Run Well: Insights From Hebrews 12Ihe Nhụchatụ

I met fitness icon Orville Rogers a year or two before his death at 102. In addition to being a husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, Orville was a world-class runner, even into his nineties. He held 15 world records in age-graded track events, having run five marathons and many shorter races.

He also ran a spiritual marathon as a church leader, Bible teacher, investor-giver, and missionary aviator. In the context of our subject, he continues as an inspiration to keep me and others from losing heart over the long run (pun intended). This Mr. Rogers illustrates the double command of Hebrews 12:12-13, to run strong and straight in life’s long race.

Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. “Make level paths for your feet,” so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed. (Hebrews 12:12-13, NIV)

If you diagram this passage, you will easily see the two commands.

Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. “Make level paths for your feet,” so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed. (NIV)

The last word (in English) of this one long sentence (in the Greek) shows that the sermon’s listeners were searching for health long before we were. All believers grow depleted and deviate from the course God has set for His people. They needed to be well, just like we do.

So how does the discipline of God’s children, trained by sorrowful trials and societal tribulations, yield the peaceable fruit of righteousness?

Beginning in the first verse of chapter 12, the speaker/writer draws his hearers/readers into a marathon race metaphor that permeates our passage. Our text’s first word, therefore, connects our short passage to powerful examples of faith and faithfulness in the middle of complication, opposition, vacillation, isolation, and dislocation. (You may detect a certain acronym embedded in these four-syllable words!)

We can be cheered on and cheer each other on by all who have run and finished their races well (Hebrews 12:1). Many finishers in the “Hall of Faith” (Hebrews 11) experienced awesome victories; others faced awful deaths. And yet they all stayed the course of faith. Their examples are not merely for illustration. Tomorrow, we will investigate how they bring inspiration and instruction.