“This command I entrust to you, Timothy, my son, in accordance with the prophecies previously made concerning you, that by them you fight the good fight…” 1Timothy 1:18
There’s always something fascinating and important about every line of Scripture and here we have no exception. In fact, we have one of the great and rare gems of all the Bible.
Note the duality of address. Paul is both Timothy’s commanding officer and his father; he’s the general and yet he’s family too. Have you thought of how this effects you personally? You may never have served a day in your country’s military but you are, as the saying goes, in the Lord’s army. You’re in His church, Christian. No matter where you are in life, no matter your station, you are entrusted with the gospel of Christ and you can not, may not, and will not (John 10:28) renounce your commission. As soon as you come to the Lord in faith, repenting of your sin, He loves you so much as to draft you into His holy and world altering service. The Great Commission is yours and mine (Matthew 28:18-20).
Paul’s command to Timothy is also his entreaty to his son in the faith. Likewise, God is both our heavenly Father and our Commander in Chief; Jesus Christ calls us friends and yet He’s the First and the Last; He is humble and meek and our royal King. We cry out, “Abba, Father” and also, rightly, we bend our knee in prayer and say, “My Master and Almighty Lord.” We have no other but Him in terms of ultimacy and yet we have pastors, leaders, elders, deacons, and other earthly authorities through which He nourishes and changes us. We aren’t saved to stay as we are, playing cheap with this amazing grace, to dilly-dally in sin, to wallow in meager things. On the contrary, we press forward in the fullness of the hope of His glory in all that love that’s been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. At the right time, Christ died for us! There are no half-measures or sloppy soldiering for the one who knows his King and Commander is also his loving Savior.
Someday we will see Him as He is and someday all things will be as they were meant to be. Until then we labor in these earthly tents, learning and loving and growing in our fields all for His glory.
For this reason there is no useless Christian. Every Christian is in His army. Every single Christian is also in His family too. Do you know what this means? That all work is Christian work. A man who labors in a store, or a doctor, a cashier, a ballplayer, a police officer, a mother, a student…all are in the Lord. And all are called to fight the good fight. And that fight is fought with sound doctrine in true love. Your labor, no matter what it is, is in the Lord so long as you prayerfully submit it to Him (Colossians 3:23).
Interestingly, we don’t know exactly what the prophecy was of which Paul refers in this verse. If it was important we would’ve been told. Therefore, the emphasis is obviously upon the glorification of the gospel of Christ through the sanctification of His church of which Timothy is a leader. The general gives his orders to the senior officers and those officers train up and prepare the troops. That’s why, in common grace, the average Christian admires the military because in it he/she can see that it’s a type of His church. Paul says in 2 Timothy 2:4 that soldiers don’t get involved in civilian affairs. Jesus extols the faith of the Roman centurion. It’s a major theme in Scripture. Abraham was a leader of 318 mighty men who rescued his nephew Lot during the world war of the eastern kings in Genesis. Moses and Joshua were types of generals. This is why the call to military service resonates within a Christian heart. In Christ we have a deep desire for the righteous authoritative order of God’s true church. We yearn for His order, not our own.
The military’s mission is to protect its citizens by killing the enemy and destroying his means of making war. This is the context through which we’re to understand the charge to “fight the good fight.” It’s war, pure and simple, and we shouldn’t shy away from that knowledge. We shouldn’t be embarrassed by the truculence of acknowledging that Christian life is all out warfare.
Ah…but with whom? With what? For what?
This gets confusing if we forget we’re in the army of the Lord. It’s not our army. It’s His. The battle isn’t decided by the man who’s drafted into service. It’s a war he is called to fight. In this case, the war is between God and Satan. Donald Grey Barnhouse called it the Invisible War. It’s a cosmic war of authority and righteousness – God’s holiness and truth over against Satan’s lies. A soldier doesn’t decide who to fight and what the objectives are in each battle. So it is with the Christian.
This means that there can be a bad fight of faith, right? So, how do we know if we’re fighting the bad fight of faith? Here’s a few things that will help all of us.
