Following the Greatest Fighter | On Fighting Good Fights, Part 2
One of the problems in the modern Church is that too many of its leaders have wanted to seem like polite civilians rather than faithful disciples. They have desired to keep their desks neat and tidy, do their homework on time, and above all, avoid getting told off by the teacher. They have lived as if that the worst thing imaginable would be to cause too much trouble.
As such, they have often downplayed or entirely ignored the fighting spirit that characterises Christianity. Wanting to do their utmost to avoid sounding like religious extremists, they have pretended that the greatest problem is the kind of Christian who might be prone to calling down fire from heaven to incinerate their opponents.
In reality, such leaders are actually far more dangerous in our day, for they risk not only eliminating the ‘saltiness’ from Scripture’s way of putting things, but in the long run, they risk mutating Christianity into something else altogether. Mild Christianity is no Christianity at all.
The Fight of Christ
Contrary to the modern dogmas of Mild Christianity™, Christianity has always been involved in a fight of one kind or another. Those who follow Christ do not follow him into retirement but into an active battle against the world, the flesh, and the Devil. They do this from the very moment their eyes are opened.
But wasn’t Christ’s mission about nicer things like grace, love, salvation, and peace? Of course. But that’s like saying World War II was not a fight against the Nazis but merely an exercise in loving our neighbours. True peace is a peace worth fighting for. As such, it is a peace that will attract enemies who wish to subvert it any way they can.
Christ’s mission was to advance the kingdom of God and reconcile us to the Father by crushing the serpent under his feet and conquering sin and death itself (cf. Rom 16:20; 1Cor. 15:55). He fought the serpent in the wilderness, on the road, in the temple, in the synagogue, in the marketplace, in the city. He fought him when he manifested through Herod, through his disciples, through his friends, through the Pharisees, through the Romans, and through the demons. Jesus shirked no fights. Nor should we. To be a Christian is to follow the greatest fighter who ever walked the earth into the greatest war the world has ever known.
How Does this Kingdom Fight?
The culmination of Jesus’ lifelong fight to conquer sin and death was, of course, the crucifixion. When the Roman Governor Pilate asked Jesus why the people of his own kingdom had delivered him up to be put to death, Jesus replied: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” (John 18:36).
These words are not an excuse to stop praying for God’s kingdom to come ‘on earth as it is in heaven’, of course, but they do mean we should not fight as the world fights. Jesus could have gone the way of all the other Jewish freedom fighters and insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the Roman yoke through violent revolution, all of which ended in failure and death. Jesus had a longer game in mind. Rome would eventually fall, but not before it first bowed the knee to Christ. His kingdom does things differently to Caesar’s.
What kind of fight are Christians in, then? If we’re not called to fight like the world, where does all of the Bible’s militaristic language take us?
It’s notable that Paul’s call to “fight the good fight of faith” is preceded by the call to flee the love of money, and to pursue “righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness” (1Tim. 6:12). So too the verse about demolishing strongholds and tearing down arguments, which is preceded by the caveat that “the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh” (2Cor. 10:4).
To be in this kingdom often means fighting for things which don’t always occur to the world to need fighting for, and fighting in ways it would never have occurred to the world to try.
The Old Enemy
Since we rely on divine power – the kind of power that still somehow led the most powerful human being ever to be humiliated on a cross – we know this fight is, at root, spiritual, and even cosmic. It’s a fight of faith, a fight against the sinful desires that war within us (1Pet. 2:11), dragging us into the wrong kinds of fights with one another (Jas. 4:1), and against the cosmic powers of sin and darkness (Eph. 6:12).
It's the fight that’s been raging from the very beginning, to combat the sin that crouched at Cain’s door (Gen. 4:7), threatening to ruin us all. This battle against sin is ultimately the fight to take God at his word, to worship no other gods before Him (Ex. 20:3). This is about more than merely believing that God “is there”; it’s about staking your whole life on Him and standing on His Word shamelessly, despite all the junk thrown at you for doing so.
But however much we should see our fight as ‘spiritual’, we mustn’t be tempted to escape the actual battlefields of our generation. Standing on God’s Word unapologetically today means living out the adventure of faith in the world. It takes place here and now, with real-time consequences embedded in the drama of this life. You can’t hide it all away in your heart. It may often be far more ‘public’ than you expected.
The Right Kind of Trouble
Those most keen to stay out of the wrong kind of trouble need to wake up to the fact that trouble cannot be avoided if they truly mean to follow Christ in a world that actively rejects Him. You can’t hide in self-protective isolation and pretend you’re being a good disciple because “at least I’m not like that crazy guy”.
If you follow the greatest fighter into the greatest fight, you must be prepared to stick your head up and take the kind of hits that we’re promised will come our way if we’re doing Christianity properly. Just make sure it’s the right kind of trouble.