“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” – Aristotle
While these fundamentals directly apply to physical conditioning, they are also analogous to spiritual conditioning. Imagine a lengthy race that not only has many spectators lining the course, but additionally, an army of naysayers trying to trip you up and wipe you out of the race. Satan and his demonic host have spent all of man’s history plotting against and deceiving God’s saints. His goal is to ruin your testimony for the Lord.
24 Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it. 25 And everyone who competes for the prize is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown. 26 Therefore I run thus: not with uncertainty. Thus I fight: not as one who beats the air. 27 But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
According to Paul, we are to run with certainty. That certainly is the knowledge of God’s Word. In the Bible, we are given many promises, and as God is incapable of breaking a promise, we can be certain that what He has promised will come to fruition. He has promised that any temptation in our paths is one we can handle, and along with that He will give us a way of escape (1 Corinthians 10:13). He has promised that He never will leave us or forsake us (Hebrews 13:5). He has promised that the work that He began in us, He will complete (Philippians 1:6). It sounds like much of the race has to do with God’s power in our lives.
God did His part. He took a blind man and gave him vision. He took a dead man and gave him life. He took a lame man and gave him powerful legs. Those are the spiritual conditions of each of us without God. Do you think that people in wheelchairs see others running, and yearn to run beside them? I know they do! God gave us legs to run the race, and we should run it for His glory. We already have received the Prize and it is God’s Son in our lives! If we finish the race strongly, we will receive a crown, yet that crown belongs to Jesus, and at the Bema Seat, we will cast the crown at His feet.
So what are we responsible for? Keeping the faith and finishing strongly. The repetition necessary in our lives involves Bible study, fellowship and prayer. Yet God has a ministry for each of us and we are to serve Him and serve others in that ministry. Don’t get confused by the world’s philosophy that bigger is better. One person is enough to make a successful ministry if that is God’s will. There are plenty of ministries with thousands of followers who are being misled. How many people were still following Jesus when He was on the cross?
Commit yourself to holiness. God would not keep us here unless He had people for us to love. Most of the time, those people will be the down-trodden, the ones the world might call unlovable. Don’t forget…God put people in your life to love you!
Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 2 looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12:1-2
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