Turning Points: Murder and Martyrdom - GraceLife Church of Pineville

Introduction—an interruption

There’s part of me that thinks we should just listen again to last week’s sermon on compassion (John Watson, “The Guts of Compassion“), and then have sermons on that subject repeated every Sunday for the near future. John chose that topic because it tied into what we’d been building on in previous weeks about love, and especially the previous two weeks about loving others.¹

We spent two weeks on loving others instead of just one week because it’s the hardest relationship of the three we have discussed (God, self, and others). All of that was discussed in the context of Heaven being the place where the Great Commandment to love—God and oneself and others—is finally fulfilled perfectly, eternally.

For a while now at GraceLife, we’ve been talking about Heaven—including the activities of Heaven and the relationships of Heaven; this topic falls under our current sermon series on eternal judgment (the sixth elementary principle of the oracles of God found in Hebrews 6:1–2; we’ve been looking at each of these principles over the past two and a half years).

Today, I’d planned to wrap up our discussion on the relationships of Heaven with a sermon titled “The Mysteries of Heaven.” But I’ll save that for next week. Today we must talk instead about the mystery of lawlessness, the manifestation of evil.

The Manifestation of Evil

On Wednesday, September 10, 2025, we saw the manifestation of evil on the national stage: a murder, a political assassination, a martyrdom. If you think that term is too strong, stay with me.

A week earlier, the release of video showed us what happened in our own backyard, on a light rail whose terminal station is about five miles from where I’m preaching at GraceLife Church in Pineville, NC.

Evil manifesting…

as a knife to the neck…

or a bullet from 200 yards.

Evil visited upon …

a Ukrainian refugee…

and an American activist.

Iryna Zarutska: crying and dying alone amid unhelping strangers.

Charlie Kirk: silenced mid-thought amid thousands of supporters helpless to do anything.

And so last week’s message on compassion was more fitting than we would know. At the root of that word compassion is the idea of “suffering with.”

We’ve indeed suffered together this week.

We have suffered together and we suffered differently.

The suffering can be compounded as we suffer the confusion of how to process such things. And we even suffer confusion over how friends or acquaintances or fellow worshipers can see things differently than we do. Politics and race and ethnicity and economics and other less-important distinctions scramble to the front and obscure our fellow humanity. Some are mourning the loss of a hero, while others claim the same person wasn’t worthy of our respect. And so I need to frame well what this sermon is about and ask you to consider it carefully.

Politics and race and ethnicity and economics and other less-important distinctions scramble to the front and obscure our fellow humanity.

I remind you of the unity we fellow believers have in Christ. I ask you to engage your mind and your heart; I also urge you to calm your mind and your heart as we take up a difficult topic.

If you feel an ear-burning anger or unease settling in, take a moment to calm your heart and mind. Those things make it hard to hear.

I ask you to avoid assumptions, whatever they might be.

We must be able to talk about such things. We must be able to worship through such things. As always, I promise to ground what I say in the Word. That is my chief charge, never to be neglected. (If there is less turning back and forth in the Scriptures than in a normal sermon, please know what will be said is still grounded in those Scriptures. And I’m happy to give additional references if asked.)

Rewinding to a Worse National Moment

To get on the same page, let me take you back to a worse time in American history. And with a description like that, of course, we begin to see the relative nature of our own experiences.

Depending on your age and relationships, your dispositions and values, some might think that we’re living in that worst time now. But if you enter a church (or any multigenerational gathering) today, you’ll find people who have collectively lived through, or seen the effects of, world wars, cold wars, financial depressions, civil rights movements, terrorist attacks, and pandemics. All of these things will have hit each of those people differently.

So let’s move the clock back even further—to a time that predates all of us who are living today. It was a time that I think, objectively, was our darkest hour as a nation, because we took up arms against one another formally in Civil War.

President Abraham Lincoln, before himself being struck by an assassin’s bullet, spent the dark hours of that national conflict at New York Avenue Church; on Sundays, in a pew rented eight rows from the front; on Wednesdays, sitting in the pastor’s office as a prayer meeting occurred. The pastor had given him that courtesy—Lincoln would sit in his office with the door ajar so he could hear the prayers of the nation and slip in and slip out unnoticed.

