Run!

Do any of you feel paralyzed by the number of choices available to you? Maybe its at school, there are so many possible classes you could take, or so many possible service projects, that you just have no idea what you should choose? Or maybe you’re starting to think about life after high school, and the number of possible colleges, trade schools, or missions opportunities seems almost threatening.

Have you ever noticed in your grocery store that, let’s say you’re trying to buy a bottle of Ranch dressing, it’s not as simple as just buying the dressing? Once you make it to the dressing aisle, and you get to the section for Ranch, you have to navigate the 12 different brands, all with great marketing that are trying to convince you they’re the “true” or “original” ranch dressing? On top of that, you look a little bit to your right and you look down a whole aisle of different kinds of dressings. What if I don’t actually want Ranch dressing? What if I’d be more satisfied with a different kind of dressing on my salad tonight? How can I choose!?

You know, they’ve actually done studies on this and they’ve shown that when you present people with only two options, people tend to be very satisfied with their choice. But the more possible options you present in front of people, the more anxiety they have about making a choice, and the less satisfied they are in the choice they made. What if I actually wanted something else? What if I actually wanted to go to this other school, take this other job, pursue this other opportunity?

This paralyzing fear of making choices is one of the things that characterizes my generation and your generation. More and more, we are being forced to try and make life choices at younger ages. Now there are magnet schools as early as middle school that you have to be in if you want to get into med school when you’re 25. If you want to play professional sports you have to sacrifice everything else to be on travel teams starting at age 5. It’s crazy. I think this is one of the reasons why there is so much anxiety amongst our generations. There’s an immense amount of pressure that we might make the wrong choice.

Does anyone here know what I’m talking about? Or am I speaking in tongues?

Well, when you cross this fear of choice over into the church, it morphs into this strange, ultra-spiritual phenomenon known as “Finding God’s Will for my life.” You ever wondered that? What is God’s will for my life? For your life? How do we know? Is there a way for us to know? Can we pray that God would speak to us in a dream or a vision? Can we be like Gideon and lay out a fleece and check for moisture to see what God wants us to do? What about casting lots, the apostles did that right? Should we? Is there a special prayer?

How can I know God’s will for my life? What if I MESS IT UP by making the wrong choice!?

In our last session together, I want to address this question. What is God’s will, or his calling on my life? But I want to make a couple points off the bat before we get into the main part of my message.

1) It is impossible for you to screw up God’s Will. It’s impossible for you to make a choice that will completely wreck God’s plan for your life. Because, for starters, you are not the center of God’s world. He loves you, a whole lot, but you ain’t all that. says this:

Ephesians 1:11–12 ESV

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, 12 so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.

God has a perfect plan for you and this world and this universe and you’re not going to be the one to screw it up. Trust me. This should give us an incredible amount of confidence in making life choices, because we can trust that no matter what choice we make, God is going to steer us to be in line with his plan. He’s in control. Trust him.

2) We need to know that this whole question about God’s call or his will for my life really wasn’t on anyone’s mind until very very recently in history, we’re talking the last 50 years or so. Before that, it just wasn’t a question many people asked, because there simply weren’t that many choices. Chances were, whatever line of work your parents had, whatever the family business was, that was most likely what you would do with your life. If you wanted to go to college, there were only 1 or 2 serious choices that allowed you to stay close enough to home to help your family when they needed you. For the most part, people lived, worked, and died very close to the area where they were born.

In other words, this whole fear about messing up God’s will is a very modern, middle-class question. And we just need to see that for what it is. Before we can properly answer “What is God’s will for my life?” we need to see how the culture has taught us to ask the question with the wrong motivation or goal in mind.

Now that being said, trying to discern God’s will for our lives is a perfectly godly and biblical thing to do. We just need to make sure we are going about it the right way. So, for our last session this morning, I want to look at these few texts in order to offer some suggestions about finding and living God’s will for your life.

Your Sanctification ()

Paul is pretty straightforward here about God’s will isn’t here? There really isn’t any mystical secret to knowing God’s will. Here he says very clearly, God’s will for your life is your sanctification. Translation: God wills for you to be holy and more like Jesus. He gives a few examples in this passage of what this means, note again how important your body is here. What you do with your body matters. God’s will for you is to learn what is right for your body.

