If you will turn with me to the Letter to the Hebrews, chapter 12. Hebrews 12:1.
Therefore let us also, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us,
and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,
looking unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith,
Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame,
and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Then, in the First Letter of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 9. I am going to read from the New American Standard Bible, because I think it is a little clearer than the older version that I use. First Corinthians 9:24.
Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize?
Run in such a way that you may win.
And everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things.
They then do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable.
Therefore I run in such a way as not without aim; I box in such a way as not beating the air;
but I buffet my body, and make it my slave, lest possibly, after I have preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.
Lastly, the Letter of the Apostle Paul to the Philippians, chapter 3. I am going to read from verse 8.
Yea verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord:
for Whom I suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse, that I may gain Christ,
and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law,
but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith:
that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death;
if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Christ Jesus.
Brethren, I count not myself yet to have laid hold: but one thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before,
I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Beloved Lord, beloved Lord, we are so thankful that we are found here in Your presence this afternoon. We have already witnessed an attempt of the enemy to disrupt things, but we praise You for the victory of our Lord Jesus.
We thank You that every attempt of the enemy to frustrate Your purpose and Your design in these days will fail because of the finished work of our Lord Jesus. Into that power and fullness, we want to stand by faith this afternoon. Breathe Your life and power into this whole time.
Lord, we thank You for the anointing which You have made available to us: for the speaking of Your Word, the translating of Your Word, and the hearing of Your Word. Beloved Lord, into that anointing we stand by faith, that in full measure it may be our experience today.
We shall be careful, Lord, as always, to give You all the praise and all the glory for answering this our prayer, which we ask in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
The theme of these days, as you all know, is The Time Is at Hand. My feeling is that it is a good deal nearer than most of us think.
Maybe there are a number of things that have to take place before the final stage in the coming of the Lord. But the rapture could take place at any single moment. We really do need, I think, to wake up.
We are caught in a thousand and one things that trouble us, amuse us, make us heavy, and turn our eyes away from the Lord Jesus.
We need a trumpet call from the Spirit of God to be done with all this mess that Christians live in, so often corporately. We need to be done with all these things that somehow or other turn us out of the race, turn us inward, until in the end we are disqualified.
My part in this is the running of the race. I take the little phrase in Hebrews 12: “running the race that is set before us.”
Running the race that is set before us. What is this race? Who are the runners? Very simple. I shall treat you like a Sunday school this afternoon, so that we can get very simply to the root of this whole thing.
Paul often used the most worldly illustrations. He used sport. He used wrestling, for instance—a rather disgusting sport for some, vulgar and down to earth. He used boxing, a little more sophisticated, but not very much. He used running.
He did not use any of those very nice games—badminton, tennis, cricket, and even baseball. They are all so much more sophisticated. But he used these pictures to illustrate tremendous spiritual principles.
One of the pictures he used was the racecourse and the runners. The writer of the Hebrew letter—we do not know who he was; some believe he was Paul, but I personally do not. I am pretty well persuaded it was Apollos because of the language of the Hebrew letter. It is the most beautiful classical Greek in the New Testament.
But that is by the way. It does not really matter who it was. The fact is that we have the letter, and he also uses this picture of the race: “Let us run with patience,” or with steadfastness, “the race that is set before us.”
Of whom do Paul and the writer of the Hebrew letter speak? Of course, it is obvious: believers. They are the only people on this racecourse. It is believers who are running this race.
I think it is important to get this quite clear right at the outset. We have one short life, and if you are saved by the grace of God, you have a course to run. You have a race to run.
It needs to dawn on us, because so often in contemporary Christianity there is this whole idea that, as long as you are saved, as long as you are converted, as long as now and again you read your Bible, say your prayers, and meet with Christians, that is everything.
But it is important for us to understand that there is a race. Whether you know it or not, you have been placed in that race. If you are a child of God, you have a race to run. It is set before us.
“Let us run with patience the race that is set before us.” It is an appointed race for every child of God.
Now, that sounds very simple. Let me go on. Why a race, with all its attendant imagery? Is it for health or for diet?
Some people run. When I first used to come to the States, I hardly ever saw anybody jogging. Now it seems to me that everywhere there are joggers galore—every side street, even where there are often no sidewalks. People are jogging.
