WordLive - Year OneSample

Prepare: Contemplate your life as a long-distance run. Where have you been? Where are you now? And where are you heading? Running the race The author’s playful enjoyment in celebrating the heroes of the faith in the previous chapter obviously hasn’t caused him to lose sight of his main goal. He comes thundering back to the point in the first verse of today’s passage: ‘let us run with endurance the race God has set before us’. Whether you would choose the circumstances you are facing right now (and, from what we understand, the Hebrew church certainly wouldn’t have chosen theirs), the race you are running is the race God has set before you. Your performance in the race so far may have been, well, a bit wobbly. But just as an athlete stays perfectly straight by fixing his eyes dead ahead, so can you too – by looking straight at Jesus (v 2). Incomparable joy Faced with his own suffering, Jesus looked ahead to ‘joy’ even though he was headed for a cross. What was the source of this joy? Surely the pleasure of returning to his Father (v 2) and knowing his approval. So the reason that God allows us to go through suffering in the present is the incomparable joy of being children of the living God (v 7). Respond: A lot of us have been put ‘out of joint’ (v 13) by circumstances that have not gone our way in life. But healing is waiting for those who seek it. http://www.wordlive.org/Session/Classic/2012-08-23