In It for the Long-Haul

Good morning, everyone.

It's great to be together with you today.

If I have not yet had the chance to meet you, my name is John.

I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood.

And if you uh, especially if you're newer with us this morning, whether this is your first time or you are new-ish to Elmwood, uh, we want to be uh want to once again say welcome.

Uh, we're glad that you are with us here today.

I would love to, if I haven't already, get a chance to connect with you.

I'll be out in the main foyer after the service and would love to meet you and get to know you a little bit out there.

Jesus, this morning we look to you as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

We look to you as the one who endured the cross for us, and our hearts are filled with gratitude for the ways that you have loved and served us.

Lord, we ask this morning that you would help us to fix our eyes on you.

Maybe some of us for the first time.

But all of us, God, help us fix our eyes on you.

Be with us now in these moments.

Would you teach us and instruct us by your word?

And would you help us to see Jesus and leave here changed more and more into his likeness and image today?

We ask this in his name.

Amen.

Well, we all know what it's like to start something and then stall out or quit before we get to the finish line.

I remember when I was in college here at Northwestern in St.

Paul, and I had a class where we got to select our own sort of end-of-the-year project.

And what I chose in my youthful enthusiasm, this was a Bible class, by the way, is I chose to translate the entire book of Hebrews, that actually the one we're looking at today, from the original Greek.

And that's a really bad idea for a couple reasons.

Number one, it's a long book.

And number two, it is some of the most difficult and complex Greek in the entire New Testament.

So terrible idea to do this.

And uh, if you couldn't figure it out yet, uh, I gave up.

And I did not finish that project, or I I uh changed the scope of the project to something that was far more manageable for little old me.

And uh I I quit early because I didn't have what it took.

There's lots of things in life, as we all know, that people start but never actually finish.

Around 80% of New Year's resolutions fail by the month of February, which is why I don't make them.

Then I don't have to feel bad about it, right?

Most adults who set out to learn another language or a musical instrument as an adult after their brain has been like fully formed and the pathways are in place, most of those adults quit within just a few months because it's hard.

Roughly half of the people who register for and even start training for a marathon give up before race day and never actually make it to race day.

You may remember a time in your life where you started a project, maybe it was a house project or a you know car repair or something, and you told yourself, I got this, I'm gonna finish this, this is gonna be great, it's gonna take me like an hour and a half, and six hours in you gave up and you call the professional because you couldn't uh take it past the finish line.

Or maybe you decided to start a new hobby of some kind and you just like threw yourself into it, and then pretty quickly you realize, oh, this costs more money than I thought, and is taking more of my time than I anticipated, and so it's only very quickly you just sort of fall off the wagon and you give up.

Right?

I think we all know that starting something is relatively easy.

We all know how to start things, but experiencing longevity and staying in it for the long haul, that is hard.

This summer we have been in a series of messages where we are looking, uh, it's called On the Heart.

And as I come back from sabbatical this summer, I thought it would be good for us to continue in that series that we started back in June with a string of other guest teachers and preachers who came for us.

And uh I get the opportunity to share some of the things that are on my heart as I come back from sabbatical and some of the things that I learned.

So the passage that we're looking at here today that you heard Glennis read for us is uh one of the passages in the New Testament that describes the Christian life as a race.

And what I want to think about this morning is this question.

How do we experience longevity in the race of faith?

How do we experience longevity?

How do we make it to the finish line without growing weary, without giving up, without burning out or flaming out?

How do we do that?

And we're gonna see the author of Hebrews here answering that question in two ways.

So, how do we do it?

How do we experience longevity in the Christian life?

First, the author tells us this throw off everything that hinders.

Throw off everything that hinders.

The text says, you heard it read this morning, begins with the word therefore, and the word therefore reminds us that what we are reading in these few verses is a part of a larger train of thought that runs throughout this section of the letter.

And if we were to go back and read Hebrews chapter 11, which we won't take the time to do here today, we would see in that chapter example after example after example of women and men who were faithful to God, even though they did not fully receive what God had promised them.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

And all of those examples of faithfulness to God that we read in chapter 11, that is the cloud of witnesses that the author talks about here in chapter 12.

And so the image that's being created for us is that we, those of us who are here, who are following Jesus, we are like runners in a race and we are in an arena, and all of those men and women who are faithful to God, who persevered to the end, they are this cloud of witnesses.

They are like spectators in the stands, and they are watching on and they are cheering us on as we run the race of faith.

