A hundred years ago, Christian pastor and writer, J. C. Ryle wrote: "The saddest symptom about many so-called Christians is the utter absence of anything like conflict and fight in their Christianity. They eat, they drink, they dress, they work, they amuse themselves, they get money, they spend money, they go through a scanty round of formal religious services once or twice every week. But the great spiritual warfare—its watchings and strugglings, its agonies, its battles—of all this they appear to know nothing at all."
I suspect that this description of Christians rings as true in 2024 as in Ryle’s day—especially with the explosion of ubiquitous screens that demand nearly every waking moment of our attention. Yet, it’s hard to understand how any Christian can be so oblivious to spiritual warfare in view of texts like these:
- I Peter 2:1: Beloved, I urge you as foreigners and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts, which wage war against the soul.
- 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying arguments and all arrogance raised against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
- 2 Timothy 2:4: No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him.
- Ephesians 6:12: For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
In keeping with these texts, the words of Paul we’re considering are about fighting. This charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you, that by them you may WAGE THE GOOD WARFARE, (I Tim 1:18). This episode examines what it looks like to wage the good warfare.
As we continue our May series, Portrait of Effective Spiritual Leadership, we discover in 1 Timothy 1:18 that spiritual leaders are expected to FIGHT. But our enemy doesn’t wear a uniform and doesn’t meet us on a visible battlefield. He uses ruthless tactics like deceit, irresistible heart enticements, rationalization, and relentless character assassination of God. Nevertheless, all Christians, especially men, are called to engage our enemy and FIGHT. To do so, we need to fully understand the battle.
ADAM IS CREATED KING OF KINGDOM EARTH TO RULE AND PROTECT
1. Being created in God’s image, means that Adam is created to share the moral attributes of God, in fact to demonstrate them to creation. Adam is to exhibit the holiness of God, having the moral law of God written on his heart.
2. Being created in the image of the One who reigns over all things, Adam is given the kingdom, earth, to rule as king. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. To “subdue” meant to develop its potential, and shaping the culture that emerged as the population and diversification of labor grew. Genesi 2:14 restates Adam’s call to exercise dominion as cultivating the garden.
3. Genesis 2:14 also restates Adam’s dominion calling to include protecting the garden as a soldier. Adam is designed to be a warrior. Any objective observer notices that girls and boys play differently on the playground. Testosterone matters. Author John Eldredge, in Wild at Heart observes,
“Capes and swords, camouflage, bandannas, and six-shooters—these are the uniforms of boyhood. Little boys yearn to know they are powerful, they are dangerous, they are someone to be reckoned with. How many parents have tried in vain to prevent little Timmy from playing with guns? Give it up. If you do not supply a boy with weapons, he will make them with whatever materials are at hand. My boys chew their graham crackers into the shape of handguns at the breakfast table. Every stick or fallen branch is a spear, or better, a bazooka. Despite what many modern educators would say, this is not a psychological disturbance brought on by violent television or chemical imbalance. Aggression is part of the male design; we are hardwired for it.”
Adam and his sons were created to be warriors.
4. A final observation about Adam’s kingdom is that its highest value was supreme allegiance to the High King. The first and greatest commandments were about worshipping, loving, and serving God first, above all else.
ADAM JOINS SATAN’S REBELLION: SATAN, SIN, AND DEATH USURP EARTH’S THRONE RULING EARTH
The perfect shalom of Adam’s kingdom of righteousness had brought harmony in all four relationships of life—Adam’s relationship to God, to himself, to other humans, and to the physical earth. But that harmony is shattered. In a symmetry of justice, as Adam rebelled against his king, God caused the earth to rebel against Adam’s rule. Adam’s KINGDOM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, which had been perfectly aligned with the kingdom of heaven has now become the KINGDOM OF SELF. Supreme allegiance to God is replaced by supreme allegiance to self. In Augustine’s words, the City of God once ruled by love for GOD even to the point of contempt for SELF has become the City of Man, ruled by love for SELF even to the point of contempt for GOD. The kingdom of SELF is Satan’s kingdom of sin and darkness. Adam’s original kingdom of RIGHTEOUSNESS is the kingdom of light. As we will see in a moment, the Second Adam defeated the Kingdom of Darkness and now rules earth’s throne, from which he is restoring Kingdom Earth to righteousness, wholeness, which was Adam’s original call. So, “the good fight” is the battle over which kingdom will prevail over earth. For this reason, we need to know the consequences of the fall, to examine what broke when the kingdom of evil usurped Adam’s throne, because our battle is to undue that corruption through the power of the risen Christ. What broke?
