June – For the Gospel’s Sake
Day 179 – 28 June
The crown time cannot touch
Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown. (1 Corinthians 9:25, NKJV)
We began this week standing in a Corinthian stadium, watching a runner cross the line and stoop to receive his prize, a simple wreath of pine or withered celery that would be brown and brittle within a few short days. It is time, on this final morning of the week, to finish that thought. For all the months of punishing training those athletes endured, all the appetites mastered and the comforts refused, the thing they were chasing was a circle of leaves that began to die the very moment it touched their heads. Paul looked steadily at this strange arrangement, the enormous price paid for so fleeting a reward, and then he drew the contrast that gives our whole week its point. The athletes, he observed, drive themselves to the very limit for a crown that perishes. We, he said, run for one that never can.
A crown that cannot perish
The word for that prize was στέφανος (stephanos, meaning a victor’s crown or wreath), the leafy garland pressed onto the head of a champion at the games. Their στέφανος (stephanos, meaning crown), Paul noted, was φθαρτός (phthartos, meaning perishable or liable to decay), destined like all green things to wither, fade, and crumble into dust. Yet the crown awaiting the believer he described with a single, world-altering difference, calling it ἄφθαρτος (aphthartos, meaning imperishable or incorruptible). The whole weight of that contrast hangs on one small prefix, the little sound that turns perishable into its exact opposite, and in that tiny addition lies the difference between something that lasts a week and something that lasts for ever. It is worth sitting with how total the gulf truly is. Every crown the world has ever offered belongs in the first category, without a single exception. The trophy tarnishes, the record falls, the applause dies away, the famous name fades from memory, and the monument crumbles in its turn, because everything this world hands its winners is woven, sooner or later, from perishing material. The crown held out at the end of our race is cut from another substance entirely, one that decay has no power to touch.
The metal that never corrodes
There is one substance on earth that has always carried a whiff of the eternal about it, and that is gold. Almost every other metal surrenders to time in the end. Iron left in the damp dissolves into orange rust, silver slowly blackens and tarnishes, bright bronze grows a dull green skin, and each of them, given long enough, returns toward the earth it came from. Gold alone refuses to corrupt. A gold coin lost in a shipwreck and hauled up from the seabed after three hundred years on the bottom comes back into the light gleaming exactly as brightly as the day it sank, untouched, unblemished, wholly unspoiled by the centuries. This is precisely why gold has always crowned kings and sealed the most precious things, because it carries that rare and priceless quality of refusing to decay. When the Bible promises an imperishable crown, it is reaching for something of that same incorruptible character, though raised to an infinitely higher power. The reward at the end of the believer’s race will keep its brightness for ever, never tarnishing, never fading, never crumbling, long after the shipwreck’s gold and every earthly trophy alike have dissolved into rust and rumour. That, and nothing less, is what we have been running toward all week.
Worth every mile
And here, on the last day of the week, everything we have considered gathers into a single clear conclusion. The race demands a great deal of us, this much we have seen plainly, the disciplined self-mastery and the aimed effort, the laying aside of every weight, the long endurance and the forward strain that refuses to look back. Such a course would be a strange and even foolish way to spend a life if the prize at its end were merely another fading wreath. Yet the prize is nothing of the kind. It is a crown that the long centuries cannot dull and death itself cannot reach, held out by a God who keeps every promise He makes. This is why living for the gospel’s sake, the thread that has run through this whole month, is the soundest investment a human being could ever make, for it pours a perishable life into an imperishable reward. So run, dear friend, with everything you have. Master yourself, travel light, endure the long miles, and keep your eyes fixed firmly ahead. The crown waiting at the finish will still be gleaming, bright and unfading, when every other trophy this world ever awarded has long since turned to dust.
Declaration
I am learning to pour my life into what lasts for ever rather than into what fades by the evening. The trophies and the applause the world hands out are real enough, yet I have watched too many of them tarnish and be forgotten to build my whole existence around winning them. So I lift my eyes past the prizes that crumble and fix them on a reward that time can never touch, choosing to run for something permanent even when the perishable glitters more brightly close up. The effort this asks of me is considerable, and I give it gladly, knowing that nothing spent in this direction is ever wasted. Today I run for the crown that outlasts everything, certain that a life poured out toward what endures for ever is the wisest and richest way a person could ever choose to live.
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