My family is a huge fan of the Olympics. My kids all play sports and my wife was a collegiate athlete, so we were all locked into watching the various events this last summer. There’s something incredibly dramatic about the competition at the Olympics. It’s very exciting to watch the greatest athletes in the world perform at the highest level.
Take track and field, for example. These are literally the fastest men and women on the planet. The Olympic record for the marathon race (which is 26.2 miles) is two hrs and six minutes. That record was set by Tamirat Tola from Ethiopia this summer. Or take the 100-meter dash. Now, I’m a red-blooded American, so I don’t understand the metric system. 100 meters…what is that, like a mile? No, it’s 328 feet, roughly the length of a football field. The Olympic record for the 100-meter dash is 9.63 seconds. That record was set by Usain Bolt in 2012. Running the length of a football field in under ten seconds? That is insanely fast.
In most cases, these athletes have been training their whole lives with a single-minded focus: winning. In order to achieve this goal, they devote themselves with extreme discipline to intense training. They push their bodies to their limits through brutal workouts, they regulate their eating by maintaining a strict diet, and they make tremendous personal sacrifices to achieve their goal. Now, imagine a marathon runner lining up for the big event at the Olympics, going all out for the first five miles, and then settling into a normal walking cadence. After another mile, imagine the athlete just sitting down for a while. If asked why, the athlete would reply, “I’m kind of tired and my body is hurting, so I’m just going to take it easy…but I still want to win.” That would be absurd! Any athlete knows that they need to press on if they want to win the prize.
In the book of Philippians, Paul exhorts us as believers in Christ to press on in the Christian life. In Philippians 3:13-14, he says, “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call o God in Christ Jesus.” Believers should press on toward the goal of becoming like Jesus with a single-minded focus.
The Christian life has been compared by many to a marathon. We face many trials that exhaust us or bring us great pain. Yet, like that athlete in the race of their life, how absurd would it be for us to stop running the race? How foolish would it be to become complacent and just coast? In the grand scheme of eternity, the Christian life is actually more like the 100-meter dash. Even a life of 100 years is miniscule compared to eternity. How foolish would it be for the 100-meter dash runner to stop running two seconds into a nine second race? He needs to press on through the temporary pain to win his prize. He needs to stay focused on the end goal. So do we.
Over the next few articles in this series, we’ll be breaking down Philippians 3:12-4:1. We’ll see the apostle Paul encouraging us to press on in the race of our Christian lives to reach the ultimate goal of Christlikeness. We’ll see the perfect interplay between the doctrines of justification, sanctification, and glorification. We’ll see that we can only run and finish our races because Christ is holding onto us.