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.
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“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.
“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.”
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“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.”
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Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2025 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.
