The Charlie Kirk assassination has shaken the world. There have been vigils in countries like Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, and Australia. Additional ones are planned for the US. Are there any lessons? How should the church respond? Is what happened to Charlie Kirk a teaching moment? I saw this:
The following quotation is from the Preface to my book God and Government. It’s attributed to Martin Luther:
If Luther didn’t say it, he certainly practiced it, as did many Christians over the centuries. Consider the number of Election Sermons that have been preached in our nation’s history. See the three-volume work of Theodore Parker, Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons (1867). The following is from Harry S. Stout.
Throughout the colonial era, American ministers delivered approximately 8 million sermons, each lasting one to one-and-a-half hours. The average 70-year old colonial churchgoer would have listened to some 7,000 sermons in his or her lifetime, totaling nearly 10,000 hours of concentrated listening. This is the number of classroom hours it would take to receive ten separate undergraduate degrees in a modern university, without ever repeating the same course!… The colonial sermon was prophet, newspaper, video, Internet, community college, and social therapist all wrapped in one. Such was the range of its influence on all aspects of life that even contemporary television and personal computers pale in comparison.[1]
In his book The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (1986), Stout wrote, “Unlike modern mass media, the sermon stood alone in local New England contexts as the only regular (at least weekly) medium of public communication. As a channel of information, it combined religious, educational, and journalistic functions, and supplied all the key terms necessary to understand existence in this world and the next.” (page 3)
Restoring the Foundation of Civilization
The main reason anti-Christian civilizationists survive and seem to thrive is that Christians have not engaged with, answered, and built a competing alternative culture—THE ORIGINAL CIVILIZATION—founded on the principles found in God’s Word and observable in creation. Moreover, many Christians don’t believe there can be or should be a Christian civilization, so they send their children off to the local government school that is anti-Christian believing that facts are neutral and public education is free. Such thinking comes at a terrible cost.
Buy NowThese colonial pastors were aware of the politics of their day, both in America and in their country of origin. Many of them made the trek to the New World because politics was affecting their ability to preach on the Lord’s Day.
Considerable literature was put out and numerous sermons were preached in London, in the interest of the colony in Virginia, and much of this, at least—practically all, in fact that we have been able to examine—was provided by men, who used the Geneva Bible, presumably Puritans. … Several sermons were preached before the Virginia Company in London, for which service they chose freely, if not uniformly, Puritans.[2]
In his book When a Nation Forgets God, Erwin Lutzer retells a Christian’s story of living during the Nazi Holocaust:
I lived in Germany during the Nazi Holocaust. I considered myself a Christian. We heard stories of what was happening to the Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it, because what could anyone do to stop it?
A railroad track ran behind our small church, and each Sunday morning we could hear the whistle in the distance and then the wheels coming over the tracks. We became disturbed when we heard the cries coming from the train as it passed by. We realized that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars!
Week after week the whistle would blow. We dreaded to hear the sound of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of the Jews en route to a death camp. Their screams tormented us.
We knew the time the train was coming, and when we heard the whistle blow we began singing hymns. By the time the train came past our church, we were singing at the top of our voices. If we heard the screams, we sang more loudly and soon we heard them no more.
Years have passed, and no one talks about it anymore. But I still hear that train whistle in my sleep. God forgive me; forgive all of us who called ourselves Christians yet did nothing to intervene.[3]
Many Reformed pastors preach verse by verse through books of the Bible and claim that this is the biblical view. I have not seen any biblical evidence for this claim. Are we to believe that speaking to the issues of the day is somehow not “preaching Christ and Him crucified”? It seems to me that every verse and every circumstance is an opportunity to preach Jesus and Him crucified!
Does the “regulative principle of worship” prohibit preaching on what is taking place culturally? I saw this in response to a post.
As much as I would find it appropriate to mention brother Charlie, a topical message, or the death cult of critical theory, the Lord’s Day gathering belongs to the Lord. The focus should remain on Him and His worthiness. We have 6 other days per week to focus on our works (political or other)—but this one belongs to God.
I don’t see how addressing the issues of the day based on the Bible somehow detracts from God and His worthiness. The prophets spoke about the moral problems of their day. For example, consider the following from Isaiah 1. Must a pastor wait until he begins preaching through Isaiah to preach on these verses when these same sins are taking place today?
How the faithful city has become a prostitute,
She who was full of justice!
Righteousness once dwelt in her,
But now murderers.
Your silver has become dross,
Your drink diluted with water.
Your rulers are rebels
And companions of thieves;
Everyone loves a bribe
And chases after gifts.
They do not obtain justice for the orphan,
Nor does the widow’s case come before them (vv. 21-23).
A woman confronted Charlie Kirk about abortion. She claimed to be a Christian and based her pro-abortion position on Exodus 21:22-25. I wonder how many Christians could have dealt with her arguments. If not, why not? Has your pastor preached on the abortion topic, or has he left it for the Sunday School hour, something of which is not found in the Bible?
Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths
Christianity's failure to show itself practical in the past 150 years has guaranteed the success of secularism and militant Islam, both of which are doing incalculable harm at home and abroad. The rejection of any type of "this-worldly" application of the Bible has resulted in the proliferation of man-centered worldviews that have steadily drained the life out of our world and left behind a spiritual vacuum. Will the church of Jesus Christ be prepared with biblical answers for the millions who will be ready to follow the light of the gospel as the folly of humanism and Islam is made manifest? (2 Tim. 3:9).
Buy NowIsn’t God the Lord of all of life? Did not Abraham Kuyper say, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’”?[4] Must we wait until we encounter relevant verses in the flow of expository preaching to deal with issues that impact our families, schools, churches, and nation at this moment in time?
Yes, preach through the Bible, but don’t let that method (which the Bible never requires) stop a pastor from addressing topics that need to be addressed. Paul’s letters to the churches serve as good examples. He was not teaching through books of the Bible. He was addressing the issues of the day. Where in the Bible does it say pastors can’t do this from the pulpit on the Lord’s Day if the Bible is being exegeted and applied?
[1] Harry S. Stout, “How Preachers Incited Revolution,” Christian History, Issue 50 (Spring 1996), 3.
[2] P. Marion Simms, The Bible in America: Versions that Have Played Their Part in the Making of the Republic (New York: Wilson-Erickson, 1936), 75-76.
[3] (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010), 25-26.
[4] Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” in James D. Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 488.