RUNNING the RACE. Sunshine Beach/Tewantin 29/30 October Harvey Williams

Transcription

1 RUNNING the RACE Sunshine Beach/Tewantin 29/30 October 2011 Harvey Williams 1 Cor.9:24-27 (+ references to Hebrews 11:1-2;12:1) Even if you have not been very interested, you will have seen around the place in these last few days any number of entrants to the Triathlon and its associated lesser events completing their training for this week's event. They are sleek, they look like greyhounds. They have a lean and hungry look. There would have been a similar scene at some times of the year in and around Corinth when Paul was writing to the Christians there, for that city was the centre of the biennial Isthmian Games, which were an event of similar importance and prestige to the Olympic Games held on the other side of Greece (at Mount Olympus). That they had this live visual aid made it particularly suitable for Paul, when writing to these readers, to liken living the Christian life to the running of an athletic race at the games. The Triathlon is a particularly punishing form of athletic exercise. Many of us will know, even without any intention of taking part in such an event, that you start off (in Noosa's version of the event) by swimming 1.5 km, then you cycle 40km and finish up by running another 10 km. There are event more extreme versions of the event, such as the Hawaii Ironman, which is more than twice as long. I am glad the triathlon was not invented until I was too old to enter. Even if I managed to stay on the bike for that long, I would have been easily last because I am a slow and inefficient swimmer. Why do you think Paul uses this example to bring home the similarity between a physical athletic race and the authentic Christian lifestyle? He wants to enable his readers to know how much dedication is involved in being an authentic and effective follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. In my younger days I was, among other things, a club distance runner. I was never particularly good at it. One of my friends, who was himself an Olympic athlete, once said to me " You're not a pretty runner, you know" - and in any case, as another of my friends once said "all running does is to make you fit for more running". In other words, most other sports require greater skill levels, but the point about Paul's comparison is to illustrate that dedication is needed. Even at my low level of athletic achievement I probably needed to spend 10 hours a week in training - and that was just for running. This weekend's competitors will have to add long swims and hours trying to manage the hard, narrow saddle on a racing bike.

2 A former extreme distance runner, Ian Thompson, who won the 1974 Christchurch Commonwealth Games Marathon, was once asked how he could best describe marathon training. In reply he made what seemed a very odd start. He referred to the Eskimos. He said that Eskimos had about 40 different words for different types of snow. That of course was because snow dominated their lives! He said that for a marathon runner (and it would have applied even more clearly to a triathlete) you needed that many different words to describe the degrees of tiredness you feel in training because fatigue similarly dominates your life. Your feet hurt, your legs hurt, you gasp for breath and each step gets a bit harder - and then there's a headwind or you come to a hill like the one on the Noosa/Cooroy Road! The first few miles are probably OK, but after that you are effectively running on empty. In the parlance of the sport it is a matter of "no pain, no gain". But of course the elite athletes are willing to submit to a regime like that because they want to do themselves, or their team, or their country, credit. It is a form of single-mindedness that is difficult to understand unless you've been bitten by the bug. You have to be really serious about what you're doing to put yourself through that sort of punishment. If you are not that serious you will not achieve your target. At some point in the race, when the pressure comes on, up that hill or whatever it is, you will be found wanting. If you haven't put in the serious training you cannot withstand the tough stretches. What Paul is saying to the Corinthians is that this is not only the standard of determination and dedication that is expected of an athlete in an endurance event, there is an equivalent duty if we expect to be effective and make progress in our Christian lives. Are we serious enough, Paul is asking, about our spiritual training and disciplines? When you read any of the New Testament writers, but especially Paul in his letters to his young church plants, whether in Rome, or Corinth or Ephesus, and so on... it is obvious that what those writers are writing about is a matter of prime importance to them. It is not something that is of mild, intellectual interest, something you can dip into and out of according to what else you have on. The New Testament writers speak as if their message is a matter of life and death, which is precisely what it is. If we are to perform as God's people today we have got to take our spiritual fitness as seriously as the triathletes treat their training for this weekend's race. Go into any bookshop and you will find training manuals on the triathlon, full of photos of men and women in their skin-fitting suits, sleek and ready for action and crammed full of details of exactly how long and how hard each session should be. Obviously there is an equivalent to those books for us if we are to be taken seriously as God's people. There can be no doubt that our Bibles contain the clearest possible set of directives about how we are to run the race and to "qualify for the prize" (v.25). Similarly, can we doubt that the examples of countless heroes of the faith is enough to give us our own training blueprint? Think of the list that the writer