New York Avenue Church has a lot of history, and it’s still there today. If you fast forward 100 years from the time of Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. was participating in meetings there just days before he, too, would be cut down by an assassin’s bullet.

I know some of the history of that church because of the man who would serve as Lincoln’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. Phineas Densmore Gurley. (What a name! If your last name as a man is Gurley, you need to add that “Reverend Doctor” at the beginning.) In addition to the interest in the spiritual life of a man like Lincoln during times of national crisis, I took interest in Rev. Gurley’s family because of his great-grandfather Samuel Gurley; Samuel Gurley is also one of my great-grandfathers.² Lincoln said this about Rev. Gurley:

I like Gurley. He don’t [sic] preach politics. I get enough of that through the week, and when I go to church, I like to hear the gospel.³

I give you that anecdote to say that I don’t intend to break the family tradition this morning (thank you, Cousin Phineas). I’m not going to preach politics. I want to preach the gospel. But you must understand that the gospel preaches to politics. It touches politics.

I’m not going to preach politics. I want to preach the gospel. But you must understand that the gospel preaches to politics.

The Gospel Touches Politics

The word “gospel” means good news. In the Christian setting, it means the good news of Jesus. What foolishness it would be for the church, the possessor of the good news of truth and life, to not speak truth and life to the area of government. The Bible speaks to it. Romans 13 reminds us we are to be subject to governing authorities.

What foolishness it would be for the church, the possessor of the good news of truth and life, to not speak truth and life to the area of government.

But we have a unique position as Americans that the authorities are subject to we the people. Why would the church forfeit its place among the people?

I say that with understanding that the church is people. And we the people, even on the basis of purely practical grounds, should speak to politics in some fashion. We’ve put our own youth of the church on that light rail. It’s reasonable, for example, that we as members of the church would persuade one another to not elect officials who appoint magistrates who release serial criminals into the public. Or as we saw in a different state recently, officials who sustain a justice system that discourages action on subways because it charged a man with manslaughter who attempted to stop attacks on fellow passengers.

I don’t want to drift too far afield. I’m aware of the difference between church members engaging in policy matters and a pastor preaching on them. So what I preach in this sermon isn’t politics. It’s a message about the awareness of suffering in this world in its general and specific contexts. It’s a message that attempts to understand Christian worldview as based on Scripture. It’s a message that preaches this: You, believers, are supposed to appear as lights in the world, blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation (Philippians 2:15).

What does it look like to shine light? Who are the lights? What is blameless living? What is crooked and perverse living?

As we answer such questions, should we keep it sanitized and general with our examples, or should we as a church to take up the real and bloody events of the day so that we can shine into the darkness and not retreat from it?

I’ve prayed to shepherd you well in moments like these. I’ve asked my fellow ministers and elders and staff to pray for me to be able to do that.

That’s enough of an apologetic about what I want and need to preach.

I want to turn now to three categories of observations:

Observations about the nature of youth
Observations about the nature of speech
Comfort from the Scripture

Observations about the Nature of Youth

I should include school shootings in the list of tragedies I’ve mentioned already. Unfortunately, school shootings are now too many to keep up with. But just last week, we saw children cut down in the middle of a prayer service. As the nation was trying to get its mind around what had happened in Arizona with Charlie Kirk, there were shootings taking place in Colorado.⁴

Irena Zarutska was dead at 23. Charlie Kirk was shot dead at 31.

My first observation about youth is the following:

Observation #1: The loss of life of young people is scary for other young people.

We must quickly be aware and sensitive to this primary human reality.

You see, there are a lot of facts we rush to collect during horrors like these. But consider wisely your priorities as you weigh the facts. Consider the experience of the audience that surrounds you.

Before the consideration of what color are the victims and perpetrators, and what are their political allegiances, and what do they say on social media (etc., etc.), be aware that these killings of young people occurred in places where young people are expected to frequent:

A public transportation system. These are frequented by the young because they haven’t reached the age or economic status to afford private transportation.
A college campus. Here, of course, you find that the vast majority of people are young people in the nascent stages of pursuing a career path.

Not only were the victims young in these recent incidents, but in most instances the perpetrators were young. It makes it doubly scary and confusing for our youth. (Who’s my friend? Who’s my enemy?)

