Charlie Kirk - A Gift To God's People

Who Charlie was, what he said, and how he said it

Charlie spoke some wonderful truths. He believed in God, and in the gospel and grace of Jesus Christ. He lived as a man who knew he would meet his Maker one day. He believed all people were created by God. He mourned the murder of unborn millions, and spoke up for them. He celebrated marriage and knew it was society’s bedrock. He believed men should step up and lead. He believed there were only two genders. He knew Christianity was the only true religion, and the only answer for human hearts and for society. He believed life was life, coming from and belonging to God. He was incredibly courageous in raising his voice about issues so often considered taboo across the western world, and shone a window into the depths of young American hearts, and by extension all of us. And for that reason amongst others, we must be grateful to God for him.

Very few of us knew Charlie Kirk personally. Like everyone else we must see him with grace and in context, in his humanity, his flaws, his failures. Despite his seeming self-assurance, Charlie could be disarmingly honest and real. We might have seen clips of him demonstrating sympathy and charity; we might also have seen clips of him in full flow where he comes across as a man seeking to win the argument rather than the person. It’s easy to sit on our sofas and say that, but we don’t live under the pressure or gaze he did, and only rarely do any of us experience the immediate cut-and-thrust of live debate, often whilst being recorded. In such situations sometimes words come out wrong. Our hackles rise. We can become frustrated and say something with our guard dropped, though it seems that was a rare occurrence for Charlie, which is evidence of the Spirit’s power of self-control in his life. It is incredibly difficult to communicate deep truths simply with nuance and sensitivity, and in love. That is life, and wherever Charlie may have failed to walk gently and kindly with someone through their struggles, he should be forgiven.

Guilty silence

Charlie’s death comes at a time when many others across God’s house are being rightly and deeply challenged to tackle what 18th-century hymnwriter Robert Robinson (himself converted in 1752 by a George Whitefield sermon titled ‘The wrath to come’) called ‘the guilty silence’. In his hymn ‘Lord of every land and nation, ancient of eternal days’, he wrote this:

Brightness of the Father’s glory,

Shall Thy praise unuttered lie?

Shun, my tongue, the guilty silence,

Sing the Lord who came to die.

Though Robinson was actually speaking about the praise the Lord demands, A.W. Tozer makes clear in his stunning 1950’s book God Tells The Man Who Cares that he believed Robinson’s observation carried to other applications of the Christian walk. Rather than extract a portion of what is an excoriating and deeply pertinent narrative, a large portion of Tozer’s chapter ‘Let’s Break That “Guilty Silence”’ is reproduced below:

There are moral situations where it is immoral to say nothing and basely immoral to do nothing.

The Bible has much to say in praise of prudence and circumspection, but it has nothing but condemnation for the coward. It is plainly taught in the New Testament that the soul that is too timid to own Christ before men on earth will be denied before the Father who is in heaven (Matthew 10:33). And in the book of the Revelation the fearful are classed with the unbelievers, the murderers, the whoremongers, the sorcerers, the liars, and all are relegated to the lake which burns with fire and brimstone (Revelation 21:8). Obviously moral cowardice is a sin, a grave and deeply injurious sin…

Even among those who make a great noise about believing the Bible, that Bible has virtually no practical influence left. Fiction, films, fun, frolic, religious entertainment, Hollywood ideals, big business techniques and cheap, worldly philosophies now overrun the sanctuary. The grieved Holy Spirit broods over the chaos but no light breaks forth. “Revivals” come without rousing the hostility of organized sin and pass without raising the moral level of the community or purifying the lives of professing Christians. Why?

Could it be that too many of God’s true children, and especially the preachers, are sinning against God by guilty silence? When those whose eyes are opened by the touch of Christ become vocal and active God may begin to fight again on the side of truth. I for one am waiting to hear the loud voices of the prophets and reformers sounding once more over a sluggish and drowsy church.