First, the knowledge that the fight is the Lord’s. The victory is the Lord’s. And the glory is the Lord’s. The preoccupation with self is antithetical to Christian living and service. When we seek first His glory and will, all the “other things” will be added to us (Matthew 6:33). Thus, the we seek to do the work and will of God in all things. What is that? Well, what does the Scripture say (Romans 4:3)? “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent (John 6:29).” The goal is to bring about the “obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5; 16:26) and “the faith” is in the Person and work of Jesus Christ.
See? That’s simple, but not easy.
We earlier read that we should avoid vain arguments and controversy. How often does that happen in churches! An effective soldier for Christ is one who doesn’t get caught up in useless skirmishes and that’s any battle that doesn’t bring glory to Jesus Christ through the ministration of talents to His glory or the preaching and teaching of His word/law. In other words, we pick our battles according to the principles of sound doctrine. A quarrelsome person is someone who’s always itching for the drama and rush of conflict. But again, the question is always one of focus. The command to live peaceably with everyone, so long as it depends on us has this in mind. We’re called to compete with each other in one way: to outdo one another in showing honor!
This will help us avoid friendly fire. The bad fight of faith finds washing the feet of others as contemptuous stuff, not the true heart of sound doctrine. In all rectitude, sound doctrine is based on Christ and Christ washed the feet of those who hours later in Gethsemane failed him.
In the first Persian Gulf War the U.S. military did more damage to themselves than the Iraqi army did to it. Unfortunately, this is usually the case with the Christian church too. We spend time talking about persecution but, in point of fact, the vast majority of our turmoil these days, and throughout church history, has been because of childish dramas in our midst. We do away with this petty and destructive nonsense when we remember that the church is the Lord’s and that all of us have been saved…even the Christians whose personalities we find, well, difficult. We aren’t called to equally like every single Christian but we are called to love them! And that means that the Holy Spirit will show us the humility to see others as forgiven saints…just as we are. Christians are rooting for each other. Christians are the best team members because they aren’t fault-finders because they know, deeply and intimately, that if the Lord went on a fact-finding mission in their life, and spread out their failures in front of others, that they’d be utterly devastated.
Notice this pattern. When Paul talks about contending for the faith, and fighting the good fight, he made sure to first point out his own personal – and desperate – need of grace. He does it frequently. In the third chapter of Titus we get the same pattern. The point is that no Christian can fight the good fight absent the fundamental realization that he/she is a winner in that fight only because of grace.
We build the church upon the rock of confession that Jesus Christ is Lord and that confession means that He picks our battles. We fight for Him, not ourselves. Notice in the book of Acts how Apollos was “corrected” by Aquila and Priscilla. They listened to him teach and detected that he was unaware of the full treasure of the gospel they’d been given. Apollos was both eloquent and fervent in spirit. He was competent in the Scriptures too! Oh, what a thing to be said about you! But they took him discreetly, and in humble joy, and explained the way of the Lord more fully to him (Acts 18:24-26). In Christian life we aren’t wearing uniforms that denote our rank, so things can get sloppy in a hurry if we aren’t all pulling in the same direction. Notice that there wasn’t selfish ambition involved. Apollos was well known and gifted with oratorical skill whereas Priscilla (a woman!!) and Aquila went to simply build him up. Humble thankfulness is the mark of Christian life. Note also the constant emphasis in Acts upon reasoning and debating. If there’s wrath or slander, the church would simply move on.
The main point of our war is then, be sure, the supremacy of God’s supernatural revelation, His word. And that word tells us of our ruin in sin and pride and the free gift of grace in Christ alone. This is the battle line. There is no other. Man doesn’t come to Christ because he insists that he’s not dead in his sin. To maintain the lie he suppresses and maligns God’s revelation. The battle is: is it man’s word/law or God’s? Van Til said that the natural man must be blasted out of his hideouts, his caves, his last lurking places. Neither Roman Catholicism nor Arminian methodologies have the flame throwers with which to reach him.
So, go forth, Christian. Fight the good fight with sound doctrine and the true love it produces.
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