Sermon Text: Hebrews 12:1-13
1Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.
4In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. 5And have you completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son? It says,
“My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline,
and do not lose heart when he rebukes you,
6because the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son.”
7Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? 8If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. 9Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! 10They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. 11No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
12Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. 13“Make level paths for your feet,” so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.
Run the Race of Faith
1) Prepared. 2) Focused. 3) Conditioned.
Life can sometimes feel like nothing more than a rat race—just a bunch of people chasing around the maze of this earth like experiment rats, running into one wall after another, trying to beat each other out to some random hunk of cheese. The devil would love us to believe that “rat race” is the sum total of our life, because if we believe that, it’s oh-so easy for him to make us forsake a mediocre prize, lay down, and quit in the middle of an exhausting race.
Our text today from the book of Hebrews is God’s fervent plea for us to not grow weary or give up. The letter to the Hebrews is a bit of a mystery as to who wrote it, because its writer is not named, but the purpose and content of the book is no mystery at all. This letter was inspired by God to encourage Christians facing opposition and persecution, both back in the First Century, and still throughout the ages, “Don’t give up and forsake the faith. Christ is bigger and better than everything you’re going through.”
So the writer uses racing imagery—not a rat race, but a long-distance endurance race—to compel us forward toward our heavenly home. Our theme today is this: Run the Race of Faith. And we’ll see how the writer’s passionate coaching will make us 1) Prepared. 2) Focused. 3) Conditioned.
First the writer sets the scene of the race. “Therefore since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses.” (12:1a). He had just finished listing off an entire chapter of heroes of faith like Abraham, Joseph, and Moses who had trusted in God’s promises and done extraordinary things through faith. Now he fills an imaginary stadium of those heroes of faith to cheer us on, who are still running this earthly race. It’s not so much that the saints who went before us are all up in heaven looking down on us cheering us on, but that their stories of faith written in Scripture encourage us as we hear them. Every time we read or hear one of the stories of believers in the past, it cheers us on to keep going. Scripture tells us that everything written in the past was written to encourage us and give us endurance and hope.
Now it’s time for the race to start and the writer tells us how to be 1) prepared for the race of faith. He says, “let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.” (12:1b) It’s fairly obvious that Olympic track stars dress lightly and tightly and efficiently because they don’t want to get tangled up and slowed down. They don’t wear their 80’s Swishy windbreakers and their headphones and big heavy shoes during the race, they throw all that off beforehand so that they can run!
Well, what is the tracksuit that hinders us? What is the sin that so easily entangles and trips us up? The book of Hebrews also tells us that “the Word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12) It reveals for us what is good and bad, what helps and what hinders, and what needs to be taken off and thrown away. The writer doesn’t mention any particular sins, but really any and all of the ones that tangle and trip you up. It’s not hard to think of a list that affect a lot of people- addiction to alcohol, drugs, and pornography, the influence of bad company, worldly friends, and peer pressure, or the idols that can take root in our heart: money, prestige, and even youth sports. They can all tangle up our feet and make us fall!
You cannot run the race of faith well trying to drag along all kinds of sins with you. Throw them off! “Cut them off” Jesus says in a different place. The living word of God must cut off what hinders so that you may be 1) prepared—impediment free—to run the race of faith. It’s a cutting that’s for our good, a wound that heals us. When the sword of the Spirit has done that preparatory work of repentance in our heart and mind and body, then there’s no reason to keep looking down at our feet. Now it’s time to run!
So our spiritual coach, the writer to the Hebrews, continues his passionate pump-up speech. “Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” (12:1b, 2). Now his goal is to help us run, not jog and not sprint out of control, but run with perseverance by 2) focusing our eyes on the right place. You want to have your eyes focused ahead on the finish line. You don’t want to be looking back to see who’s creeping up on you, just trying not to lose. You want to run to win. You don’t want to be looking at the ground, which is bad for your form and your breathing. You want to picture Jesus on the other side of that finish line, already there, finished, race complete, victory won, and he’s waiting there for us with the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us.
When our Bible translations talk about the race Jesus has run, they all say it just a little different way- “the pioneer and perfecter,” the “author and perfecter” of faith. I kind of like this combo, “the trailblazer and finisher” of the faith, because they’re all trying to get to the idea that Jesus started this race, paved the way as the frontrunner, and finished it in victory. And the form of the word for “perfecter,” or “finisher” is a word the writer basically coined right here on the spot for the first time in the New Testament, but it comes from the root word of one Greek word you might now—it’s the same root word as tetelesthai– the world Jesus used to proclaim “it is finished” as he died on the cross. Oh yeah, I’d say we can call him the “finisher” of faith.