They’ll pay a price for their boldness, but the results will be worth it.

It seems Tozer could have been writing about today and about Charlie. On the 13th of September, social media influencer and pastor’s wife Millicent Sedra said:

I wonder how many Christians would have remained silent over the beheading of John the Baptist. “He should have stayed out of politics.” “He should have just preached the gospel.”

Perhaps we can be honest with ourselves and others and say that we are scared. Scared to affiliate with Charlie Kirk for a lot of reasons, perhaps. Scared to call him a brother because he was shot by a sniper who, in an explanatory reply to his lover who asked why he did it, apparently gave the following reason:

I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.

Any singular characterisation of Charlie as a man who hated is wholly unfair. But perhaps another reason we are scared to affiliate ourselves squarely with him is because we don’t believe some of the things he believed, or agree with many of the things he said, or know if we want to die for believing and saying such things. We might also be scared because it’s hard to stand shoulder to shoulder with someone who sometimes expressed himself in a combative and abrasive spirit that we may be trying to check in our own hearts and lives. But more than either of these reasons, perhaps we’re scared because deep down we do believe a lot of the things he believed, agree with a lot of the things he said, and absolutely definitely believe in and worship the same God Charlie did, he with his flaws, and us with all ours. And, in that sense, if we force ourselves to watch the video of the bullet tearing through his jugular and see him shudder and slump, we are watching a video of what our own futures might well look like. So yes. Perhaps we are scared.

When to stand up, what to say, and how to say it

Psalm 12 is such a help because it seems to answer all three questions that this section’s subtitle infers. The words of the beautifully succinct psalm are below.

1 Help, LORD, for the godly man ceases!

For the faithful disappear from among the sons of men.

2 They speak idly everyone with his neighbor;

With flattering lips and a double heart they speak.

3 May the LORD cut off all flattering lips,

And the tongue that speaks proud things,

4 Who have said,

“With our tongue we will prevail;

Our lips are our own;

Who is lord over us?”

5 “For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy,

Now I will arise,” says the LORD;

“I will set him in the safety for which he yearns.”

6 The words of the LORD are pure words,

Like silver tried in a furnace of earth,

Purified seven times.

7 You shall keep them, O LORD,

You shall preserve them from this generation forever.

8 The wicked prowl on every side,

When vileness is exalted among the sons of men. [NKJV]

In verse 1 we see a problem: faithful people have disappeared, and in such situations, the Lord Himself arises (v5). One thing every single one of us must agree on is that Charlie Kirk didn’t disappear. He arose, he stood up. Boy, did he. For that reason, he was and will be an inspiration to so many of us because he was willing to be courageous in a way that so many of us are not. We praise God for the mirror he has held up to our trembling timidity and our knocking knees. The Lord uses such men as these to varying degrees, just as He used John the Baptist to powerfully prepare the way for Christ’s first coming and will use the ‘two witnesses’ uniquely and supernaturally in the Great Tribulation to prepare the way for His return, whose murder (we are told in Revelation 11v10) will be rejoiced over, just as we have seen in the aftermath of Charlie’s.

The psalm also gives us an understanding of when we should stand up. When the talk around us is idle, duplicitous, or flattering (v2). When people are speaking proudly, from a proud heart (v3). When people say that with their words they will win, and that there is no God over them (v4). But, perhaps most pointedly, this is when the Lord arises. As we see so often through scripture, this can involve the Lord physically and practically rising through His people (though we must remember He can and does use angels and even animals if He wants or needs to), and He does it when the actions that flow out of evil words endanger the safety of the poor and needy (v5). In moments like these, then, is when we are supposed to arise. In other words, now. And quite possibly, it is a call to every chapter in the history of God’s people.

What should we say? Well, it’s simple. God’s words. Like all of us, Charlie was at his scintillating best when he simply shared God’s words with the world, because only those words are seven-times pure (v6). It is seemingly those words that ensure that the poor and needy mentioned in verse 5 (who David the psalm’s author perhaps saw himself to be) are preserved (v7). People are protected, people are saved, by God’s pure words. And we forget this at their peril.

