A reading from the letter to the Hebrews.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud
of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which
clings so closely. And let us run with endurance
the race that is set before us. Looking to Jesus, the founder
and perfector 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.
Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against
himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted in
your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the
point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the
exhortation that addresses you as sons?
My son, do not regard lightly to discipline of the Lord, nor be
weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one
he loves and chastises every son whom he receives.
It is for discipline that you have to endure.
God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his
father does not discipline? If you are left without
discipline, in which all have participated, then you are
illegitimate children and not sons.
Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined
us, and we respected them. Shall we not much more be
subject to the father of spirits and live, For they disciplined
us for a short time, as it seemed best to them.
But He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His
Holiness. For the moment all discipline
seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields
the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have
been trained by it. Therefore lift your drooping
hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths
for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of
joint, but rather be healed. Strive for peace with everyone,
and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God, that no
root of bitterness brings up and causes trouble, and by it many
become defiled, that no one is sexually immoral or unholy, like
Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal.
So you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the
blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent,
that we sought it with tears, the word of the Lord.
Please be seated. Good to see you and invite you
to turn to Hebrews 12 and your Bibles are Bulletins as we
continue our series Walking By Faith during the 1996 Summer
Olympics in Atlanta, GA the US. That women's gymnastics team was
on the verge of an upset. The Russians were highly favored
to win the women's gymnastics and the Americans were ahead
with one exercise to go, and that was the vault exercise.
All the Americans needed was one strong finish from one of their
gymnasts on the vault exercise and they would take home the
gold medal the first gymnast went.
And as she approached the vault, she vultered herself up in the
air, did twists and turns and landed and stumbled.
Did that twice. The 2nd gymnast, same thing.
Failed to stick the landing. Stumbled, the third one
stumbled. The 4th 1 stumbled.
The 5th gymnast, highly talented and celebrated gymnast, ran.
Vultered herself up at the air landed.
And then fell entirely twice. With each successive failure,
the pressure on the shoulders of Kerry Strugg got heavier and
heavier. Kerry Strugg was an 18 year old
from Tucson, AZ and she would get two tries at the vault to
salvage the gold medal for the US Olympic team.
On her first try, Kerry vaulted herself high up in the air.
Twisted. And turned beautifully landed
and you can watch in the video, her ankle gives way just so and
she falls. Not only that, but she injuries
her ankle in the process and she stand up and she limps.
She limps over to the sidelines where she finds her coach and
she says, do you need me to go do like, do I have to do this?
Do we need this? And he says, Harry, we need you
to go one more time. We need you to go one more time
for the gold. So Carrie surprisingly limps
over to the starting place and she straightens her feet and she
focuses her eyes and she begins to run and she performs one of
the most risky, one of those dangerous, one of the most
beautiful vault exercises available to gymnasts.
She. She goes high into the air.
She twists. She turns, She lands with
determination. You can see the pain pulsating
through her body. She salutes the judges on one
leg and then she collapses in absolute agony.
Kerry Strug needed a 9.7 to secure the gold medal.
She looks up at the scoreboard. 9.712 Kerry Struck's finest
moment came when she was in great pain, when she was nursing
an injury and most wanted to quit.
That was the exact moment when Kerry's team and Kerry's nation
looked to her the most and needed her the most, and her
most painful moment became her finest moment.
My friends, the most difficult time for you and I to walk by
faith is when we are in great pain.
Maybe, like Kerry, you have a bodily pain, you have an injury,
you have a chronic pain somewhere in your body, You have
a scary medical diagnosis, you're undergoing treatments and
it's hard to pray, isn't it? When you're in bodily pain,
isn't it hard to pray, Hard to trust God?
We start to curve in on our pain, curve in on ourselves.
You may have relational pain from loneliness to rejection,
and the last thing you want to do is to identify yourself as a
Christian and may and make it even harder to build
relationships. The pain that you might be
feeling right now is one of the worst pains there is, and that
is the pain of feeling like you failed.
You feel ashamed. Maybe you suffered some kind of
setback in your career, Some kind of setback.
Senior schooling and trusting God with more risk, which is so
much of the part of walking by faith, seems unacceptable to you
after you've gotten burned. It's like we're limping to the
sidelines and we're looking to our coach Jesus Christ.
And we're like, do we have to like, do you really need me
right now? Couldn't I sit this one out?
And through the author of Hebrews, through this word of
God, which Jesus Christ, so. Clearly speaks through Jesus
Christ, says we need you. This is your moment.
This is the time when you are in greatest pain.
Actually, this is your finest moment.
It's time. The author of Hebrews will tell
us to stop walking by faith and to start running by faith.
Ironically. Great courage, it will take
great determination. And as we looked at Hebrews 12,
we find that we have in Jesus Christ.