1. Our desires are corrupted. Love for God, which is the only way to keep our desires aligned properly, is replaced by love of SELF. Sexual desire becomes selfish lust. The godly desire to please our creator becomes the selfish desire to please ourselves. Instead of worshipping God, we serve the idols that promise to meet our heart hungers for success, power, prestige, pleasure,and whatever else we are convinced will make us happy. The love of money prevails, as a root of all evil, because we think money lets us obtain whatever it is we want. If humans get in the way of what these idols promise will secure our happiness, we are filled with anger, envy, and hostility towards them. James asks rhetorically, What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. Wrong desires are the enemies to be taken down in the good fight.
2. Our thinking is corrupted. Scripture says:
- No longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart (Eph 4:18).
- There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death (Prov 14:12).
- For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth (Rom 1:18).
There is great emphasis in Scripture on correcting our thinking because ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims. So, not only wrong desires but wrong ideas are the enemies to be taken down in the good fight.
3. Our behavior is corrupted. A darkened understanding combines with corrupt inner desires to produce sinful actions: we step across the moral line to sin.
In the Romans 1 text we just read, Paul tracks this process of suppressing the truth through desires being corrupted, thinking being corrupted, and behavior being corrupted. Sinful behavior is both wrong attitudes and sinful actions. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (vs28-31). So, wrong attitudes and actions are the enemies to defeat in the good fight.
4. Our call to exercise dominion over the earth is corrupted. The ground is cursed, making Adam’s task of cultivating the garden possible only by sweat. Sin mars the process of building culture at every level. As sin invades the 4 relationships of life it corrupts aspects of every culture. Cornelius Plantinga explains:
"We are born into a world in which for centuries, sin has damaged the great interactive network of shalom—snapping or twisting the thousands of bonds that give particular beings integrity and that tie them to others. Corruption is thus a dynamic motif in the Christian understanding of sin: it is not so much a particular sin as the multiplying power of all sin to spoil a good creation and to breach its defense against invaders. We might describe corruption as spiritual AIDS—a systemic and progressive devastation of our spiritual immune system that eventually breaks down and opens the way for hordes of opportunistic sins" (Engaging God’s World).
There is a term for this evil corrupting force in the culture; it is the world.
- Romans 12:2: Do not be conformed to this world.
- I John 2:15-16: Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world
It is extremely important to understand that this world and today’s culture are NOT used synonymously in Scripture. Every culture has aspects that reflect the righteousness of God because man is made in God’s image with the moral law written on his heart. The biblcial concept of the world, from which Christians are to flee, refers NOT to culture but to the ungodly elements of the culture. This world refers to the wrong cultural values of our age, which Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:6-7 are doomed to pass away in contrast to the wisdom that God decreed before the ages. It is the combination of ungodly forces within the culture that Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:4 result from the fact that the god of this word has blinded the minds of unbelievers. The term world, then, refers to any culture’s values, perspective, and thinking—contributed by the sinful nature of humans (who are darkened in their understanding Eph 4:18). The culture and the lost are not the enemy. Nor are Christians called to separate from culture but from the evil forces within that culture, which the biblical writers call the world.
So, the ungodly values, perspective, and thinking within the culture are the enemies that are to be taken down in the good fight. Our normal method of seeking cultural transformation is prayer warfare combined with winsome influence, not a combattive attitude. We are the salt and light for Kingdom Earth, retarding corruption and exposing evil. However, in democracy, where Christians are to be good stewards of their right to particiapate in governing, political opposition to ungodly ideas that shape the culture is appropriate; but we must remember that the cultures' greatest need is the gospel, not a political victory, and that those in the LGBTQ+ life, as well as political Progressives are NOT the enemy, but held captive by the enemy, Satan.
REDEMPTION DOESN’T JUST FREE-FROM-SIN INDIVIDUALS BUT KINGDOM EARTH
Messiah Jesus accomplishes our redemption—purchasing us out of slavery to Satan, sin, and death with his shed blood. He gives a foretaste of the work he would accomplish at the cross by temporarily overthrowing each of these powers. Demons are cast out, Jesus demonstrates human righteousness, calling his followers to a righteousness of character that far exceeds the superficial works of the scribes and Pharisee’s. His power to restore the broken physical world is shown by healing lepers, the blind, the paralyzed, by silencing a howling storm and by raising humans from the dead. Jesus’ resurrection proves that the curse has been reversed. But the story doesn’t end with Jesus handing his followers a ticket to escape to heaven, thereby escaping a culture dominated by religious leaders who were so evil that they condemned to death the holy Son of God. Instead, Jesus appointed them to go and FIGHT for the Kingdom of Righteousness to prevail over the Kingdom of Darkness. Perhaps the best summary of what it means to fight the good fight is to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness (Matt 6:33). The gospel is not escape from the sinful world but transformation of this world.