And so the author tells us, because we are surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses, we should throw off everything that hinders.

The word that's translated throw off is the word that uh is used in other places to refer to taking off a piece of clothing.

And I think we can all understand how a piece of clothing could affect an athlete's ability to perform.

Uh so maybe a uh illustration would help this.

Caleb, I asked Caleb to come up here and help me.

I told Caleb we're gonna race.

Okay.

So we're gonna start here and we're gonna go all the way around here.

So I told Caleb we were gonna race.

What I didn't tell Caleb is that he is going to be wearing this very heavy-weighted vest.

Now, as you can see, he can barely stand.

I'm not that cruel, and I'm not gonna make him do this because I would smoke him.

So we're not so we're not gonna we're not we're not gonna do this, okay?

Uh I'll take this off you.

I'll take this off.

And you get fake your nose in the process.

Everything is fine.

You can go back to your seat.

Thank you, Caleb.

Uh a weighted vest like that may be helpful in training, but on race day, that thing is gonna do nothing other than slow Caleb down.

And so if he wants to run the race effectively, not just to win, but also just to like make it to the end without having a small heart attack or or dying in the process, he's gotta cast that thing off and throw it off because it is hindering him.

And this is what the writer of Hebrews tells us we as followers of Jesus are to do is to throw off everything that hinders us.

And he tells us two specific things that we are to take off.

So he says in verse one, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.

So he tells us to throw off the sin that so easily entangles.

We'll tackle that first because I think it's maybe the more clear black and white sort of category that's here.

We are being told that we are to lay aside everything that the Bible says is outside of God's design for our bodies and for our relationships and for our character and for our lives.

And if you read the Bible, you see that there's lots of different examples of very specific, clear things that we are told we are, as followers of Jesus, we're not to engage in these kinds of things.

Things like idolatry, which is giving your heart and your affections to something besides God, treasuring anything more than you treasure God Himself.

So we are to put off idolatry, we are to put off sexual immorality, drunkenness, slander, lying, greed, coarse joking, laziness, evil desires, prejudice against certain people, favoritism towards certain people, hatred, injustice.

And we could list more and more and more examples of this.

There's all kinds of things we are told as followers of Jesus are categorically off-limits for us because they fall outside of God's design for how we are supposed to live.

And we are to cast all these things off because it entangles us.

You imagine trying to run a race and and your shoes are untied and get tangled up in something, or you're sprinting through the woods, and there's all this underbrush, and your foot gets caught on a on a vine or something, and it tangles you up and trips you up.

We are to take these things off because they entangle us and prevent us from running the race well.

But not only are we supposed to take off the sin that so easily entangles, this is this is the one that's that's uh kind of challenging, very challenging.

Everything that hinders.

Now that's a scary thing because there's all sorts of things that fall into the category of everything that hinders that are not morally wrong.

Okay, so uh I'll just give you some examples for my life.

I know that if I watch one YouTube video, I'm probably gonna watch eight.

Okay?

That that's the the temptation that I face, right?

I know that if I have one potato chip, it's likely I'm going to eat half the bag.

If I have one cookie, I'm gonna have three or four.

If I watch one episode, I'm gonna watch two.

Okay?

And again, these are not bad things.

In fact, those things I just mentioned, those are all good gifts from God that we are meant to enjoy.

But I know that some of those things, if they are not kept in the right place in my life, will hinder my ability to run the race.

You can imagine, you know, when you can't say no to certain food, it affects your health, it affects your mood.

When you stay up until 11:30 or midnight scrolling on YouTube, it affects your sleep and your, you know, your ability to be a reasonable human being the next day.

It affects your attention, it affects your ability to be present with those who are around you.

And so none of those are bad, morally wrong things, but they're wrong for me.

In the sense that if I'm not careful, those things can hinder my ability to run the race faithfully.

So we are told to cast off all of these things, and you may, you, you may be able to be able to identify these things in your own life as well.

Maybe you can identify with some of those that I named, or maybe you you realize, okay, if I watch one TikTok video, if I open Facebook or Instagram, an hour, just gone.

If I open up the game console, it's two or three hours.

I know it.

You may know that if I if I click on one news story, I'm gonna start reading and clicking hyperlinks, and before you know it, I've spent a whole bunch of my time, and my heart is now more angry towards those people that I disagree with culturally or politically, and it hinders my ability to love my neighbor well.

