All murders are tragic and unconscionable, bringing grief and loss to loved ones, but some seem, beyond this, to signal a kind of inflection point in social life, especially when it comes to our ability to engage in public discourse on highly contentious topics. That’s the way many people, including myself, feel about the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Writing for the New York Times, David French expressed what seems to be a widespread sentiment

Who can feel safe? Where can they feel safe? Whatever you think of Kirk (I had many disagreements with him, and he with me), when he died he was doing exactly what we ask people to do on campus. . . .

Every threat, every assault, every shooting, every murder — and certainly every political assassination — builds the momentum of hate and fear.

When I heard that Charlie Kirk had been killed yesterday afternoon, I was preparing to go into a prayer meeting with my church family. The question in my heart was, “How can we pray in view of this tragedy?” Several passages of Scripture came to mind, which should not only inform our prayers, but also shape our thinking and actions 

Here are four petitions.

1. Pray for comfort for Charlie’s family and friends.

Psalm 34:18, “The Lord is near to the broken-hearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” The bullet that struck Charlie Kirk, and the assassin who fired it, turned a young wife into a grieving widow and two little ones into fatherless children.

They are heart broken, and we want the comfort of our God to be with them. In the words of Albert Mohler, “The political loss disappears into the mist in comparison to the unspeakable loss that is now experienced by his widow and young children, now fatherless.”

2. Pray for moral sanity and clarity.

The prophet Isaiah spoke into a culture darkened by moral confusion when he proclaimed, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20). I saw the similar moral inversion in comments on social media within minutes of the announcement about Charlie Kirk’s death. I was, of course, grateful to see many, who are ideologically opposed to Kirk, express indignation. However, many commenters, rather than condemning the act, insinuated—or even directly stated—that Kirk deserved it. 

The point is that it appears that many people increasingly fail to recognize that in a free and open society, we must be able to express and debate disagreements without resorting to, celebrating, or condoning violence. When reasoned speech itself is called “violence,” and violence called a reasonable response, we are headed for societal disintegration. We must pray that people would have the moral sense to call good good, and evil evil.

3. Pray for law and order in our country.

In a similar vein, we pray for the kind of law and order that can sustain the ongoing flourishing of American society. It is the God-given responsibility of a government to protect its citizens by punishing those who would harm it. The locus classicus for this teaching is found in Romans 13:3, in which the Apostle Paul writes that rulers should deter, by use of the “sword,” evil conduct. The government is to be “an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:4).

When publicly elected officials, who are responsible to uphold and enforce justice, buy into an ideology that states that the criminal is primarily a victim of society, we are well on our way to a more dangerous society. We must pray, as Scripture teaches us, “for all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”

4. Pray for courage.

Charlie Kirk was publicly outspoken not only about conservative values—including the sacredness of human life in the womb, the importance of the family, the inherent maleness and femaleness of every human being, the exclusivity of sexual activity between a man and woman in marriage—but also about the gospel. I don’t know everything Kirk believes; I do know that he clearly and forthrightly stated that a person must trust in Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Son of God, for one’s eternal salvation. He stressed that Jesus was full of both grace and truth, love and righteousness, that we cannot redefine Jesus to fit our cultural preferences, and that we need the intact Christ as he is described in the Bible. 

It’s hard, if not impossible, to separate the deadly violence inflicted against Kirk from the message he spoke, and therefore not ask ourselves the question, “Is this what’s coming to me, if I am as forthright as Kirk was about the gospel and Christian values?” The early Christians understood the danger of such intimidation, and didn’t want it to silence their witness. As the book of Acts records, after two of their leaders were threatened, they held a prayer meeting—not to ask that God would eliminate the threat, but that God would give them, in spite of the threat, the courage to speak the gospel (Acts 4:23-31).

Christians should hope and pray that the effect of Kirk’s death will be neither lawless rage nor cowardly silence, but courageous and loving declaration of the good news that Jesus is King.