Let's open our Bibles to the Scripture reading this morning. We'll read from Hebrews chapter 11. We'll begin reading at verse 24, and we'll read to 12 verse 3. And the text for the sermon will be verses 1 to 3 of chapter 12. Hebrews chapter 11 is the well-known chapter. wherein the author of Hebrews describes several Old Testament figures and their faith. We pick up in the middle of the chapter at verse 24. Hear the word of the Lord. By faith, Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God, rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward. By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king's anger. He persevered because he saw him who is invisible. By faith, he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, so that the destroyer of the firstborn would not touch the firstborn of Israel. By faith, the people passed through the Red Sea, as on dry land. But when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned. By faith, the walls of Jericho fell, after the people had marched around them for seven days. By faith, the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies, was not killed with those who were disobedient. What more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised, Who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword. Whose weakness was turned to strength, and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. Women received back their dead, raised to life again. Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned. They were sawed in two. They were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted, and mistreated. The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains and in caves and holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us, so that only together with us would they be made perfect. Now we come to the text for the sermon. Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. May God bless the reading of his word. Beloved congregation of Jesus Christ our Lord, I'll bet that most of us remember the last time we ran a race. Even if we have to go back in our memories and we have to go back many, many years, most of us still remember what it's like to be at the start line waiting for the signal to go. Perhaps somebody announced it, perhaps there was a starting gun. But when that signal comes, then we run. And some participants came in the top three and received a ribbon. Others didn't have such great success. Well, it's this image of a race that's used in our text for this morning. It's an image that was common in the ancient world, and it's one that we still find today. It's timeless, really. The picture of a group of people running around a track or around a course, gunning for the prize. But the image of the race in our text is a little bit different than what we may be accustomed to when we think of a race. Most of the time when we race, we race to win. This is especially the case when we're talking about sprints and we're talking about races over relatively short distances. But when it comes to things like half marathons and marathons and even ultra marathons, our goals often shift. The people who run those long distances with winning times, well, those kind of people are an elite few. For most of the people who run these really long distances, their goal is simply to finish. Or perhaps to finish with a half-decent time. Perhaps to beat the time that you had the last time. You see, the goals change when the distance is longer. And it's that image of a long-distance race that's used here in Hebrews. In this race, the goal is not to beat the others who are running alongside you. Rather, the goal is to finish. The race of faith in a broken world, a broken world full of obstacles, well, that race is a test of endurance. It's not a sprint, but an ultra-marathon. And it's this race that we all, as believers, we're all in this together. So let's listen together to God's Word this morning as it's preached with the theme, Run the Race. There are three points that we'll consider. First of all, the participants in the race. Second, the way to run the race. And finally, we'll look at the motivation for the race. Well, first of all, let's consider the participants. We read through Hebrews 11, or part of it anyway. And there we find a long list of Old Testament characters who lived by faith in God's promises. The author says, I've defined faith. Verses 1 and 2 of chapter 11. Now, do you want to know what faith looks like? Look in the Bible. Look in the Old Testament. And there you'll find all these examples. And so chapter 12 then begins with a therefore. And actually that therefore in Greek is found in only one other place in the New Testament. It's an unusual word. It's a very strong form of therefore. It's as if the author wants to put the word in bold, underlined, italics, in a 16-point font. Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, all those people in chapter 11 have finished the race of faith. They're now part of the crowd watching the race. Not just watching passively, not really involved, just kind of neutrally watching, but they are witnesses. They are cheering on those who are still running. They're actively involved. That means that they can testify to the fact that the race can be finished. That's what it means, that they are witnesses. By God's grace, they have done it. And so when we ask about who runs this race, first of all, we can look to the past, because this race has been going on for millennia. The Old Testament patriarchs ran it. The apostles have run it. The early church. Believers in the Middle Ages. For many of us, our great-grandparents, Grandparents and parents have run or are running it. This great cloud of witnesses attest to the fact that the race can be run. And not only can it be run, it can be finished. It's doable. It's doable, not because of anything that rests in man, but because of the author and perfecter of faith. The writer of Hebrews directs our eyes, our gaze to Jesus. Why is that? Because he, more than anybody else, ran the race. And he ran it well. We're told to fix our eyes on him, Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith. And