The Battle Drills of a Christian Soldier!

2 Timothy 2:1-4 & Proverbs 1:1-7 (NAS95)

The Scripture lesson for today and the theme verse for the 2022 sermon series is found in 2 Timothy 2:1-4:

You therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.

In the first three weeks, I covered the first three verses of this passage to learn how we are called to grow strong in the grace of God, live with a missional focus, and commit ourselves to the training routine of a good soldier of Christ Jesus. Today, I finish the framework for our study of the book of Proverbs by examining the fourth and final verse of our theme passage: “No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.” Let’s look at the first half of this verse.

“NO SOLDIER IN ACTIVE SERVICE ENTANGLES HIMSELF IN THE AFFAIRS OF EVERYDAY LIFE”

As we learned from out study of 2 Timothy 2:3, the soldier imagery was a favorite of the Apostle Paul. Here are three other usages of it from Paul’s writings in the New Testament:

1) 1 Corinthians 9:7. “Who at any time serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat the fruit of it? Or who tends a flock and does not use the milk of the flock?”

2) Philippians 2:25. “But I thought it necessary to send to you Epaphroditus, my brother and fellow worker and fellow soldier, who is also your messenger and minister to my need.”

3) Philemon 1b-2. “To Philemon our beloved brother and fellow worker, and to Apphia our sister, and to Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the church in your house.”

As a follower of Jesus Christ, you are not a part-time employee; rather, you are an active-duty soldier. You are not a National Guard soldier, who works a civilian job during the week and trains as a soldier one weekend per month and two weeks out of the year just in case you are called up to serve in a time of need. You are on “active service” to Jesus Christ, meaning, this is your priority, and nothing can be allowed to compete against it as your top priority. Therefore, I am called to train you as a member of an elite rapid-deployment unit who must be ready in season and out of season to go on mission for God. This is exactly what Paul had in mind as you hear his exhortation to his protégé in 2 Timothy 4:1-8:

I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths. But you, be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing.

Those days have arrived, the return of the Lord is imminent. Are you trained and ready to be deployed as a good soldier of Christ Jesus to fulfill your ministry, or are you entangled in the affairs of everyday life, distracted, and discouraged by the circumstances of these last days? God has enlisted you to be His hope-bearer in the despair, His light in the darkness, and His peace in times of division! This is the mission of God for His Church, for such a time as this!

A good soldier of Christ Jesus does not allow himself to get entangled with anything that would distract him from pleasing the Commander, the One who enlisted him, and the accomplishment of the mission. Hebrews 12:1-3 is a clarion call to such a focused life:

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

The way to remain unencumbered and disentangled from that which would distract you from your active service as a soldier, is to remain focused on your allegiance to the commander. Let us now look at the second half of 2 Timothy 2:4.

“SO THAT HE MAY PLEASE THE ONE WHO ENLISTED HIM AS A SOLDIER.”

Jesus modeled the life of a good soldier of God by submitting His life, and His death, to His Father’s will. Jesus came from Heaven to Earth to show us the way of a life of full submission and complete allegiance to God! As Paul’s Christ Hymn of Philippians 2:5-11 proclaims:

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

From Matthew 26:38-42, we see that Jesus knew what it meant to be a good soldier, which is why we highlight and exemplify His faithful prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night Jesus sweat blood as He knowingly anticipated the plan of His Father to be the propitiation of sin, which required of Him to follow the prescribed path of suffering – His betrayal leading unto death, even death on a cross as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world:

Then [Jesus] said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch with Me.” And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.” And He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “So, you men could not keep watch with Me for one hour? “Keep watching and praying that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” He went away again a second time and prayed, saying, “My Father, if this cannot pass away unless I drink it, Your will be done.”

Do you have this same attitude of Christ Jesus? Are you motivated to glorify God with every area of your life? Are you confident that you will be able to say that you have accomplished the good works that God enlisted you to walk in with your life? How are you actively and intentionally training yourself to live on mission today to the glory of God?

We must train this same attitude of Christ Jesus into our own lives! To do this training routine effectively and to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel, we must know what it is we are to put into practice. I am calling these the battle drills of a Christian soldier. Last week, I taught you that Army doctrine defines battle drills as “the ‘fundamentals’ that must be constantly rehearsed until they are second nature for all Soldiers. … [They are] a collective action executed by a platoon or smaller element without the application of a deliberate decision-making process.”[1] In other words, the action of both the individual soldier, and his or her fellow soldiers, must be vigorously trained into every soldier as a collective unit until the unit functions as one mature body; it’s reflexive, instinctual, and habitual behavior for this one purpose – God’s glory! Every soldier in the unity must commit to these four action steps of the training routine:

1) Know the manual – the Bible.

2) Train together as one unit – the Church.

3) Seek the Commander’s approval – Jesus Christ, the head of the His Church.

4) Live on mission – the Great Commission.

Hence, next week we embark upon our year-long study of the book of Proverbs. We will learn how to apply God’s wisdom as the battle drills of a good soldier of Christ Jesus, according to these four action steps of the training routine. Listen to Proverbs 1:1-7 as King Solomon gives us the purpose of Proverbs as God’s book of wisdom, and, in doing so, gives us the overarching motive of every soldier’s training routine and mission success:

The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel: To know wisdom and instruction, to discern the sayings of understanding, to receive instruction in wise behavior, righteousness, justice and equity; to give prudence to the naive, to the youth knowledge and discretion, a wise man will hear and increase in learning, and a man of understanding will acquire wise counsel, to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.

The overarching motive of a good soldier is the fear of God! Apart from this respect, reverence, and awe of God as the Sovereign King, the Ruler of all creation, the Supreme Commander of Heaven’s armies, then there can be no training of wisdom, or instruction in righteousness, for us as the good soldiers of Christ Jesus. We must know who it is we are seeking to please with our lives; therefore, we must train into our minds and hearts a complete submission to the one who saved us, called us to be His, and chose us to be a part of His plans.

Being a soldier in active service means that everything you do is submitted to the Commander – “the Lord Christ whom you serve” (Colossians 3:24). It is Christ you seek to please, not a job description, or a volunteer’s expectations, or prescribed hours, or a designated amount of money. Those are misleading goals and heavy burdens, but in your wholehearted allegiance to Jesus, you learn how to seize the moment for God by living out what Paul prescribed as a right response to the gospel of Jesus Christ in Romans 12:1-5:

Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith. For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.

For example, in my pastoral ministry, the day after my dear sister Carole Hiatt passed away, Beorn, my fifteen-year-old son, and I spent all day, from breakfast straight through to dinner, moving all her possessions out of the local senior living facility to over an hour away in Ohio. As we were driving, my son asked me if this was considered a workday for me. I told him that everything I did was part of my calling and that while technically this day of service was not a “workday,” as defined by our culture, it was an integral part of my calling. Together, Beorn and I were learning how to live and love like Jesus modeled for us and commands us to train to live on mission today, it just so happened to look like us being “Two Men and a Truck” on that day.

You can listen to Pastor Jerry’s message here:

You can watch the video by clicking HERE.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “The Importance of Battle Drills” by Risk Management Magazine on January 25, 2019. https://www.army.mil/article/216557/the_importance_of_battle_drills (accessed December 16, 2021).