Is this race just for spiritual health, just to keep us healthy, keep us moving, keep our joints supple and our muscles toned up? Is it for our figure—to stop us from getting a pot belly or a pear shape that so often develops with all of us as we get older?
Why a race? The apostle says it very clearly in 1 Corinthians 9:24:
Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize?
Run in such a way that you may win.
Run in such a way that you may win. He does not mean that there is only one single believer in all the millions of believers who is going to get the prize. The point he is making is this: everyone runs, but one person crosses the finishing line before the others and wins the prize.
There is a prize to be won.
Listen carefully to the Apostle Paul. If ever there was an example of a runner in such a race, it is expressed in his Philippian letter, chapter 3:
Forgetting the things which are behind,
I press forward to the things which are before,
to the goal.
I press on to the goal,
to the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Interestingly, that little word goal is the Greek word for the mark, the marker set at the end of the racecourse that you had to pass. That was the goal. So it is all the imagery of the racecourse and of the runner.
“I press on toward that marker, toward the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
Now, that is what I want to look at this afternoon. What is the prize? I am asking a whole lot of questions and seeking to answer them. What is the prize?
Well, it cannot be salvation. We are told that there is a prize to be won. What is the prize?
To the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus.
So God is calling you upward. Your salvation has placed you on a course; it has placed you in a race. There is a prize to be won.
The salvation that you have experienced by the grace of God, with all its completeness and all its fullness, is the foundation for the whole race. But there is a prize. What is the prize?
Let me quote a few Scriptures you all know very well.
By grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.
Or again:
For the wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
A free gift. By grace have you been saved. What, then, is the prize?
It becomes quite clear, at least to me, that the prize is not salvation. Salvation may provide everything you need to obtain the prize. The grace of God may be the basis upon which you receive that prize, but you have to run a course, and you have to win the prize.
Again, consider the Apostle Paul’s words in Philippians 3:12:
Laying hold on that for which Christ also laid hold on me.
Why did Christ lay hold on you? What was it that, when He arrested you, when He apprehended you, when He laid hold on you, He laid hold on you for?
The apostle is very concerned that whatever the Lord laid hold on him for, he should lay hold of it. In other words, whatever the Lord had in mind in saving him, he wanted it to be fully realized in his life.
Have you any idea why the Lord laid hold on you?
Sometimes, in the fellowship of God’s people, we wonder why the Lord laid hold on most of us. If we have got anywhere in the Lord, we wonder why the Lord laid hold on us.
But it is a much more common thing to wonder why the Lord laid hold on others. We think, “Why in the world did the Lord save so-and-so? A pain in the neck, a problem in the fellowship, and all the rest of it. Why did the Lord lay hold of them?”
Yet there is an amazing thing. This word is such a strong word: to arrest, to apprehend, like a policeman taking hold of somebody. The Lord took hold of you.
Many of us have had certain experiences of the salvation of God. Thank God for those of you who went forward at meetings and made a decision, and it was a real one, and you got wonderfully saved. But there are others whom, in some amazing way, God took hold of. The Apostle Paul was one of them. It is amazing how the Lord struck him down.
What was it that God did when He broke into the Apostle Paul’s life and circumstances? It seems as if it gripped the apostle, as if he was saying, “I want to lay hold on that for which Christ took hold of me. I want to apprehend that for which He apprehended me.”
It is tremendous. This testimony, which I have often said is contained in Philippians 3, is probably the most extraordinary testimony in the whole of Scripture, because it presents us, the normal Christian, with enormous problems.
What does he mean: “That I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead”? Is not everyone going to be raised from the dead?
Why does he say, “That I may attain unto the resurrection”? The Greek is even more interesting: that I may attain unto the out-resurrection from among the dead—a special resurrection. What is he talking about?
Why does he say, “I count everything loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord,” and then say, “I count all refuse, that I may know Him”—the little prefix there means that I may fully know Him—“and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death”?
What is the Apostle Paul talking about? When he wrote this letter, he had already written Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, and Philemon. I would have thought that was evidence enough that he really had a knowledge of the Lord, a full knowledge of the Lord.
Most Christians and servants of the Lord who had been used by the Spirit of God to write even a fraction of that would feel that they were something very special in the history of the church. “Look, you see my knowledge. You see how I know the Lord.”