we're going to look a little bit more at what that means in a few moments. But at this point, let's just look at what it means that he is the author and perfecter of faith. When our text says that he is the author of faith, it means that he is the trailblazer. He is the one who has run the race first. We follow in his footsteps. Imagine that most of you have probably never been snowshoeing. Well, I used to be a missionary before I was the co-pastor of the Langley Canadian Reformed Church. And where I served as a missionary, we had a lot of snow every winter. And if you wanted to go in the bush in the wintertime, you needed to use snowshoes. Well, there was this one time that I went snowshoeing with a young fellow from the village where we lived. I went first and he followed in my footsteps. Because you see, even when you have snowshoes on, you still do go down in the snow quite a bit. Not as far as if you didn't have them, but you still go down. And so by following in my footsteps, the whole business of snowshoeing was a lot easier for this young fellow. A trail had been blazed for him. Well, Jesus is the trailblazer of faith. He has gone on ahead of us and we look to His footsteps to lead the way as we run the race. When we lose sight of His footsteps, we have to go it alone. And this race is not around a track, you know, where the way is always clear. This race runs through forests and over mountains. It's a cross-country race, you could say. You could become lost. But keeping in mind that we have the footsteps of Jesus to guide us, we will not become lost. Living out of our identity in Him, our union with Him, the author, the trailblazer of our faith, will be kept on the right track, headed for the finish line. And His Word is where we find the revelation of His footsteps. So if we want to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, we search in His Word. Because when we look at the Bible, we see Jesus Christ. And that's not just in the New Testament, in the obvious places, such as in the Gospels and the Epistles and so on. That's also in the Old Testament. Think back to our Lord on the road to Emmaus with his two disciples. How he showed to those two disciples how Moses and all the prophets, it's a way of speaking about the whole Old Testament, how it all spoke of Him. So it's in His whole Word, from front to back, Genesis to Revelation, that we find Him and His footsteps. There He gives us the map for the race. So that's what it means that Jesus is the author of faith. He is also the perfecter of faith. Before I go further, we should note that our translation adds a word here that's not in the Greek original. It's the word our. It says in the NIV, the perfecter of our faith. That word our is not there in the original Greek. It literally says that Jesus is the perfecter of faith. That harkens back to all those witnesses in the Old Testament. Jesus shows to perfection the faith displayed by Old Testament believers. Because their faith, was not perfect. They often faltered. But Christ brings faith to what it should be. When the author calls Jesus the perfecter of faith, he's saying that He's our model, our example. And yes, He is the object of our faith, but He's also the perfect exemplar of what faith should look like. And yes, He will bring our faith to perfection as well. As we run the race, His Holy Spirit fills us. His Holy Spirit energizes us and helps us, equips us to run better and better. However, perfection only comes with the end of the race. Even though we've run the race imperfectly, missing turns here and there, occasionally tripping, getting lost. At the end of the race, God has His declaration that we have run a perfect race. Won the prize. Because as He watched us run, He did not see us. He saw Christ. The author and perfecter of the race. Christ was the lens through which He watched us run. Christ's perfections cover all our perfections. Christ's obedience covers all of our disobedience. And so, brothers and sisters, you see the good news there in those words. The author and perfecter of faith. Well, let's now consider our text as it teaches us how to run the race. There are three points here about how to run the race. And as we consider these three points, we need to remind ourselves that this is the race of faith. It is a race run by those redeemed by Jesus Christ. This is not about a way to earn your salvation. Running the race is not about earning the favor of God, doing something that will make God accept us more or love us more. We are accepted in the beloved. We are united to Christ. Keeping that in the front of our minds, we'll safeguard ourselves against turning our running the race into the gospel. Running the race is our thankful response to the gospel. It's not the gospel itself. That brings us to the first point, running the race. We find that in verse 1, where the Spirit says, Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. But when you run a race, you don't do that in a three-piece suit. If you're serious about running a race, you wouldn't have a tuba hanging in front of you, would you? It would be ridiculous. Those sorts of things would hinder you from running properly. And so we think to ourselves, what sorts of things might hinder us? from running properly in the race of faith. And here we're particularly thinking of things that might not necessarily be sinful in themselves, but nevertheless they do have a negative effect on our performance in the race. All of us need to consider that in our own way because everyone's life is different. Reflect on that for yourself. Consider whether you're running the ultra-marathon of faith with a tuba hanging around your neck. But the author of Hebrews also speaks about the sin that so easily entangles. We get to this point, all of us, every single one of us, can identify with this. The necessity for this command. The image here is from the ancient world. In the ancient world around the time of Christ, the normal outer clothing was a long robe. And normally, you couldn't run with that long robe. So you'd have to tuck it away so that you wouldn't get tangled