You may know that there are certain activities that if you engage in them, or certain people, if you hang out with them, or certain kinds of entertainment, that if you engage in it, it's going to hinder your ability to run faithfully and be faithful to Jesus.

Here's something I've been pondering since sabbatical, and uh, it's this that if we are going to experience longevity in the race of faith, one of the things that needs to be cast off is the faulty mindset that says faster is better.

I know I'm not the only one who uh can identify with this, but it's one of the things that I've been thinking about, especially since sabbatical, is uh there is a faulty belief that says faster is better.

Okay, we live in a cultural environment that prizes people who do lots of things and move fast.

We live in a cultural environment where it is the expectation that your life is full, and then when people ask you how you are, it's a badge of honor to say, Oh, I'm so busy.

Like, wow, congratulations, you're busy.

That's that's the normal way that life in our culture happens.

We live in a culture that lends itself more towards survival than sustainability.

And I know this because of my own experience, but also when I talk with you, the words that many of you would use to describe your life would not be sustainable.

It would lean more towards, yeah, I'm I'm surviving, I'm getting by, but I'm this doesn't feel sustainable in the long term.

One of the things that we have to put off is the belief that life lived at the fastest possible pace, filling our time and our schedules with all the things.

We have to jettison the belief that that kind of life is normal and good for us.

Because it's not.

Now, of course, there are seasons, don't get me wrong, okay, there are seasons of your life where you will find yourself so busy, right?

Maybe a season of parenting, where you have young kids or lots of kids or kids with some sort of special needs.

And you find yourself just like, okay, this is this is go time.

Maybe a season in in your vocation, where maybe it's it's a seasonal kind of work, and in some season of the year it's like it's crazy and I'm working 60 hours a week and I don't have a choice.

Maybe it's not that, maybe it's something different.

But there are seasons, yeah.

Seasons of your education, seasons where you're experiencing a crisis, seasons where things are just sort of coming together to create a perfect storm of like you're just busy all the time.

Okay?

There are seasons where this will happen, but that's not the way that we are designed to live.

We cannot and we will not thrive in the long term if we continue to live in that kind of pace of life.

The question that has has been haunting me is this for how long have you been telling yourself this is just a season?

For how long have you been telling yourself, just right after this, right after this project, right after this promotion, right after my kids, you know, are in this season, right after this, right after that, then things will calm down, then things will slow down, then I'll have margin, then life will be sustainable.

Author and Pastor Carrie Newhoff put this, uh said this with a with a convicting kind of simplicity.

Listen to what he says.

He says, seasons have beginnings and endings.

If your season has no ending, it's not a season, it's your life.

Ouch.

Right?

If the season doesn't have an ending, it's not a season, it's just a life that we've created for ourselves.

For how long have you been telling yourself it's just a season?

In order to experience longevity and to run the race and finish the race well, we have to run the race at a sustainable pace.

I'm really sorry.

That's I I couldn't think of a different way to say that that wasn't like rhymey, cheesy sounding.

I'm hoping that that maybe helps it stick in your minds though.

In order to finish well, we gotta run the race at a sustainable pace.

And remember, we are not in a we're not in a sprint.

The Christian life is a marathon.

And you cannot run a marathon at 100% output all the time without burning out or flaming out.

On sabbatical, I realized that the life that I had opted into was a life that put me on that trajectory towards burnout.

Now, by God's grace, I didn't end up in burnout.

But it is was very likely of a thing if I continued living at the pace I was living before sabbatical.

And I'll share one of the things that I've been experimenting with is uh is putting speed bumps in my life.

That's the image that has been helpful for me is the image of a speed bump.

So think of the day Daytona 500.

Lots of cars drive really fast in a circle.

That's all it is.

Uh and they drive at 200 miles an hour, which is super fast.

What would happen if you went out and every couple hundred yards, even put out a speed bump?

Either someone's gonna like die and rip the axles off their car, or it's gonna mean that no one can drive that fast.

You can't drive at 200 miles an hour if you're going over a bunch of speed bumps.

And so this is an image that has been sort of in my mind that I've been thinking about is what are the speed bumps that I can and should put in my life in order to slow me down.

Because my temptation and my my default is to run fast and to run hard and to do all the things and to give and to give and to give.

And so I I've learned that I need to put things in my life with with the sole purpose of slowing me down, of saying you're not gonna go as fast as you're going.

A couple of those things for me that I'll share with you, uh, things I've been experimenting with.

I I'm not like great at these, I'm not perfect at these, I'm not saying these are gonna be what I do for the rest of my life, world without end.