How should we speak God’s words? Well, we should speak them in precisely the opposite way to the ‘wicked who prowl on every side’ and who exalt ‘vileness’ (v8).

• Faithfully, with a commitment to the truth of those words, regardless of how challenging, problematic or controversial they may be.

• Earnestly and with purpose, knowing that while we idle our short lives away, the poor and needy sigh and die.

• Critically, challenging man and society’s status quo, without flattering them to our own vainglory, but with eyes fixed on the glory of the Saviour who died for us.

• Transparently – not in two minds or with ulterior motive to burnish our image, further our cause, generate some profit or grow the membership of our club, but with integrity that our audience can see, aiming at every man’s two fundamental and intertwined issues – temporal suffering and eternal security.

• Meekly, not in a strength our own. This is not to say we should lay aside our own gifts and abilities in the proclaiming, but it is to say that we enter the fray knowing that if anything will prevail, it will not be our own lips, but the Spirit speaking through us.

• Humbly. May we continually ask ourselves these questions before and after an opportunity arises: did we stand up at the right time, speak the right words, and speak them in the right way?

We must take courage, stand up, and speak openly

Many of us long for a flawless martyr, a truly blameless ‘Christian leader’, a powerful Christian celebrity that we can re-post and re-tweet and lionise to the prowling masses around us to save us the personal discomfort of doing it ourselves. We often desperately want to sub-contract out our witness responsibilities to someone we can disown and cut off at a moment’s notice should they fall or fail, keeping ourselves safely at arm’s length. Surely instead we must celebrate the incontrovertible good we see in a fellow Christian’s ministry without having to understand the complicated, the secondary or even the plain bad that inevitably sits inside their heart and mouths, and ours too.

Charlie was flawed, we all are, and speaking God’s truth matters, as does the way we speak it. The way we hold ourselves often speaks louder to our audience than the words our lips speak, and we have to do everything we can to take responsibility for that, taking care to not get in the way of the Holy Spirit, whose power to disarm is so much greater than ours. However, sometimes love is simply speaking the truth in whatever way we can, and we should not always be held hostage to the way a person may interpret that truth on account of their own situation. Sharp correction is also sometimes a tool God uses to reach us; as God says in Proverbs 27v5, ‘open rebuke is better than love carefully concealed’. May Charlie spur us all on as those ‘speaking the truth in love’ (Ephesians 4v15).

When we analyse and platform the Charlie Kirks of this world, we need to do so with nuance and with tact, appreciating both the divine and the human. There has only ever been One who perfectly modelled truth in love, and He is the God-man, the Christ, Yeshua. Charlie certainly teaches us more than most about the Lord, about courage, and about the consequences of showing both to the world, and the incredible testimonies rolling in from around the world (and the increasing numbers of Kirk-watchers attending our churches) underline that. Praise God! At the same time, unequivocally declaring Charlie as either unalloyed saint or Christless sinner is wrong too.

As we mourn Charlie’s death, we should all continually remember one thing – that we are only ever effective if we lift Christ and His testimony up above us as we stand. For the wonderful extent to which Charlie and others have done this and still do today, we should be supremely grateful. We should be more ready to commit ourselves, our loved ones and our legacies to the Lord’s safekeeping, and more wedded to the Lord and His truth – whatever the cost – than before we met Charlie. Lord help us be more like the You we saw in him, and help us respond by standing up strongly now, before it is too late!

And there was much complaining among the people concerning Him. Some said, “He is good”; others said, “No, on the contrary, He deceives the people.” However, no one spoke openly of Him for fear of the Jews. (John 7v12-13)

When they heard these things they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed at him with their teeth. But [Stephen], being full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and said, “Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” (Acts 7v54-56)

Top image credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/38696382190