A Cause With No Pause

“However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the gospel of God's grace.” Acts 20:24

In running the race we will trip and we will stumble. Oftentimes, despite our best efforts, we will fall; face first with dirt in our teeth.

In ancient times, when the Olympics were the grand event (instead of the Super Bowl), the race was everything. The crowds would gather, the runners would take their place and a symphony of human effort would follow; muscles and sweat, determination and grit, man against man in search of the victor’s wreath and the accolades of the crowd.  The idea was to win. The idea was to conquer. Hence on such a day in those times one could see on a small scale the mentality of mankind as it played out on a larger scale, in wars between nations, when conquering and being a conqueror was everything.

The message of the Christian faith as born in Christ was to transcend this mentality. Paul put it best:
“… in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

The idea seems simple but it’s not. For one to be more than a conqueror you must first lose interest in being one.  In Western culture this notion, for some of us, can be hard to accept. We have been raised to believe that the race always goes to the swift, that finishing anything less than first place is failure and that getting ahead at any cost is worth the price, even if it is at the expense of someone else. In the Old Testament King Solomon addressed the futility of this approach to life when he warned "...the race does not always go to the swift, or the battle to the strong...". The notion of a life spent trying to conquer and overcome leads only to defeat because someone has to lose and, at some point, that someone is going to be you.

Instead of conquering one another we are called to conquer ourselves or, better yet, our sinful natures. How many battles and World Wars have been fought because men could not handle the battles within their own souls? Turning to the battle within is much harder than dropping bombs or pointing a gun. But to find God, to find true peace, we must engage ourselves daily and overcome, enslave and defeat our own weaknesses, all while trying to engage daily life at the same time.

It’s not easy and no one said it would be.  We must run the race, even when we are weak and tired, burdened or broken, not to win but to be glorious to God in the effort.

And when we fall? The message of faith is to get up. Every…single…time.

Because we are all part of a cause. A cause with no pause.