June – For the Gospel’s Sake
Day 173 – 22 June
Run like you mean it
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. (1 Corinthians 9:24, ESV)
Just outside Corinth, every couple of years, the whole region poured into a great stadium for the games, and the people Paul wrote to had grown up in the roar of that crowd. They had watched the runners crouch at the line, muscles coiled, then explode forward in a desperate sprint for glory. They knew what waited for the winner too, and by our reckoning it was almost laughably small, a simple wreath twisted from pine or wilting celery that would brown and crumble within a week of being set on the champion’s head. Men gave years of brutal training, denying themselves food and sleep and comfort, all for a garland that died nearly as soon as they won it. Paul looked hard at this familiar effort and saw in it a living picture of something far greater, and he handed the Corinthians a challenge built from the very sport unfolding on their doorstep.
So run, but how?
His challenge turned on a single ordinary verb, τρέχω (trechō, meaning to run), the same word any Corinthian might use for chasing a child or hurrying to market. Yet notice the way Paul framed it, because the whole weight of his point sits in the framing far more than in the verb alone. In a footrace, he observed, every competitor runs, and yet only one breasts the tape to take the prize, so run, he urged, in such a way that you genuinely obtain it. The instruction was never simply to run, since everyone alive is running at something. The instruction was to run a particular way, with the fixed, hungry intent of a sprinter who has the finish line burning in his eyes and strains toward it with everything in him. A few sentences on he sharpened the same idea, admitting that he himself refused to run like a man flailing aimlessly down the track, with no clear goal to pull him forward. That distinction presses on every one of us. We are all spending our energy on something, pouring our days into some pursuit or other, and the question Paul drives home is whether we are running with deliberate aim or merely jogging through life on the spot.
Two ways to run
The difference is easy to see if you set two runners side by side. The first is out for an aimless Sunday jog, trainers half laced, ambling along at whatever pace feels comfortable, slowing to peer into shop windows, with no destination in mind and nothing whatever riding on the outcome. The second stands in the blocks at the start of a race she has trained months for, every muscle tuned to a single purpose, her whole being narrowed to the line ahead and the effort it will cost to reach it. Both are technically running, yet only one is truly racing. The gulf between them lies entirely in whether a goal is pulling the effort forward or the legs are simply moving for their own sake. So much of a human life can be lived in that first, aimless mode, busy enough on the surface yet drifting all the while, spending real energy on a hundred small things that lead nowhere in particular. What Paul calls us to, as this new week begins, is the second kind of running, a life gathered tightly around a goal worth crossing a finish line for. For the believer that goal is bound up with the gospel itself, the great purpose worth pouring out every last ounce of strength to reach, and the prize at the end of this particular race, as the coming days will show, puts every wilting wreath in that Corinthian stadium thoroughly to shame.
Declaration
I am finished drifting through my days with no real aim, ambling along as though nothing in particular were at stake. There is a life worth running toward with everything I have, and I want to run it the way a true athlete competes, focused, wholehearted, and fully awake to the goal ahead. So I gather up my scattered energy and point it in one direction, refusing to fritter my one short life on things that fade by evening. I train, I press on, I keep the finish clearly in view, and I give my best to what truly lasts. Today I run with purpose rather than wander, sure that a life poured out toward something worthy is a life magnificently spent.
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