Seldom is someone like Max Lucado — a minister once dubbed “America’s pastor” — left without words.
Less than 24 hours removed from conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination in Utah, two weeks after the senseless shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, and just under three weeks past the slaughtering of a Ukrainian refugee in Charlotte, there was a palpable exhaustion in Lucado’s voice.
“I just don’t have the words,” he told CBN News, holding sorrow at bay. “It leaves us struggling.”
To make sense of the darkness of this world, Lucado turned to geography — not the geography of maps and charts, but toward a spiritual geography, a divine placement that holds in tension what Christians often call “the already but not yet.”
“Sometimes, just a reminder of where we are in the scope of human history does help,” Lucado said. “And that is: we’re between the two gardens. We’re between the garden of Eden, we’re between the garden of eternity. In the garden of Eden, there was no panic, there was no chaos; there was simply peace [and] harmony between Adam and Eve, between Adam and Eve and God, between Adam and Eve and nature, and I firmly, with all of my heart, believe that day will come again.”
“But right now,” he continued, “we’re at a time in which the nature itself, the world itself — even the creation — is groaning, because we all sense that something is not right.”
While the decline of Christianity has slowed in the U.S., it is clear the country is moving in a post-Christian direction.
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One of the consequences of forsaking relationship with God, Lucado said, “is violence,” pointing to the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, where Cain, jealous of God favoring Abel’s offering over his, murdered his brother.
Unfortunately, our social media-driven culture has reinforced some of humanity’s darkest instincts, instincts that can be traced all the way back to the first family. These inclinations run rampant when God is absent from the heart.
“If you don’t have to look face-to-face or eye-to-eye with someone with whom you disagree, and you can say anything you want without consequence, it cultivates this type of hostility,” Lucado said. “It sows the seeds of anger and leaves a person feeling like they have the right — which we don’t — to lash out and hurt somebody, not just disagree with them.”
While certainly a dark diagnosis, Lucado offered a glint of hope — a possible way forward. In fact, he called it the “ultimate cure” to the darkness that has reared its ugly head in the last 24 hours.
“What Charlie Kirk was doing was well within his right as an American citizen,” Lucado emphasized. “Whether a person agrees or disagrees with him, that’s a nonissue. What we cannot do, regardless of what your viewpoint is, is try to silence somebody with the act of violence or the shedding of blood. That’s just so against what God intends for human nature, how He intends for us to behave.”
And at this dark impasse, this despairing divergence, Lucado said there is only one way out, and that is “to discover the peace of God.”
“As long as a person is not at peace with their God and with themselves, they’ll never be at peace with their neighbor,” the pastor said. “But once we’re at peace with the shed blood of Jesus Christ, we trust Him for forgiveness of sins, we know our name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, it changes the way I see everyone, because I see every person made — every person alive — as a child of God and, whether I agree or disagree, I’m going to respect the dignity of that person’s right to live.”
Lucado, a teaching pastor at Oaks Hill Church in San Antonio, closed his time with CBN News with a powerful prayer for the United States and for Kirk’s surviving wife, Erika, and their two very young children:
Heavenly Father, on this day we come to You. I know 24 years ago on this day we were coming to You on 9/11, and we still come to You, Father. We’re still under attack. Maybe not the towers in New York City, but good men and women on university campuses, school campuses, and churches. We beg You for mercy. Father, heavy on my heart today are children and adolescents and young adults who are framing the way they see the world. I beg You, Lord, do not let them be embittered by this and do not let them respond in kind. But grant to them a great grace in which they will trust a good and living God and that we will turn to You.
We beg Your mercy please to be upon the Kirk family and extended family. We continue to pray for every campus and every church. And we ask, Lord, that You would consider returning today. Please, open the sky. Come for Your Church. Receive us into Your presence. Rescue us from this evil generation. But grant that we can be faithful, regardless of if You come today in our lifetime or not.
We offer this prayer through Christ. Amen.
You can listen to more of our conversation in the video above. Lucado addressed the problem of evil — why God allows such horror to happen — as well as how to process anger and anxiety in times of profound darkness.
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