The best example there is for running by faith when we are in
great pain. It's all about who we fix our
eyes on when we were in pain. It makes all of the difference
in Hebrews 12 versus one, and two is going to give us the gold
standard example for us to look to while we are in pain.
Verse one, the author of Hebrews says this.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud
of witnesses. Let us also lay aside every
weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with
endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the
founder and perfector 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 the author of Hebrews pictures Jesus here as a runner
in a great race. He is the quote.
Founder and perfector of our faith.
You know, you could translate this, that Jesus is the
forerunner and champion of our faith.
Forerunners in the ancient Olympic foot races were those
who broke away from the pack and set their own pace.
And maybe you've seen this in foot races in our day, or in
bicycle races, that there's a breakaway group.
There's someone who's able to get away from the pack.
And run at their own pace. And set a different pace.
Jesus was the forerunner who triumphed where every other
person in the history of mankind failed.
He didn't give in to temptation. He didn't despair when he was
mocked. He responded in love.
When he was crushed and when he was isolated, he didn't crack.
He was faithful to his call. He was faithful to the end, to
what his father asked him to do. Now I want to draw.
Our attention to one particular way that Jesus triumphed in his
race. Verse two says this.
He endured the cross, despising the shame.
And then in verse 3, Jesus endured from sitters such
hostility against himself. Notice those two words, shame
and hostility. Jesus endured those two things.
Shame and hostility are power tools.
They're used to control people. And we see it even in our day.
If you want to control someone's behavior, you publicly shame
them, and you make them the object of interpersonal
hostility. It's an extremely powerful and
effective weapon. And any you know this, if you've
ever been publicly humiliated, you know how scalding of an
experience this can be. Shaming and hostility are their
weapons. And they they attempt to control
us, but also they drive us to despair if we endure them long
enough. Now the the race that Jesus ran
included extreme physical cruelty, but that physical
cruelty was a was only a means to an end.
They're trying to break his soul and break the break the spirit
of his disciples. They made him the object of of
hostility in the form of jeers and taunts and violence.
And the indignity of being killed and buried like a common
criminal. The the Son of God, the King of
Heaven was denigrated as much as you can denigrate a human being
in the Roman Empire at the turn of history.
And Jesus endured all that, which was an amazing feat.
The author of Hebrews is identifying This was incredible.
This was when Jesus was in. It was in pain.
That was actually his finest moment.
And why was it his finest moment?
Because instead of being dissuaded, he was seated at the
right hand of the throne of God, that he went from the most
denigrated lowest pit in in this earth, and he was raised up.
Not only was his body resurrected, but he was brought
up to the Father's right hand to rule over all of heaven and
earth. He triumphed over all of those
jeers. He triumphed over all of the
mocking. He triumphed over all of the
shame. And not only did he do that, my
friends, Not only did he do that, he took with him anyone
who's ever been enslaved, who's looked to him.
Anyone who's ever been abused, who's looked to him.
Anyone who's ever been shamed or mocked or put down.
Anyone who's ever been dehumanized, who's ever looked
to Jesus. He took them by the hand and he
led them out of the depths of that shame.
And he brought them and he intercedes for them today as
their great high Priest who stands at the Father's right
hand on their behalf and on our behalf.
What an amazing triumph this was, that Jesus Christ triumphed
over all of the shame, degradation, abuse, and he
stands over it. And and he took people with him.
What an inspiring example. Wouldn't you like to keep up
with him in that race, my friends?
Would you like to triumph over any dehumanizing force in this
world, any anybody who's ever, who, who's ever committed acts
of injustice against you or against those that you love?
Wouldn't you love to follow Jesus in his path of death and
resurrection and see the Lord work justice and make all things
new? But what keeps us from doing
that? What keeps us from following the
example of Jesus? Why do we quit?
Why do we stop? Verse one says this.
It's the sin which clings so closely.
The sin clings so closely. The injustice that we want to
fight out. There is in here.
There's sin and there's wait that clings so closely.
Have you ever noticed that when you're walking with a backpack,
the longer that you walk, the more irritated your shoulders
get? Starts to dig in a little bit.
Have you ever noticed that you, you know, at some point you're
have to like, man, like, if I'm going to keep walking, I'm going
to have to find a way to walk without this bag.
Or maybe you've run in a race before and you've had layers
because you started out cold, but then you start to heat up
and you're like, man, these layers are like actually doing
more harm than good. They're kind of getting
scratchy. They're kind of getting hot.
You have to shed some layers. So it is in the race of the
Christian life. The pain, the pain of the race
is going to reveal the sin that we're carrying with us, the sin
that's clinging too closely and and and weighing us down.
