Endurance of the Soldier of Christ

 Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. 
No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him
​who hath chosen him to be a soldier. 2Ti 2:4
​
The Christian Soldier

Every Christian, and especially every Christian minister, may be regarded as a soldier, as an athlete (2Ti_2:5). as a husbandman (2Ti_2:6); but of the three similitudes the one which fits him best is that of a soldier. Even if this were not so, Paul’s fondness for the metaphor would be very intelligible.

Military service was very familiar to him, especially in his imprisonments. He must frequently have seen soldiers under drill, on parade, on guard, on the march; most have watched them cleaning, mending, and sharpening their weapons; putting their armor on, putting it off. Often, during hours of enforced inactivity, he must have compared these details with the details of the Christian life, and noticed how admirably they corresponded with one another.

Military service was also quite sufficiently familiar to those whom he addressed. Roman troops were everywhere to be seen throughout the length and breadth of the empire, and nearly every member of society knew something of the kind of life which a soldier of the empire had to lead.

The Roman army was the one great organization of which it was still possible, in that age of boundless social corruption, to think and speak with right-minded admiration and respect. No doubt it was often the instrument of wholesale cruelties as it pushed forward its conquests, or strengthened its hold, over resisting or rebelling nations. But it promoted discipline and esprit de corps. Even during active warfare it checked individual license, and when the conquest was over it was the representative and mainstay of order and justice against high-handed anarchy and wrong. Its officers several times appear in the narrative portions of the New Testament, and they make a favorable impression upon us. If they are fair specimens of the military men in the Roman Empire at that period, then the Roman army must have been indeed a fine service. But the reasons for the apostle’s preference for this similitude go deeper than all this.

Military service involves self-sacrifice, endurance, discipline, vigilance, obedience, ready cooperation with others, sympathy, enthusiasm, loyalty.
​
Military service implies vigilant, unwearying and organized opposition to a vigilant, unwearying, and organized foe. It is either perpetual warfare or perpetual preparation for it. And just such is the Christian life; it is either a conflict or is preparation for one. (A. Plummer, D. D.)

Every Christian a Soldier

​"Not only ministers, but laymen, should be Christ’s ambassadors. Must a soldier be an officer in order to fight well? By no means. Minus gold lace and cocked hat, he may do good service. Hard blows may be given, or a sure aim may be taken, by him who is quite destitute of ribbon and medal. Thus is it spiritually. Eminent talent and honorable position are non-essentials in benevolent effort. The humblest warrior in the Savior's army can be valiant and victorious. And he ought to be. Excuse here is quite vain. None that are saved have a right to be idle; all are to evangelize. The work is not to be delegated to one order or class. Each is expected to take his share. What should we think of him who refused to rescue a drowning man because he was not connected with the Royal Humane Society? “Let him that heareth,” as well as him that preaches, “say Come.” (T. R. Stevenson)

Comment:
At this point, the Lord has prompted me to add a few things that the Christian will go through, and what we can do, that will help us to stay on track, when we face great adversity, and become weary, disillusioned, confused, and question our calling and walk with the Lord.

At these times, it's a good idea to take the time to get alone and do some serious soul searching, and seeking God in prayer, and recall the path He directed you on when He first called you into ministry, if you are a leader. Go back, and remember what His calling was, and how He directed you. Refresh your memory, on what God's intentions for you are, and what the purpose for your ministry is, in the Body of Christ. Ask if there's some sin you need to repent of, or if there's something He wants changed, in what your doing in your ministry. We have to be constantly seeking Him, for seasons of change, of either adding something to what we are doing, or stop something, and make the needed changes.

We are not all called to be in cookie-cutter ministries. God calls people in unique, and individual ministries, and uses us according to our gifts, and abilities. Don't look around at other's ministries, and feel you are lower, or not as spectacular as those in more public ministries, who are more popular than you. No one will really know how successful we are, until we stand before the Lord, and are shown by Him, what He thinks of us, and what we've done. John Wesley said something I remind myself of often- "You'll be rewarded according to your labor, not according to your success." 

