“Fighting Against the Fight”, Titus 1:10-16, 3:9-11, Dr. John B. Carpenter

Titus chapter 1 verse 10 to 16, hear the word of the Lord. For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party.

They must be silenced since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach.

One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.

This testimony is true. Therefore, rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth to the pure.

All things are pure, but to the defiled and the unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.

They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.

And skipping to chapter three, verse nine. But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.

As for a person who stirs up division after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him knowing that such a person is warped and sinful.

He is self -condemned. May the Lord add His blessings to the reading of His Holy Word.

Do you love a fight? Well, don't deny it. A lot of us really crave some kind of conflict.

That's why so many movies and TV shows and things like that revolve around fights and conflicts.

The more gore and the more violence, the more things get blown up, well, the more popular it is. Because people like fights.

Fighting sells. Boxing or MMA now, maybe, is still so popular a lot of money can be made on pay -per -view.

Newspapers love to find conflicts, either between nations or between leaders. If they can't find them, they'll make them.

Some historians believe that the Spanish -American War was provoked by a newspaper publisher, William Randolph Hearst, so he could sell newspapers.

He sent a photographer to Cuba to take pictures of the coming war. When the photographer got there and found that there was no war, he sent a telegraph back to his boss, saying, you know, there's nothing to take pictures of here except beautiful beaches.

And Hearst sent a telegraph back saying, you supply the pictures, I'll supply the war. It's not just physical violence people love to see.

Soap operas and even reality shows are popular because people like to watch conniving, backstabbing, outwitting, outbetraying of each other.

People love fights. I should say people like watching fights.

Most people, when they grow up, they realize that fights, real fights, with either fists or with words or with lawyers, aren't really very much fun.

Usually the cost is high and the reward is low, even if you win. When General Douglas MacArthur was ruling over Japan, supposedly some

Japanese came to him pleading that the new Japanese constitution forbid a real army.

These Japanese in particular had seen the destruction caused by the militarists who just craved conflict and took

Japan to war. And MacArthur told them, no one hates war more than a soldier.

That's probably true. They know, the soldiers from experience, that conflicts are generally unprofitable.

They're useless and grisly. It would be a truly war person who would knowingly choose to be involved in a conflict for no good reason.

There are such people, though. They lust after a fight. They're motivated, not by a love for peace or a passion for truth, but by the adrenaline jolt they get when they're in the heat of battle.

They feed on conflict. It energizes them. They feel alive when they're crusading for something.

They love the fight. Here in Titus, we see the reality that we live in a world that loves to fight, and particularly loves to fight against God, that is at war against the

Lord. And we, the household of God, are the people who belong to the one the world is at war with.

We are surrounded by that fight. So here we see three things in Titus.

The pervasiveness of fighting, the perversity of fighting, and finally, our persistence in fighting.

First, the pervasiveness of fighting that is everywhere. We continue where we left off, where Paul has left his close friend

Titus in Crete, to put the believers there created through Paul's preaching of the gospel in Crete into order and under proper leaders.

And we see that right away why God's house, the church, why it needs what he calls stewards to instruct and to correct.

Starting at verse 10. Why does the church need that? What we saw last week. Four, that is, put the churches in order because, this is the reason, there are many who are insubordinate.

That is, they are rebellious, they're disobedient. They do not want to submit.

They will fight to impose their will. Like Adam and unlike Jesus, they demand, my will be done.

That is the environment that we, the church, are in. That's what we're surrounded by.

We're in the midst of a rebellious world that's fighting against God. For many are insubordinate.

Their struggle against God comes into the church through two ways in these two passages.

For false teachers, in chapter one, and the divisive in chapter three. To fight against that pervasive fight against God, we have the church, the household of God, with its stewards, its leaders.

Now first are the false teachers, especially those who add something to the gospel, who say you need to do this or that to be saved, that Christ's sacrifice on the cross wasn't enough.

