2 Timothy 4:7 “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

Don’t misunderstand Paul’s assertions here. He isn’t putting his confidence in himself or boasting about his virtues. He fought the good fight, and it was a fight. You know how he resisted Jesus as a young man. If ever there was an arrogant so-and-so, full of all the wrong kind of self-confidence, it was this same man Paul. Jesus finally had to knock him off his horse in a blaze of light and glory to get his attention, and to show him that in all his self-satisfaction with his own goodness he was just as evil as the most violent or sensuous sinner. “Chief of sinners” he learned to call himself. The fight ended with Paul becoming Jesus’ servant and taking the gospel’s battle for souls to others, fighting inch by inch to reclaim this world of sinners for the Savior who had died to save them all.

We are locked in a fight, a battle for our souls and the souls of others as well. We may share Paul’s weakness for a high opinion of ourselves that doesn’t have much use for a Savior. It’s no secret we Christians have developed a reputation for being a little too pleased with our own goodness. I can’t say the accusation lacks evidence. I think you understand how poisonous to faith such a high regard for self can be.

But there is a ditch on the other side of that road, too. We may be equally as drawn to scratching every itch and satisfying every craving, like the world around us that never met a perverted pleasure it didn’t like. Statistics regarding pornography, premarital sex, and drug and alcohol use make it hard to distinguish Christians from anyone else. These aren’t harmless pastimes. Peter says they wage war on our souls.

Thank God we don’t fight the good fight alone. At the beginning, we don’t fight it at all. Like he did for Paul, Jesus fights to make us his own. He breaks into our lives with his grace. He leads us to the cross where he strips us of our sin and dresses us in his righteousness. He woos and wins our hearts to his side in the struggle between good and evil, heaven and hell. Then he goes with us, he never sends us alone, to fight against temptation and contend to save others, too.   

The picture that follows is similar. “I have finished the race.” First a hard contest, a great struggle, and then a good end. But it all ends this way: “I have kept the faith.” Paul reached the end of his life knowing the truth about Jesus and continuing to trust in it. He not only reached the end, but at the end he still had all he needed to enter the life to come. May Jesus bring us in faith to the end of that race as well.