Here’s an application. Parents, teachers, and anyone around youth: Don’t jump right into the role of playing the talking head or the armchair detective. If your first conversation with a youth or around youth consists of you giving your political analysis or conspiracy theories, stop. Learn compassion. Don’t assume. Ask. Ask the youth around you:

How does this affect you?
What are your friends saying? What are your friends thinking?
What do you think about that?
Can I help you think through these issues?

Observation #2: Young people are likely to influence other young people.

This observation works both ways. Young people influence other young people for good; they also influence them for evil.

There are young people aspiring to be Charlie Kirk, and there are young people aspiring to be the person who killed him. You can’t choose the path for your children. You can protect it as best you can. There’s no guarantee there, but there is wisdom.

So parents, I beg you to realize something: There’s a technological black hole that relentlessly pulls on your children and on my children. There’s a digital world whose portal sits right at your children’s fingertips. It will desensitize them. It will transform them. It is a tree of knowledge that will kill them.

There is a lot of talk about guns in the hands of children. And God forbid that that form of destruction ever comes your way. But the phone you’ve placed in their hands is more likely to destroy them. Similarly, the computer that sits in their room, unfiltered and unmonitored. Don’t do that. For the sake of your house, don’t do that. For the sake of others’ houses, don’t do it. It’s your house! Take it away!

There is a lot of talk about guns in the hands of children. … The phone you’ve placed in their hands is more likely to destroy them.

Discord: What an appropriately named platform! As it turns out, despite the tagline, it’s not “all fun and games.”⁵ By the way, that warning against living in a digital world is for more than just youth. And the events of this past week have been a good reminder that you need a break from those things. Lose the phone for a bit, turn off the news for a bit, put your feet in the grass. Show that example to young ones—you, we, can exist offline.

Charlie Kirk died young, at the age of 31. But he was 18 when he founded his organization, Turning Point USA. The stated goal of that organization was to be a youth movement of three core ideas:

America is the greatest country.
The Constitution was the greatest political document.
Free enterprise was the best way to lift people out of poverty and create prosperity.

Turning Point, at the beginning, was going to have an economic focus and avoid social issues. But at some point along the way, Charlie Kirk had his own turning point—a spiritual turning point. Kirk grew; the mission evolved. And Kirk “spent the final years of his life telling young people, especially young men, to find Christ, get married and have children.”⁶

Not a bad message.

His most recent goals were clear. Number one: preach Jesus to a broken world. Those are his words. He called it the most important thing you can do. His second most important goal was to make sure we can do number one.⁷

[Kirk’s goals were] number one, preach Jesus to a broken world. Number two, make sure we can do number one.

Kirk’s stated goal, his holy focus, was number two—to sustain a society in which we are free to continue to preach Jesus to a broken world.

So I’d argue that the Charlie Kirk at 31 was a better version than the Charlie Kirk at 18. The policy-minded youth who saw Christianity as limiting began to see Christianity as freeing. In the Lord’s sovereignty, God has seen fitting, perhaps, that the best version of Charlie Kirk required life to stop at 31.

Kirk’s death is not to be celebrated in the sick way we’ve seen in the cesspools of media. But his death might be celebrated in this way—and I say this under the category of youth influencing youth: Do you know how many youth will be attending church somewhere this first Sunday after his assassination for the first time—or for the first time in a long time?

Have you seen the good side of social media? Thousands of posts have said “I’m not sure who Jesus is—I’m going to go to church Sunday to find out.”

For those who might struggle to see Kirk as a role model, consider the words of the apostle Paul:

What is the result? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is being proclaimed, and in this I rejoice. Yes, and I will continue to rejoice. (Philippians 1:8 NET)

A Parallel Worth Noting

Speaking of Christ, I want to make a parallel. And please understand that with this parallel, I’m not trying to make Charlie Kirk out to be Jesus. I’m trying to encourage you to use any opportunity this world affords to make you think about Jesus. So many people have talked about his life being cut short, a life that appeared to offer so much promise. Jesus, too, was killed in his 30s. It’s reasonable to think that the disciples of Jesus would have been that age or younger—possibly the age of someone like Iryna Zarutska (23).

