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Our spiritual war is a war against the flesh, that lingering vestige of our pre-Christian lives that must be beaten to death so that we can live in the fullness of life given to us in Jesus. The apostle Paul says, "Fight the good fight of faith" (1 Tim 6:12). We are to beat the flesh in the power of the Spirit: "For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live" (Rom 8:13). These texts call us to "fight" and "put to death" the deeds of the body, our sinful patterns of anxiety, self-pity, anger, fear of man, vanity, pride, lust, greed, and so on. Upon becoming a Christian, we are inducted into a Fight Club—the Fight Club of faith.

The Three Rules of Fight Club

Fight Clubs are small, simple groups of 2-3 who meet regularly to help one another beat the flesh and believe in the promises of God. Men meet with men, and women meet with women, in order to effectively address general and gender-specific issues head-on. We have three rules:

1) Know Your Sin.

The first rule of Fight Club is "Know your sin." If we don't know our opponent, how will we beat him? We must become well-acquainted with the areas in our lives where the flesh gets the best of us, where we are prone to sin.

2) Fight Your Sin.

The second rule of Fight Club is "Fight your sin." Once we know our sin, we know where to strike. The challenge then is to actually strike, to beat up our flesh.

3) Trust Your Savior.

The third rule of Fight Club is "Trust Your Savior." How do we fight? We fight, not in our own strength but with the strength of the Spirit.

One day the fight will be over. Faith will become sight. Our image will be perfectly aligned with Christ's image. We will no longer know our sin, fight our sin, or struggle to trust our Savior. But until then, may God grant us his sovereign grace to fight the good fight of faith, for our joy and his eternal glory.

(Adapted from Fight Clubs, Chapter 5: A Spiritual War)

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Real faith is fighting faith. This faith fights not for perfection but for belief. We fight to believe that Jesus is more precious, satisfying, and thrilling than anything else his world has to offer. We fight every day of our lives. We fight from salvation, not for salvation. This is the faith that works through love (Gal 5:6). It is faith that works, not faith in works. It is faith in the gospel—the grand announcement that Jesus has defeated sin, death, and evil, and is making all things new—which includes us. Our faith is a faith that fights.

Repentance and Faith

In order to receive the redemptive benefits of the gospel, we must repent from trusting in false gods and exercise faith in the one true God. We must fight. Repentance and faith are the two sides to the coin of the gospel. They are not a one-time act to get us into heaven, but an entire way of life to maintain Christian joy. Repentance is not a work we tack onto our faith; it is an expression of faith.

Fighting with God's Promises

Repentance can be described as giving up our sinful behaviors and turning our affections away from false gods. God wants our hearts, not just our morality. Repentance is a stepping-stone to true joy. Faith, then, is trust in the one, good, true, dying, and rising-from-the-dead God. It is relying on the person of Jesus through the power of the Spirit by the promises of God. It is not blind faith but perceptive faith. Biblical faith sees the truth, goodness, and reliability of God's promises and chooses to trust them over the fleeting, false, and bad promises of the world.

The Christian life is a constant repenting from belief in false promises and an increasing belief in the true, good promises of God.

Repentance, then, is letting go of false gods and promises, both with our affections and actions. Faith is grabbing onto the one true God and his promises with our affections and actions. Faith is not merely belief in the facts of the gospel message; it is trusting and treasuring the gospel medium—Jesus Christ our Lord.

Repentance and faith form the bridge that leads us away from union with false gods and promises and into the promise of joyful union with the one true God. This is a gospel that motivates, that animates the life of a disciple of Jesus!

(Adapted from Fight Clubs, Chapter 3: Faith and Repentance)

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An eBook by Jonathan Dodson

1. Read the intro and chapter 1

2. Buy the book

3. The eBook page

If you’ve struggled to follow Jesus by veering away from the gospel into duty-bound legalism or moralistic indifference, then this book is for you! Fight Clubs is a radical call to fight the fight of faith in the strength of the gospel. Jonathan Dodson calls us to join the fight against sin, legalism, and license by looking to Christ and His gospel. Fight Clubs equips us to fight the fight of faith by exposing the fleeting promises of sin and drawing us into the grace-saturated promises of God. Displacing defective forms of discipleship, Dodson keeps the gospel central by tapping into various layers of biblical motivations that promote joyful obedience to Christ. The book also provides a strategy to fight sin as the church—small fighting communities called Fight Clubs. Read this book; form a fight club; and start fighting in the strength of the gospel.

Fight Clubs Series: Click | View Series

This series has been adapted from Jonathan Dodson's forthcoming booklet Fight Clubs: Gospel-Centered Discipleship. The eBook download will release here at The Resurgence on Saturday, August 1st.

Discipleship does not place the professional at the top of the stairs peering down at his novice disciple. It is not about a vertical relationship, professional instructing the novice. It's not good advice over good coffee. Discipleship is much messier and weightier. It is radically horizontal. It is about a shared struggle in the gospel to live a life of repentance and faith in Jesus through the power of the Spirit. This struggle is constant. Every day, not just every week, every minute, not just every hour. In this struggle, we desperately need one another to fight the good fight with us. We need Fight Clubs.

Fight Clubs

Fight Clubs are about promoting gospel-centered discipleship, groups of two to three men or women fighting the fight of faith. We make disciples of one another in the gospel and in community. We are peers in Jesus, not professionals or novices. Fight Clubs promote a radical peer-to-peer discipleship.

Gospel-Centered Discipleship

This kind of discipleship is, in the end, not about how I perform but who I am—an imperfect person, clinging to a perfect Christ, being perfected by grace. And in this I am not alone. I am one disciple among many. I no longer stand at the top of the stairs but sit in the living room, where we share our faith and our un-faith, our obedience and our disobedience, our successes and our failures.

But we don't stay there. We don't linger in imperfection, unbelief, disobedience, and failure. We fight. We fight the good fight of faith. We struggle to believe the promises of God over the fleeting promises of the world, the flesh, and the devil. We press on to Christ-imitating obedience and victory over sin.

(Adapted from the Introduction: The Gospel is for Disciples Not just Sinners)

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