“not a sprint but a marathon”

Download discussion questions:  Hebrews 12:1-3
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I encourage you to look at the passage in Hebrews before you read this Blog entry.  What do you see in the text yourself?  What questions come to your mind?  How would you interpret what the writer says?  After even a few minutes examining and thinking about the text you will be much better prepared to evaluate the comments in the Blog.

Examples

Our discussion of the passage began with the questions, “Why did the pastor devote over 10% of the written sermon to record examples of faith?  How does that list lead to the ‘therefore’ in Hebrews 12:1?”  The group contributed several helpful suggestions.

• • To show what others have gone through.
  • To remind recipients that they were not the first to suffer for faith.
  • To offer encouragement before the exhortations in the chapter.
  • To illustrate faith in a wide variety of persons and circumstances.
  • To display faith as an endurance race, not a brief sprint.
  • To emphasize faith in lives that were “train wrecks” (to quote one comment).

After his list (and its somewhat surprising conclusion in v. 35-39), the pastor wastes no time in getting down to serious application.

Exhortations

The instructions picture the Christian life as a race.  Encumbrances and entanglements (literally, weights and distractions[1]) clearly hinder a runner.  Those impediments delay or even prevent finishing a race that is already challenging.  No serious racer would knowingly allow those limitations to remain if he could remove them.  Likewise, the pastor expects that believers should be alert to weights and distractions that interfere with spiritual formation.  He uses the picture of a race to emphasize the importance of endurance in the Christian life.  He saw endurance (mentioned three times in verses 1-3) as a key need for his congregation (and for us):  How to  trust God when life is hard?

No specific types of entanglements or encumbrances are mentioned by the writer, probably because those will vary from person to person.  What are things that hold us back or divert us from following Christ?  Our group suggested a few items, possibly from personal experiences.  Anger or frustration with circumstances or with people may weigh us down and slow down any progress we perceive in our spiritual formation.  Temptation to particular sins or pressure from work or family responsibilities may distract us from discipleship.  Simply dealing with life – car repairs, budgets, health concerns – can entangle us in complications that seem unrelated to Christian growth.  The list could go on.  One person commented how easily discouraged and overwhelmed we can become.  Maybe that is part of what the writer to the Hebrews described as “easily entangled” in verse 1.  Running the race with endurance is the goal.  As someone commented, it is not a sprint but a marathon.

In chapter 11 the writer provided a wide-ranging list of examples of faith.  He showed what faith looks like even in lives otherwise filled with failures.  Our group agreed that we identify with those examples and the struggles we have, especially with our own failings.  But as someone observed, the fact that Noah and Abraham and even Samson are on the list shows that they did not abandon the race.  They endured difficulties and even their own failures through their faith.

The image of a race was helpful in our discussion.  Group members commented how early in the Christian walk we expect an easy time.  We don’t think of a long, often difficult, lifetime process of successes and failures.  Even after years of following Christ we expect to be farther along in the race than we find ourselves.

Our common struggle is frequent discouragement and even shame over our failures.  Despair over our imperfections can be a snare that “easily entangles.”  An important observation by one member was that all of the passage (Hebrews 12:1-3) uses “we” and “us.”  Like most of Hebrews (and the New Testament), the emphasis is on the corporate nature of our spiritual journey.  Perhaps the race is more like a relay, with each runner supporting the others.  We need to remind each other that shame at our imperfections or despair at our failures are focused on ourselves.  In contrast, the pastor exhorted believers to “fix our eyes on Jesus” and to “consider Him.”

But the exhortations still seem overwhelming.  How do we lay aside the weight of worry or shame that we struggle with?  How do we disentangle from the anger that often enfolds us?  The examples from chapter 11 show us that it is possible to endure.  But we need more than examples.

Model

The pastor provides the model.  Dictionaries define an example as “a typical instance illustrating a general principle.”[2]  Hebrews 11 certainly does that, providing numerous cases of “typical” men and women who “gained approval through their faith” (Hebrews 11:39).  Those examples illustrate the general principle of faith.  However, a model is on a different level: “A person proposed for imitation; a perfect exemplar of some excellence.”[3]

Jesus is that “perfect exemplar of every excellence.”  One member described Jesus as “conspicuously above the rest of the examples.”  That superiority has been a repeated theme through the first part of the sermon.

The pastor’s exhortation to endurance seems surprisingly simple:  Fixing our eyes on Jesus.

