Contending Without Being Contentious: Guarding Truth with a Steady Heart

J. Neil Daniels 

There’s a strange tension we live with as Christians who care about truth. On the one hand, the New Testament consistently warns us that doctrine is not a hobby but the lifeblood of the church. Paul didn’t tell Timothy to “dabble” in sound words; he told him to guard them as if wolves were already circling the flock. And they were. They still are. Error rarely shows up wearing a neon sign. It creeps along the edges, half-truths stitched to pious language, and before anyone realizes it, the center shifts. So yes, contending for the faith matters. It has always mattered.

But contention is easier than contending. Anyone with a keyboard can become quarrelsome. You’ve seen this—some well-meaning brother gets hold of a doctrinal point like a terrier with a rope and forgets that the person he’s speaking to is, well, a person. I’ve done it myself. You fire off a response thinking you’re Luther at Worms, only to realize later that you were just irritated because someone on the internet was wrong. The early church fathers had this problem too; Jerome and Rufinus practically set a record for theological pettiness in the fourth century. It didn’t help their arguments.

Discernment requires a slower instinct. Not every mistaken sentence is a heresy, and not every disagreement is an act of war. Some errors are seedlings—easily corrected with patience and plain teaching. Others, of course, grow into noxious weeds if left unchecked. The art lies in knowing which is which. Jude’s little phrase “have mercy on those who doubt” assumes that some people need rescue, not rebuke. And then there are others, he says, “snatching them from the fire.” That takes skill, prayer, and a heart that isn’t secretly delighted to go theological sword-fighting.

When we contend without being contentious, we aren’t softening conviction; we’re refusing to let pride masquerade as zeal. The truth doesn’t need our irritability to make it more compelling. It needs clarity. It needs courage. It needs someone willing to say, “Brother, that claim about Christ’s nature actually veers into a ditch the church condemned in A.D. 451,” but say it as someone who remembers that the same grace that preserves doctrine also preserves sinners like us.

So we guard the good deposit with steady hands, not clenched fists. We remember that wolves are real, but so are wounded sheep. And we fight the right battles, not because we relish the clash, but because sound doctrine protects the people God loves. Contend, yes. But let the manner of the contending bear the fragrance of the One who is “gentle and lowly in heart.”