It's not ultimately that they are just badly taught, these people. They're badly taught or just that they're confused or that they're ignorant.

They are, Paul says, insubordinate, in verse 10. That is, they're in rebellion.

They're unsubmissive, unsubmissive to God. They're in rebellion to God, and they are using false doctrine to attack

Him. That's their tactic in their war against God, is teaching false doctrine, particularly denying the gospel.

Now for some, it's for money, particularly kind of the people on the top of organizations. They may be in it for the money.

In verse 11, teaching for shameful gain, what they ought not to teach. But for others, they really believe their false doctrine.

You know, a lot of the people who go around door to door trying to spread what they ought not to teach aren't paid at all.

They do it volunteer, voluntarily. Now, sure, they profess to know God. Verse 16 says they're religious.

They're even disciplined, and they're rigorous, and they're intensely concerned about their doctrine.

Here they were, he says, particularly the circumcision party. That is, they were Jewish Christians who said that they believed the gospel, but that in order for you to be a true

Christian, to be saved, it wasn't good enough just to believe in Jesus. You had to be converted to Judaism first and keep the law.

That means don't eat pork, and if you're a Gentile man, be circumcised.

That's why he calls them the circumcision party. They were in the church teaching believers, and these were the ones

Paul says were insubordinate. They would not submit to Paul's teaching, to the teaching of the church.

They're refusing to submit to the gospel, that Titus needs to appoint elders over the church because of them, to correct, refute them.

Now many are also, in verse 10, empty talkers. They like the sound of their own voice.

They have an urge to speak, and so others listen to them. And they look at the church, and they see the church is the perfect place.

It's the perfect opportunity to satisfy that urge. You know, what better place? What other place?

Other than maybe a school? Can you go to and people will sit there quietly and listen to you talk for over half an hour?

Where else does that happen? And so be on notice, church. You've got to be careful.

There are people out there who are attracted to do what I'm doing right now simply because they like to talk.

They are also deceivers, in verse 10. They deceive themselves first, and now they want you to share in their deception.

So in verse 11, they must be silenced. Literally, it says, it is necessary to stop their mouths.

It's necessary. You have to stop their mouths. Church leaders cannot give false teachers silent permission to spread their nonsense by just sitting back and letting them talk.

Well, that's his opinion. That's his views. If they're contrary to the gospel, you can't let them get away with it.

It is our responsibility to take positive action and put an end to their voice being heard in the church.

There is no freedom of speech in God's church. He wants only

His Word taught, His truth cherished. Because false doctrine, he says in verse 11, it ruins lives.

It overturns, like you've got an overturning table and everything goes everywhere. Not making a mess.

Overturns whole households, disrupting them. So families are broken up. No caring shepherd is going to let his sheep get led into slaughter by a false teacher.

Now some, like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons, they will not submit to the gospel. They're insubordinate.

They'll go door to door, denying the full divinity of Christ, teaching that we have to belong to their church to be saved.

Others teach that they are the true church and we have to follow their rituals, use their icons.

And many today assume that if someone is moral or religious, that they're our friends. You know, what are you so upset about?

They vote kind of like we do. They're our friends and they're moral people. They're good neighbors. They're on our side, even if their doctrine is opposed to ours.

As if our only opponents were secularism. As if that's all we're about is kind of being vaguely religious.

But here in chapter one, the pervasiveness of the fight against God is such that even many religious people are part of it.

That is, many religious people are part of the fight against God. And religion is their tool to fight against God.

It's their weapon. In chapter three, we see the pervasiveness of the fight against God is such that even people who don't deny essential doctrines are a part of it.

They may not be false teachers. They may be able to say our Nicene Creed, say it faithfully. Today we face a kind of problem.

You know, what are our problems we face today? Kind of a problem is that there are many people in our culture now who aren't heretics, who are not false teachers, not because they care about orthodoxy, right, doctrine, but because they don't care at all about it.

And so they don't think about it. They don't spend the time to think and come to conclusions that would be heresy and false doctrine.

