Beneath this bulky middle-aged body and especially beneath the generous folds of this preaching robe, there beats the heart of a runner, a racer. Surprise, surprise, you never knew that, did you? But it's true. Inside this fleshy disgrace to the human race there lies buried somewhere the soul of a fleet-footed runner, ready to break all records, prepared to dash to victory, eager to wear the winner's garland, and to stand in the full glare of Olympic lights. A runner, a racer.
I say the heart is there, the dream is there, it’s just the body that’s missing, and certainly also the athletic ability. What I may fantasize and what I can do are two entirely, totally different things. Most of you know the old story of Walter Mitty, who dreamed of being and doing a hundred different exciting things, but who in reality lived a dull, drab, dusty life of nothingness. Now I would hardly describe what I do do as dull, dusty, and drab, but it isn't running. Like Walter Mitty, I may dream of four-minute miles and of Boston marathons, but the truth is that I can scarcely run faster than a glacier. The truth is that only with difficulty can I outrun your pet turtle. The truth is, whatever my dreams and visions, that I am a non-athlete, a total non-athlete. Can't run, can't hit, can't catch, can't do anything but turn the channel selector to a sports station and sit there and dream, dream, dream.
Now one of the reasons – and I assure you there are many – but one of the reasons that I don't outrun anything faster than molasses in January is that I will not pay the price of getting down to a decent racing weight. I will not pay the price demanded of refusing those desserts or staying out of the fast-food houses or telling Estelle Frank to keep her delicious fudge at home. I won't do those things, and therefore I do not get down to racing weight. And that's important. If you want to race, you don't carry around excess baggage, you get down to racing weight.
In just about six weeks we Kentuckians will be glued to our TV sets, getting all nostalgic and misty-eyed, because it will be Derby Day. And when the run for the roses comes up, one thing that has to be watched very, very carefully is the weight of the jockeys. Horseracing is the only sport I know of where it is a distinct advantage to be just as small and as light as you can be; you don't want to burden down the horse with useless weight. You want to get down to racing weight.
Now the author of Hebrews sees Christian discipleship like a race. His picture is that you and I come at the end of a long line, a long history of spiritual athletes. And thus we are called to run a spiritual race, we are called to follow the examples of faith set before us, and we are to run. For him, the life of Christian faith is not a matter of sitting in the rocking chairs, watching the world go by, hanging on to our tickets to heaven, and saying, "In the sweet by and by I'll get mine" Not at all, not at all. For the author of Hebrews, the only way you can live the life of faith is to race, to run, to persevere. The only way the life of faith can be lived out is to hustle and struggle, to get down to racing weight and then to move, to march, to go forward. "Let us run with perseverance that race that is set before us."
I
About this business of getting down to racing weight, in the first place, Hebrews suggests to us that getting down to racing weight means getting some decent heroes and heroines to serve as role models. If we are going to run the spiritual race with perseverance, if we are going to have the motivation to get down to racing weight, then we need to select some role models that are worthy of imitation.
"Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight". The great cloud of witnesses he refers to, of course, are all those saints of faith named in the previous chapter of Hebrews: men and women of Israel's history – Abraham, Sarah, Noah, Moses, Rahab, on and on and on – all those who had lived with continuing faith and who had in the midst of whatever adversity had come on them gone on to live in faith. Role models, people worthy of imitation, people who will get you down to racing weight.
I am always a bit amused and also a bit dismayed by those lists that come out every now and again of the most admired people in the country or in the world. They go around and ask folks, "What ten women do you admire the most?" And while a Mother Teresa may make the list, while an occasional scientist or academic leader may show up, more often than not we admire, or say we do, people from entertainment, rock stars, movie idols, soap opera players – role models all of them. And it seems as though what we are saying is that we'd like to look like they look, we'd like to be as svelte and sassy and, yes, sexy as they are. They look so sleek. They look like they're down to racing weight, don't they?
Ah, but on the spiritual side, I'm not so sure. I'm not so certain that we have done a good job of choosing role models for ourselves. "Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and run with perseverance the race that is set before us." Who do you really want in your personal cloud of witnesses? Whose approval really matters to you? Who is it you want to please more than anyone? Get some heroes, get some heroines who are really worth imitating, who are spiritually and morally down to racing weight and can do something powerful with their lives.
Think of it this way: the author of Hebrews pictures something like the stands at an athletic event, and as you run, up there in the stands are all the saints of the past, cheering you on. There is Abraham, saying, "Get on even though you aren't sure where you are going!" There is his wife Sarah, giggling still after about 4000 years, cheering you on and saying, "Yeah, I didn't believe I could carry a child either, but I did!” Next there's David, tossing a few smooth creek stones in his hand. And so on and so on, all of them cheering you, all of them urging you to go on in your spiritual race of faith. Who else would you want watching? Who else is to see you and cheer you through? Do you want the folks you now look up to? Or might you want some folks with genuine spiritual maturity, some real achievers, to be urging you on? Get some heroes and heroines, some authentic ones, and run like they do, slim and trim down to their racing weight, and then run, surrounded with a great cloud of witnesses.
II
Next, if you want to get down to racing weight and to run the authentic race of faith, Hebrews will tell you to take care of that sin which clings so closely, that besetting sin, as the King James Version puts it. If you want to get down to racing weight and to run unencumbered with things which only hold you back, then you have to watch for those habits, those patterns of mind and heart, which sneak up on you and trip you up. “Let us lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely.”