Yes, a group that young can change the world. Don’t discount what’s taking place because of age. The Scripture warns us about despising people because of their age.⁸

In this idea of life cut short, of hope lost, I want to remind you of what we have encountered in our studies on the resurrection from the dead. Remember those travelers on the road to Emmaus? Remember the hopelessness felt by those two followers who said, “We were hoping that it was He [Jesus] who was going to redeem Israel,” but now He’s dead (Luke 24:21)? What we know is that Christ was moving in that moment, literally right beside them. And they didn’t know it.

Christ will move through this too.

Consider Stephen. If you want to read his story, see Acts 6, 7, and 8. Stephen—like Jesus and Charlie Kirk—was also killed in what appeared to be his spiritual prime. Everyone loved Stephen. And yet, the crowd bashed his head in with a rock because they didn’t like what he was saying. After his martyrdom, the Church scattered … and the Church grew. In his story, we’re given the Scriptural hope that lives cut short can spawn growth, can create life in ways that would not have otherwise been possible.

Observations about Public Speech

Jesus and Stephen were killed for what they said. Kirk, too, was killed for what he said.

Just minutes before his death, Charlie Kirk was telling the crowd of thousands at Utah Valley University that there is “pretty amazing evidence … intrabiblical … extrabiblical .. that Jesus Christ was a real person; He lived a perfect life; He was crucified, died, and rose on the third day, and He is Lord and God over all.”⁹

You might say, “Yeah, but that’s not what got him killed. It was his other types of speech that got him killed.” But let me remind you of a few things. What we do every Sunday, though on a smaller numerical scale, is very similar to what was being attempted on Wednesday, September 10 (the day Charlie Kirk was shot): Someone delivers a message, probably flawed, but in an attempt to urge others toward good. And we can disagree over what the good is and how well the messenger conveys it—or even how good the messenger himself is. (We welcome that at GraceLife.¹⁰) But the wisdom of the First Amendment touches on everything we do at church on a Sunday morning: the free exercise of religion, speech, writing, assembly, speaking out and against what we perceive to be grievances.

We have to stand united on such fronts. We have to defend against threats to the contrary, whether those come from the government or from individuals. And we must defend each other’s rights even when the religion, speech, writing, assembly, and grievances don’t align.

As an American, I support your right to say and write terrible things. As your pastor, can I encourage you not to?

Here are some tips on communicating well, especially in a season like this.

By the way, this is not a self-help sermon on how to talk; these ideas are rooted in Scripture. Consider Ephesians 4:29: “Let no unwholesome talk come from your mouths, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear.”

Tip #1: Strive to hear what others are saying.

Whether you like it or not, the heart of a lot of what Charlie Kirk did was this (and this is an exact quote from one of his talks): “Here’s my view, and I want to hear yours.”¹¹

In a world of talking heads, there’s a lot of one-way talk. Charlie made at least an invitation to dialogue. But someone who didn’t want to hear his view killed him.

Strive to hear what others are saying. That’s part of loving your neighbor as yourself.

Tip #2: Be careful of what you say, and be bold about what you say.

Here are some things to be careful about:

Stop using careless words. Fascist, racist, supremacist, Christian nationalist. Quit throwing those terms around. Stop calling people Hitler. It means something and it’s disrespectful to those who lost their lives because of Hitler’s intentionally perpetrated violence.
Stop qualifying terrible things. Stop saying “I’m sorry he’s dead, but …” Moral equivalence is of no value here.
Be careful how you talk about the problem. Understand Scripturally that we’re taught that the core of the problem is the human heart in need of redemption, in need of changing. That’s why there’s the Scriptural promise that we can be born again, created with a new heart, both spiritually speaking and (as I’ve said in recent sermons) physically speaking as well one day (when the entire self is redeemed).

Because the core problem is the human heart in need of a Savior, factors like weapons of choice and societal problems are merely accessories. It only took one generation of sin-infected humanity to reveal that. Cain didn’t need a gun to carry out murder against his brother Abel. He didn’t need political discourse to convince him to take a life. He didn’t need society to exist for thousands of years to reach this low point. That’s what happened with the First Family.