Much of my ministry is done in maintaining and adding content to these websites I created. It takes many hours of time, research, and creativity to create the graphics, and devotions/teachings for these websites-much of it is done in the middle of night, when most are asleep. This comes from years of working the nightshift when I took care of seniors, I use the nights I don't sleep doing this. Intercession, and seeking the Lord on specific world events, is also a large part of this ministry-which started many years ago, when I served as a prayer chairman for Aglow Int. in Montpeliar Vt., in the 80's. As I listen to news videos, and podcasts, God gives me direction and also speaks specific things at times on what's really going on in a world event, and then confirms it in the next few days/weeks, and gives direction on how to pray about it. Most of this is never mentioned here, I've learned over the years, that a real watchman with prophetic calling will only be directed by God to speak publicly of it about 10% of the time, and if we do, it's for a very specific purpose. Today's "prophets" are many times, the same false prophets described in the bible-pillow prophets, and in it for the money and attention it brings them. Some of them are being exposed now, and they need to be.

It's been said before and worth repeating, sometimes it's very important to do nothing but to stand firm in your faith, your calling, and your position, and not worry about forcing something to happen. Be strong in your faith, and firm in your calling, without needing to make a step. Stand strong-where you are. Keep standing, keep proclaiming Christ is King, keep teaching/proclaiming the gospel, in the areas you have the ability to do so. God will honor this, and you'll defeat the devil, simply by not letting his attacks stop you. Faith, courage, standing firm, and proclaiming Christ to a wicked world-is the devil's number one goal in all his attacks against you. This is the great test-and the great conflict Paul dealt with his entire life. In the end, he stated-
2Ti 4:7  I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: 
2Ti 4:8  Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.
​ 
This is the pattern set for us in ministry, and any Christian, who stands for Christ in this evil day.
​Lorna Couillard

Be Prepared for Trial and Conflict

"Some of God’s people seem to forget this. They think they are soldiers on pay days and at reviews: but as soon as the fiery darts begin to fall around them, and the road gets rough and rugged, they fancy they are deserters. A strange mistake this. You are never so much a soldier as when you are marching or fighting. I fear the fault of this mistake lies very much with some of us who may be called recruiting sergeants. In persuading men to enlist we speak much more of the ribbons, the bounty money, and the rewards, than we do of the battle-field and the march. Hence, perhaps, the error. But if we are to blame in this respect our great King is not. The whole of His teaching is in the other direction. He puts all the difficulties fairly before us, and we are exhorted to count the cost, so that we may not be covered with shame at last." (C. Garrett.)

Christianity: a Warfare

If we are true Christians we are every one of us soldiers. If we really belong to Christ we are every one of us carrying on a daily warfare. The enemy is never out of our sight; the contest is a lifelong contest; the battle ground is our soul; the enemy whom we have to beat down is sin in its ten thousand varying forms; the struggle is often invisible to all but ourselves: alone we have to fight, alone we have to conquer, seen only, aided only, guided only (it may be) by our unseen Chieftain, our great and glorious Leader, who, seated high above the din and turmoil of the contest, watches all the efforts, and controls all the movements of His mighty host.

Our text gives us some very necessary, very useful advice on this topic. It bids us remember that it is not an easy thing to be a Christian: it bids us remember that to be a soldier of the Cross requires effort and self-denial and constant endurance. Thou therefore endure hardness," or, as it might be paraphrased, "Thou therefore take thy share of suffering, take thy portion of hardship, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ."

Our army has its great tradition. Through the exertions of the early warriors it is that we are possessed, as we are today, of all the blessings of the Gospel. To their courage, their zeal, and their love for souls, we owe the peace and the happiness which Christianity has brought to us. Let us thank God that He raised up these mighty warriors; let us thank God that they went forth as good soldiers of Jesus Christ, and conquered ignorance, conquered superstition, conquered sin. One last word. Do not let us forget that we belong to a victorious army. We are on the conquering side: those of us who love and serve Christ must prevail at last.  (E. V. Hall, The Waiting Savior, p. 37)

Endurance

Let us understand the meaning of the injunction, “endure hardness.” The reference is to the life of privation and suffering which a soldier, far more in those times than now, had to undergo, and which in all times he is expected to bear without murmuring, to endure willingly, as a part of that profession which he has voluntarily embraced. Endurance is not merely bearing suffering, but bearing it manfully. To bear hardship with the spirit of a hero is to “endure hardness as a good soldier.” Samuel Rutherford, when in prison, used to date his letters from “Christ’s Palace, Aberdeen,” and when Madam Guyon was confined in the castle of Vincennes, she said, “It seems as if I were a little bird whom the Lord has placed in a cage, and that I have nothing now to do but sing.” Paul, too, did not tell his son in the faith to do more than he had done himself.