Here is a man who has been used by the Spirit of God to give us a whole portion of the New Testament, and he is talking as if he does not know the Lord, as if he has got to come into something deeper than ever before to know the Lord.
What is it that gripped him? What is it that gripped him? I will tell you what gripped him: the prize. It is the prize that gripped him.
He knows he is saved. He says it again and again and again in this letter. He knows he is saved by the grace of God. He knows, because he says it, that he was laid hold of by Christ. He is quite clear about that: “I have been laid hold of by the Lord Jesus Himself.”
What is it that is inflaming him? Oh, that the Christian people were inflamed with even a small percentage of this hunger for the Lord. We are so pathetic, so dull, so boring. Let us face it: Christians are boring, for the most part.
I know the Lord calls us lilies among the thorns. Sometimes I have thought we are thorns among the lilies.
But what is it that has got this apostle, who has given us so much? It has gripped him, obsessed him, possessed him, inflamed him.
He says, “I count not myself yet to have laid hold.” Well, where does that leave you and me? Good question. Where does it leave you and me?
If he thinks he has not yet laid hold—and he has already written, think of it, Romans 8. Forget the rest: Romans 8. If I had only written Romans 8, I would have been so thrilled. I should be forever telling you, “Have you read my little tract?”
Or think of 1 Corinthians 13. If you had been used by the Spirit of God to communicate that to the people of God, would you not be thrilled? Yet here is a man who has been used to give far more than that, far, far more than that.
And he is consumed with a desire to know the Lord more deeply. The less you know of the Lord, the more bumptious you can be, the more arrogant you can be, the more self-possessed you can be, the more self-sufficient you can be, the more independent you can be. The less you know of the Lord.
The more you know of the Lord, the more you know how little you know.
It is almost as if the very knowledge of the Lord inflames you with an understanding that there is far more than your little heart can contain, far more than your little spirit can experience.
Here in this amazing testimony in Philippians 3, we have the heart of this apostle, with all his weaknesses and all his failings. Weaknesses and failings he had.
It is not for nothing that the churches in Asia turned away from him. But we see something incredible about this man whom God so greatly used.
I can only say that if we, the people of God, had a fraction of this fieriness, this passion, this hunger in us, this thirst in us, it would transform everything.
It would certainly transform our prayer meetings. It would certainly transform our Bible studies. It would certainly transform the breaking of bread.
We would not just have quiet little things given, sometimes almost stale. It would burst out of hearts that were in love with God and knew how little they had, and how much there was yet to possess.
So it is here in this amazing testimony that the apostle says, “I do not consider myself yet to have laid hold,” or, “to be made perfect,” or complete.
Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect; but I press on.
Where does that leave you, dear child of God? If this is the testimony of the Apostle Paul, where does it leave you? Where does it leave me?
The apostle puts one little word in this testimony that is quite extraordinary. For me, at least, when I first saw this, it was the key. I puzzled and puzzled over this testimony of the Apostle Paul.
It seemed so unevangelical. In one way, I thought it was almost—God forgive me, I do not want to lead anyone astray—it seemed almost Catholic. It really did.
It seemed to me as if it was all works, because here, after all, salvation has a lot to do with work.
Then I found this little phrase:
That I may win Christ.
My version puts it, “That I may gain Christ,” and that was the key that unlocked everything for me.
That I may win Christ. Christ is given to you as Saviour. Christ is given to you as Redeemer. Christ is given to you as Lord. But you win Him as Bridegroom.
That is the key that unlocks this incredible testimony. It is also the key to our understanding of the prize.
I press on toward the goal,
the final mark,
the finishing line of the race,
to the prize
of the upward calling of God
in Christ Jesus.
What is this calling? It is not just to be saved. Rather, by the salvation into which, by the grace of God, you have been brought by the Spirit of God, you may win Christ as Bridegroom.
The prize. Some people speak of rewards, and I do not have any doubt about rewards. Nor do I have any doubt that one reward differs from another reward.
We are not talking about some Maoist or communist state where everything is dished out equally—except for the top class. We are talking about real rewards.
But it seems to me that all those rewards pale into insignificance next to winning Christ as Bridegroom.