They just kind of go, okay, whatever. They don't bother contradicting it because they never consider it.

They don't think about the Trinity or the divinity of Christ or justification at all. And so they just kind of go along with it because they don't, you know, whatever.

They shrug their shoulders. Now, there's other things they're very concerned about. They're dividers, and they're part of the pervasive fight against God.

They are those who love to fight, and it really doesn't matter what the fight's about. If there's no fight going on, he or she will stir it up.

They refuse to submit to anyone. They must have their way and the church is their arena to prove that they're the champion.

Instead of championing some false doctrine, they want to spark fights over irrelevant, abstract speculations, what

Paul calls in chapter 3, verse 9, unprofitable and worthless issues like speculating about genealogies, perhaps some ancient

Gnostic ideas about us having been descended from God through emanations from God, various angels, and so forth.

Or perhaps they argued over Jewish genealogies, like trying to prove that Melchizedek was really

Enoch. I actually had somebody preaching through Hebrews, and we mentioned Melchizedek, come up with me, gave me,

I think it was a CD or a link, I forgot what exactly it was, some lesson some guy gave, some nutty guy, that Melchizedek was really

Enoch. What in the world? I mean, even if it's true, it's not important. But it can't be true because it says in Hebrews, Melchizedek has no genealogy and Enoch does.

But whatever, that's beside the point. The point was, he tried to make a big deal out of this. And so he probably couldn't tell you anything about the

Trinity, divinity of Christ, justification, but Melchizedek is Enoch, and here's all the proofs of it.

It's crazy. They like to fabricate new commands in verse 14. The commands of people, commandments of people,

Paul mentions. That is new things to forbid. Some people love making up new things to forbid, as though the

Bible doesn't have enough for them, so they'll make up new ones. Like, you know, don't dance, no alcohol ever, no video games.

I'm sure there's someone that says that somewhere, so that they can argue over them. Once you make it up, then you get to argue over it.

Some people just love that kind of thing. They love to talk endlessly about these kind of issues, these minute things, sometimes things they just made up out of thin air.

There are those who will divide the church, like here the circumcision group, by attacking doctrine that is at the heart of the gospel.

And then there are others who will try to divide the church by raising up minor issues, or really no issues at all, and say that they are at the heart of the gospel.

Either way, it's part of the fight against God. For example, the family integrated church movement,

FIC for short, believes that churches should not have groups made up by age or by sex, that we always all meet together, sitting with our family, either for Sunday school or for worship.

No children's church, no youth group, none of that kind of thing. Now, the first red flag should be that they are taking something, always meeting together in families, that the

Bible says nothing about, and then making it too essential. Now, personally, that's my preference, that we not have a nursery or Sunday school, and make it too much noise, whatever you can take up behind.

But if kids make just a little bit of noise, I don't care. My opinion about the way we've done it. If other people prefer to have a nursery, okay, whatever.

I'm not going to fight over that kind of thing. The problem is fighting over it. You understand? And so these group of people made a whole movement around that, family integrated church movement, and they're dividing over that.

They're planting churches. They're all about that. This is their thing. Not right doctrine, not

Bible teaching, not right worship. It's, oh, we all meet together. No youth group, no nursery, none of that.

They even had plans to try to start one in Danville. Now, is meeting together as a family wrong? Of course not.

No. But is it such an essential thing that you should organize churches around that?

No, it's silly. It's divisive. And it's divisiveness, once you get divisive over it, then it is wrong.

The fight against God is so pervasive that insubordinate people in the world are not just doing so, being insubordinate, teaching, making mountains out of molehills, not just by teaching serious false doctrine like the

Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons, but also by raising up, like I said, making mountains out of molehills, by raising up minor issues to be the main thing.

In the Middle Ages, they say that monks and theologians would debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. You want to have that debate?

I don't know where you start with that. That sounds silly to us. It should. But Christians today will divide over things like music styles, dress styles, whether we read the

KJV or only, rapture theories, spiritual gifts, the age of the earth, politics, whatever.