The Christian’s profession, as a soldier, implies a voluntary change of position in life.

It is now nearly universally allowed that an intelligent acquaintance with the plans of the general, and with the purposes for which the battle is fought, or the campaign undertaken, by begetting confidence in his leader, enables the soldier to render more efficient service. So in proportion as a Christian grows in the knowledge of God and of His plans for the redemption of our world as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, in that proportion he throws his whole soul into the fight. Four special conditions in which a soldier is called upon to “endure hardness.”

1. In standing his ground. Wellington brought peace to Europe by his stand at Waterloo. To retire would have been disgrace, to advance would have been destruction. Holding his position brought victory. The battle of Inkermann was won by an eight hours’ resistance of six thousand men to sixty thousand. So a Christian soldier often finds himself so hotly assaulted by the world, the flesh, and the devil, that he is unable to advance a foot. But a firm, resisting stand is conquest.

2. A soldier must endure hardness in marching. The chief care of one who has a long march before him is to be well shod. If this be not attended to, even things so insignificant as thorns and briars will occasion suffering, and may unfit the soldier for the fight. So the lesser vexations and petty cares and trials of patience in everyday life, if not guarded against, will weary and wound the “feet of the soul,” as Bishop Home calls the affections, and, footsore and wearied, he will be ill-prepared for those special encounters with the enemy to which he is always liable.

3. The soldier must endure hardness in action.

4. Although many an earthly soldier endures who is never crowned, no soldier of Christ is overlooked in the day of victory. The only condition is endurance. (W. Harris)

Why Should We Endure Hardness?

Do it for your own sakes because we cannot live like beasts to be cloyed with honey; because sickness and satiety are the just nemesis of self-indulgence; because, by the very constitution of the nature God has given you, it is a bad thing as well as ruinous to all earthly happiness that the body should be pampered, since where the body is pampered the spirit is almost necessarily starved. We have bodies; but we are spirits. He who would truly live must walk in the Spirit, and he who would walk in the Spirit must keep the body under stern control.
​
But we go further and say, endure hardness also because it is the manifest will of God. See what pains God takes to teach us that it is His will. The everlasting hills are full of their mineral riches, but to get them men must drive the tunnel and sink the shaft. The soil teems with golden harvests, but to win them man must scatter his seeds into the furrow, and breathe hard breath over the plough. Nature has priceless secrets in her possession; but she holds them out to us clenched in a granite hand, which sheer labor must unclasp. Everywhere in nature God teaches us the same great lesson. Anything worth having is not to be had for nothing.

Endure hardness also because it is the training-school of worth. When God wants a nation to do Him high service, to fight His battles, to wrestle in His arenas, then He gives that nation labors and sorrows too. He takes them out of the sluggish levels of Egypt, and makes them climb His granite mountains and listen to the wild music of His desert winds. A nation of greedy slaves might have been contented to live and die in gluttonous animalism; but when God wants heroes, then out of His house of bondage He calls His sons. Read God’s lessons written on the broad page of history. The type of Egypt’s centuries of sluggish placidity is but the cruel, motionless, staring Sphinx; but the type of immortal Greece and the brave flash of her glory is the Apollo launching at the Python with his arrows. What would Sparta have been had she never had Thermopylae? What would Athens have been but for Salamis and Marathon?

