Martin Luther King Jr. delivered this sermon titled “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life” at New Covenant Baptist Church in Chicago on April 9, 1967.
Below is the text of the sermon.
MP3 Audio:
TRANSCRIPT:
I want to use as the subject from which to preach: “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.”
You know, they used to tell us in Hollywood that in order for a movie to be complete, it had to be three-dimensional. Well, this morning I want to seek to get over to each of us that if life itself is to be complete, it must be three-dimensional.
Many, many centuries ago, there was a man by the name of John who found himself in prison out on a lonely, obscure island called Patmos. And I’ve been in prison just enough to know that it’s a lonely experience.
And when you are incarcerated in such a situation, you are deprived of almost every freedom, but the freedom to think, the freedom to pray, the freedom to reflect and to meditate.
And while John was out on this lonely island in prison, he lifted his vision to high heaven and he saw, descending out of heaven, a new heaven and a new earth. Over in the 21st chapter of the book of Revelation, it opens by saying, “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. And I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven.”
And one of the greatest glories of this new city of God that John saw was its completeness. It was not up on one side and down on the other, but it was complete in all three of its dimensions.
And so in this same chapter as we look down to the 16th verse, John says, “The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.”
In other words, this new city of God, this new city of ideal humanity is not an unbalanced entity, but is complete on all sides. Now I think John is saying something here in all of the symbolism of this text and the symbolism of this chapter. He’s saying at bottom that life as it should be and life at its best is a life that is complete on all sides.
And there are three dimensions of any complete life to which we can fitly give the words of this text: length, breadth, and height.
Now the length of life as we shall use it here is the inward concern for one’s own welfare. In other words, it is that inward concern that causes one to push forward, to achieve his own goals and ambitions. The breadth of life as we shall use it here is the outward concern for the welfare of others. And the height of life is the upward reach for God.
Now you got to have all three of these to have a complete life.
LENGTH OF LIFE
Now let’s turn for the moment to the length of life. I said that this is the dimension of life where we are concerned with developing our inner powers. In a sense this is the selfish dimension of life.
There is such a thing as rational and healthy self-interest. A great Jewish rabbi, the late Joshua Leibman, wrote a book some years ago entitled Peace of Mind. And he has a chapter in that book entitled “Love Thyself Properly.” And what he says in that chapter, in substance, is that before you can love other selves adequately, you’ve got to love your own self properly.
You know, a lot of people don’t love themselves. And they go through life with deep and haunting emotional conflicts. So the length of life means that you must love yourself.
And you know what loving yourself also means? It means that you’ve got to accept yourself. So many people are busy trying to be somebody else. God gave all of us something significant. And we must pray every day, asking God to help us to accept ourselves. That means everything.
Too many Negroes are ashamed of themselves, ashamed of being black. A Negro got to rise up and say from the bottom of his soul, “I am somebody. I have a rich, noble, and proud heritage. However exploited and however painful my history has been, I’m black, but I’m black and beautiful.” This is what we’ve got to say.
We’ve got to accept ourselves. And we must pray, “Lord, help me to accept myself every day; help me to accept my tools.”
I remember when I was in college, I majored in sociology, and all sociology majors had to take a course that was required called statistics. And statistics can be very complicated. You’ve got to have a mathematical mind, a real knowledge of geometry, and you’ve got to know how to find the mean, the mode, and the median.