This morning, I ran a race with my neighbor called the Christmas Caper 5k. It was a lot of fun and my time was decent given that I haven’t run a race in more than a decade. I didn’t place high enough in my age group to take home a prize (though my neighbor finished 3rd and won a giant pumpkin spice candle!), but I did come away with some lessons from a road race for the Christian life:

1. The Christian life is like a race. There is a starting line, and a finish line, and a lot of hard work in between. And there is a prize: salvation! This is why Hebrews 12:1-2 says, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”
2. Initial excitement won’t get you across the finish line. I had forgotten how when the pack crosses the starting line, it is easy to take off on a totally unrealistic pace. I can’t sustain five-minute miles for long. What gets a normal person like me across the finish line is endurance. In the Christian life, conversion is sometimes accompanied with a bustle of joy and excitement. And rightly so! But the Christian life is lived out not in that initial excitement, but in the mundane, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other faithfulness over years, even decades. It is, as one author said, “a long obedience in the same direction.” Christians are marathoners, not sprinters.
3. Not everyone on the path is in the race. The race was on the Mt. Vernon trail, but the trail was open to anyone. The only way to tell the racers was to look for the race number pinned to the chest. In the Christian life, there are sometimes people who appear to be on the path, who look like they are in the race but aren’t really living the Christian life. They are just going through the motions. But there is no race number to distinguish the racers from the non-racers. Now, our job isn’t really to figure out if other people are in the race or not, but to make sure that we are in the race. Which is part of why 1 Corinthians 9:24 says, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it.”  Or as Mark Dever says: “Are you following Christ, or are you just going the same direction for a while?”
4. Crossing the finish line is really sweet.  The pain is over.  Endurance is no more.  When I crossed the finish line today, I got a half-hearted congratulations from a race official, a high-five from my neighbor, a cup of water and half a banana.  Heaven is going to be a lot (A LOT!) better.  Not sure?  Check out Revelation 21-22.

Categories: five15 blog