Run to Win

The Apostle Paul compares the Christian life to a "race", and when I think about this race I think about four different types of people:

1. Spectators

These people are not running the race at all. They are just on the sidelines. Some are thinking about getting in the race while others seem to not care at all.

2. Pretenders

These are the people who pretend to be runners. They wear the right clothes and the right shoes so they will look like a runner. They can talk the talk, discussing times and distances just like a runner. But in fact they never enter the race.

3. Finishers

These are the people who are running the race, but they are only running to "finish". What I mean by that is that their goal is not to win the race, just to finish it. Because of this, they do not put in the required time and effort to make them winners. They do "just enough".

4. Winners

These are the people who work and train themselves. For them, just finishing the race is not enough. Their goal is to win, to obtain the prize. They put in not only the time required to meet their goal, they even go over and beyond that because they don't want to leave anything to chance. They spend countless hours training alone, doing whatever it takes to build up their endurance in order that they will have what it takes when the day arrives.

Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it. 1 Corinthians 9:24

On this last day of 2008, as I look into a new year, I have to ask myself "Which one am I?". I'm afraid that for much of my life as a Christian I've been just a 'Finisher', putting in just enough time and effort to enable me to finish the race. One of those people that say "just give me a cabin in the corner of heaven". But that is not what Paul says we should do.

"Run in such a way that you may obtain the prize."

I can't help but think about Michael Phelps and his Olympic gold medals. I think about all the work and effort he put in when no one was watching. The training day after day with no glory, no pats on the back, no TV appearances. Four long years of training. The Christian race is the same. We all want to be victorious Christians, but we must put in the effort, the training, the discipline.

Don't run the race just to finish - Run to Win!

Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it. And everyone who competes for the prize is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown. Therefore I run thus: not with uncertainty. Thus I fight: not as one who beats the air. But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified. 1 Corinthians 9:24-27

Do You Know?

Do you know that you are saved?

Do you know that you have eternal life?

Now be honest - do those two questions make you uncomfortable? We normally only hear questions like these in a church service, usually when the preacher is giving an invitation for non-believers to come forward and accept Christ. But shouldn't we as believers be asking ourselves these questions as well? The greatest and most horrific deception in the world is that of being deceived into believing you are a Christian when you are not.

I've heard many say that you should not question your salvation, but I believe that we should examine ourselves to make sure that we are in the faith. In fact, the scriptures command that we do it.

Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? - unless indeed you are disqualified. - 2 Corinthians 13:5

I think the reason that most people are uncomfortable with those questions is that they may not know how to answer them. They may refer back to a decision they made years ago as a child or young adult. They may rely on how they "feel" at a particular time. But we should never rely on our memory or our feelings (even the most ardent believers will tell you that sometimes they "feel" like a Christian and sometimes they don't). We should rely on the truth, the Word of God. If the Bible tells us to examine ourselves, then it should also tell us how to do it, and I believe the book of 1 John does exactly that. In fact, John says that is one of the reasons that he wrote the book.

These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God. - 1 John 5:13

As you read through the book of 1 John (something that I would suggest doing fairly often), you'll see several "tests" that can determine whether a person is in the faith.

1. Obedience to His Commandments

Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him. - 1 John 2:3-5

Now he who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. 1 John 3:24

2. Brotherly Love

We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love his brother abides in death. 1 John 3:14

My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth. And by this we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before Him. 1 John 3:18-19

If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also. 1 John 20-21

3. Practice Righteousness

If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone who practices righteousness is born of Him. 1 John 2:29

In this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest: Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother. 1 John 3:10

4. Holy Spirit

Now he who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. And by this we know that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us. 1 John 3:24

By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. 1 John 4:13

As we move into a new year, many people will be examining their life in order to make a new year's resolution. But I want to encourage each one of us to go far beyond the temporal and look to the eternal. We need to examine ourselves - to ask ourselves once again life's most important questions:

Do you know that you are saved?

Do you know that you have eternal life?

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’ Matthew 7:21-23

We're Not Alone

I was out of town last week on business so I had to spend some undesirable time in airports and airplanes. As I was sitting in the airport waiting on my plane to leave, a young mother with 3 young children came and sat down across from me. It was fairly early in the morning, so she had evidently bought them some biscuits for breakfast. As she unwrapped them, she stopped and had them all bow their heads and pray.

