The Good Fight

   A few years ago, I inadvertently stirred up a hornet’s nest in a private Christian school classroom because I answered a student’s question about the Salem Witch Trials with prohibitions from the Bible.  When the girl firing questions at me protested that that was just my opinion, I calmly held my ground that, no, it was God's Word, which is true whether we believe it or not. To my dismay, the entire class erupted in my face.  In a gang-up such as I had never seen, they demanded that I concede that the Bible was “true just for me."  This I could not and would not do. After all, was I not in a Christian school?  Reeling in bewilderment and a deep sense of betrayal, I ran this heated discussion past another teacher who had taught there for many years.  He modeled for me how he would have handled it: he would indeed have said his piece and then said, “That’s just my opinion.”  I stared at him in disbelief.  In a matter of two years, I left the school.

Progressive Christianity that has caved to our meta-modern culture is clearly dysfunctional. The cavernous void of true thinking mislabels scriptural certainty as arrogance and conservative conviction as “virulence”—a criticism I came across just the other day in a Christian blog.  Whether anyone actually spread any microorganisms of disease in this discussion, I doubt.  But what an absurdity has numbed our minds!  And what is really almost amusing is watching the people who are fighting for tolerance sling insults at the people who merely expressed an informed opinion convincingly.    

The Apostle Paul's clarion call for Christians to “be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might” (Ephesians 6:10) includes the command to put on the whole armor of God—armor we examined in the previous post.  Each piece of armor not only symbolizes what we believe; it serves to define our foe. Deception and guile are the primary characteristics of our opponent, and it is no accident that the belt of truth is the very first piece of armor Paul names.  Truth is both our defense and our weapon against the tsunami of lies that will inundate the last days before Jesus comes.  This crescendo of evil the Scriptures make clear, bringing urgency to our preparation for battle. When Jeremiah cries out to God regarding the prosperity of the wicked, the Lord asks him this piercing question, “If you have run with the footmen, and they have wearied you, then how can you contend with horses?  And if in the land of peace, in which you trusted, they wearied you, then how will you do in the swelling of Jordan?” (Jeremiah 12:5).  Speaking of the destruction that is to come, Jesus asked, “For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?” (Luke 23:31).  Are we prepared? 

I should not have been surprised at the onslaught of relativity in my classroom that day.  I have since learned that, even in so-called Christian circles, the real surprise is to find genuine faith. An even greater surprise is to find that Christian who knows his or her Bible and who believes it from cover to cover.  A quaint minority in these days, such believers absolutely must heed Paul's call to Timothy to "fight the good fight of the faith" (I Timothy 6:12).  It is indeed a fight, and sometimes there are casualties. We may lose the approval of public opinion; we may lose those we thought were our friends; we may even lose close ties with family.  But better to lose even these than to lose our bearings and to begin believing the nonsense inundating us every day.

The most essential requirement of this battle is to stand.  With good reason, Paul urges the Christian “to stand against” (Ephesians 6:11), “to withstand in the evil day” (6:13), “having done all, to stand” (6:13), and to “stand therefore” (6:14).  Even when he changes the metaphor to show what we wrestle against, the command to stand still holds, for a strong stance is the most crucial thing a wrestler can have for both offense and defense if he would win his match.  The Apostle Paul also cautions, “Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (I Corinthians 10:12).

Jesus addresses the failure to stand when He describes the foolish man who builds his house upon the sand.  This foolish builder falls for the view, not taking into account the wiles of the sea.  But when the rains, floods, and winds beat upon this house, it falls, and great is its fall indeed.  But the humble cottage tucked high into the cleft of the rock withstands every storm. Nothing can shake its firm foundation, and, having done all to stand, it stands.

Is it any coincidence that there is only one letter’s difference between “sand” and “stand”—and that that letter is “t”?  The Cross makes all the difference between standing and falling. The wise man who hears the sayings of Jesus and does them (Matthew 7:24-27) takes up his cross. He lives for Jesus. He obeys Him in his personal life, not just once in a while when it's convenient but especially when it's not. He knows he will bear the reproach of doing so (Hebrews 13:13), but he would rather stand for Jesus than to fall for any other false claim to peace.

"Having done all to stand.  Stand therefore,” Paul says in holy redundancy.  How much is "all"?  Like the flexible iron framework of the Statue of Liberty, that little word "all" withstands more and more, even when it thinks it can't endure one more thing.  It grows like a piece of elastic; every time we stand, our "all" expands beyond where we thought it could stand before.  And the reward for enduring as a good soldier of Jesus Christ is to face yet another battle fiercer than the last.  Perhaps this sounds quite intimidating, but what is the alternative?

We must stand against the ever-drifting worldview of our culture if it is the very last thing we do.  We adorn the gospel with a winsome spirit but not because we are obsessed with being "relatable."  At the end of the day, it matters not a whit if anyone agrees with us. No one agreed with Noah--until the flood.  Courageously, sweetly, lovingly, we remain unyielding in our beliefs, and as Paul commanded Timothy, we do indeed “fight the good fight of the faith” (I Timothy 6:12) like a good soldier of Jesus Christ (II Timothy 2:3-4). As the prime example of a good soldier, Paul himself before his death could affirm without hesitation that he had “fought the good fight,” he had “finished the race,” and he had “kept the faith” (II Timothy 4:7).  And now we regard him as the greatest apostle the world has ever known.