What does this mean for you? That means holiness is your goal. So a really good question to ask ourselves, when there’s a ton of possible options ahead of us is, “What is going to make me most like Jesus?” Or, “Are there any choices that are going to give me great temptations to sin?” Whatever would make you most like Jesus and lead you furthest from sin is God’s will for your life.

So, practical example. Let’s say you’ve gotten into several different colleges and you’re not sure what to pick. Here are some great things for you to consider in making this decision:

Which college has the best ministry on campus where I can be with other believers who are trying to be like Jesus?

Which college has a great church nearby where I will be able to get plugged in and serve for my 4 years while I am there?

Do any of these schools have a reputation for being out of control with parties and other temptations?

Maybe you plan to play college sports, so you should be looking for colleges that have a strong Christian presence among their athletes.

I want to suggest to you that questions like these are the very first questions you should be asking in making your decision. Before you look at academics or the opportunities available to you, ask the question: Which college is going to allow me to become most like Jesus? Maybe when you plan your college visits, you should also be meeting up with campus ministers and visiting churches near those colleges as well in order to help you make that decision.

The same thing applies to our romantic relationships. This is so important. When you’re considering going out with someone, ask the question: will this person help me become more like Jesus? If they’re not a Christian, the answer is no. If they’re a Christian but they’re pressuring you to be physical and sexual before marriage, the answer is no.

When you’re thinking about how you spend your time, what you’re looking at on your phones, ask this question, “Is this going to help me be more like Jesus?” If what we’re doing with our times or on our phones is preventing us from being like Jesus, chances are we shouldn’t be do it.

I could go on and on with examples, but I hope this makes sense to you. When faced with multiple choices, ask the question, “What will help me become more like Jesus?”

Be Merciful ()

Part of what we’ve talked about this weekend is the call for the church and for individual Christians is to engage our culture and the people around us with mercy and compassion. For our session this morning we read from , there the prophet asks the question, what does the Lord require of you? And what is the answer that he gives? Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.

Again, very straight forward isn’t it? This should remind us of something Jesus said when he was asked what the greatest commandment was. What did he say? The first is, Love the Lord your God. And? The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. Micah and Jesus are saying the exact same thing.

God’s will for our lives is that we would bring Jesus to our neighbors through our words and our deeds. So again, more questions we can ask ourselves:

Am I making room in my life so that I have plenty of time to be merciful, to do good, to seek justice, for my neighbors and my community? When our lives are so busy with activities or our own pursuits that there is no room for anyone else, we can be sure that something is terribly wrong.

Don’t get so busy that you don’t have time to obey God’s will, even in the very small things. Make time to do good for others. Leave margins in your schedule to serve others. Does everyone know what I mean by margins? Leave room in your schedule. Don’t feel as if every block of your week needs to be taken up by something. Leave some extra room so you can use that time to serve other people.

Get involved with community efforts at your church. Take your upset classmate out for coffee or a snack. Take interest in your coworkers’ lives and look for ways to be of use to them. This is God’s will for your life.

Run! ()

Finally, let’s go back to our theme verses. The author of Hebrews uses athletic imagery summarize God’s will for your life. He uses this idea of “running the race.” This would have been an illustration that really resonated with the audience when Hebrews was written. Sports competitions in the arena were very popular. The Apostle Paul uses the exact same imagery in for this reason.

Now some of you may be athletes in this room so this image may still really resonate with you. That’s great. I used to be a runner, but now my knee hurts all the time. That’s what I get for getting older. But I assume that everyone in here has, at some point, ran somewhere. So we all know that running isn’t a passive action, it isn’t something that just happens. Running is an intentional, purposeful action toward a particular goal.

Sometimes that goal is to get somewhere, sometimes that goal is to get away from the person that is chasing us, sometimes it’s to win.

The author of Hebrews is using this competition imagery, running the race, to tell us to run that we might finish what God has set before us.