All of this may appear, when they're crusading over these things, they may appear to be very concerned with God and His Word, and they'll say they're earnest and it's about the

Word of God, and they'll be very adamant about it. But it's really a way to take attention away from Jesus and the gospel and divide the church, and so it's just another expression of the pervasive fight against God.

Not only is the fight against God pervasive, second, it is perverse.

That's why Paul calls division unprofitable and worthless, in chapter 3, verse 9.

Now, to do something that is unprofitable and worthless is irrational. Who would do that?

We all do whatever it is we do, from our work to the way we spend our spare time to church, believing that we will get more out of it than we put in it, that it will be profitable.

Even if we're just, you know, spare time, we're relaxing, watching TV. Well, this relaxing will help me work better later on. There's some profit out of it.

But to do something that's totally unprofitable, that's crazy. To do things like dividing over unimportant issues, consumed about arguing about whether the

King James Version is the only true version or whether you must speak in tongues or why all those gifts have passed away or why you absolutely must not have a separate

Sunday school class for kids or how old the earth is or to divide over stuff like that, that's unprofitable.

And so it is perverse to do it. The people arguing about trivial things, insisting that their pet topics are really important, such people will certainly claim that they're acting for some noble purpose.

They'll always say, oh, it's about the Word of God. Don't you see? If you don't believe in me about this issue, the whole

Word of God is lost. They'll claim that they're trying to save the church, that they only want what's good.

But the truth is they are, chapter 3, verse 16, detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.

That's strong language, isn't it? He's describing people that are detestable, disobedient, like I said before, and unfit for any good work.

Detestable means they're repulsive. People are repelled by a divisive person. Someone is obsessed by some secondary issue and won't stop arguing about it.

It's repulsive. Over eight years ago, we had a divisive man here who was obsessive and divisive.

And yes, because of that, detestable. I finally basically told him, you've got to stop being so obsessive about your pet topic or leave.

And I don't think anyone was sad to see him go. Sad he didn't change, but he had gotten on everybody's nerves.

So if he wasn't going to change, people were kind of happy that he had gone. Several years ago, too, I commented somewhere online about someone called one of the

Psalms a chapter, like Psalm 79. They called it Psalms chapter 79.

I said, that's wrong. It's not actually chapters. Someone made a video, seriously, of me. John Carpenter said they're not chapters in Psalms, and they really are.

Someone made a video of that. This guy had a weird look on his face, too. I never watched the video.

I just thought, this is the weirdest thing. Why would you? You're so obsessed, and you're wrong, by the way, but besides that, so obsessed by this weird idea that Psalms have chapters that you make a whole video to try to prove your point.

And the guy looks kind of repulsive, to just be honest. He's a young guy. He looks like the kind of guy, he looks scary.

I don't want to be around this person. Also, he says disobedient, like the false teachers who were insubordinate before, and they're unfit for any good work.

It means you can't use them for anything. You know, it's not like, well, I can't sing,

I can't preach, but I can drive a van, something like that. Okay, you're fit for some good works.

That's fine. But these people, you can't do anything with them. They won't fit in.

They are, as Paul says in chapter 3, verse 11, they're warped. They're perverse.

And there's something perverse about a Christian who claims that he has submitted to the lordship of Christ but cannot submit to the body of Christ, who cannot bear having to submit to the preferences of other members of the body.

That's perverse. Often we Christians strongly denounce, you know, compromise, and certainly to compromise

God's will, to sell God's word short, just to please someone, the crowds, the world.

That's a dreadful thing. That's a wrong thing. But to compromise my will, I prefer it.

We keep all the children in the service. I prefer that. That's my preference. But if you want to have a nursery over there, okay.

That's okay. You can do that. To compromise my will for the good of others, for the happiness of your wife, she wants to go to this restaurant, you want to go to the other one, you'll compromise for the peace of the church.

