Fight the Good Fight

October 14th, 2025
by John Thweatt

This past Sunday I preached my last sermon from Paul’s first letter to Timothy. In the last chapter he said, “Fight the good fight of the faith.” The simple truth is this, true Christianity is a fight. 2 Timothy 2:3 says, “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.”

Far too often we find Christian soldiers fighting other Christian soldiers. JC Ryle said, “Wretched indeed is that man’s idea of religion who fancies that it consists in perpetual controversy.” He or she is never satisfied unless they are engaged in some strife between “church and church, chapel and chapel, sect and sect, faction and faction, party and party,” but he or she knows nothing about the true fight to which we are called.

Ryle is helpful here in his book Holiness.

We must fight the flesh. Our own flesh. I find most of my battle is with myself. It is the flesh that I must mortify.

We must fight the world. Friendship with the world is enmity with God and if we love it the love of God is not in us. We must be crucified to the world.

We must fight the devil. He roams like a lion seeking to devour. He is a murderer and a liar and seeks to deceive. We must fight him at every turn and refuse to give him even a foothold into our lives.

We will never be holy if we don’t fight. We must, by the Spirit’s power, overcome. Ryle said,

“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 of the great spiritual warfare—its watchings and strugglings, its agonies and anxieties, its battles and contests—of all this they appear to know nothing at all. Let us take care that this case is not our own.”

I’ve found that the battle is thought by thought and if I don’t fight it there, I lose the battle. The inner battle is necessary to be able to fight the outer battle. How? How do we fight that battle?

I must devote myself to prayer…seeking to abide in Him so that I pray without ceasing. That’s the goal, that is what we strive for, and that should the measure…not how long did I pray this morning, but how many hours minutes did I pray throughout the day.

I must delight in the Word. That means I read it, study it, memorize it, meditate on it, pray it, and obey it. When I do this along with prayer I find holiness becomes more and more visible.

When I fight the good fight, I have confidence even in death. At the end of Pilgrim’s Progress, we find Mr. Valiant-for-Truth coming to the end. Bunyan said,

“When the day arrived that he must go there, many accompanied him to the riverside, into which as he went he said, ‘Where, O death, is your sting?’ and as he went down deeper, he said, ‘Where, O death, is your victory?’ So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”

To understand Mr. Valiant-for-Truth’s death, we must understand his life. When he first appears, the pilgrims saw a man with his Sword draw and his face all bloody. He had just fought a battle with Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatic. When the battle started, he cried out to His King and His help was sufficient. That’s the secret…the sword of the Spirit, the empowerment of the Spirit, and “praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication.”