Sometimes people talk about reigning, as if they are going to be somehow big people and important people. It almost attracts something in us, do you understand what I mean? That is self-centred, out for our own fulfilment and satisfaction.
But if you understand it in the right way, it is to win Christ as Bridegroom. Then all the other rewards fall into place.
You have often heard me say here before, over the years—I cannot remember how many years I have been coming to this conference—but I have often said that the Bible begins with a marriage, it ends with a marriage, and the centre of the Bible, in your Christian arrangement, is another marriage.
When our Lord Jesus began His ministry, John took eight signs and eight declarations of the Lord Jesus and gave us an interpretation of the Lord Jesus. His Messianic ministry began at a wedding.
John the Baptist, the greatest of all the prophets in the old covenant, said, “I am the best man.” In other words, he saw himself as having something to do with a wedding.
This race that is set before us has everything to do with a final, eternal wedding.
Now, you may not feel I am the best person to speak on this, but let me put it this way. Some people look upon marriage as the end.
I do not know whether ladies think of it that way so much, but some men do. They think it is the end of their freedom, the end of their independence—the end. They have got to be committed to somebody for life, and then there will be screaming children and this, that, and the other all around.
Other people look upon marriage as the beginning—mostly ladies. They think of it as something so wonderful. Here is a new life beginning, a whole new way.
But, of course, it is both. A marriage is the end of one phase in life and the beginning of another. The Bible ends with a marriage.
It is the end of one whole phase of sin, death, mourning, sickness, and an endless cycle of corruption. The Lord says, “I make all things new.” It is the beginning of something.
But we do not know what we are going to do. I have said it many times, so you must have heard it before, either on tape or in person.
People are always asking me, “Are we going to wear clothes?” I do not know why people are so bothered about wearing clothes. They say, “Are we going to wear clothes? What do we dress in? Are we going to eat?”
Especially the Chinese—they have always asked me, “Are we going to eat?” Will we recognize one another? These are mostly people with difficult relatives.
People have thousands of questions, and these questions are not actually specifically answered in the Word of God.
The Word of God ends with a wedding, as if that explains everything. As if the Lord says, “All these questions you can just put on one side. It is enough to be married to Me. Then you will see what we will do, the way all these matters will unfold, the key to them, and so on.”
We do not know what we are going to do in eternity. I am always amazed every time I look at the heavens in the part of the world where I live, which is cloudless for so much of the year.
As you look into the heavens and see millions—tens of millions—of stars, you marvel.
In one place where I often stay, in a little cottage, the Milky Way goes right over us into the sea. I think to myself, “A universe is up there.”
Now, I am not a scientist, so I never put things in a very scientific way. But for my little brain and my little head, I marvel. I think to myself, “All those universes out into space—what is the Lord going to do?”
We do not know. It is so exciting.
People say, “Oh, I am going to be so bored in heaven if we are going to have that long hallelujah chorus that goes on for thousands and thousands and thousands of years without change.”
Even the greatest musician among us, and those with the finest voices, would begin to pale. Oh, it is wonderful to praise the Lord, but even the Lord Himself would get a little dissatisfied after a while with the same old song, millennium after millennium after millennium.
No, no, no. The Lord is not interested in some eternal choir. He is not interested in some great divine orchestra. Of course, there will be one—do not make any mistake about it. A choir and an orchestra, no doubt about it. Maybe some of you will be playing in it.
But that is not the real thing about eternity to come. We do not even know what the Lord is going to do. That is what this prize is all about.
Until it dawns on you—until, to use an old English phrase, the penny drops—you will not understand it.
I will not explain how we got that term. It came from public toilets. We used to put a penny in, and you waited to hear it clink, and then the door opened. So we got the phrase, “the penny drops.”
But until the penny drops with you, until suddenly you say, “Oh, that is why I have been saved. That is why God took hold of me,” what do you do? Do you just sit there passively? Do you just sit there waiting for angels to carry you?
No. You must lay hold on that for which also Christ laid hold on you. That is the prize. You have a race set before you. It is no good just saying, “Here is the racecourse. There are the runners.” You have got to run.
Dear brothers and sisters, this matter is, I think, of tremendous consequence and import.
There is not a soul in this room, saved by the grace of God, who has not got this race set before him or her.