Because the core problem is the human heart in need of a Savior, factors like weapons of choice and societal problems are merely accessories.

Don’t attempt to curry favor by casting blame everywhere. It is okay to say, “This was wrong. I’m sorry it happened”—hard stop.

Tip #3: Stop spouting unverifiable facts.

We are to be a people about the truth. Here’s something scary. We don’t really know the truth of the matter. We know what the news tells us. We think we know what we see. Not all of us are capable of even processing that. We will continue to know even less perhaps in our new artificial intelligence (AI) existence.

Just look at social media. Consider the number of people fooled by stories created from AI. There were stories about a man standing next to Charlie Kirk before he was shot, giving hand signals, directing a shooter to shoot. That was his good friend, a Christian apologist who lives in our city and has been in our building before.¹²

Be vigilant.

Tip #4: Be bold in the truth.

Since we’re to be about the truth, I do urge you to be bold in the truth that we know. Be bold with the gospel.

Let me tell you a way in which Charlie Kirk preached this truth. It’s the way we preach it at GraceLife as well. He offered the good news of Jesus in these words. He would say, here is the gospel in …

4 words: Jesus took my place
3 words: Him for me
2 words: substitutionary atonement
1 word: grace

Regarding that one-word gospel presentation (“grace”), Charlie Kirk once said this:

Grace you cannot earn; grace you do not pay for. … You can’t earn it. Doesn’t matter if you’re a good person… have always done the best you can… because what’s different about Christianity is that it’s a gift for all of humanity to receive regardless of everything we have done. Your life will be transformed. You will be born again. Grace is not earned, it is given by a god who loves you and wants to spend eternity with you. It is the most important decision you can make in your life.¹³

You did not earn your way into this world. You won’t earn your way into the next one. And there are no guarantees of the time we each have here.

Comfort from the Scriptures

Following events like recent ones, there’s going to be a lot of talk (already is) about the nature of good and evil. What an opportunity. The human heart affected by sin might be evil. But we are not completely and totally depraved so as not to still seek some good.

Yes, I understand that the Scripture says there are none who do good. It’s talking about the class of humanity—there is no special class, no privileged class, that’s going to be saved because of simply who they are.

Most people, in their attempts to pursue the good, will think they are somehow going to earn their trip to the next life. They think they will do enough good works, spend money on the right things, or go to the right church, and that will contribute to their salvation. But none of that will earn your way to life with God in Heaven. The cross of Christ earned that. Spilled blood earned that. What work in this world will you do that you think is greater than the work of Christ on the cross? Nothing! If you are attempting to earn eternal life through works, cease striving. God offers eternal life freely as a gift. You simply trust Him for it. That’s His promise to you: I died for you. If you trust Me for that, you’ll live eternally in Heaven forever with Me.

If you are attempting to earn eternal life through works, cease striving. God offers eternal life freely as a gift.

Many will be trying to understand that truth of the gospel now. You, believer, have the power to help them understand it.

Believer, here’s a message for you. You never know how long you have. Take up the Scriptural advice: “Be careful how you walk, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:15–16). Those words were written by the apostle Paul 2,000 years ago. The days are still evil.

Be bold in the truth. Be bold in the gospel. Be bold in prayer. Pray for the Kirk family. Pray for the Zarutska family. Pray for the families involved in school shootings. In our prayer sessions for the victims this past week, I was reminded to pray also for the shooters. Pray for the people who witnessed the shootings. Pray for those people who did their best to respond in the best way they knew how. Pray for those whose efforts fell short of their desired outcome—people who had to go home and wash the blood of friends off their hands. Pray for first responders. Pray for Jerome Bell,¹⁴ whose task is to minister in chaplaincy to local police officers. It’s a hard job both for the officers and for those they minister to.

Be bold in prayer about your own heart. I didn’t like everything that came to mind when I saw the news of the days. I didn’t like everything I thought. I didn’t like the place it put me in.

God says we can approach His throne of grace with confidence.¹⁵ His love, His grace, is greater than our hearts. Approach Him honestly—praying something like, “Lord, here’s where I am. Here’s why I’m mad. Here’s what I don’t understand. Here’s how I’ve fallen short of the ways you’ve asked me to act and talk, the ways I was inactive when I should have been.”

