Scripture Notes: Fight the Good Fight (1 Timothy 6)

“[A]im at righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life...” (1 Tim 6:11-12). St. Paul offers Timothy and us some practical yet deeply spiritual advice in these two verses. 

He begins with a goal. The verb translated here as “aim” carries overtones of haste, running, pressing on, moving rapidly and decisively, striving for, seeking after, and intense pursuit. And what do we pursue? First, righteousness, in Greek dikaiosunē, being right with God. We cannot attain to this righteousness on our own, though, so part of aiming toward righteousness involves opening ourselves to God’s grace, accepting it, and cooperating with it. 

We are also to pursue godliness, eusebia, piety, respect and devotion to God; in other words, we recognize that God is God and we are not and live accordingly. We press on to faith and love, too, seeking to grow in our trust and fidelity toward God and in our love of God and other people. The word for love here agapē, and it indicates a self-giving kind of love, a kind of love that pours itself out and, in doing so, enters into divine love. 

We must seek steadfastness, hupomenē, patience, endurance, perseverance, holding the course when everything seems to be falling apart. And then there is gentleness, praupathia, meekness, which is not weakness but rather strength under control. None of these come from within us. They are gifts from God, but we have to cooperate with them and strive to live them. Our choices and our efforts are important, are critical.

In fact, Paul continues, we have to fight the good fight of the faith. Both the verb “fight” and the noun “fight” come from a Greek root that gives us our English word “agony.” The Christian life is not a proverbial walk in the park; it’s a struggle, a fight, every day, against the fallen world, against temptations, against our own fallen natures. In the midst of it all, we have to reach out and take hold of eternal life. The verb here is epilambanomai, and it can mean to grasp or catch or take hold of something to make it one’s own or even to pounce on something. It is a vivid, active word that tells us that we cannot just sit back and wait for eternal life to come to us. Eternal life is a gift, but we have to strive for it, to grasp it, and to make it our own all with the help of God’s grace.