When Hebrews talks about the sin which clings so closely, he's picturing the way athletes dressed, or shall we say undressed, to race in ancient times. You know, of course, that the common street dress was a robe or a toga, a long clinging garment with many folds, all the way down to the ankles. Very lovely, very graceful; but you're not going to do much running in it, are you? No, if the fire alarm sounds one Sunday while we are in church, I expect you will see me hitch this critter up before I try to jump out the windows or climb down the drainpipe!
Well, that's the image Hebrews wants us to see. If you were a runner in the ancient world, you took off your toga; in fact you may have taken off everything in order to run that race unencumbered. You do not want anything that clings closely.
My wife loves to watch tennis matches – she too is a spectator athlete, by the way – and when they are showing Wimbledon or Forest Hills or something like that, they will often show films of the tennis games of 50 and 60 years ago. What strikes me about those games is the way the players dressed: long slacks, baggy ones at that, for the men. Long dresses, long sleeves, and even hats for the ladies – not "women" in those days, mind you, but "the ladies." How in the world did they every play at all, let alone play well? Well, tennis players have since learned to lay aside everything which clings closely and to get themselves down to racing weight, playing weight.
Now the Scripture is reminding us that we often let habits accumulate and hold us back from what we ought to be. We readily allow old patterns of mind and heart, old sins, to hold us back and keep us from being as effective as we might be. It might be laziness, not so much a deliberate act of sin as just the slow, dragging, spring feverish sin of inaction! It's not that we do anything wrong so much as it is that we don't attempt anything right. And we get spiritually heavy, spiritually sluggish. We have let sin cling and we are no longer down to racing weight.
Or it might be impatience. Impatience, for me, is something that builds and builds, gathers and collects like moss on the trees, until suddenly I fall of the weight of impatience. You see, the long distance runner – and that’s what the author of Hebrews has in mind – the long-distance runner wins not so much because he has speed but because he has patience, he knows how to pace himself. But if you let impatience build up in your life, you will stumble from its weight, you will not be down to racing weight.
Or it might be inattention, it might be lack of disciplines, it might be because you put off preparing, it might be because you think you are beyond having to practice the fundamentals. It might be a score of things. But the result is the same. Habits of mind and heart collect, they build up, the sin clings closely, and soon you are not down to racing weight any longer.
In the movie, "Breaking Away" two groups of bicycle riders are squared off against one another. One group are the cutters, townsboys who have come out of the families which work the limestone quarries of Indiana. They are from the wrong side of town, not expected to achieve much. The other group are students at the University, confident, elite, self-assured, well-trained, superior in every way. But in the end it was the cutters who won the great bike race; they got themselves down to racing weight with their disciplines, and the students – well, the students took themselves for granted and let those habits of discipline slip. Their sluggishness clung closely like a garment, and they lost.
So, Christian, run like this: lay aside every weight, and sin which so closely clings, and run with perseverance the race set before you.
III
But now, if you are finally down to racing weight, there is still one more thing you need before you can conquer in this spiritual race, this race of faith. You need a pacer, you need for someone to set a worthy pace.
As you watched the Olympics a number of months ago, you noticed that sometimes the person who led the pack for most of the race did not win it. He or she in fact exhausted too soon all of the reserves, and up from behind came someone else to take the lead and win the race in the last few seconds. And it was important, quite often, that that winner not be the leader for the whole race; it seems to work better when someone else sets the pace for you and then you can set your own time against that, else you will run too hard, too fast, and you won't make it.
You and I too need a pacesetter in our spiritual race, and that we have. We have one who has gone before us, we have one who has run a challenging race ahead of us; we have one who has showed us in every way what it is to live in faith and to give our wills to the will of God. Listen: "Look to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith." Or as another translator puts it, "Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, on whom faith depends from start to finish." He is our pacesetter. He is our challenge. He is the one who keeps on summoning us to do better, to do more.
I can remember when it was supposed that no one would ever run a mile in less than four minutes. It seemed to be both a physical and a psychological barrier, and no matter how close anyone came to the four-minute mark, no one broke it. But finally it happened, and a young Australian, Roger Bannister, ran the mile in just less than four minutes time. The world cheered, and then cheered again, as someone else beat Bannister’s mark, and then someone else, and another, and another, and I have no idea how many by now have done it. The pacesetter, you see, somehow summoned a better performance from others.
And when you and I see Christ and see Him as a model of what it is to live faithfully, then we are inspired to do more, to be more, to be more like him. He takes away our insecurities, he gives us motivation, he offers us his energy, he sees to it that we are down to racing weight and can run the great race. He is the pioneer who goes before us, he is the perfecter of the life of faith, he is one who races before us, pointing out to us what faith really is and urging us forward, urging us to follow him.
In the film "Chariots of Fire," young Christian Eric Liddell finds himself in a double bind. Not only does it appear that he has wasted his training and his discipline when he finds that the Olympic events in which he is expected to compete are to be run on Sunday – and he will not compromise his understanding of what it is to keep the Lord's Day holy; but not only that, he is also challenged by his Christian friends as to whether he is not giving up something much greater and finer, preaching and teaching, just for this silly business of running. But in the end Eric Liddell saw that as a runner, as a disciplined, down to racing weight athlete, he might gain access to young minds and hearts as no ordinary preacher could. And so run he did, training and pounding away with a fury until it became clear that in his pursuit of excellence, it was no simple human runner who paced Eric Liddell. It was no friend, no coach, no fellow competitor. For him the pacesetter was the pioneer and perfecter of faith; for him the only pacesetter worth following was Jesus Christ, though pain and cross it meant.
Nothing else is worthy of your life; no one else can make so demanding and yet so fulfilling a claim on your life as this one who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame of it all.
For Him, for Christ, run the straight race, run it with perseverance, and lay aside every weight. And look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. Let him bring you down to racing weight.
