1. THE phrase, “the fight of faith” is found in 1Ti_6:12, “Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life.” The translation is an unfortunate one. The metaphor is not that of the battle but that of the ring. It is another example of the picture with which St. Paul makes us familiar, the picture of the wrestling or boxing match, with its strict conditions, its tense agony of struggle, its cloud of witnesses, its chaplet of reward to the victor (1Co_9:24; Php_3:12; 1Ti_4:10).
The expression in 2Ti_4:7, “I have fought the good fight” is an instructive parallel. The old saint’s mind goes back upon mental pictures dear in earlier days, and he sees again the struggling limbs and the swift feet of the Greek athletes. Life had long ago seemed to him to be vividly parabled by those scenes. In one great passage (1Co_9:24-27) he had developed the illustration in minute and powerful detail; the stern discipline of training, the strict rules, the rejection which must follow an infraction, the straight eager course of the runners, the terribly purposeful blows of the boxers, the wreath of leaves, “corruptible” shadow of the amaranthine crown of the victorious Christian. Again and again in other less conspicuous passages he had used those familiar and eloquent associations to animate himself and his disciples to live true to the Lord, true to present grace and to coming glory. Once more here, the athlete of Christ speaks the old dialect, but now with the accent of achievement and repose. He is so very near the end, so very much of the peculiar trial of his lot is for ever over, the “journeyings often,” “the care of all the churches” (2Co_11:26; 2Co_11:28), and so certain is his Master to love him and to uphold him over those few difficult paces before the end that he speaks as if already off the field. Christ Jesus had enabled him so long for such a life that it was a relatively minor thing (may we not dare to say it?) to be sure that He would enable him, with a glorious adequacy, for the one last step of death.
How often these farewell words have voiced the gratitude and courage, the calm and hope, of the saints of God, in the long course of the centuries, no tongue can tell; but assuredly no one in these later times had more authentic right to use them of himself than Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who repeated them as his last words at Mentone to his faithful secretary. It, too, was a pathetic scene. The worn warrior lays down his sword—a sword trusted in a thousand fights for God and right and truth, and says, “I have fought the good fight.” One can hardly read it without a choking at the throat; but at once we feel the great utterances are as true of our nineteenth-century Paul as they were of the Apostle of the first century. They describe the entire purpose and distinctive temper of his life, and indicate the exhaustless sources of his boldness and fortitude, energy and valour. They are true of him as a lad and a man, as a preacher and writer, as a worker and builder. He was intrinsically a Crusader of massive strength and sterling character, imperturbable fearlessness and irresistible dash. Like Browning, he “was ever a fighter.” The sword of the Lord was in his hands from his youth, and he attained to marvellous skill in the use of it. Sometimes, as with a battering-ram, he went against his foes, and overcame them. Verily he fought; he was always fighting, and his fight was a good one. [Note: J. Clifford, Typical Christian Leaders, 87.]
2. But even if the metaphor in 1Ti_6:12 were correctly reproduced, “fight the fight” is not idiomatic English. St. Paul’s expression is literally “agonize the agony.” Ellicott and Alford attempt to reproduce it with “strive the strife,” which is no better English than “fight the fight.” We must either accept, the Greek idiom or be content with a paraphrase, such as; “maintain the good contest of the faith.”
Weymouth’s translation is: “Exert all your strength in the honourable struggle for the Faith”; the Twentieth Century New Testament: “Run the great race of the Faith”; Moffatt: “Fight in the good fight of the faith”; Way: “Wrestle in the glorious struggle of the Faith.”
3. What is the meaning of “faith” in this place? In our modern speech we have come to use the word “faith” in two different senses. We describe by it that spirit of trust in God which is the key to salvation—the great principle informing and controlling genuine Christian life in all its stages. And this without doubt was the first meaning Of the word. But the word “faith” is also used to denote the body of doctrine accepted in common by the disciples of Jesus Christ—those dogmatic interpretations of the New Testament teaching which have been built up in part by intellectual methods. In this secondary signification the word is a synonym for religion and formulated religious beliefs.
The following clause is decisive for the first of those meanings: “lay hold on the life eternal.” Moreover “faith” here is obviously identified with the “good confession” borne “before many witnesses”; but the subject-matter of that confession is a personal experience, together with the gospel facts authenticated in that experience, and not a tradition. The faith for which he had to wage unresting warfare was a larger ramification of that which was the motive power of his conversion—a faith which united him not only to the Redeemer but also to the Redeemer’s work, and was to be continuous through the successive acts of his vocation.
God in His wisdom has seen fit to determine that this root principle of the spiritual life shall be proved, strained, and perfected, by much buffeting and contradiction. He who has come into the possession of faith and would keep it to the end finds himself a combatant, whether he desires the part or not. A continuous faith is incompatible with quiescent moods and an unruffled career. Faith, whether we think of it as a life implanted within ourselves and our fellow-disciples, as the secret and the earnest of a character to be achieved, and of a providential work to be fulfilled, or whether we think of it as the burden of a testimony we must bear to our contemporaries, thrusts us into fierce and perhaps daily struggle. It marks out for us, clear as the lines drawn on a military map, an area within which our inward and outward strife must be passionate, if we are to guard that which is even more sacred than hearth and home.