I'm not sure why seeing one small family in an airport stop and bless their food would have such an affect on me, but it did. I think it's because with all the junk going on in the world around us, it seems sometimes that we're the only ones serving the Lord. Sure, we know there are others out there, but because we don't know them they can become invisible to us. The world can be so bad that it begins to drown out the good, and if we're not careful we'll begin to feel sorry for ourselves.

The same thing happened to Elijah. It seemed to him that the entire nation of Israel was given over to Baal.

So he said, “I have been very zealous for the LORD God of hosts; for the children of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars, and killed Your prophets with the sword. I alone am left; and they seek to take my life.” - 1 Kings 19:10

But God reminded him that he was not alone.

Yet I have reserved seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.” - 1 Kings 19:18

So just as that small family in an airport reminded me last week, I want to pass on the favor and remind you that you are not alone. In every city and town, every airport and mall, God has those who belong to Him.

Mere Christianity

One of my favorite books is Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. If you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend that you take the time to do so. It's not the easiest read for sure. Lewis was very intelligent and he brings that intelligence to all his writings. However, it does what a good Christian book should do - it enhances scripture instead of trying to replace it. In fact, when you read some of the stuff that passes for Christian literature in today's market, it makes you appreciate the giants of the recent past such as Lewis and A.W. Tozer.

I picked out a few of my favorite quotes from the book to share with you.

Comfort and Terror

“God is the only comfort; He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.”

Enemy Territory

"Enemy occupied territory - that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.”

A Poached Egg

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said, would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

More Than We Can Spare

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.”

Understanding Evil

“When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.”

A Lovely Idea

“Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”

Being Made Human Again

“I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life-namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.”

A Humble Man

“Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about his is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him.”

One of the Great Secrets

“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more.”

Aim at Heaven

“Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.”

Laying Eggs

“There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of "Heaven" ridiculous by saying they do not want "to spend eternity playing harps." The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendor and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”

Everything For Nothing

“Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing. In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer.”

Beyond Time

“God is not hurried along in the time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his own novel He has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. He does not have to deal with us in the mass. You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created. When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only man in the world.”

Give Me All

“Christ says "Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You.”

Everything Else Thrown In

“Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

Living an Eternal Life

A few weeks ago I was just casually browsing through some different blogs that I follow. One of the blogs was talking about Bible reading and was encouraging readers to pick one of the four Gospels and read it through in one sitting. In this day and age when it seems like we are always in a hurry, the blog's author realized that challenge might be hard for some people to accept. So he made the following statement:

"You are an eternal being - start living like it."

Let's think about what that really means. I am two different people in a manner of speaking, an inner man and an outer man. For the sake of this conversation, let's refer to these two people as the Inner Life and the Outer Life.

Now the Outer Life is temporary and is going to end at some point. This life is lived in a body that is dying. But while it's alive, this life is interested in things that can make its existence more enjoyable - it loves good food, spending time with family and friends, playing sports, going fishing - a multitude of activities that seem to make this life fulfilling. But in the end, it's all temporary and will fade away. Nothing we can do or attain or accomplish with this Outer Life is permanent. A hundred years from now I doubt anyone will even know this life existed. The Scriptures describe this Outer Life this way:

You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. - James 4:14

But the Inner Life is different. It is not a body but an eternal spirit that will never die. The Scriptures refer to the Inner Life this way:

Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. - 2 Corinthians 4:16-18

What's different about this Inner Life is this - everything you do to it, everything you do for it and everything you accomplish with it does not fade away. When you feed it or exercise it, those changes are permanent and eternal. So here's the question:

Which life are you living?

Do you make your plans and decisions based on the Outer Life, the one that is a vapor and here but for a moment? Or is the direction of your life guided by the Inner Life, the one that is permanent and eternal? When the blog's author challenges us to "live like an eternal being", he is asking us to realize that not only do we have all the time in the world, we have all the time in this world and beyond! In that light, shouldn't we be putting our time and resources into the Inner Life? Shouldn't we be living the eternal life?

