Running The Race of Life
Philippians 3:12-14
Do any of you ever make out “To Do” lists? – a list of things that need doing throughout the day.
Do you always complete your list everyday or do you sometimes have to carry over some things to the next day?
If you seldom complete your list, then I guess you could say that the things listed are more like goals that you would like to accomplish. These are things that you shoot for, hoping to finish.
When you have a long list of jobs to do one day and you actually get them all done, how does that make you feel?
It feels great! You’re thinking, “I did it! I got everything done that I needed to accomplish today.” = a great feeling.
THEN, dum-de-dum-dum: tomorrow comes! All those things you accomplished yesterday mean what? Not Much.
Those goals you met yesterday mean nothing today. That’s old news. Today brings new goals, new challenges and you have to start all over again.
That’s the bad thing about goal-setting; you always have to come up with new goals when you meet the ones you’ve already set. But That’s life.
You all went through school so you know what I’m talking about. You may have been told, “You did a great job in fourth grade, you passed your tests and met the requirements the state mandated. You did such a good job meeting the goals of 4th grade we’re moving you up to 5th grade.” Then you got promoted to the 5th grade, which came with a whole new set of goals, challenges, and tests. You met those 5th grade goals so they promoted you to the sixth grade and so on until you graduated from high school.
You never could rest on your laurels because you might fall behind and possibly be held back.
That’s how it is in life, there’s always a new challenge, a new goal to shoot for. We have to keep striving to improve. The question I want us to ponder today is, “Are we preserving or progressing in our walk with the Lord?”
In today’s passage Paul talks about the goal of his life.
Turn in your Bibles to Philippians 3:12-14 and let’s take a look at the ultimate goal of Paul’s life.
What is Paul saying here? Well, if we look back at verses 10 and 11 we see that Paul is telling us that the goal of his life is to know Christ and the power of His resurrection, to share in the fellowship of His suffering, and to become like Him so that he might attain to the resurrection from the dead.
Basically, Paul is saying he wants to be made Christ-like. He wants to know Christ personally and intimately so that through the power of Christ’s resurrection he might be made perfect in Jesus and be the best of friends with Christ.
Now he tells us in verse 12 he hasn’t reached that goal yet. He’s not perfect but he presses on toward that end.
To get there he says he forgets what is behind him, the past, and he strains forward to what lies ahead; the goal of winning the prize of the upward calling of Christ.
In other words, eternal life, and resurrection from the dead, where he will finally be made perfect and be able to enjoy the kind of relationship God intended for us to have with Him.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with setting goals. We need incentives in life. The problem arises when we reach our goals and become satisfied or complacent in our accomplishments.
The difference between preserving and progressing is that:
1. Preserving is maintaining in safety to protect what was;
2. Progressing is movement towards the goal.
Paul spelled out his focus and that was the prize set before him at the finish line of life. In order to gain the prize we have to be moving toward it.
There are many Christians who are content to live in what used to be. They are content to dwell in safety and not take risks for the Lord. In their walk with God they feel it is much easier and safer to preserve what they have than to reach out for more that God has for them.
We can’t allow ourselves to become satisfied with past accomplishments. We need new goals to keep us motivated toward continually progressing. This is what Paul is telling us in our passage for today.
Paul liked sports and he often used sporting events to illustrate his points. Here Paul uses the picture of a race to make his point so let me do the same.
During the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles I remember seeing the 110 meter high hurdles. The favorite to win was an American named Greg Foster. “ABC” even did one of their three minute features on him. When the gun went off and the runners charged toward the hurdles Greg Foster got off to a good lead. But just as he jumped over the last hurdle, he turned his head ever so slightly to see where everyone else was. BIG MISTAKE. That look back cost him only hundredths of a second, but it was enough to lose the race.
In a race you don’t look back and you never stop. No, you keep looking straight ahead and keep running until you cross the finish line.