Here's some examples of that. Along the race of following
Jesus, someone insults us, and that insult reveals our
willingness to lash out and to gossip in response or a
financial setback that we have reveals.
An unhealthy trust and money. We didn't know that we had that,
but we discovered that through pain.
What about work pressures that reveal our willingness and our
habits of binging behaviors or parenting stressors reveal our
irritation, our anger? Pain makes us confront our sin.
We have to ask the question, are we going to rid ourself of the
sin? So we can run the race after
Jesus or we going to quit the race so that we can keep the bag
of our sin. We either have a breakdown or we
have a breakthrough. And this is intentional.
This is actually part of the process of growing in Christ.
Our text mentions Esaw, our author.
The pastor of this text talks about how he warns us against
becoming immoral or unholy, like esaw.
For 16, who sold his birthright after a single meal, And then
afterward, when he desired to inherit a blessing, he was
rejected, for he found no chance to repent that we saw it with
tears. What's what's the author talking
about? What you saw was the grandson of
Abraham. I mean, he was a child of the
covenant. He was.
He was in line to receive God's incredible blessing and to take
that blessing to the nations, to the world.
One day you saw comes in from a hunting trip.
He's tired. He's really hungry.
And his brother Jacob's cooking some Stew and his brother Jacob,
who's very strategic, says, hey Esau, I would love to serve you
some Stew, but in exchange, I would like for you to sell me
your birthright, your birthright.
Esau's birthright was his legal, It was like his, like, legal
proof that he was the first born in the line of the covenant.
And so the birthright was sort of like this tangible sign of
God's blessing. That flows through Abraham down
to Isaac, down to Esaw. And Esaw could have at that
moment took a stand. He could have said this
birthright means too much to me for me to to sell it so that I
can satisfy my cravings and satisfy my appetite.
He could have confronted Jacob and said, hey Jacob, look,
listen, you and I are brothers in this covenant.
Don't tempt me like this. This is not appropriate.
I actually want my birthright. I actually own my birthright.
I actually want to honor God by keeping this birthright.
He didn't do that. He didn't take a stand.
He made an excuse. And he said actually, like, why
not sell my birthright? What does my birthright mean to
me? I'm really, really hungry.
I'm really, really in pain. And so he sold his birthright
and he got the Stew. And then not only that.
For the rest of his life. So then the, you know, then
Jacobs also stole the blessing from Esau, and the drama even
unfolded. And so Esau lost his birthright
first. Then he lost his blessing.
Then, you know, what he did is that he blamed Jacob his whole
life. He he stooed in resentment.
He stooed. Things didn't turn out his way.
Life didn't go how he thought it should go.
And so he became an angry, resentful old man.
Later there was a reconciliation, but things were
never the same. For you saw, because he curved
in on cravings and then he curved in on conflict.
And who among us my friends, have not been there?
Who among us has not been? He saw at some point in our
life, right? We sold the birthright of God's
bless of God's blessing for something short sighted.
We were in pain, right? So instead of taking a stand, we
made an excuse and we gave in and we gave into the darkness
and we denied Christ and we blame it's everyone else's
fault. It's God's fault, right?
But you know what? Jesus Christ ran his race to
rescue all the esaws of the world because he he knew that we
would fall and he didn't want to leave us helpless.
So when we've collapsed along the race, whoa.
Like that candle glass when we have crashed.
All we have to do, my friends, is to cry out Jesus Christ,
Savior, Son of God, Have mercy on me, a Sinner, and He will
come find us. He will scoop us up and He will
carry us. He will get us back into the
race. That's how great His mercy is.
That's how great His kindness is.
And we'll actually have that opportunity.
We'll have that second chance to run the race again.
But here's the thing, my friends, The pain threshold is
going to go up again the minute we start running again.
And that's part of the process of grace.
Grace isn't going to take that away.
Grace isn't going to take pain away.
It's not going to take temptation away.
It's going to give us strength to face the temptation and to
face it again. And instead of having a
breakdown to have a breakthrough.
And we're going to have a choice between.
Repentance and resistance. As some of you have been
spectators of the Chicago Marathon.
Some of you have run the Chicago Marathon.
Some of you are training for the Chicago Marathon, right?
And you know that around mile 20 to 22, what happens?
You hit the wall. Energy drops.
Exhaustion sets in. The excitement is not You burn
through all the adrenaline, Adrenaline's gone, and the race
seems like it will never, ever finish.
And at that point, it's all about who you fix your eyes
upon. You could fix your eyes upon
those who have given up. They've lost focus.
They're dragging their feet, They're shuffling.
You can. Their shoulders are hunched.
They're they're defeated. And if you fix your eyes on
them, that's exactly what you're going to do.