Are you a child of God? Are you born of the Spirit of God? Then you are in a race, on a course. There is a prize to be won.
Tomorrow I will talk about the things that turn us out of the race, slow us down, or stop us from running altogether.
But all I want to get over to you this afternoon is that there is a goal, there is a prize, and that prize has something to do with winning Christ.
I have never been able to understand the ideas so often found in Christian circles: that Jesus just wants to have someone sitting next to Him. That looks good.
Of course, nobody is going to say something like that, but that is what it really means. You can live any kind of lukewarm, apathetic life, but once you die, somehow, however mean or crabby or hopeless you are, when you die you become a saint.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon used to say, when he went walking with his dog through the cemetery, “Where did they bury the sinners?” All the inscriptions said wonderful things about the people. They were all resting in Jesus, or beholding Him face to face. And he said, “Some of them I knew.”
There is this idea that somehow, when you die, a magic wand is waved over you and you become fully grown.
Why, then, does the apostle speak like this in this testimony? If that is the case, why does he not just rest? It does not matter what he does. He does not have to count anything as refuse. He does not have to share the sufferings of Christ.
I think that God’s original purpose for humanity was to reign with Him. He wanted them to be in such fellowship with Him that they would start with the garden.
I have a theory, and we recognize that it is speculative, so please remember this.
Life is a riot. You cannot have life without it being riotous. Some people think that came in with the Fall. I do not.
Look at any plant. If it is really healthy and happy, it goes all over the place. You have to train it; you have to cut it back. Then it becomes even happier and more fruitful, if it is a fruit tree or vine or whatever else.
Even flowers—you all know that. The more you cut them, the more they flower.
I think when the Lord put humanity into the world, the whole planet was a riot of life. He planted one garden and said, “Tend this garden, guard it, keep it.” Then He said, “Multiply,” and so on.
I think what He meant was that if Adam and Eve had taken the tree of life and come into union with God in the Lord Jesus, they would have had first the garden. Then, from the garden, as they became experienced, they would have added an allotment, and then another, and another, and another.
There was no sin in the world in that sense. But it is amazing to think of it. Life is so amazing.
That is, in the beginning, what the Lord had in mind for humanity: that in union with Him they might be able to govern the whole world.
What would have happened beyond that, I do not know, because God, being God, would never stop still.
That is what I find so interesting when young people tell me they think they would be very bored with heaven. Well, I understand it. They are basing it on our meetings.
They say, “Well, that is what we are going to have for ever and ever and ever.” But that is not the Lord I know, and it is not the Lord you know, if you think.
There is something tremendous about the Lord we know: never stopping still, always creative, always moving. The problem with sin, the Fall, is that it arrested everything.
So, dear child of God, is this not amazing?
I press on to the goal,
to the prize of the upward call of God
in Christ Jesus.
Upward call. My version says “high calling,” but you will see that most of the modern versions put it as an “on-high calling.” The idea is that God is calling you up.
He is calling you to be the Bride of His Son. He is calling you to reign with Christ from the throne.
Well, I hope that is enough for one afternoon.
Think again about this little phrase: “The upward calling of God.” It is God Who is calling.
Where is this call? In Christ Jesus. It is something to do with the Lord Jesus, something to do with belonging to Him, something to do with union with Him.
It is something to do with the divine destiny of the Lord Jesus. This upward call is that you and I should share His destiny.
We cannot share His deity, but we can share His destiny. We are heirs of God and joint-heirs with the Lord Jesus.
Is it any wonder that the apostle, once he begins to glimpse this, says, “Forgetting the things which are behind”?
It is not that you forget your conversion or forget the way God has saved you—not at all. But all the things that are behind: the failures, the weaknesses, the sins—so much.
Forgetting the things which are behind, I press on toward the mark, toward the goal, to the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus.
If the Lord were to give you a glimpse this afternoon of this prize, this wondrous calling of yours, it would change your life.
When I first saw the Lord, I came from a totally secular, non-religious home. I was excused from all religious instruction at school, for which I was very thankful. I did not have to go to what they called Scripture lessons in those days, chapel prayers, or anything like that. I was excused from all of it.
When I first came to the Lord, such a sense of sin came in. I was only twelve, going on thirteen—just a few months before I was thirteen. I have never forgotten it.