​Endure hardness, scorn sloth, embrace labor, despise sham, practice self-denial in the path of duty, because Christ did. It is the will of Christ; because there is no virtue and there is no holiness possible without it. The word “virtue” occurs but once in the whole of the New Testament; because the pagan world has made of it too dwarfed an ideal, and Christianity had better words than that; but even the pagan world saw that broad is the path of evil—broad, and straight, and smooth to ruin by the steps of sin. The type of nobleness, even to the pagan world, was not Sardanapalus, but Hercules; not Apicius, the glutton, but Leonidas, the king. They knew it was difficult to be a good man—difficult, and not so easy as it seems; they knew that any fool could be a money-getter, or a drunkard, or a debauchee; that out of the very meanest, vilest clay that ever was you can make an effeminate corrupter, or selfish schemer, or a slanderer, or a thief; but that it takes God’s own gold to make a man, and that it wants the furnace and the toil to make of that gold and fine gold; and it is strange how unanimous all nations have been on this point. David Hume has a passage in his writings about virtue, and her affability, and her engaging manners, nay, even, at proper intervals, her frivolity and gaiety, and her parting not willingly with any pleasure, and requiring a just calculation, and her ranking us as enemies to joy and pleasure, as hypocrites, or deceivers, or the less favored of her votaries; whereupon one of our men of science, far from being a dogmatist, says that in this paean of virtue there is more of a dance measure than will sound appropriate in the ears of most of the pilgrims who toil painfully, not without many a stumble, along the rough and steep road that leads to the higher life. But if virtue be difficult of acquirement, far more is holiness. (F. W. Farrar, D. D.)

No Entanglements

"No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life" - Having alluded to the soldier, and stated one thing in which the Christian minister is to resemble him, another point of resemblance is suggested to the mind of the apostle. Neither the minister nor the soldier is to be encumbered with the affairs of this life, and the one should not be more than the other. This is always a condition in becoming a soldier. He gives up his own business during the time for which he is enlisted, and devotes himself to the service of his country. The farmer leaves his plow, and the mechanic his shop, and the merchant his store, and the student his books, and the lawyer his brief; and neither of them expect to pursue these things while engaged in the service of their country. It would be wholly impracticable to carry on the plans of a campaign, if each one of these classes should undertake to prosecute his private business. See this fully illustrated from the Rules of War among the Romans, by Grotius, “in loc.” Roman soldiers were not allowed to marry, or to engage in any husbandry or trade; and they were forbidden to act as tutors to any person, or curators to any man’s estate, or proctors in the cause of other men. The general principle was, that they were excluded from those relations, agencies, and engagements, which it was thought would divert their minds from that which was to be the sole object of pursuit. So with the ministers of the gospel. It is equally improper for them to “entangle” themselves with the business of a farm or plantation; with plans of speculation and gain, and with any purpose of worldly aggrandizement. The minister of the gospel accomplishes the design of his appointment only when he can say in sincerity, that he “is not entangled with the affairs of this life.

"That he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier" - That is, him who has enlisted him, or in whose employ he is. His great object is to approve himself to him. It is not to pursue his own plans, or to have his own will, or to accumulate property or fame for himself. His will is absorbed in the will of his commander, and his purpose is accomplished if he meet with his approbation. Nowhere else is it so true that the will of one becomes lost in that of another, as in the case of the soldier. In an army it is contemplated that there shall be but one mind, one heart, one purpose - that of the commander; and that the whole army shall be as obedient to that as the members of the human body are to the one will that controls all. The application of this is obvious. The grand purpose of the minister of the gospel is to please Christ. He is to pursue no separate plans, and to have no separate will, of his own; and it is contemplated that the whole “Corps” of Christian ministers and members of the churches shall be as entirely subordinate to the will of Christ, as an army is to the orders of its chief."  (Albert Barnes)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Note: The teaching below is very relevant to this devotion, and the day we live in now. Derek Prince taught this many years ago, in the 90's, it was prophetic in many ways. It was spoken in 1992, at Westminster Chapel UK. Many of the things he brings out in this study, we are living in now. He said the same thing I did, when both president Bush's began to speak in public about the coming "New World Order", and programing people for it-most Christians were blind, and could not see what they were doing, but some of us knew, and Derek Prince exposed it also in this video. When I heard both of them promoting the NWO in their speeches-I renounced them every time, and the Holy Spirit has had me praying against it ever since. The wars, chaos and social collapse we are in now, has all been by design, and Trump is just playing his role, and extending it even more. The things Derek Prince teaches and advises in this, are very much needed in this hour-for those who have ears to hear.

How To Respond To The Shaking Of All Things--Derek Prince Bible Study
https://youtu.be/ZANf57k9y0M?si=fvkHsBo42TJYdFQb