Next, the writer gives us a look inside the mind of our Savior as he was running his race, and what his focus was on. It says, “For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning it shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (12:2) Jesus ran his race of faith, knowing the grueling suffering and death he was going to face, the worst agony and punishment anyone would ever know because the sins of an entire world was all going to come down on him, and he disregarded the pain and the shame for the sake of the gain—the joy it would bring him.
What is the source of that joy? Well, a couple things. For one, the joy of finishing and perfecting his Father’s plan and continuing to make him well-pleased. Number two, it was his joy to make you holy, and part of the family, so that he could call you his brothers and sisters and present you to God as true children, in whom the Father is also well-pleased. It was for that joy that Jesus endured the cross, finished the race, and sat down at God’s right hand. And there he sits across the finishing line, holding out the victor’s crown for us to receive when we get there.
Fix your eyes on that, the face of your Savior, the love he has for you, and the crown he holds out to you, and don’t look anywhere else. First and foremost, you must see him as your champion and Savior, and secondly, see him as the rabbit in the race, the pacesetter for you to follow. That’s how you should run—2) focused on Jesus, says the writer to the Hebrews, and he is the one who will be your source of strength to keep running the race. The writer says, “Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” (12:3). Coach says, “Look at Jesus and don’t give up!”
Finally, the writer of Hebrews reveals to us the kind of 3) conditioning, training, and discipline that is going to be needed to finish. When things get tough in the race of faith, when it feels like there’s nothing but an uphill climb, treat it as conditioning practice, like wind sprints at two-a-day practices in the hot August sun. But here is where the metaphor shifts a bit from discipline in running, to discipline between a Father and his beloved children. It says, “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children.” (7)
So often we think that if something bad happens in our life, it means that God doesn’t care about us anymore, and we must not be his children. Actually, this section says the opposite. If nothing hard or bad ever happens to you, if God doesn’t bother to discipline you, it means you’re not real children. But if he does discipline you by bringing hardship and trouble into your life, that’s a good sign, and those hardships are serving a good purpose. God is disciplining children he loves. He’s training and conditioning our faith.
Here it might be good to stop for a minute and talk about how we use the words discipline and punishment. In everyday life, those words can be used somewhat interchangeably. A parent might decide on the punishment of “grounding,” or the consequence of “going to your room for a time out” as a form of discipline when a kid breaks the rules. These “punishments” are a form of discipline to correct wrong behavior for the overall good of the child. There, punishment and discipline are synonyms.
Theologically though, there’s a helpful distinction to make between discipline and punishment. God disciplines believers in his love, but he doesn’t punish them with his wrath. He punishes unbelievers who will spend eternity in hell. That’s the ultimate form of a holy God’s righteous punishment on sin, but no believer will ever feel the slightest ounce of that because it’s what Jesus suffered in our place on the cross, so that we will never have to. “The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5). His wounds are for our healing.
What the believer does experience when hardship comes is a form of God’s discipline. So, for example, when a random fluke of nature happens like it did to me a couple weeks ago, and I get a weird medical condition called spontaneous pneumomediastinum, where air somehow spontaneously leaked into my neck and chest with no known cause, and forces me go to hospital for a couple days, I might be tempted to think, “I must have really done it this week. I better figure out what God is punishing me for.” That’s the wrong kind of thinking.
But that doesn’t mean that God isn’t using a weird fluke that thankfully came and went in about a week to teach me something about what it’s like to sit in the hospital for myself, to give me a little perspective, and to train and condition me, or even just to give me two forced days to stop think about life and my spiritual life. That is the kind of discipline, not punishment, that God uses to shape and condition his believers on the race of life.
The difference is that it’s for our good, to bring about peace and righteousness. “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” (12:11) So as you run, whatever hardship and hills pop up out of nowhere, whatever cramps set in on your body, know that the Lord is bringing them to condition and strengthen your faith to be even stronger. As we come to the end here, we see what an awesome pump-up speech this has been from not just an inspiring, but God-inspired coach. Hear his last encouragement as you continue to run the race of faith 1) prepared, 2) focused, and 3) conditioned. “Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees (12:12) Look to God for the strength to finish the race in faith. Amen.