3 to the Hebrews gives us in Chapter 11 of that letter. It is a marvellous list of heroes of faith... Quote Heb.11:1-2 It was their faith that they were commended for. To put it another way, they showed total trust in God, whatever the situation may have looked like. All those heroes in Hebrews 11 put trust in God at the very centre of their lives. They had weighed up the evidence that they had and on the strength of that evidence reckoned that God was going to be as good as his word. It is worth our while re-reading Hebrews 11 from time to time because it is an inspiration that will help us to live by faith and not by sight. Then let us look at the way the writer wraps up his list. It fits perfectly with the athletic comparison we have been considering... Quote Heb.12:1 So how can we train ourselves to the point where we can show that our faith, and the seriousness with which we seek to develop it, makes a difference? A difference to ourselves, a difference in our church and neighbourhood and a difference to those with whom we come into contact? For all of us individually this can never be an intellectual exercise. Trust in the last analysis can only be developed by trusting. The heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11 really put their trust into practice. Now all those athletic comparisons (including that 'no pain, no gain' epithet) may make our task sound daunting. Have we really got to pursue a life of faith until it is like a millstone round our necks, dominating everything else we want to do? I do not think so. Committing our way to the Lord in our individual prayer lives and whatever form of associated daily bible readings we follow is the ideal preparation for living by faith. Yes, it does take daily discipline. The winners of the triathlon will not have reached the podium by putting off their training until tomorrow or to next week! Nor shall we grow as Christians unless we are prepared to spend time daily with the Lord. Do not be put off by the cynics like those who sneered at running and who we probably all meet from time to time. They think daily devotion to God is a waste of time. Their sneering approach to questions of faith and of prayer is like this. "Just because you think about God does not prove that He exists", but there is an answer to that... "That's true, but the fact that we get hungry does suggest that there is such a thing as food." Many years ago I spent some time as a merchant seaman. Quite early in my career I had to check the stores in the ship's lifeboats. I was working with an older man who had been at sea on the Atlantic convoys during the Second World War. I was surprised to find among the biscuits, the water and the condensed milk that there was a New Testament. I commented on this to the older man. He just laughed and said "Oh, there are no atheists in a lifeboat". None of us has anything like a full understanding of how our prayers, whether individual or corporate, actually work, but there is one thing we can be

4 quite sure about. From Jesus as our prime example and through all of the heroes of the faith throughout our Bibles, it is clear that prayer is an essential part of the pattern. They all did it! To the sceptic who cannot see the value of prayer we can say this. "You may think that favourable answers to prayer are random and in fact mere coincidences. But if I keep praying it seems that the coincidences keep happening". If you doubt that approach, try keeping a prayer diary, and in that way you will have a record of the results of prayer. I know that if I had kept such a thing more diligently myself I would have had cause to be more regularly thankful than I am to God! Do you remember the chorus many of us will have sung as children: "Count your blessings, Name them one by one, And it will surprise you what the Lord has done!"\ What that little jingle is doing is to remind us of a great truth of our lives as Christians. If we keep a record of our prayer times we will see how God has been active in our lives in ways that we would otherwise forget. Reminding ourselves how God has been faithful in answering our prayers is a great encouragement for the future. Prayer is not necessarily easy, any more than running, swimming and cycling great distances are easy things to do. For me, that is where the linkage between prayer and bible reading comes in. There are times when I feel dry, wordless and without anything useful to bring before the Lord in prayer. That is something that we all experience at times, I do not doubt. Such times are best met by recourse to Scripture. Paul has a very comforting word for situations like that. Quote Romans 8: Another way is to use a Psalm as the best antidote to such gloomy feelings. That is because while all Scripture speaks to us, the Psalms are different. They speak for us. Starting our own prayers where those of the Psalmist left off will often get us going. Nor does wordlessness in prayer necessarily matter much. It is quite clear from God's word that what God wants is for our minds to be engaged with His. He is not limited by words or the absence of words, and nor should we be. God is a God of love above all else. Can we really think that he intends to make life difficult for us? Does anything in Jesus' earthly ministry suggest to us that he wants to make our lives more difficult? "On the contrary" we might say! Finally, the triathlete will have one final obstacle to overcome. Training, in whatever activity we are involved in, can be lonely. The way to overcome that is to train in a group. You see some lone cyclists and runners around of course, but whether we are talking of physical or spiritual conditioning, it is easier if in a group the participants are able to share with and to encourage one another. This is perhaps the best way to illustrate what the New Testament writers meant by urging their readers not to give up meeting together. In our

5 own fellowship this translates into taking our opportunities to encourage and build each other up. That will involve making the most of our joint activities, especially no doubt on Sundays, but it also has a great importance in our small group activities. There is nothing quite like a well-run small group for the mutual building up of its members. At my last church one quiet but very spiritual man once said to me: "My heart leaps when I see another member of my homegroup". This was a very uncharacteristic thing for him to say and what he meant by it was that there exists between the members of a small group of Christians who meet regularly a bond of intimacy and of mutual encouragement which enables one to grow spiritually at a rate which is very difficult to match anywhere else. Meeting in such a group means that over time you will have shared the hard times as well as the good together. You will have seen how you can bear each other up and look back on shared answers to prayer. So, what is "Running the Race" ultimately about? If we are serious about building ourselves and each other up as Christians, as we should be, we shall need to be as serious as those triathletes are about doing their personal bests. In that way we can encourage each other to see how we are not running the race alone. We are running it with all God's promises to back up our own efforts. May the Lord give us a hunger for his word and his ways that really puts the faith we profess into practice.