Feature
By Ron Kirk, 9-23-25
Publisher’s note: My longtime friend, evangelist, theologian, minister, educator and deep thinker Ron Kirk has opened my mind much in the past. Here, he writes his thoughts inspired by the Charlie Kirk memorial. Most will find his prose dense, but it is worth it to plough through, like cracking a tough lobster shell to get to the sweet meat underneath.
Given the present moment, I feel this may be the most important single thing I have ever written.
Watching the Charlie Kirk memorial service aroused my spirit over something I think many will have missed, and it is distressing.
On the positive side, the centrality of Christ and the need of redemption and Christ’s power of life came across loud and clear. Likewise, the message that the body of Christ must seek first His kingdom and His righteousness (which also always means justice toward others in the original languages).
Missing was the proverbial gap between theory and practice, between faith and kingdom action, its power, purpose and direction. How specifically does the one inform and empower the other? Charlie’s remembrancers did not seem to have an answer. Some emphasized the Gospel, other emphasized Action. No one seemed to bridge the gap.
It took 1600 years for Christianity to figure out civil self-government, the pattern God gave to Moses through his father-in-law as described in Deuteronomy One. God Providentially also through our American forefathers left a legacy of how systematically to apply Biblical principles to every area of relational government and economy—these together comprehensive of all human life. These principles serve from the personal to international and everything in between. Verna Hall re-discovered these recurring principles when she began to inquire how America had begun to go so wrong. RJ Rushdoony supplied the theological underpinnings of this Providence.
Together, these two legacies inspired my determination to bridge that gap in child education. The results were astounding. Those results have kept me at this work for over five decades, though general success at propagating the resulting system of thought and practice has eluded me. I’m no brilliant Charlie Kirk, just a stubborn yeoman, blue collar worker. Why persist so? Consistent anecdotal evidence demonstrates the power of this Biblical system of thought in the hands even of the most humble people, especially them, because the humble are willing to walk by faith.
I have found it impossible successfully to transmit in a sound bite the significance of this system I call Get Wisdom!, which in turn is based in the Principle Approach®. Nonetheless, here are the basics:
The equal ultimacy of the One and the Many. Neither the individual nor the covenant community are more important, but we must max out the importance of both simultaneously. Encourage rugged individualism, AND the sacredness of the community. Plato and Aristotle got this wrong, and those who look to Classical philosophy rather than the exemplar in the Holy Trinity completely miss the boat. Maintain the both/and, regardless of the apparently hopeless logical tension. Without a tenacious holding to this principle, we will never see America restored, nor any nation reach its potential.
Man’s wholeness, the capacity to accommodate God’s Spirit depends on constant relationship with Christ. It always has since Adam.
Adam fatally damaged that capacity when he failed to avail himself of God in his moral crisis. Ever since, God’s has worked to restore Relationship with Him first through external disciplines, such as the difficult economy of this world to force men to work together. Then He provided the ultimate relational solution in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To restore relationship with God and among men, with resulting economic blessings, is the fundamental movement of history. This is the importance of America, where we see the highest expressions in history, however flawed and fledgling. It is about God and His Providence, not about us.
Restoring this heritage, if we will awake to it, is Charlie Kirk’s real legacy, and it ought to be our singular purpose. In it, we will bridge the gap between evangelical salvation and its fruit in rebuilding Christ’s kingdom work—His will done on earth as it is in heaven.
By what mechanism do we restore the ultimacy of the holy individual and the covenant community? Again, the early American Christian legacy left a bread crumb trail for us…
Always remember the centrality of Christ and His glory. If we deny Him in practice, He will deny us. Yesterday’s memorial was encouraging in this vein. Only in the Name of Jesus Christ will we succeed.
God’s way is anti-authoritarian. Sinful men love to lord it over one another. God’s way is self-government. Self-government and its concordant liberty require self-restraint against selfish sin. Only the power of God’s Spirit can enable this. Why is self-restraint important? Selfishness produces presumption. Presumption produces push-back. Everyone pushing back destroys liberty. Liberty can only exist with self-government by the power of the Spirit.
Self-government requires a sturdy framework—character. Character results from doing, overcoming difficulty by faith. Mere enjoyment of Evangelical salvation by itself does nothing to produce character. Apostle Paul says in Romans 5, we have hope! We also have trials! Trials produce perseverance, perseverance produces proven character, and character produces hope! Without character, circumstances blow us about with every wind of easy-out doctrine.
These first three Biblical principles—individuality, self-government, and character—are the personal ones. Others are outworking principles.