In times like these, it’s easy to say, “Look at all the problems in the world!” The problem is right here, in our own hearts.

In times like these, it’s easy to say, “Look at all the problems in the world!” The problem is right here, in our own hearts.

We need comfort from the Scriptures.

Psalm 37 offers some healing words. It’s a psalm of David, and he begins by saying, “Do not fret because of evildoers.” The message of grace is this: David, at some point in his life, was himself an evildoer; he took advantage of a young woman, then saw to it that her husband was killed. That’s the raw reality of what we see in Scripture. But it’s a message to us of grace, because God will use the messiness of this world to speak to us, to teach us, to use us, to remind us that there is reason for hope.

Do not fret because of evildoers,
Be not envious toward wrongdoers.
For they will wither quickly like the grass
And fade like the green herb.
Trust in the Lord and do good;
Dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the Lord;
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord,
Trust also in Him, and He will do it.
He will bring forth your righteousness as the light
And your judgment as the noonday.

Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him;
Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way,
Because of the man who carries out wicked schemes.
Cease from anger and forsake wrath;
Do not fret; it leads only to evildoing.
For evildoers will be cut off,
But those who wait for the Lord, they will inherit the land.
Yet a little while and the wicked man will be no more;
And you will look carefully for his place and he will not be there.
But the humble will inherit the land
And will delight themselves in abundant prosperity.

The wicked plots against the righteous
And gnashes at him with his teeth.
The Lord laughs at him,
For He sees his day is coming.
The wicked have drawn the sword and bent their bow
To cast down the afflicted and the needy,
To slay those who are upright in conduct.
Their sword will enter their own heart,
And their bows will be broken.

Better is the little of the righteous
Than the abundance of many wicked.
For the arms of the wicked will be broken,
But the Lord sustains the righteous.
The Lord knows the days of the blameless,
And their inheritance will be forever.
They will not be ashamed in the time of evil,
And in the days of famine they will have abundance.
But the wicked will perish;
And the enemies of the Lord will be like the glory of the pastures,
They vanish—like smoke they vanish away.
The wicked borrows and does not pay back,
But the righteous is gracious and gives.
For those blessed by Him will inherit the land,
But those cursed by Him will be cut off.

The steps of a man are established by the Lord,
And He delights in his way.
When he falls, he will not be hurled headlong,
Because the Lord is the One who holds his hand.
I have been young and now I am old,
Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken
Or his descendants begging bread.
All day long he is gracious and lends,
And his descendants are a blessing.

Depart from evil and do good,
So you will abide forever.
For the Lord loves justice
And does not forsake His godly ones;
They are preserved forever,
But the descendants of the wicked will be cut off.
The righteous will inherit the land
And dwell in it forever.
The mouth of the righteous utters wisdom,
And his tongue speaks justice.
The law of his God is in his heart;
His steps do not slip.
The wicked spies upon the righteous
And seeks to kill him.
The Lord will not leave him in his hand
Or let him be condemned when he is judged.
Wait for the Lord and keep His way,
And He will exalt you to inherit the land;
When the wicked are cut off, you will see it.

I have seen a wicked, violent man
Spreading himself like a luxuriant tree in its native soil.
Then he passed away, and lo, he was no more;
I sought for him, but he could not be found.
Mark the blameless man, and behold the upright;
For the man of peace will have a posterity.
But transgressors will be altogether destroyed;
The posterity of the wicked will be cut off.
But the salvation of the righteous is from the Lord;
He is their strength in time of trouble.
The Lord helps them and delivers them;
He delivers them from the wicked and saves them,
Because they take refuge in Him. (Psalm 37:1–40)

Table of Contents

Introduction—an interruption

The Manifestation of Evil

Rewinding to a Worse National Moment

The Gospel Touches Politics

Observations about the Nature of Youth

Observation #1: The loss of life of young people is scary for other young people.

Observation #2: Young people are likely to influence other young people.

A Parallel Worth Noting

Observations about Public Speech

Tip #1: Strive to hear what others are saying.

Tip #2: Be careful of what you say, and be bold about what you say.

Tip #3: Stop spouting unverifiable facts.

Tip #4: Be bold in the truth.

Comfort from the Scriptures