“Wage the good warfare” (part 2)

WHAT IS THIS “GOOD WARFARE”? (1 Tm 1:18, part 3)

What is the “good warfare”? To what can we compare it?

Across thousands of years, leaders and countries have made great, heroic, sometimes ludicrous efforts to make their conflicts appear just. In the American Civil War, both sides prayed to the same God for victory in arms. Even the Nazis tipped their hats to this principle, going so far as to stage a phony attack on a radio tower in a border city as the “justification” to start a ground war in Europe.

We need to be on guard, though, lest the cynical acts of others make us cynical as well. History does provide examples of struggles against tyranny, battles to liberate oppressed peoples and endangered communities, conflicts begun with dubious motives but the end of which occasions much good. Much of the best Christian teaching recognizes the principle of “just war” engaged in righteously and rightly, if reluctantly.

This is not even to mention moral campaigns such as the “war on poverty”, “war on drugs”, “war on terror”, the civil rights struggle and the battles against ills such as illiteracy and obesity.

Struggle, it turns out, is a normal, even necessary, part of life. It is with struggle and strain that we are born into the world and see our first light of day. Too-easy deliverance from struggle can even be harmful, such as for the animal who is helped to break out of its egg, and whose ability to fight to survive is compromised thereby. And some of our nouns representing the most noble traits and qualities were themselves born in struggle: hero. Duty. Valor. Virtue.

In annals, story, and song ... in sources as disparate as Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and “The Ballad of Private Rodger Young”, it is not the one who has nothing to live for or who knows no fear, but the one who has his or her whole life ahead and future at stake, who may feel that he or she has every good reason to flee the battle and turn their back on the fray, yet who is drawn or driven on by something higher, deeper, more important than one’s own existence, who is valorous.

What Paul is speaking to here is the passion of the quest. Paul recognized it in Timothy, saw a reflection of his own “upward calling”, that prize to which all else was subordinate, the struggle of most supreme importance that claims even one’s life.

The question for each of us, daily, is: have I given myself fully to the quest? Am I waging the good warfare?


Lord, remembering that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, nor riches to the wise, let my life’s energies be bent with all my strength to the quest and struggle for Your Kingdom. Let whatever lack there is in my swiftness, or strength, or resources be supplied by Your goodness. Let my heart’s cry be for that which is most important to You. In Christ, Amen.



Romulus, Michigan (DTW)