It Is Enough

In case you haven't noticed lately, the world is obsessed with sex. It's everywhere - movies, TV shows, billboards and magazines. In advertising, it's used to sell everything. It used to be that you could shield your children from it by filtering what shows they were allowed to watch. But now the advertisements are as bad if not worse than the shows themselves. As bad as that is, that's the world and I really shouldn't expect anything better from it.

What really bothers me is that lately it seems the church is trying to use this obsession with sex for it's own purposes. Let me just give you a couple of quick examples:

1. The Revered Ed Young, an author, a television host and the pastor of the evangelical Fellowship Church, issued his call for a week of “congregational copulation” among married couples on Nov. 16, while pacing in front of a large bed. Sometimes he reclined on the paisley coverlet while flipping through a Bible, emphasizing his point that it is time for the church to put God back in the bed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/us/24sex.html

2. Sexually themed billboards have shocked some drivers traveling on Blanding Boulevard in Clay County. They show four bare feet sticking out from the end of a bed in what is clearly a reference to sexual relations. But more surprising than the billboards themselves is what they're advertising -- a church. The pastor of New Life Fellowship, Bob Morro, said the billboards promote a series of sermons at the church concerning the role of sex in Christian life.

http://www.local6.com/news/15109415/detail.html

Trust me, that's just a couple of examples, but there are plenty more out there. What bothers me is that these churches are using sex to titillate and intrigue in order to draw people in. Just because the actual sermons may not be graphic in nature does not mean that the churches are not knowingly using sex to sell themselves. What's the difference between what they are doing and any other company or business using similar imagery to sell their wares?

Now some people may say "Well, you have to use new methods to reach the young people of today". Really? Well, pardon me while I disagree. Why is it that churches feel like the truth of the Word of God is not enough anymore? Why are we reduced to cheap gimmicks like putting a bed on the stage or using a billboard with four bare feet sticking out from the end of the bed?

Let me state something as emphatically as I know how:

The Message of the Cross is Enough!

1 Corinthians 1:18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

A cross. Wood and nails. Torture device. Blood. Thorns. Broken Legs. A spear. Soldiers. Casting lots. Place of the Skull. King. Mocking. Sour wine. Criminals. Paradise. Darkness. Earthquake. Veil. Tomb. Three days. Angels. Resurrection.

God knows men's hearts. He knows the message that we need to hear and he put His Word together with the express purpose of revealing Himself to us. We may think other methods are more exciting and more marketable, but God promises His Word will not return void. It will accomplish its purpose. We need to preach "Jesus Christ, and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2)".

Foolishness? No, power!

O that old rugged cross, so despised by the world,
Has a wondrous attraction for me;
For the dear Lamb of God left His glory above
To bear it to dark Calvary.

In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,
A wondrous beauty I see,
For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died,
To pardon and sanctify me.

The Marriage Secret

A friend of ours sent us a note the other day. Her daughter is getting married and she asked us to write down a few things that we had learned in our 25 years of marriage. She was going to gather these lessons from several couples and then give them to her daughter as a wedding gift. This got me to thinking about marriage and what it really takes for it to be successful.

Now in 25 years I've learned a lot, but the more I thought about it the more I realized how difficult it was to encapsulate the lessons I've learned over the years into nice little cliches. Marriage is a lot like life in that it's something that you grow into and grow with. The years go by and you realize that you've become a different person. But with everything that I've learned, there is one special piece of knowledge - a secret - that I learned years ago. It's guaranteed to make a marriage work.

We all know that marriage is a complicated thing - so I've decided to let everyone in on this secret. Now before I tell you what it is, I want you to understand how big a secret this really is. You don't have to attend a seminar - you don't have to buy the DVD's for $39.95 - you don't have to read a book - and you don't even have to sit in a room full of people and talk about your feelings. But this little piece of knowledge will absolutely revolutionize every aspect of your marriage.

So now that I've built this up, are you ready?

Here it is:

Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself - Philippians 2:3

Disappointed? You shouldn't be. Why is it that we will read the next book, go to the next seminar or buy the next DVD - but we will not apply the simple truths of God's Word? What you've just read is a foundational truth in the Scriptures. If you will apply that truth, it will change not only your marriage but every relationship that you have. Feel free to pass it on.