Again, this is someone else’s spin on what King had to say, in 1949; before he got saved!
Most of us, when we were young, had ‘weak sinful reasoning’! We had radical ideas and did stupid things. Some of us were even Democrats...Michael Savage is one I think of; and secondly one of the most radical changes has been found in Jon Voight. It would not be fair to define the man by what he he said in 1973! And it is not fair to define King by what he said early on either. He grew up, he actually studied and looked at his true beliefs. He was taken through the fire, and refined—he found in the dark night, that his “resoning” and “beliefs” were lacking, and they did not give him strength. He knew that he had to go to Jesus for that strength, and he did.
He said, “But before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I don’t plan to run for any political office. I don’t plan to do anything but remain a preacher.”....
“and I’m going on believing and knowing that God is alive. You see, as long as love is around, God is alive. As long as justice is around, God is alive. There are certain conceptions of God that needed to die, but not God. You see, God is the supreme noun of life; he’s not an adjective. He is the supreme subject of life; he’s not a verb. He’s the supreme independent clause; he’s not a dependent clause. Everything else is dependent on him, but he is dependent on nothing.
One day Moses had to grapple with it and God sent him out and told him to tell the people that “I Am sent you.” And Moses wondered about it, and he said, “Well, what am I to tell the folk?” He said, “Just go on and tell them that I Am sent you. And then if you need a little more information, let them know that my first name is the same as my last, ‘I Am that I Am.’” And God is the only being in the universe that can say that “I Am,” and stop there. Whenever I say, “I am,” I have to say, “I am because of”—because of my parents, because of my environment, because of hereditary circumstances. And each of you has to say you are because of something. But God is life supreme. Now God, the power that holds the universe in the palm of his hand, is the only being that can say, “I Am,” and put a period there and never look back. And don’t be foolish enough to forget him.
You know, a lot of people are forgetting God. They haven’t done it theoretically, as others have done through their theories—postulated through the God-is-dead theology—but a lot of people just get involved in other things. (Yes) And so many people become so involved in their big bank accounts and in their beautiful expensive automobiles that they unconsciously forget God. So many people become so involved in looking at the man-made lights of the city that they forget to think about that great cosmic light that gets up early in the morning in the eastern horizon and moves with a kind of symphony of motion like a masterly queen strolling across a mansion and paints its technicolor across the blue as it moves—a light that man could never make. Some people have become so involved in looking at the skyscraping buildings of the cities that they’ve forgotten to think about the gigantic mountains, kissing the skies, as if to bathe their peaks in the lofty blue—something that man could never make. So many people have become so involved in televisions and radar that they’ve forgotten to think about the beautiful stars that bedeck the heavens like swinging lanterns of eternity, standing there like shining silvery pins sticking in the magnificent blue pincushion—something that man could never make. So many people have come to feel that on their own efforts they can bring in a new world, but they’ve forgotten to think about the fact that the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof. And so they end up going over and over again without God.
But I tell you this morning, my friends, there’s no way to get rid of him. And all of our new knowledge will not diminish God’s being one iota. Neither the microcosmic compass of the atom nor the vast interstellar ranges of interstellar space can make God irrelevant for living in a universe, where stellar distance must be measured in light years, where stars are five hundred million million miles from the earth, where heavenly bodies travel at incredible speeds. Modern man still has to cry out with the Psalmist, “When I behold the heavens, the work of thy hands and all that thou hast created; what is man, that thou is mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou hast remembered him?”