Day Seventeen 

Hebrews 12:1-8

12:1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 

² looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

³ Consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against Himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. 

⁴ In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. 

⁵ And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
    nor be weary when reproved by Him.
⁶ For the Lord disciplines the one He loves,
    and chastises every son whom He receives.”

⁷ It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? 

⁸ If you are left without discipline, in which all have  participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.

         The writer of Hebrews was facing a very difficult job in the writing of this book. He is writing to Jews who have become believers, and this was a hard thing. Christianity had come from the Jewish faith. These Jews had become believers and were struggling to make their old faith compatible to their new faith. The two faiths are quite different. The Old Testament is the foundation for the New Testament. The first thing that you do when building a house is you dig a big hole and put in a foundation. After a period of time the house is done and in no way resembles the original foundation. It has changed. However, the foundation is still there. These Jewish believers wanted to hold onto the old way and blend in the new way, but that wasn't to be. Throughout Paul’s writings to the various churches, we see a division between the Jewish believers and Christian believers. The Jews assumed that since they had always been the chosen people of God, then they were superior to the Gentile believers. This, of course, was not true, but it was hard to bring the Jews to a different way of thinking.

         (Christianity can be like this, as well. Everything changes in life, from the cars we drive to the clothes that we wear to the way we communicate. Everything changes. Except our churches. Drive through the country and you will see churches that have either died on the vine or are dying. The excuse is always, “Well, you see this everywhere"…..Only that isn’t true. Other churches are doing very well. The folks in the dying churches have just refused to change their way of thinking. We might even use the word, ‘stubborn.’)

         In chapter twelve here we have talk of discipline. The writer starts out in verses one and two by pointing out that we live our lives in front of people. In verse one we are told, Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 

         This is a sports metaphor. Sports were as huge a thing then as they are now. Olympic type sports. In this illustration he makes mention of the weights. Runners wore weights on their legs during training so that when they actually ran, they would remove the weights and their legs would feel lighter. We do away with the weights and the sin and we run the Spiritual race.

         Verse two starts out by saying, looking to Jesus. If a runner will focus on one thing, they will run faster. If we look away, we will falter.

         And then the writer starts talking about discipline and how we are disciplined for doing wrong. It is common among both Christians and non-Christians alike to say that God doesn’t punish. Yet the Bible says that He does. ⁵ And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
    nor be weary when reproved by Him.
⁶ For the Lord disciplines the one He loves,
    and chastises every son whom He receives.”

         The Lord disciplines His own, those He loves.

         So someone asks how we know we are being punished. If we are going through a rough patch and we are feeling guilty for something, assume it is correction, just like we would correct our own child. Of course, not everything is punishment. We age and we go through the process of aging, we might be in an accident, might fall and break something. But if we know we are doing something wrong in God’s eyes and things are a struggle, remember that we are His child and He does punish His children.

         Our prayer for today is to name those sins we have allowed into our lives and shed them before we continue to run. Maybe those weights are too tight to remove. Ask the Lord for help.

For a number of years I worked on the side as a church consultant. Almost every problem came down to one thing. Stubbornness to see things as God sees them. We have to have it our way because we are right. A person will not change their way of thinking because they are convinced that they haven’t done anything wrong and, by golly, no one can tell them different. A church dies because the people have never done it that way so you can’t take a chance and there is no need to change anything.  

We cannot let our personal lives or our church life suffer because we are not ready to run the race.