Paul likens life to a race, so imagine with me that life is like the 110M hurdles. The runners start the race with their gaze straight ahead toward the finish line. When the gun goes off the runners takes off like a bullet, flying down the track. After a few steps, this thing pops into their consciousness, and they think, “Whoa, I’m going to have to hurdle over this obstacle to continue the race.” So they jump over the hurdle and continue running. Then what?
You got it, another hurdle, and another, and another.
Now the runners don’t stop after making it over the first hurdle and proclaim, “I’ve made it!” Of course not. The runners keep going, jumping over all the obstacles till they finish the race. The goal is not to clear the first hurdle, or the 2nd or the 3rd. The goal is to finish, and hopefully win, the race. That must be our goal, as well.
Paul indicates that there is one major threat to us achieving our goals of the future, and that is our past. Paul says, “One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind, I press on toward the goal to win the prize.” Our pasts, good or bad, can cause us to miss out in the future. But we don’t want that to happen. So, like Paul, we have to forget our pasts and keep our focus ever on the future.
Many people in churches today are simply preserving spiritually. They are holding on to the past and by doing so are forfeiting their future. They are forfeiting the possibilities of what could be because they can’t let go of what has been.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. His Word is unchangeable. But we are changeable and we should not be the same today as yesterday, and especially not in the future.
I don’t want to just preserve my relationship with God. I want to progress in it daily, because if I’m not progressing I’m not growing.
We won’t make it to the prize if we are preserving. We have to be moving forward!
We should be continually striving to be, and to become, all that God wants us to be.
There are a couple of dangerous attitudes that people in the preservation mode often have:
1. Yesterday’s experience was sufficient.
2. Yesterday’s experience can’t be exceeded.
There are those in the preserving mode that believe that an experience they had some time in their past was enough and they are trying to living off of that experience.
We often refer to such experiences as “Mountain Top” experiences and they are great but they’re not enough to sustain us forever.
Think back to the best meal you ever remember eating. I’m sure whatever it was you ate you thought it was delicious and very filling. You may have even thought at the time that you would never eat a meal as good as this for the rest of your life. Now think about how long ago it was since you enjoyed that meal. Have you eaten anything since that time. Of course you have. Because despite how pleasing that meal was it was not enough to sustain you for the rest of your life. That meal was good for you then but it is no good for you now.
It’s the same principle spiritually speaking. No matter how good your spiritual experiences were in the past they are not sufficient for your spiritual advancement anymore. Thank God for those experiences but don’t try to live off of them. You need to build on those experiences and keep pressing on. Yesterday’s experiences are just that, yesterday’s.
Tell me about your experience today. What is God doing in your life today?
As long as we think that yesterday’s experience was enough we will never be able to progress toward the prize that is waiting for us at the finish line.
Preserving is a defensive hold on the past. Progressing is an offensive hope for the future.
I imagine that many of you have played some sport in your past. If you haven’t played any sports I’m sure that you have at least watched some sporting events. Well, I used to play tennis and I was pretty good at it. But my game had a serious weakness. Whenever I would get a comfortable lead on my opponent I would stop playing to win and start playing not to lose.
There’s a big difference between these two ways of playing. When you’re playing to win your more aggressive and willing to take more risks. You’re playing with more heart and determination. But when you’re playing not to lose you are playing more cautiously and less intensely. Those of you who know anything about sports know that when you start playing not to lose, you usually start losing. Your opponent often starts to close the gap and as they do they build momentum and confidence, which sometimes results in them overtaking you and actually beating you.
Again, the same is true spiritually. Whenever we let up and start trying to preserve what we have we actually start losing ground. We can’t afford to let that happen so we have to keep taking spiritual risks with God and for God, and not allow ourselves to be content or complacent in our spiritual comfort zones.
In our walk with God, if we are going to progress, it’s all about action.
Notice the action words Paul used to describe his pursuit of his goal.
I press on, Take hold, One thing I do, Straining toward, I press on, To win
These are not words of someone who is passive but rather one who is aggressive and offensive for God.
Paul had a passion about knowing Christ and it was not a passive thing; it was very active.
