The Christian Warfare

Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. 2 TIMOTHY 2:3

Spurgeon preached free grace so often and so gladly that some of his critics accused him of making holiness optional. They had not read him carefully. The same man who told the ungodly that God justifies the ungodly told the justified that they were now at war — with the world, with the devil, and above all with the sin that still lived in their own hearts. He saw no tension between the two messages. The grace that forgives is the grace that enlists.

Pardoned and purified

In All of Grace, after several chapters on justification, Spurgeon stops to speak to a particular kind of reader: the person who understands that Christ forgives sin, but whose trouble is that he keeps on sinning. Such a person feels, he says, as if he had a den of wild beasts within him. He has tried to tame them, and they will not be tamed.

Spurgeon’s first word to him is that salvation would be a sadly incomplete affair if it did not deal with this. “Justification without sanctification would not be salvation at all.” It would call the leper clean and leave him to die of his disease. It would pardon the rebel and let him go on as an enemy of the king.

And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins. MATTHEW 1:21

He puts the whole of salvation in one sentence. The Lord Jesus came, he says, “to remove the penalty of sin, the power of sin, and, at last, the presence of sin.” The penalty is removed at once, when we believe. The power of sin may be broken at once too, and its grip begins to loosen from that day. The presence of sin is removed only at the end, when we see Him. The Christian lives between the second and the third, and that is why his life is a war.

A new heart, not a cleaner old one

How is the power of sin broken? Not, Spurgeon says, by resolutions. A man might as well try to hold the north wind in his hand as to tame his fallen nature by his own strength. What is needed is a new nature, and that is what God promises.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. EZEKIEL 36:26

He borrows a homely illustration from Rowland Hill. A cat washes itself because it is a cat; a pig wallows because it is a pig. You may scrub a pig, but it will head straight back to the mud. The only way to make a pig wash itself is to turn it into a cat. So it is with the sinner. Reform alone does not last; God must give a new nature, and then what was impossible becomes natural.

This is the great hope of the Christian in his warfare. He does not fight to become a new creature. He fights because he already is one, and the old nature within him no longer rules, though it still rebels.

No kid gloves

When Spurgeon turned to the believer’s war with sin, his language grew fierce. In a passage gathered in Gleanings Among the Sheaves he tells the Christian never to take hold of sin “except with a gauntlet on thy hand; never go to it with the kid-glove of friendship.” Whether sin comes roaring like a lion or creeping like a little fox, whether it is dressed in respectability or applauded by the crowd, it is to be hated everywhere. “Not one sin is to be spared.”

Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth. COLOSSIANS 3:5

He was a realist about what this war would feel like. There is no bed of down for the soldier of Christ, he says, and no riding to heaven in a carriage. Mountains must be climbed and giants fought. And yet the road is pleasant — not because it is easy, but because of the company. The Beloved walks with His soldiers through every thorny place.

Kept in the battle, not out of it

One of his most useful insights concerns how God keeps His people. We tend to imagine that God’s protection means being shielded from temptation. Spurgeon disagreed. “The way that God keeps His people in security,” he writes, “is not by shutting out their enemies from attacking them, but by sustaining them while engaged in the conflict.” God does not grow His plants in a hothouse. He sets them out in the open air, and they are sturdier in summer for the frosts of winter.

There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. 1 CORINTHIANS 10:13

That is a great comfort to the believer who is ashamed of being tempted at all. Temptation is not proof that God has abandoned you. It is the ground on which He intends to show that He has not.

Honest about the fight

Spurgeon lived in a period when some Christians taught that believers could reach a state of freedom from conscious sin in this life by a single act of consecration. He was wary of such claims, and it shows in his preaching. He knew too well the remaining corruption of his own heart to believe that the war could be ended this side of heaven. He preferred to speak of steady progress, of victories that are real but partial, and of a final triumph that is certain but not yet.

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other. GALATIANS 5:17

Some readers will find his militant imagery hard to warm to, and it is true that it can be taken in unhealthy directions — towards a grim, suspicious, joyless religion. Spurgeon himself was not joyless. His warfare was fought in the company of a Friend, and he expected the victory. In Gleanings he says that the believer’s battlefield is here, and his triumphal procession above.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name the sin you have been treating with the kid gloves of friendship. Decide today to take it up only with a gauntlet.

2. Ask whether you have been fighting sin with resolutions alone. Pray Ezekiel 36:26 as a promise, not a wish.

3. When you are tempted this week, remind yourself that temptation is not abandonment. Look for the way of escape God has promised.

4. Distinguish the penalty, the power and the presence of sin. Thank God for the first, ask Him for more victory over the second, and long for the third.

5. Find one fellow believer with whom you can be honest about your battles, and pray for each other.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You came to save me from my sins, not only from their penalty but from their power.

I confess that I have made peace with sins I should be fighting. Put a gauntlet on my hand and a new heart in my breast.

Keep me in the battle, not out of it. When I am tempted, show me the way of escape, and give me the will to take it.

And bring me at last to the day when sin is gone for ever, and I see You as You are. Amen.