Join with me in suffering, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.
In my last post, I mentioned how, if we’re in the church, we’re not so much in Switzerland, but Ukraine. We are in the middle of a mighty conflict. The storyline of the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 20 is of a great war, between the devil and his hosts on the one hand, and the Lord God, His Son and His people on the other.
The devil wants to destroy God’s work, and entices people away from Him. But God establishes a people, sends His Son to be their King and Redeemer and will build and shield His people to the last day, when evil will finally be vanquished.
I wonder if the churches are forgetting this? We may talk occasionally about “spiritual warfare” as if it were a specialist subject, when it is in fact the Christian life!
If you doubt that, listen to the Book of Common Prayer. Straight after baptising a child, the Vicar says “We receive this child into the congregation of Christ’s flock, and do sign him / her with the sign of the cross, in token that hereafter he / she shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his banner, against sin, the world, and the devil; and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant unto his/ her life’s end.”
The Apostle Paul described the Christian life as a fight, and his fellow-workers as fellow-soldiers (Philippians 2:25, Philemon 2).
This military language has made some uncomfortable. War is horrific, and seems an unattractive metaphor for the Christian life. Thus the latest revision of the Church of England’s baptism service, in Common Worship, replaces “soldier” with “disciple”. It’s not wrong to call followers of Jesus “disciples”, but you can detect the shyness!
However, the Bible does use the language of soldiers and war to describe the Christian life, simply because that’s the truth: a war is what we’re in.
If we don’t recognise we’re in a war, we’ll be surprised when the churches are attacked in various ways: by persecution, or by that nastiest of Satan’s weapons, false teaching. We’ll be surprised when we ourselves battle with discouragement and temptations.
If we don’t recognise we’re in a war, Christianity could become just a leisure activity, more akin to being on a cruise with friends than in the trenches with our fellow soldiers. We won’t be vigilant; we won’t be prayerful; we won’t be willing to face hardship, or to commit deeply in service.
Sabine Baring-Gould’s Victorian hymn Onward, Christian Soldiers isn’t sung much now, probably rightly, for it could be misunderstood as an apologia for militaristic colonialism (it was not intended like that, as far as I know). But even so, we should be encouraging each other onward!
