He is the last public figure that I can remember who preached his message straight from the Bible, including the prophetic works of Amos and others. His Letters from a Birmingham Jail is a classic, restating the theology of Augustine and Aquinas that “an unjust law is no law at all.” In the great debate over judicial philosophy today, King would truly be a strict constructionist. Those letters are eloquent testimony to that.

How do we honor his life? By learning the lessons he taught. One of the most segregated places in America on Sunday morning is the church. This must be changed—and it can be. I saw the promise of that this past Easter Sunday morning, when I joined with some 500 prisoners and Prison Fellowship volunteers to celebrate the Lord’s resurrection at a prison in Darrington, Texas. Both on the platform and in the prison yard, I saw black and white, Anglo and Latino, worshipping the risen Christ together.

Now, if you know anything about American prisons, you can appreciate just how unusual that was. In a world where racial and ethnic identity can be literally a matter of life and death, these men transcended race and embraced their true identity as brothers in Christ. And what happened this past Easter was far from unique. This unity is one of greatest joys of our prison ministry.

If it can happen behind bars, there’s no excuse for business-as-usual among Christians outside prison walls.

On the night before he died, King spoke at Mason Temple Church. He warned of hard times to come but added that God had shown him “the promised land.”

Forty years later, we’re not there yet. As Francis Schaeffer wrote, we give the world the right to judge Christ by the way we treat each other. It’s high time to give them a reason to speak well of our Lord.