The first of the outworkers is stewardship. Stewardship means protecting your resources while you judiciously use them for the sake of Christ. A steward was originally a sty ward—keeper of the pigsty on behalf of the master. God’s first commandment included taking dominion over the earth—economic investment. Everything in life is a stewardship—home economics, business, one’s civil community, time, conscience. Why are economic things important? They supply provision for Christian work AND its reward, God’s down-payment gift on eternity. America, more than any other country has enjoyed this gift, though we Christians have largely abandoned our responsibility. Where are the great contemporary Christian musicians, writers, lawyers, educators, farmers, and scientists. They seem all too few and the few carry the water for the rest of us. This is why we popularly desire and exalt heroes like Charlie Kirk, though we ought not, because we all ought to be such heroes in our given sphere.
The next outworking principle is centrally important and expansive. It is the principle of appropriate expression. Essentially, every expression of the work of man must either self-consciously comport with godliness or defy it and tend to undermine godliness. Just so, man’s job is to redeem every subject and endeavor, taking it to Christ, every thought, Apostle Paul says. Mere sinful inertia will tend toward decadent expressions and resultant institutions. A great example is materialistic behavioral psychology almost universally displacing the Biblical view of man in Christian institutions. Prove me wrong. What form of worship best accomplishes the job of glorifying God. Is it a rock and roll concert? How about clothing? Entertainment? Verna Hall identified numbers of additional sub-principles under this heading to describe Biblical relational government, including in the civil sphere. These briefly are local self-government, limited authority, relational representation, sphere authority—as in federalism, and expressed covenantal basis for association—as in constitutionalism.
The sixth principle is also demanding of Christian attention, and should go without saying, but it can’t. Discipleship is fundamental to the Christian faith. The organized church’s job is to make mature disciples of Christ capable of reproducing and doing the ministry as the organic body of Christ by its individual members. Instead, the church insists on doing the ministry itself, while typically denying the members the rigorous education the Word of God requires. Every church ought to be a university. Briefly, reproduction requires two elements: Content and good soil. The Word is the Seed—raw material—and must go into receptive soil—the human heart—where it becomes a full expression of the raw material. In other words, the Bible is not the end in itself, but its great themes must enter the mind and heart, and rule in the life it possesses. Then it reproduces itself some thirty, some sixty, some a hundredfold. With the Bible as content, godly peripheral content produced by God’s people in literature, science, the arts, industry—every endeavor—supplies the rest of the content need, a holy heritage we must not forget. The Christian must become discerning of what specific views in every area of life and what expressions most glorify God and produce the kingdom relational and economic results He intends.
Additionally, building on the shoulders of giants in this work, I find two other critical, complementary principles. One is the place of Law. Apostle Paul says the Law is for the Lawless, corrective. That means in the child, for example, whose original law is selfish sinfulness, and so needs a tutor. In adults, the Law serves when relationship—again, the real goal—fails. Thus, we Christians must rid ourselves of regulatory and institutional practices as first resort rather than as corrective measures, and then replace them with relational thinking and practice if we will ever once more see the Faith of Christ as mainstream, our millennial vision.
The last is principle epistemological self-awareness to use Rushdoony’s term. We must know how and why we can have, as believers, sure knowledge both evangelical and applied. Simply we know a tree by its fruit. Since all knowledge comes by analogy—comparison and contrast, as Cornelius Van Til observed—all knowledge and argument are circular until pinned down by a faith-based starting place. Knowledge is always an approximation of some reality, and merely subjective unless grounded in the knowledge of God. Sure knowledge for humans, as Scripture declares, is as close an approximation as makes it work for the purpose. The Holy Spirit makes up what lacks in our limited ability and corrects us as needed. Absolute, materialistic science is a lie, though those who hold to it deny or hide their presuppositions. Biblical theology was once known as the Queen of the Sciences, and the origin of all other sound science including modern natural science.
I cannot possibly suggest the immense ramifications of this brief explanation, but I know it deeply—Biblically, historically, and in personal experience. If anyone will invest in learning these principles unto practicality, the ability to live in them, they will have the power of Christ to do whatever the Lord gives as gifting and purpose, regardless of a humble starting place.
Please catch on, invest in learning how to apply the Bible, and then help our leaders bridge the gap between theory and faith on one side, and faithful practice and real fruit on the other. Let us ordinary people become Christian heroes again. Https://getwisdom.us.
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About the author
Ron Kirk, ordained minister of the Gospel since 1984, offers over forty years experience in historic, applied-Biblical-faith Christian education. This is broad and deep education toward mastery of subjects, real skills, and Biblical wisdom.
Ron founded schools, developed curriculum, trained teachers and taught the school subjects in all grades. His peers and those he has served endorse him. Eighteen local, national and international Christian leaders endorsed Ron’s book Thy Will Be Done: When All Nations Call God blessed.
