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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.’
2Ti_2:3
I. Eyes fixed.—He turns neither to the right hand nor to the left. Through evil report and good report, in sunshine and in storm, in patient endurance and with earnest endeavour, he climbs the steep ascent which leads to Life, drawn onwards by the attraction of Him on Whom his faith and hope and love are fixed, the King in His beauty.
II. The hardness of which the Apostle speaks is not the petty chastisement which men may choose to inflict upon themselves, and imagine that so they are bearing the Cross of Christ. It is the hardness of actual war. Keep watch and ward over the thoughts, the words, the deeds, of every hour. Take up arms with all your heart and mind, and soul and strength, against the sin which most easily besets you; and soon you will find that your path is rough indeed, your struggle hard.
III. There are three marks by which you are to be known:—
(a) The bold confession of His Name before a world which loves Him not.
(b) Manly energy in the wars of the Lord.
(c) Faithful perseverance even to the end.
Illustration
‘We are called upon to “endure hardness,” to take our part in suffering hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ. The word for this duty is often used in classical writers of the fatigues, the burdens, and privations which are connected with military service; and these thoughts may be applied to the higher service of the King of kings. Christianity means to-day what it always did. There is ever a cross to carry, spiritual fatigues and privations to be borne, principles for which to contend, hardness to be endured.’
QUALITIES OF A GOOD SOLDIER
I. Loyalty to the Captain of our salvation.—Loyalty to the Church of which we are so justly proud; loyalty to the principles of our Church; loyalty to our baptismal or confirmation vows—this is right and good, but nothing will sustain our enthusiasm in the battle of life like loyalty to the Person of Jesus Christ. This word ‘loyalty’ involves several ideas.
(a) It involves absolute trust in our Leader and devotion to His Person. The Christian soldier does his work well in the exact degree of his devotion to Christ. This is the deep secret of a good warfare. Great leaders have ever had the power of calling forth the enthusiasm of their followers. Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon, and our own Wellington had this power. And ‘the love of Christ constraineth us.’ There is no power like the power of His Name to excite the enthusiasm of His people and to draw them on to battle and to victory.
(b) And loyalty to Christ involves the hatred of sin—the enemy of Christ, of goodness, of our souls. ‘Ye that love the Lord, hate evil.’ This knowledge that sin is disloyalty to our Master may often be the means of keeping us from it, as we struggle to be good soldiers of Jesus Christ.
II. Strict obedience to orders, although we may not at the time understand them.
III. A face, and never the back, turned to the enemy.
IV. A readiness to take whatever place be assigned to us in the battle without question.
V. A firm persuasion of the righteousness of the cause in which we are fighting.
—
Rev. Dr. Noyes.
Illustration‘The exhortation of the text is, no doubt, addressed in the first instance to one who was an officer in the Christian army; but its application is not restricted to those only who are “stewards of the mysteries of God.” The life of every Christian is from one aspect a warfare—a warrior’s history—a fact of which we should never lose sight. It is a thought before us very frequently in the Holy Scripture, and in the Offices of our Church. When the sign of the Cross was imprinted on our brow at Holy Baptism, it was in token that we should not hereafter be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, but manfully to fight under His banner against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant unto our life’s end.’
MILITARY LIFE
I. He is a man of discipline, who has taken, in the Roman phrase, a sacrament, or oath. He has chosen his side and has his Master. It is that which our dear Lord Himself praises in the first centurion of the Gospel (St. Matthew 8.). We Christians need that lesson very much. There are Christians who all their life long are wondering on which side they shall stand, and who are ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth. Let us pray our Captain, our Lord and Saviour, that we may not fall into the awful curse of those who deny Him, their Master.
II. The hardness, the endurance, of the military life.—That also is a lesson to us as a nation and a Church. In the nation there is a perilous seeking after softness, pleasure, satisfaction, ease, a longing to avoid what is hard; I speak not of luxury, I speak not of eating and drinking, of ‘lying soft and rolling swift’: those are mere specks upon the stream of our life. I speak of that general and widespread longing to avoid all that is unpleasant, to avoid the word that costs us or our neighbour pain, to avoid the manly course when we are in an awkward situation, to replace the Christian ideal of suffering and conflict by another ideal of mere release from bodily pain, of an earthly and passing peace of mind, of a health and bodily development which subjects all other interests to its own. The man who is trying to find a soft place in the world will never find one soft enough. It is from those given up to pleasure, and longing for what they call happiness, that we hear words which come near to rebellion against God Himself when they have met with one of the common troubles of life. They see endless losses in losses which are indeed real, but in which braver souls find encouragement. Fighting people find the world tolerable and joyful; it is those who recognise it as a battle who are optimists. The soft theory means a bitter heart, and the bold acceptance of God’s call to arms means a heart at peace, knowing peace under the banner of a King at war.
—
Rev. P. N. Waggett.
Illustration‘St. Paul loved soldiers, and owed much to them; and, seeing their frank and brave carriage, he says, This also is what the Christian is to be: let him be the good soldier of Christ, and keep himself from all entanglements of civil life, the ordinary affairs of this life, which he must use but not be used by, in order that he may give satisfaction to Him Who has chosen him to be, not His darling, but His soldier.’