THE GOOD FIGHT IS THE FIGHT TO RESTORE ADAM’S KINGDOM TO "RIGHTNESS"
The fourth chapter of the Gospel story is restoration. CS Lewis points to this truth in the Chronicles of Narnia. Aslan dies an excruciating death at the hands of the White Witch but comes alive. He explains to Lucy and Susan what it all meant:
It means, said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still that she did not know. If she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness before Time dawned, she would have read there, a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s place, the Table would crack and death itself would start working backwards" (The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.)
Restoration is about death working backwards throughout Adam’s fallen world to fix and restore everything broken by sin. Participating in this work of restoration is what we are saved FOR! Although our true homeland is the Kingdom of Christ and no earthly kingdom, Christians are not preoccupied with some kind of higher world. Christ came to restore Adam’s kingdom, Earth, which will be the dwelling place of God with his people for eternity. As we surrender to Christ’s lordship, our sanctification makes us more HUMAN (not otherworldly) Tom Howard reminds us,
“The Incarnation takes all that properly belongs to our humanity and delivers it back to us, redeemed. All of our inclinations and appetites and capabilities and yearnings and proclivities are purified and gathered up and glorified by Christ. He did not come to thin out human life; he came to set it free. All the dancing and feasting and processing and singing and building and sculpting and baking and merrymaking that belong to us, and that were stolen away into the service of false God’s are returned to us in the gospel.” (Evangelical is Not Enough).
BATTLEFIELDS OF THE GOOD FIGHT
1. Fight for the purity of our heart desires—to delight in God, and wrestle with selfish desires. Anger sometimes reveals our idols because it erupts over what keeps us from the idols we subtly think will make us happy. In contrast to trusting idols, God say's "trust me." Delight yourself in the Lord; And He will give you the desires of your heart (Ps 37:4)
2. Fight to transform our minds through the Word. God’s wisdom is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her (Prov 3:15).
3. Fight sin by resisting temptation. See James 1:13-15 and Proverbs 4:23, which give insight about protecting the heart.
4. Fight to implement Christ’s righteous agenda in your roles as husband, father, employee/employer, neighbor, church member, steward of resources, ambassador for the kingdom.
5. Fight for truth to prevail in our culture. Warren Cole Smith and John Stonestreet provide a useful lens for evaluating where to fight in our culture:
- What is good in our culture that we can promote, protect, and celebrate?
- What is missing in our culture that we can creatively contribute?
- What is evil in our culture that we can stop?
- What is broken in our culture that we can restore?
As believers have engaged culture, rather than retreating from it, here are some of their accomplishments (cited in their book, Restoring All Things).
- Not all help is helpful, and the Christian church has learned much that it is teaching the world about helping the poor.
- God is a worker, and we are created in His image. Therefore, our work, when rightly understood and engaged can bring good to the world.
- Christians have led the way in rescuing women and girls from prostitution and human trafficking.
- Throughout history, Christians have championed education.
- While society struggles with how to handle those convicted of serious crimes, Christians are leading the way in restoring them to our communities.
- Christians are once again offering the good gift of marriage as a healing institution to a sexually exhausted culture.
- Christians have proclaimed the dignity of all life by taking seriously the exhortation in James to care for orphans.
- God is a creator, and we are made to create too. For centuries, Christians led the way in the arts. Some modern Christians are leading the way again.
Let’s close by returning to Paul’s command to Timothy, which is literally, war the good war. The word war is STRATEUO from STRATUS—the word for an armed enemy camp. So, literally it means to make war on an encamped enemy. Satan has been defeated. He cannot stand against the risen Christ and our spiritual weapons. But he will remain encamped over the kingdom he once owned UNLESS WE MAKE WAR ON HIM. And so, Paul says to spiritual leaders everywhere FIGHT!
For Further Prayerful Thought:
- When seeking to understand what fighting the good fight means, why might it be valuable to recognize that we are engaged in a war between two kingdoms?
- How does understanding the extent of the damage done to Adam’s posterity and kingdom by sin and its consequences help us better understand how to implement our orders to FIGHT?
- In the 1) fight against wrong desires, thinking, attitudes, behaviors, 2) the fight to implement Christ’s agenda in every sphere of our lives, and 3) the fight to be salt and light, influencing culture towards righteousness and truth—which do you feel you are most alert to? Which do you need to consider more carefully?