That's a glorious thing. To compromise our egos, to give in on matters that are not clearly scriptural, to care more about the whole rather than just narrowly thinking of ourselves, is a major part of being a mature

Christian. It's not only false teachers who are fighting against God and whom the stewards of God's house, the elders of the church must oppose, but also the discontent, the disgruntled person who will not stop agitating in the church.

They may be the type, Paul describes in chapter 1, verse 15, to the pure, all things are pure.

They're good people, they assume the rest of you are too. But to the defiled, the unbelieving, nothing is pure.

But both their minds and their consciences are defiled. Because they are corrupt on the inside, they project that corruption onto others.

If they're liars, they assume that other people are lying to them. If they're self -absorbed, think the world's all about them, they assume you think the same way, that you're self -absorbed.

You're not thinking enough about them. If they're unloving, they accuse others of being unloving.

Even if the others gave generously to them, they'll still accuse them of being unloving. If they are full of pride and unsubmissive, they accuse others of that.

If they are suspicious, and they're so constantly accusing others because deep down they suspect others are like them.

They will defile you with their scornful attitude. So be careful, be careful that you don't even support them with your silence.

Divisiveness, because it is so perverse, has to be stopped.

And when you look at the end result of their crusading, when you look at the wake of destruction they leave behind, it's like ground zero in New York City after the terrorist attacks.

I know of a man in the church who drove off three pastors and undermined others. Now if you ask him during each of those dissensions why he was doing what he was doing, he would give you some smooth, spiritual sounding answer.

It was for the good of the church, whatever he would say. But the truth is that he made the church into a battlefield rather than a fruitful field.

And the end result is the church is fruitless and barren and unprofitable, and they are dying and shrinking, and most of the children of the members, including the children of that man who did these dissensions, are unbelievers, rebellious, and bitter.

That's the end result of the perverse. The fight against God, especially bringing it into the church, is perverse.

Another way to say it is that it is warped, as Paul does in chapter 3, verse 11. The person who loves to fight, who either uses some minor doctrines or personalities or his own quest for power or just likes to hear himself talk or whatever, or his own gripes, he tries to cause cliques in the church camps or parties, try to work up a sense of agitation to be created, and then makes parties against each other, teams, and then sets them against each other like a dogfighter sets vicious dogs against each other, that person is warped.

He's twisted. He's bent. He's crooked. Perverse. It's like those old phonograph records left out in the sun.

They would get warped. Did you ever listen to a warped phonograph record?

I bet you Herbie has. The sounds are all still there. It's like a divisive person who's orthodox.

Says he agrees with all the right doctrine. All the right doctrine is there, but because it's distorted, it's in the wrong proportion.

He makes big deals out of small issues, and the main issues he hardly touches. It's all warped.

It's distorted, and it sounds awful. His teaching sounds awful. It's just warped. To love to fight is to be warped.

He may have all the right words, all the right doctrines still there, but if he loves to fight, it just sounds horrible. Paul tells us the mouths of those who do so must be stopped.

We must persist in the fight against them. Third, our persistence in the fight.

The fight against God is pervasive in the world. It's what the world is all about. The church is an enclave of submission to God in a world that is in rebellion against Him.

Now, that pervasive fight against God can make its way into the church if we're not careful.

If it does not come through overt false doctrine, because if we're looking carefully after the doctrine, like we try to do here, then it can come by insubordinate people perversely insisting on their own way, making big deals out of small issues, making up their own commandments.

And so we deal with that by being persistent in fighting against the fight.

We will have to persist in our fight against the fight against God.

Sometimes we'll have to fight against cultural sins. Cultural sins are the sins promoted by the culture.

In other words, they're all around us, championed in the media, on the

TV, on the Internet. They're in the air, just waiting to be breathed in and for you to be infected by them.

And they're not recognized as sins. They're championed by society. The apostle Paul in chapter 1, verses 12 and 13 notes that the people of Crete admit about themselves their own ethnic weaknesses.

