. Christ Jesus had the kind of mind that God offered Adam in the Garden of Eden, which he rebelled against—the mind that Jesus offers us is the mind of God. In order to accept this mind that is offered to us, we have to permit the overthrow of the mind that is in us now. God is calling for a regime change—get rid of the mind of Willie Lynch and accept the mind of God.
Let the mind of Christ Jesus come into your life. If he knocks, let him in, for if you let him in, He will sup with you. This will make Satan angry, because Jesus came to meddle in the lives of people who thought that they had accepted him, but were actually following the mind of Satan.
If you let him in, you will be able to say, “Greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world.”
Psalms 23 reads, “The Lord is my shepherd”—I have no leader but the Lord; “I shall not want”—for anyting that I will not be able to achieve because if He is my shepherd I can do all things in Christ; “he leadeth me besides the still waters, he restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for his namesake.
Yea though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of my enemies. My cup runneth over, surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
This is the Promise of the Lord; this is our inheritance. Let him in and there is nothing that we will not be able to achieve.