In its attitude, towards both the present and the future, faith is meant to be an intense, sustained, valiant, pauseless advance, a pressing forward in face of much that would keep us back, a pressing upward through the down-driving clouds. The spirit of trust to which we are summoned is not all soothing poetry, gracious sentiment, uninterrupted and speckless sunshine. The temper of the disciple is prevented from settling down into drowsy religious affability. Faith is a receptive faculty of the new life opening the nature to all the gifts of God; but it needs effort to maintain the receptive habit, and if the habit is lost, whilst we are in moods of spiritual exhaustion produced by ingratitude, discouragement, human provocation, the bounties bestowed without money and without price cannot be freely conveyed to others. Faith itself is a gift of incalculable preciousness, but a gift bestowed to stimulate and embolden the wide ranging activities of the after life.
Dante tells us that as soon as he essayed to climb the sunlit hill his way was challenged. It is a very ancient problem. The psalmist marvelled that, whilst the wicked around him enjoyed a most profound and unruffled tranquillity, his life was so full of perplexity and trouble. John Bunyan was arrested by the same inscrutable mystery. Why should he, in his pilgrim progress, be so storm-beaten and persecuted, whilst the people who abandoned themselves to folly enjoyed unbroken ease? Many a young and eager convert, fancying that the Christian life meant nothing but rapture, has been startled by the discovery of the beasts of prey awaiting him. [Note: F.W. Boreham, Faces in the Fire, 189.]
Shall I tell you about the battle
That was fought in the world today,
Where thousands went down like heroes
To death in the pitiless fray?
You may know some one of the wounded
And some of the fallen when
I tell you this wonderful battle
Was fought in the hearts of men.
Not with the sounding of trumpets
Nor clashing of sabres drawn,
But silent as twilight in autumn,
All day the fight went on.
And over against temptation
A mother’s prayers were cast
That had come by silent marches
From the lullaby land of the past.
And over the field of battle
The force of ambition went,
Driving before it, like arrows,
The children of sweet content.
And memories odd and olden
Came up through the dust of years,
And hopes that were glad and golden
Were met by a host of fears.
And the hearts grew worn and weary,
And said, “Oh, can it be
That I am worth the struggle
You are making today for me?”
For the heart itself was the trophy
And prize of this wavering fight!
And tell me, O gentle reader,
Who camps on the field tonight?
4. Faith in God is the highest condition on earth of a human being. If faith in God is a reality, the realization of that faith is the highest conceivable state of men. Row then is faith in God realized? In two ways—by growth in the knowledge of God and by fellowship with God.
(1) Now when faith unites me with God, there are two sources of growth: first, the natural effect upon my own mind of contemplating that which is infinitely higher than myself. By striving to know One who is too great for me ever to know perfectly, but whom I am invited and encouraged to know by the conscious progress I make in this knowledge, my faculties are in the condition of a constant and healthy strain, and necessarily expand. The second source of growth is not so easily defined, but, as a fact, it is equally distinct; there is the positive help communicated by the greater mind to the lesser. St. Paul expresses this truth perfectly: “The same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him” (Rom_10:12). That is, if any man, be he Jew or Gentile, place himself by meditation and prayer under the sympathetic notice of the Divine presence, there will flow out to him immeasurable streams of sympathy, of love, and of revelation that shall act upon his strained faculties and upon his growth as a flood at the roots of a parched tree.
(2) Again, faith in God means friendship with God; and, whatever be the desirable aspects of human friendships, whether they take their origin in family life from the parent and the maturer offspring, or from the elder and the younger brother; or whether the affinities of taste, likeness, or pursuit, draw two minds together, the purest conditions and the noblest features of human intercourse are comprehended in indefinite capacity in our communion with the heavenly Father. If it be said that the idea of the Supreme Being is too vague from its vastness and its want of representation to awaken friendship in the worshipper, we reply that sympathy, trust, and love may flourish in a fellowship in which one of the parties is scarcely able to know anything of the other; as in the case of a young child whose affections thrive upon the simplest impressions and the mere touch of contact. But even supposing this objection could be made good as an abstract truth, it falls to the ground in the incarnation of Christianity, where the mystery of godliness is not in its obscurity but in its revelation: “manifested in the flesh” (1Ti_3:16, RV). In Jesus Christ we love God when we love man; in the Maker of all men we behold the Brother of all men: and with the reverence, the trust, and the obedience inspired by the Godhead, we have the physical sympathy, the mutual suffering, and the common destiny which are the cords by which one man is drawn to another. Our friendship with God through Christ is not merely friendship with God, but is the model and inspiration of the entire circle of human relationships, without their frailties and their limitations. “Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mat_12:50).