I'm just saying that these are things I'm doing now that I'm experimenting with, and I want to suggest them to you as things that you can also experiment with in your life as well.

Uh the first one is silence.

Okay, creating uh little pockets of silence throughout the day.

Could be five minutes, could be ten minutes.

We're not talking like hours of extended silence, just like little pockets of silence throughout the day.

Now, like you, I begin every day with a list of things to do that's far longer than I can ever possibly accomplish in that day.

And I know that you all can identify with that.

And for years, the way that I conditioned myself to face that was with black coffee and sheer determination.

Okay?

And and again, many of you are like, uh, guilty as charged.

That's how I had been uh facing that.

And what I've come to find is uh is is the helpfulness of the practice of silence.

Now, silence, it is horribly inefficient.

Like terribly inefficient, but it's not unproductive.

When when we choose to spend, say it's five minutes or ten minutes, when we choose to sit in silence before God, no music, that's the hard thing for me, is like I always like ambient music or something.

Uh, but but just having total silence before God, what is happening in that moment is that you are unforming yourself in the belief that your life is what you produce.

When you sit in silence, you are unforming yourself in the belief that the goal of my life is to do as much stuff as possible, as efficiently as possible, and to produce.

The goal of our lives is not uh efficiency, it's not productivity, it's faithfulness and longevity.

And silence forces you to face that and gives you the opportunity to be unformed in some of those beliefs that have been formed in you.

On the flip side of that, it also forms it forms your heart to trust.

Okay, when you experience a moment of uh a period of silence, you're forced to trust God in ways you wouldn't if you didn't stop and experience silence.

When you are silent, a moment of silence or a period of silence is like a mini Sabbath in the middle of your day.

And when you s stop producing things as we're supposed to do on a day of Sabbath, you have to trust that the world is going to be just fine if I don't keep doing stuff.

The world is gonna be okay if I'm not producing.

The world's still gonna turn.

God's still on the throne, it's gonna be okay.

And so it's uh a practice that can help form those things in us.

Uh second practice, I'll be quick on this one, uh, practice of journaling.

I know this isn't for everyone.

I actually uh started doing this because I was afraid when I got to the end of sabbatical that I would be like, man, it was it was really good, and I have I couldn't tell you what I did on any given day.

Like I literally don't remember what I did three weeks ago, you know?

And so I started just journaling and saying, okay, I'm gonna write down like here's some stuff I did today, and and pretty quickly it turned into Okay, here's here's you know, here's what happened to me or to my family.

Here's some things I'm thinking about, here's some things I'm learning about.

Hey, I dreamed about this weird thing last night.

Like, what is that?

And like space to just like think and process, and sometimes it turned into prayer.

And so it just gave an opportunity for me to like just slow down and to just like notice things in my life.

That when you're living at warp speed, you can't pay attention to those things.

It's actually been really helpful also when uh paired with my personal Bible reading, where it's like it forces you to read scripture slowly.

Okay, there's times where it's good to just like read the Bible in a year, you want like totally commending that.

And also, if that's all we do and we have this super high, super fast you know, overview of scripture and never actually sit with what the Bible says, we need that too.

And so this is a way of saying, okay, I'm just gonna write down, here's what I'm seeing, here's maybe something that stood out to me, here's something that like maybe God is saying this to me.

And so it just it helps both of these practices, they force slowness, they force you to slow down and stop living as fast as you had been living.

And again, I'm not saying that I'm not binding your conscience to do these things.

I'm not saying that everyone should do these things in the exact same way, although I am saying it would be really healthy and helpful for you to experiment with this too.

And and my guess is that there's some of us in the room who are saying, Yeah, but I don't have time.

Precisely.

That's why you need to do this, is because you don't have time.

So if we are going to run the race of faith, we have to throw off everything that hinders.

And the second thing we have to do is we have to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.

Throw off everything that hinders, and keep your eyes fixed on Jesus.

In these verses, there are two main commands.

The first is to run with perseverance, run with perseverance, the race marked out for us.

And the second command is consider him, which I think is another way of saying what he says up here, which is fix your eyes on Jesus.

So, in other words, run with perseverance, that's the that's what we are supposed to do, and fix your eyes on Jesus, consider him, that's how we're supposed to do what we're supposed to do.

So there's what we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to do it.

So if you want to finish well, if you want to run the race with perseverance, and as the author says, not grow weary, not lose heart, not flame out, not burn out, you have to fix your eyes on Jesus.