You'll give up as well. But you could fix your eyes on
those who have the shoulders back, who are keeping their
pace, who've got consistent strides, who are, despite their
exhaustion, continuing to press on one foot in front of the
next. And they'll keep you going, and
they're going to carry you through to the finish line.
Someone once said this. Show me your friends and I'll
show you your future. Right?
So running by faith is so often a matter of running by the
faithful. So think about people in your
life. Who are the people in your life
who are running as close to Jesus as they can?
They're running after Jesus as hard as they can.
Are they enduring hard things with patience?
Are they winning battles over sin?
Are they showing joy instead of cynicism?
Are they venturing on God to provide?
Are they taking risks to love and serve?
Are they growing in holiness and peace?
If you got people like that in your life, keep them in your
sights. Those people are golden.
Stick as close to them as you can.
Ask them to pray for you in your own battles against it.
What about other people in your life?
Do you have anyone in your life that's a little bit more like
Esaw? Making excuses, taking
shortcuts, dropping out, losing heart, curving in on themselves.
When the pain thresholds, it's a certain point.
Do they stop seeking God, and do they instead curve in on
cravings and conflict? Maybe you have a chance to
encourage them. That would be great.
Encourage them, but don't spend much time with them.
Don't let them set the pace for your life.
It's fine if you're setting a pace for them and they're
following you. The stakes are too high, my
friends. There's a reason that we never
hear this. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Esau. That's how it was supposed to
be. That's how it could have been.
But Esau dropped out because he didn't get what he wanted.
Esau dropped out because he sold his birthright.
We don't say the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Esau because Esau
threw in the towel at the very moment he was called the step
into grace. So, my friends, Jesus the High
priest, is pleading with us and praying for us to not make the
same mistake as Esau. He wants us to run the race
well, and he's running next to us.
He's not just the one who ran the race before us.
He's still running the race with us as our great High priest,
feeding us, encouraging us, strengthening our inner person
so that we can cross the tape. A man is facing a cancer
diagnosis in the prime of his life.
He finds that though his body is weaker from the painful
treatments, his prayer life is richer than ever and his
compassion for others is deepening.
And he would never actually want to go back.
A young woman is starting out in her career.
She's got a coworker who's outwardly hostile to
Christianity, openly hostile to Christianity.
And so this, this young Christian is, is kind of set
back on her heels from the constant barrage of questions
that seem to come from a bad faith place.
Yet her Citigroup is praying for her as she goes into work, and
she's actually finding that her confidence in Christ is growing
from these conversations, that she's becoming a little bit more
free to disappoint people who don't like Jesus, and also to
speak with greater grace and truth in response to her
coworker. There's more peace and Holy
Spirit in her life as a result. But what about this hypothetical
example? A local church is in need of a
permanent worship space. They pray fervently for God to
provide, and in the moment of greatest uncertainty, he answers
their prayer by bringing over 500 migrants to live in the
campus where they meet. So instead of despairing, they
rise to the occasion with a carnival and a lunch, and even a
few people step and step up and volunteer for perhaps an ESL
ministry going forward. When we are in great pain, when
the discomfort is at its highest, Jesus Christ makes us
capable of great faith. The time came for the US Olympic
gymnastics team to go up to the podium to receive their gold
medal, but they refused because Kerry Struggle was not with
them. They would not receive their
gold medal unless she was up on the podium.
And so after Carrie struck, got her her ankle in a cast, her
coach scooped her up and actually carried her up to the
Olympic podium. And and there Carrie along with
all of her teammates received. They dipped their head down and
received their commendation, received the gold medal and the
national anthem played A time will come, my friends, when the
race that you and I are running will be over and we will come to
our deathbeds. We will be unable to run any
longer. And at that time, if we have
looked to Jesus in this life, the founder and perfector of our
faith, our great High Priest, will come to us.
He will scoop us up, and He will carry us up to where he belongs,
Up to the throne of grace, where we today have mercy and grace to
help in time of need, up to the Father, where the Father reigns
over all of heaven and earth. And there we will receive our
great commendation as the cloud of witnesses cheers.
But there are miles to go still, and our work is not yet done.
And so, Emmanuel, while we have the opportunity, let us lay
aside every weight and fix our eyes on Jesus Christ, and run
after Him by faith and not by sight.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,
invite you now to take a moment to offer to God your prayer as
we consider running after Him by faith.
And though we do pray that we would have the mercy and grace
we need to run after you without falling, but we can only do it
through your strength, through your power.
We repent, Lord, of any ways that we've made an excuse rather
than running after you in the moment that we have.
So we offer to you our lives, Lord, and we pray that we would
be able to put 1 foot in front of the other today and every day
until we meet you face to face. In Jesus name.
Amen.