“I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). It is often a fight to choose good over evil, faith over fear, love over hate, but it is a good fight. There is a reason that the final principle of the gospel is to endure to the end. “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). In this lifetime, it is not really about good triumphing over evil, strength supplanting weakness, perfection casting out imperfection. It’s about fighting the good fight. Salvation comes not to those who win the fight but to those who never stop fighting. Our Heavenly Father knows what our weaknesses are. He gave them to us! He knows what sins do so easily beset us. He sees our willing spirit fighting against the natural tendencies of our flesh, and He sees our natural tendencies rebelling against the enticings of the Spirit. It breaks His heart to see us in such pain and misery as we lose one round after another of this good fight, but He rejoices nevertheless to see us still fighting the good fight. We may have to go seven rounds or seventy times seven rounds before we have worked out all of our pride and our fear and our anger and our enmity with our Heavenly Father and with ourselves and with the world around us, but every time we pick ourselves back up and put up our dukes for another round, we give ourselves another chance to keep the faith. Our Heavenly Father is committed to seeing this good fight all the way to the end. He wants us to work everything out and get all of the fight out of our system. If we tweak slightly the words of King Benjamin, God is willing to be the enemy of the natural man, forever and ever, until he yields to the enticings of the holy spirit and becometh a saint. God will allow us to fight against Him for as long as we need to because He knows that one day we will finish our course, and we will run back into His open arms and submit to His will even as a child submits to their Father, because we have fought the good fight and kept fighting until there was no more fight left in us, until every natural thought and instinct and willful desire had been beaten and pounded into harmony with our Heavenly Father’s plan for us. Trying to become more and more like our Savior Jesus Christ will be a struggle every single day of this life and we will win and lose over and over and we will want to quit and we will wish that it didn’t have to be this hard but we will keep fighting anyway because it is a good fight.