And the author tells us here what it is we're supposed to fix our eyes on.

He says, He is the pioneer and the perfecter of our faith, which means he has charted the course for us.

Okay, we are not expected to, through our performance, earn God's favor or earn his affection or his love because Jesus has already accomplished it for us.

Jesus is the pioneer.

He's the one who paved the way, who charted the course, who's gone ahead for us.

We are not left to find our way or to make a way to God because Jesus has already done it.

And it's through Jesus and through Jesus alone that we have forgiveness of sins, that we have a restored and renewed and healed relationship with God the Father, and it's because Jesus is the one who has charted that course for us.

But not only this, he's also the perfecter of our faith, which means he takes the weak and broken and so often flawed faith that we have, and over time he purifies it.

He's the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

He's the one who endured the cross.

He endured the cross because our faith is weak, because our faith is shaky, if we're honest, like at best on most days, he endured the cross for us.

Because our hearts do not naturally love God, because our hearts do not naturally desire to live in obedience to all of God's instruction, because of that, Jesus went to the cross for us and he gave his life in our place.

And he didn't just endure the cross, it tells us that he rose from the dead, and in doing so, he conquered death and the evil one, and he now reigns over creation.

He's now seated at the right hand of the Father.

He has done all of this for us on our behalf, and here's why this matters.

Here's how this changes us.

If through faith in Jesus and no effort whatsoever of my own, I have been forgiven and rescued and redeemed and brought into relationship with God, then there's nothing left for me to prove.

There's nothing left for me to accomplish.

There's nothing left for me to achieve.

Which means, if that's true, that there's nothing left for me to achieve, it means that I can stop.

I can rest.

I can live at a slower pace of life because I'm not looking to the things I do to justify my existence or to please God in some way, you know, thinking that my efforts are gonna impress him.

So I can slow down and live at a slower pace of life.

The reason that we can leave things undone, the reason we can leave things unfinished, as uncomfortable as that is, is because on the cross Jesus cried out, it is finished.

And because of that, we can stop, we can slow down.

We can push back against the pace of culture and the pace of life that is just sort of uh broadly out there in the culture around us.

If you trust Jesus by faith, the work has been done for you.

All of it.

Which means that the only work left for you to do and for us to do is to fix our eyes on him.

That's the work we're called to.

And it is, it is work, okay?

It is work, but this is the work we now get to be called to is to fix our eyes on him.

And of course, we do that in a number of different ways.

We do that by gathering here on Sunday mornings.

And as we say every week, every single thing we do here when we gather is to point us towards Jesus, is to help us fix our eyes on him.

As Dave talked about earlier, we do that in small groups, in relationships that take place outside of Sunday morning where we have spiritual conversation and we engage in relationships and we and we pray together and for one another.

Those are environments where we get to fix our eyes on him together in a way that we can't do in an environment like this.

Another way we do this, that we do every single Sunday, is by coming to the communion table.

And this is one of the ways that we fix our eyes on him.

We do this each week because we need to, every single week, we need the reminder to keep our eyes focused in the right direction.

And so we come to the communion table.

And as we come, we come here and we confess.

As we stand up out of our seats and walk forward, we are confessing our need to be rescued.

We're confessing our need to be saved because we don't have what it takes in our own efforts to earn our way to God.

And so we come forward empty-handed to receive from God something we could never earn for ourselves.

We come forward remembering as we receive the broken body and shed blood of Jesus that he has done it.

He's done it for us already.

There's nothing left to achieve or to gain because he's already given us everything.

And as we come forward, the act of doing so can be, if we are mindful of it, can be kind of like a prayer where we come forward and we receive Christ and we express our gratitude to God.

And the act of coming forward is a prayer saying, God, please keep my attention focused on Jesus.

God, never let my attention be turned anywhere else.

Keep my eyes focused on what matters.

If you're here today and you have never made a decision to follow Jesus, or maybe you're here today and you feel like, you know, maybe I've walked away from a faith that I used to have, or I need to come back to God in some ways, uh, that's something that you can do even right now in this moment, is to experience his grace and his forgiveness and to experience for yourself that what God has done, he's done for you on your behalf.

If you make a decision to follow Jesus today or to recommit your life to him, the communion table is now open for you to come and to receive and be nourished by Christ.

As we come to the table and fix our eyes on him, let me invite us to take just a few moments of silence for confession and reflection, and then we'll come and receive Christ together.