Some months later, I actually saw the Lord. I say that carefully. I never saw His face. I just saw the Lord, and I saw the huge light in His hand.
I remember very clearly Him saying to me, “You do not go this way; you go that way. Are you ready to obey?” And I said, “Yes.” I was so young, so ignorant.
But that was not the thing that captured me. It was later, when with the eyes of my heart I saw the Lord Jesus. That was the thing that caught me. From that moment, I could not turn back.
I well remember being so disillusioned with God’s people. In the assembly in which I was, there were two pastors, and the whole congregation arranged themselves behind either one or the other.
I worshipped the ground they walked on originally, and so for me it was as if the bottom fell out of my life.
I went to Paris to be with an uncle and an aunt. I stayed for four or five months in Paris, and the pastors of the assembly I was in thought, “He has gone. He has backslidden.”
I was nearly in that place because I was so disillusioned. I talked with an abbé of the Roman Catholic Church, but I thought I could never be happy there because of the pope.
Then I talked with an Islamic imam. I remember that, and I knew that was false. But I was really a child—sixteen years of age—trying to find my feet. I could not find them.
In the end, I wrote a letter to the deaconess of the church with all my aches and pains, and what I felt about them all—how hopeless I thought they all were, including the two pastors.
She wrote back a starchy letter in which she said, “So serious are your criticisms that I have felt it only right to put it before the deacons.”
I remember standing there in Paris with the letter open and saying out loud, “Lord, I could give up all Your people. They are not worth anything.”
Then I heard a voice behind me, so real that I swung round to see who it was. The voice said, “You can give up My people. Can you give up Me?”
At that moment, my feet touched the bottom.
You remember the story of Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress. When he was sinking, he was crying, “Help me, help me!” Then all of a sudden he was all right: “My feet have touched the bottom.”
That, for me, was the great turning point in my life. I could not give up God. From that moment on, though every Christian proved to be a liar, I would still follow the Lord Jesus.
I give that little personal testimony because, for me, it was as if a hallelujah chorus sang all around me—so real that I could feel that they were there. I think a battle was won.
It was the beginning for me of seeing the purpose of God for the Lord Jesus, and my being—hopeless as I was, failing as I was, weak as I was—somehow or other involved. He had taken hold of me. From that moment, I felt I must take hold of Him.
Now I am seventy-four. I was sixteen then. I am seventy-four now, and I have accumulated many more weaknesses and many more failings over the years.
Yet I am still possessed by that vision of the Lord Jesus.
For me, when I saw an actual vision, it was something very real, but it has never meant so much as the other experience. The other was a turning point, a huge turning point in my life.
My feet had touched the bottom. For the first time, my feet were on the rock of the Lord Jesus—not on other people’s experience, but on Him and in Him.
We need that kind of experience if we are going to go through what lies ahead.
May God grant it to us and help us in these days in which we are living. Run the race. There is a prize to be won.
The most beautiful thing about this is that when the Apostle Paul said, “That I may win Him,” he also said, “That I may be found in Him, not having a righteousness which is of my own, of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ.”
In other words, he sees the winning of the prize as based in the grace of God.
Based in the grace of God. Everything you need to win that prize is available to the weakest child of God in this building.
Everything you need—the energy and power of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection life of the Lord Jesus—is available to you, to the weakest and most hopeless person saved by the grace of God in this building.
It is all available to us. We were saved by the grace of God. That was God’s gift to us, His free gift.
We win Christ through exploring and laying hold of the grace and the power of God.
May the Lord stir you up. May He touch your heart. May He give you a new glimpse of Himself. May He inflame you in a way that you have never been inflamed before, so that in these days, when so much is happening on all sides that would depress us and pull us down, we are those who are followers of the Lord Jesus and follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth. Thank God. Give it to us.
Shall we pray?
Beloved Lord, hear our prayer. We do not want to go on in this kind of apathetic, lukewarm state that some of us are in.
We want, Lord, that You will do something in our lives. Touch us by Your Spirit, Lord. Upset our circumstances, if necessary, but bring us face to face with Yourself.
Help us to see that prize that is to be won in this race set before us. Lord, hear us.
We ask all this in that precious name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.