‘Contending for the faith’, writes Lee Gatiss in Evangelicals Now, is a phrase often used by Christians, but not always with a clear sense of its meaning.

Gatiss offers a helpful, if hard-hitting, summary of ‘the biblical doctrine of contending’:-

1. Contending is not a worldly exercise

• We do not contend against flesh and blood, but against demonic powers.
• We do not merely contend against something but for the faith, for the gospel.
• We do not contend in a violent way for Jesus’s kingdom as if it were an earthly kingdom.