How many of you are familiar with the CW show the Flash? What’s the line that someone always says to Barry in just about every episode? “Run, Barry, Run!” It’s always at the climax of the episode, when Barry needs to work up the courage and the strength to overcome the bad guy or rescue his friends or whatever the problem might be. Barry has 2 options; he can either give up and let evil win, or he can run fast enough to save the day.

This is very similar to what we find in our passage here in Hebrews. Let us run the race that God has set before us, why? So that we might obtain what God has for us. The other option is what? Give up the race, don’t run, and miss out on what God has for us.

And what is it that God has in store for us? What do we “get” if we run the race? To understand that, we need to go back and look at chapter 11. This is a very famous passage, many of your Bibles may use the heading “By faith” for chapter 11. That’s because the author of Hebrews not only tells us what it means to live by faith, but he gives us over 13 examples from the Old Testament of people who lived by faith. By faith Noah constructed the ark, Sarah trusted the promises of God that she would have a child, and Moses trusted God to lead the people out of Egypt.

All of these examples serve to illustrate the point of what it means to live by faith, which the author says in chapter 11 verse 1 is the “assurance of things hoped for.” Now some people may try to tell you that having faith is a “crutch”, that faith is just a wishy-washy, sentimental, hoping for the best, that it’s just all in your head. Many people think faith is the opposite of common sense, or reasonable thought. Like, we all know that we shouldn’t run through traffic with scissors right? That’s common sense. Having faith does not mean believing that you can close your eyes and run through a busy intersection with knives in all of our pockets and think we can make it out on the other side ok. Faith does not mean we ignore the advice of all our friends and mentors because we want things to be different.

Living by faith is trusting and acting on what God says; which we know deep down in our bones to be true. All of the examples that are given in chapter 11 are of Old Testament figures who not only trusted what God said, but acted on it. Faith isn’t made up. Faith is real because the object of our faith – Jesus Christ – is real.

So now coming back to chapter 12, when the text says to run the race, what it means is to live by faith. To run the race means we trust what God says to be true, and we trust him enough to obey and follow him even when it is incredibly difficult to do so. When we trust God, we receive everything that he promises to us.

The promises of God are endless. It will take eternity for us to fathom the depths of God’s promises to us. says that whoever believes in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins will have eternal life. And as great as that is, this is just the beginning. We are also promised in (and elsewhere) that we will be made sons and daughters of God, we are promised in new bodies that do not decay and are not corrupted by sin, we are promised in that we will be made like Christ, holy and beautiful, we are promised to be a part of God’s family, to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, we are promised that we can never lose God’s love and adoration, we are promised a future of being able to see God face to face, we are promised satisfaction and purpose and meaning. The list goes on and on and on…

Friends, when we trust God and run the race that he has set before us, all of this becomes ours. Because God is gracious, and kind, and he is eager to give good gifts to his children.

But that doesn’t mean any of this comes easy. Some of you may know this already. Living by faith isn’t easy, running the race is not a simple thing. While trusting God is the most satisfying thing you could ever do, it will often be the most difficult path as well. If you go back and look at all of the examples of faithfulness in the Bible, it was never easy for anyone. Think about Moses, who not only gave up all the riches of living as a Prince in Egypt, but he was also scorned and rejected by the Israelites over and over again.

The world is a fallen, sinful and broken place. It has been corrupted. We sin, others sin, Satan and his evil forces tempt us to despair, and the very air we breathe is subject to decay and death. And so in every time in place God’s people have had to choose to trust God, to run the race of faith and obedience that God has set out for us.

The author in our passage says as much. Do you see? He says, lay aside every weight and sin which clings closely. Again, the image here is an athletic one. What are obstacles for runners? Excess weight, improper clothing and shoes, bad technique, a poor diet, a lack of discipline. The exhortation for us is to take the race that God has set before us seriously. We must remove anything that is an obstacle to the race that God has for us.

And how are we going to do that? By looking to Jesus who is the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

And so, my friends, here’s my summons for you: run. Run! Run the race that God has for you with intentionality, purpose, with energy. Pursue God with everything you have and RUN. Live in God’s kindness and his mercy to you, discipline yourself to obey God even when it is incredibly difficult to do so.

And, as you run, Look to Jesus, who died for your sins, that you may be forgiven and made new, and live a new life of great value and purpose.

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