He calls a man a prophet of their own. He's a Cretan poet.

He says, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. And he says, that's true.

That's true. That's, whoa. In other words, this man, this poet who said this about your own people, he's basically a poet.

God inspired him to say these things. And so these are the corporate sins that they are especially liable to, that they need to persist in fighting against.

And for them it was lying, laziness, gluttony. There are such things as cultural sins.

A culture encourages. Here in Crete, lying, laziness, gluttony.

And so the apostle Paul tells Titus, he didn't say, well, you know, that's their thing.

That's their culture. Can't change their culture. You've got to cherish their culture. Leave their culture be.

No, he says the opposite of that. In fact, warn the Christians there in Crete who are absorbed in this culture of lying and gluttony and laziness.

Warn them especially be careful about those sins. Rebuke them sharply, in verse 13.

Now, it doesn't matter that these were the sins that were common in their environment, that they were actually encouraged by people.

It doesn't matter about that. He said, let it be rebuked carefully. They said, well, you have to understand that we're all raised that way,

Paul. You have to understand, this is our culture. You've got to honor our culture. Don't call us liars. You know, in our culture, we always say what we don't mean.

Don't be so picky. We don't take our words seriously. That's just the way we are here in Crete.

You've got to contextualize to us. Don't call us lazy. We just live for the time off.

We like our weekends. We make up three - or four -day weekends. Don't call us gluttons.

We just love our treats. We're foodies. That's just part of our culture, all of that.

But that doesn't excuse it, Paul says. Paul says, rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound, that is healthy, whole in the faith.

Your culture is no excuse for your sins. You have to persist in fighting against them.

What sins are promoted by our culture? What weaknesses does our society encourage?

What sins are just in the air, and we've got to breathe them in just by living here in this environment?

Maybe we're not too different than the Cretans. Are we faithful to our word? We speak the truth?

What does the high divorce rate, the decline in promise -keeping, even the decline in church covenants say about our culture?

Are we lazy? We can't be bothered to do the extra work to keep things clean and tidy, or we can't go to bed on time, so we can't make it to church on time, or we can't stay awake.

What about gluttony? Doesn't our national obesity show that we're in the grip of indulgence, indulgence of all our appetites, any pleasure we want?

Maybe we're not too different than the Cretans. And so like them, we need to be rebuked sharply, rebuke, fight against cultural sins.

A cultural sin in the South used to be racism. Is it still? Maybe, maybe not.

Even if it's not, we have the problem that the church did not rebuke that cultural sin.

It took it for granted. At best, often it enabled it. It kind of silently went along with it.

Sometimes even vocally participated in it. If the church did that then, even if it's gone now, even if the culture is not racist anymore, but if the church did that then in the past, then what makes us think that it will rebuke the cultural sins today?

Is our cultural sin now greed? Well, we have to rebuke it. Is it sexual immorality?

We have to persist in our fight against that. Is it dishonesty and unfaithfulness?

Is it breaking promises? Did you know that before a century ago, Baptist churches were expected to keep and enforce their covenants?

They weren't just plaques on a wall. Covenants are at the heart of a congregational church, a church that takes membership seriously.

But as the culture became more unfaithful, and so covenants started to fade away.

As more people in the culture like to live together without marriage, without a covenant, that's what marriage is, more

Christians started living together in the church without a covenant or without taking it seriously.

Instead of rebuking the unfaithfulness, instead of rebuking the promise -breaking, the covenant -less, we've often just adopted it.

We've gone along with it. We need to fight against unfaithfulness. We fight by, in chapter 3, verse 10, warning the divisive, the fighters, once and then twice, and then if he still doesn't repent, have nothing more to do with him.

And this is an application of the Lord Jesus' words in Matthew chapter 18, verse 15 and following, the famous church -discipline passage.