Some in our group mentioned other programs they had heard in the past, complicated regimens of spiritual discipline, “daily minimums” for reading chapters of the Bible and minutes spent in prayer, number of verses to memorize.  Spiritual disciplines can be of great value as we are “nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine which you have been following” (cf. 1 Timothy 4:6-10).  But those disciplines are only valuable if they serve to more firmly and clearly fix our eyes on Jesus.  Only then do the disciplines genuinely contribute to our endurance.

The passage provides a particular aspect of Jesus for our attention.  If the purpose of the examples in Hebrews 11 was to promote endurance, what can we learn from Jesus about His endurance?

who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2b).

An appropriate question might be, “What kind of joy enables that kind of endurance?  How did Jesus (a true human who was subject to testing just as we are – Hebrews 2:17-18; 4:15) endure death by torture on a cross?”

The verse makes the answer explicit:  For the joy set before Him.

What was that joy?  Does His model of endurance-producing joy apply to our endurance?  Our group had several suggestions about the source of His joy.

• • Having us with Him in eternity
  • Glorifying the Father (John 17:1)
  • Accomplishing the work that the Father sent Him to do (John 4:34; 6:38; 17:4)
  • Returning to the presence of the Father

All of the suggestions interrelate.  The work that the Father sent the Son to accomplish was our salvation.  Our salvation glorifies God.  But the passage points particularly to the reunion of the Son with the Father as He “has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”  In fact, that emphasis has been in the sermon to the Hebrew congregation since the opening paragraph.

When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, (Hebrews 1:3b)

One member recalled a scene from the gospel according to John.  Jesus prepared to wash the disciples’ feet as He began moving toward the cross.  One thing was clearly on His mind.  One thing was “set before Him.”

Now before the Feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He would depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.  During supper, the devil having already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray Him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come forth from God and was going back to God, got up from supper, and laid aside His garments; and taking a towel, He girded Himself.  (John 13:1-3, emphasis added)

His anticipation of “departing out of this world to the Father” and “going back to God” was heightened by what He knew to be true about His relationship with God.  He had come from God, having shared the intimate relationship with the Father “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24).  Now He was going back to God, to sit at the Father’s right hand.   Returning to that perfect relationship was clearly on His mind.  That anticipation enabled Him to endure everything before Him, from the humble act of washing the disciples’ feet to His agonizing death on the cross.

Anticipating Joy

For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross.  Anticipation of being with the Father enabled Jesus to endure hours of agony on the cross.  That anticipation enabled Him to endure the shame and ridicule He experienced during that torture before and during the crucifixion.  Anticipation enabled His endurance.

Anticipation enables our endurance.  We are following the model Jesus provided and the writer to the Hebrews emphasized.  In our conversation it became clear that fixing our eyes on Jesus is not possible when our attention is fastened on our circumstances.

We know that we can trust God in uncertain or difficult circumstances.  Yet there are times when life, this side of eternity, still is unbearably difficult.  The cross would have been unbearably difficult.  Jesus was not focused on the pain (although He experienced it fully).  He was not centered on the mocking (although He heard every syllable).  His attention was on the joy set before Him, on His reunion with the Father.  Our endurance grows as we anticipate our eternal joy with the Father and with the Son and with the Holy Spirit.  The Apostle Paul had that kind of anticipation:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. (Romans 8:18)

Paul’s anticipation kept him from “losing heart” as mentioned in Hebrews 12:3.

Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18)

Puritan pastor Jonathan Edwards gave us a helpful suggestion to stimulate anticipation.  Our gazing on the beauty of the Lord (Psalm 27:4) will continue forever in eternally increasing joy.  John Piper comments on Edwards’ insight:

Heaven will be a never-ending, ever-increasing discovery of more and more of God’s glory with greater and ever-greater joy in Him.  If God’s glory and our joy in Him are one, and yet we are not infinite as He is, then our union with Him in the all-satisfying experience of His glory can never be complete, but must be increasing with intimacy and intensity for ever and ever.  The perfection of heaven is not static.  Nor do we see at once all there is to see – for that would be a limit on God’s glorious self-revelation, and therefore, His love.  Yet we do not become God.  Therefore, there will always be more, and the end of increased pleasure in God will never come.[4]

The value of spiritual disciplines – the study of Scripture, small group fellowship, memorizing verses, understanding theology, private and corporate worship – all of their value is in the degree to which they increase our understanding and trust in the Triune God.  That increasing understanding and growing trust in all circumstances intensify our eagerness for that never ending, eternally increasing joy.  That anticipation enables our endurance.

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[1] https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/euperistatos , https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/onkos ;
Both words are used only here in the New Testament.

[2] Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2003), 878.

[3] Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2003), 1806.

[4] John Piper, God’s Passion for His Glory (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1998), 37; italics in the original.