In order for us to progress in our walk with God we have to be doing the same thing. We have to be active and offensive spiritually.
Until you are able to honestly say, “I am perfectly like the Lord Jesus Christ,” you have no right to be satisfied with your spiritual development because you haven’t reached the finish line yet.
If you are satisfied and have no desire to go on further with Christ, to be more holy, to pray more, to study your Bible more, and to do more for Christ, my only conclusion is that you must already be like Him or you just have no appetite for Him.
You know what it means when you have no appetite? It means you’re sick. Paul is insinuating that if you don’t have this type of appetite for Christ that he has described, then you’re spiritually ill and you don’t even know it. If that’s the case then you need to consult the Great Physician for a critical heart surgery.
But you know it’s not only good experiences in our past that can rob us of reaching our full potential in the future, it can, and often is sin and past failures that hold us back. Maybe you find yourself stuck in a spiritual sense today, You feel unable to move forward spiritually.
No one has ever reached Christian maturity until they were able to deal effectively with their past. We all have things in our past that Satan would like to continually remind us of in order to hold us back from progressing spiritually.
But Paul’s formula is the same whether your past has been full of “Mountain Top” experiences or “Gutter” experiences: You must forget the things that are behind.
If you’re going to strive for perfection and spiritual maturity, you’ve got to forget the past.
This forgetfulness can only occur through confession of your sin, correction of your life, and restitution. You’ve go to come to God and tell Him that you’ve sinned, you’ve got to correct the problem in your life and repent of it. Then you have to make things right. Restitution is making right whatever you can that you’ve done wrong in your past.
Many believers feel stuck spiritually, unable to progress because there is something in the past that’s holding them back. The past is wiping out their future. Paul is saying, ‘The only way to press on toward the future is to wipe out the past.’
1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us of all unrighteousness.” And in Psalms it tells us that God removes our sins from us as far as the east is from the west and that he sends them to the depths of the ocean. Submarines can’t even go to the depths of the ocean because they will be crushed by the pressure down there. That’s how God deals with the sins we confess to him. He discards them where they can never be retrieved and He remembers them no more.
We have to take God at His Word and believe He does what He says He will do. Otherwise we are calling Him a liar and showing our lack of faith in Him.
Usually it is harder for us to forgive ourselves than it is for God to forgive us. If you confess your sins to God they are under the blood of Christ and they have to be forgotten. God dealt with them on the cross of Christ, they are history so we have to let them go.
If you don’t forget it, it will remain a bitter memory that will destroy what God wants to do in and through you in the future. So don’t be historical about your forgiven sins. Don’t keep a record of our faults and failures, let them go and forget about the past so that you can progress toward the prize that awaits you at the finish line of life’s race.
As we press on, we will have goals to complete and hurdles to overcome. We can’t stop after clearing our first hurdle or become satisfied after accomplishing a goal and we can’t quit running just because we may have tripped along the way. We have to keep “straining forward to what lies ahead” lest we get left behind.
We need to remember that the race is not over. God is not through with us yet. We aren’t perfect, we’re just forgiven.
We will have many more goals set before us and we must keep pressing on toward the goal of the heavenly calling of God.
What is the goal? It is to be like Jesus. What a goal!
If we compare ourselves to Jesus, we soon come to the realization of how far we are from Him in perfection and love.
How could we ever even hope to reach that goal. Think of the 110M hurdles. Therein lies the secret to moving from where you are to the character of Jesus. The runners know that they can’t get over all those hurdles in one leap. No! They must take one hurdle at a time, as they get to them, moving ever closer to the finish line. God puts all of these goals (or hurdles) in front of us to lead us in the same direction – toward becoming more Christ-like.
Let us not rest on our laurels and the successes of yesterday. And let us not stay down when we fall.
Keep moving forward. Keep straining for what lies ahead. Keep pressing on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly calling of God.
And when you make out your “to-do” list for tomorrow, and for the rest of your life, make sure you put on it “be a little more like Jesus.”