And here he applies it, in chapter 3, to the divisive person. So when we see a brother or sister in sin we are to care enough to confront, that's what

Jesus taught in Matthew 18, we go to them and make the effort of warning them and try to win them over. If that doesn't succeed the first time, we persist, we bring it to others, not to embarrass the person in sin, but with the hopes of helping him or her out, out of that sin, to bring about change.

But at the end of the process, here he applies it to the divisive person, at the end of the process, if the person is still in his or her sin, still stirring up division, still being divisive, they are to be ostracized.

They are to be intentionally and publicly expelled. Look carefully at chapter 3, verse 10, and remember that this is the word of God.

Have nothing more to do with him or her.

It's the divisive person. You warn them, you've gone through the process, still doing it, still harping on it, still trying to divide people.

Nothing more to do with him. It says the divisive person is to be avoided. They are to be rejected because we love them and we've determined this is the only way that they will see that their sin, particularly their divisiveness, cannot be tolerated in God's church.

Perhaps it's the only way they will see that it is God's church and not theirs to rule over and start fights in when they don't get their way.

Put them out with the hope of bringing them back. The inspired apostle Paul here applies

Jesus's directions directly to the divisive person, the one who loves to fight no matter what it's about, the power monger, who thinks that the church belongs to him.

Such a person is so warped, it is after a while, it's just futile to try to talk to them, just to tell them that this is a problem, this is an error.

People like that simply do not listen. Being warped, they are assured of themselves and so we show them by our actions that we mean what we say.

We say, there's the door. Sometimes we have to fight for peace.

Just this past week I saw a video online from somewhere overseas. They sounded like they were speaking

Arabic. It's taken from an apartment balcony about two or three floors up and a man on the ground puts a ladder against the building and begins climbing up to the balcony and he's a robber.

And the people taking the video on the balcony don't want him coming, they're not asking him to come up to them.

They could push the ladder away and he'd get a broom and swat at him or when he got closer up to the top of the ladder they could push him back.

Even if they don't have a gun to defend themselves, they could give him a shove. You know how vulnerable someone is on a ladder.

They could just give him a shove and down he goes or a punch in the face if they had to. One man does hold out his hand to timidly try to stop the robber but the robber just kind of brushes to the side and then climbs off the ladder onto the balcony and pulls out a knife.

The robber could have been easily stopped but the victims were too timid. Today we have some in the church who think they're in action.

They're enabling. Their timidity is a virtue. They say they love peace but they are really among those the prophet

Jeremiah describes who say, peace, peace, when there is no peace. Joy Davidman, the short -lived wife of C .S.

Lewis wrote that the pacifist, that's the one who will not fight evil, does not see the bloodstains on his peace.

Pacifists can sit back and talk about how they hate to fight because others before them went out and fought and died to win the peace they take for granted.

Pacifists in the church think they're being loving when they just kind of passively sit back and allow the warped person to rob the church.

There are some things worth fighting for. There is a good fight.

Don't love the fight but be willing to fight for what you love.

When something crucial truly is at stake, when we're being tempted to excuse our sins, when the gospel is being denied or the church is being attacked by the divisive, don't love the fight but be willing to fight for what you love.

We fight the good fight when we fight for what Christ himself fought for, that we could be saved from the punishment that our sins deserve.

His bloodstains are on our peace. Our good fight is not to get our own way.

It's not even some vain attempt to add to our salvation as though it depends on something else we do, some ritual we participate in, something we contribute to what

Christ has won on the cross. No. He conquered. See the bloodstains on your peace that your sins have been paid for.

See that the cross is worth fighting for. The cross sears into our hearts what our sins deserve.

It shows us how we are all detestable, disobedient, unfit, even warped because the cross shows us what punishment we should have suffered.

And the cross shows us the fight Christ himself fought, the fight against the temptation to say, my will be done.

Unlike us, who followed our first parents, became insubordinate, the

Lord Jesus fought the good fight even unto death, and so he conquered.

We fight that good fight when we believe him, when we show with our lives that we believe

Jesus is Lord. So, come, fight that good fight.