up in it, so that you wouldn't trip and fall. In our older Bible translations, this is what they called girding up your loins. Gird up your loins was another way of saying, get ready to run. And so in this text, the sin that so easily entangles is like this long robe hanging off your body, sitting there. It's going to entangle you. It's going to trip you up if you don't do something about it. Same idea is expressed a couple of different ways elsewhere in God's Word. Paul describes it as putting off the old nature. Christ describes it in Matthew 5 as radical amputation. He says if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Throw it away. What Christ is saying there is that if there's anything in your life that's leading you to sin, chop it off. Get rid of it. As a practical application of this teaching, I know a man who does a lot of traveling. In fact, he's an airline pilot, so traveling is part of what he does. He stays in a lot of hotels, and these hotels have TVs with channels and shows that Christians should never watch. It's been a problem for him in the past. So whenever he comes to a hotel, he asks the hotel staff, when he checks in, he asks them if they could first go to his room and take the TV out of his room. Now that's awkward, sure, but it's necessary. That, brothers and sisters, is radical amputation. That's throwing off the sin that so easily entangles. So we can ask ourselves, where might we need the same kind of throwing off, The same kind of radical amputation in our lives. So, lose anything that will slow you down. That's the first way to run the race. The second way is also in the first verse. Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Now that we've made ourselves aerodynamic, so to speak, now it's time to fly. We're called to run the race. In other words, it's not a leisurely stroll. Running means there's a sense of awareness of the urgency. And this is reflected in what we do. Our actions, our words, our thoughts, our behavior. We're called to run with perseverance. That's the part of running that's related to our wills and our minds. Perseverance means that we don't give up. We've got our hearts and we've got our minds set on finishing the race. By God's grace, nothing will stop us. Failure is not an option. And God calls us in our text to run with perseverance the race marked out for us. If you were an athletic sort and into that kind of thing, you could pick any number of races that you might want to run. But in the scenario in our text, the illustration, word picture, you don't have a choice as to which race you're going to run. God has laid out the course. God has marked out the race for us. You don't choose which race you're going to run. Sovereign God has decided what's best. And if we think that we can choose another race, we'll quickly find out that the finish line doesn't bring relief or joy or rest. Much less does it bring any glory to God. So rather, we need to run the race of true faith that is mapped out for us in God's revelation, in His Word. So, get rid of the stuff that slows you down. run the race marked out with perseverance. Now we come to the third point. And this, brothers and sisters, is what is of the greatest importance. The writer of Hebrews tells us to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. He says, fix our eyes. And when he says that, he uses a word which means something like direct your attention away from the others and other things and focus on this person. In other words, you've got the cloud of witnesses on the sidelines and they're encouraging you and that's got its value. But what you really need to do, more than anything else, don't be distracted by anything or anyone else. Focus on the one at the finish line. Look there and you will see Jesus. Now it's worth noting that he uses the name Jesus. Most often the author of Hebrews uses the title, Christ. But here, it's the personal name, Jesus. We'll hear more about that name this evening, God willing. Here in Hebrews, it's Jesus. And for good reason. He wants us to see Him in His humanity with the suffering He endured. It was in His human nature that He ran the race of faith in His earthly ministry. We're told that He endured the cross for the joy set before Him. That means that as part of His humiliation, He exchanged the glory that was His for a life of suffering culminating in death on a cross. He traded joy for pain so that we could be accepted by God. So that we could enter into the joy of our Master. Fix your eyes on Jesus. And you see a man who endured the cross, scorning its shame. It's good for us to remember that the cross was a place of shame in that culture. I've tried really hard to think of something, but it's hard to find a parallel in our world today. It seems to me that our culture and society doesn't really use shame as an instrument of social control, at least not to the same degree as in the Greco-Roman world. In that world, to die on a cross was the ultimate insult, the ultimate shame. This is what our Savior, this is what Jesus endured for us. He scorned the shame. That means that He held it in contempt. He made light of it. When He ran the race, He suffered like no one else ever has in the history of the world. And so when we look to the finish line, we see a Savior, our Savior, who has passed through unimaginable suffering. He went through this suffering and then, only then, sat down at the right hand of God. he went through suffering to glory first humiliation and then only then exaltation that was the pattern of his life when we run the race when we live out of our union with Christ that pattern is there for us as well some time ago I think perhaps you've heard about this already. Maybe you saw it. Time Magazine featured a cover story entitled, Does God Want You to Be Rich? The authors of the story describe how people like Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer teach that believing in Jesus will lead to wealth and prosperity and glory now, in this life. Their teachings are popular. But they are dead wrong. They miss the point here in our text. The race of faith is not found in wealth