Fight the Good Fight of Faith.

1Ti 6:11 But thou, O man of God, flee these things; and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness. 

1Ti 6:12 Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses.

Fight the good fight of faith.

Lay hold on eternal life.

We are FIGHTING in our spiritual life. At a recent Bible study we talked a little bit about spiritual fighting. If people who are Christ followers don’t realize that there is a spiritual fight they are engaged in then they have not read Gods word at all.

The struggles of a Christ follower are very real. The spiritual warfare is real. We don't have to see our attackers to be attacked. We don't have to see Satan to know he is real. Once more, it has to be said because people tend to forget-  if you believe in Jesus you have to believe in Satan.  Jesus did battle with Satan when He was tempted in the wilderness for forty days. And Satan didn't hide himself after that. Evil spirits were in the presence of Christ often in the form of possession of so many people. This was REAL then and it is REAL today. Satan did NOT disappear from our world when Christ died and rose again. Jesus even prayed this--

Joh 17:15  I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. 

Joh 17:16  They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. 

Jesus would have had NO reason to pray this way if there were no longer evil in our world. There IS evil in this world in so many ways. A lot of evil has been hidden by Satan in things we don't even want to imagine. So much evil is called good it's unrecognizable to us. The standard we have is God's word, God's truth.

We need to fight the good fight of faith, laying hold of eternal life. 

We need to fight.

The good fight of faith is a life devoted to living for our Savior in a world where Satan will do all he can to keep us from eternal life. God will keep us from evil as our Savior prayed for us to be kept from evil. Being kept from evil as long as we are Christ's! We are not to be taken out of this world. We are to be kept in this evil world but kept from evil - all through our Savior's love.

The fight is an everyday spiritual battle and if you think you can take a single day off and are going to be free of the attempt of evil to seduce you, to attack you, to ruin you eternally then you're wrong. We can never take a day off from this spiritual battle, never. We must pray DAILY. 

Jesus prayed this--  'Give us this day our DAILY bread.'  If, we weren't supposed to pray daily, then those words would not be necessary. Perhaps…give us our weekly bread, our yearly bread… would have been used, but that's not the case, that's not truth. We are to pray THIS DAY for our DAILY BREAD. In our DAILY prayer.  Daily protection, daily need for protection. As we fall under attack sometimes if we are allowed the discernment we will recognize the attack for what it is. Other times we get caught up in believing as the world does and things just go wrong because of worldly reasons, tangible reasons. We forget that behind so much that is tangible are evil forces manipulating them invisibly. They are REAL. Jesus battled with the invisible evil forces, we too must do battle with them and through our SAVIOR'S love, we will grab hold of the faith we need to fight.

All in HIM now and forever, our Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior. In His love, His grace, His mercy, His everlasting existence!