and prosperity and all manner of material blessings and earthly glory. The race of faith is illustrated in the pattern of Christ's life. Passing through suffering and trials to attain glory in the age to come. This is what it means for us to be in Christ. We share in the pattern of His life as we run the race of faith. Fixing our eyes on Him. In faith, we are united to Him. And so, we bear our daily crosses. The so-called gospel of the prosperity preachers. Brothers and sisters, it's sad to say, that's a different race. In fact, you could visualize it, not even as really a race, you could visualize it as running on a spiritual treadmill. You go on a treadmill, you go nowhere. You sit on the treadmill for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe an hour or two, and at the end of it, you're tired and that's it. You haven't gone anywhere. It's a dead end. And so instead of that dead end race, fix your eyes on Jesus. And run His race, the race revealed in His Word. Seeing Him and focusing on Him, we know what the race will be like. It's not going to be easy. We also know that in Him there is a rest for the people of God. As He sat down in glory at the right hand of His Father, so there is also a place that He has prepared for us whom He loves. You see, glory is not in the middle of the race. It's not in the last half of the race. Glory is at the end of the race where Jesus waits. Let's now briefly consider our motivation for this race, our third point. Verse 3 continues that thought of fixing our eyes on Jesus. This time with the added nuance of giving us motivation for the race. There's a command, consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men. As we read these words, we're reminded to reflect again, freshly, on the suffering of our Lord Jesus. As he lived among us, sinful men were hostile to him. They opposed him and did everything they could to subvert him. To subvert his ministry and the truth of what he was teaching and preaching. They plotted and they schemed against him. They did everything they could to make his race an obstacle course that could not be finished. He wasn't surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. Instead, he had a cloud of hooligans. While he was running, they were in the stands mocking and jeering at him. In other words, if you think your race is rough, think about Jesus, what he went through. Look at the story of his life. And you know that your race doesn't compare. The author of Hebrews compels us to reflect on what Christ endured for us. And as we do that, we'll be motivated, we will be energized by His Spirit for our race of faith today. We're told to consider Him so that we'll not grow weary and lose heart. Looking at the one who went alone, we're not going to get tired. We're not going to get discouraged. We're not going to get distracted and fall out of the race. Perhaps you've heard of how runners and other athletes use positive mental imagery to motivate themselves. They imagine themselves at the end of the race. They see themselves there and they've got the gold medal around their neck and everybody is cheering. They visualize victory. And then it's supposed to happen. I think the technical term for that is self-actualization. Well, that's not the Christian race. The Christian race is different. We don't self-actualize. We Christ-actualize. We don't focus on ourselves and our ability to do it. Saying, I know I can, and I know I can. I can see myself doing it. I can see myself in heaven right now. But instead, we focus on Christ. And we think to ourselves, he did it, he did it, and he is going to do it in me too. He is doing it in me too, and he's going to keep on doing it in me too. Because I am united to him by faith. This text speaks about commitment to Christ. And it shows us that commitment to Christ, at its root level, it's not about what you do. It's not about deeds. Though it is included. And we saw that. Commitment to Christ, at its most basic level, is about faith. It's about focusing all our attention on Christ. Running the race with our eyes fixed on Him. And Him alone. Because, brothers and sisters, if we think that commitment to Christ is about what we do, about our deeds, there's some bad news. Commitment to Christ will not save us. But if we believe from God's word that commitment to Christ is about faith in the Christ, embracing Jesus Christ, the Savior, who suffered, died, rose again, ascended into heaven for us, the Christ who is committed to the Father, the Christ who intercedes for us as we run, The Christ who covers all of our imperfections. If we believe in that Jesus Christ, then there's great news in that. There's salvation in that. Brothers and sisters, let this text be a reminder to all of us that we do not lose our focus on what is most important. Jesus Christ and His Gospel. Let's continue. Fixing our eyes on Jesus. Let's pray. Lord God in heaven, thank you for once again opening your word to us and revealing to us Jesus Christ, our Savior. We thank you for the precious gospel and its promises. We praise you, O God, for the Redeemer, who endured the cross and despised its shame. We rejoice in you for the mediator who sits at the right hand of your throne. We thank you, we praise you for your grace and your mercy in him. And Father, we also pray that you would please give us yet more grace and help us in our race of faith. Help our unbelief. We pray that you would help us with your spirit and word. so that also we would lay aside every weight and every sin which so easily ensnares us. We pray that you would strengthen us, so that we would run with endurance the race that you have laid out for us. Well, Father, please give us mercies new every morning. Help us each day anew to fix our eyes on Jesus. We pray that we would not be distracted by earthly and perishable things. Father, we acknowledge that we depend entirely on You for everything in our salvation, from front to back. We pray that You would uphold us and help us. We pray that You would carry us onward to the day of glory in the age to come. We pray in Jesus Christ, the author and perfecter of faith. Amen.