Philippians 3:4-14
October 4, 2026
You have seen them along the side of the road. They often wear loose fitting clothes and the expression on their face is usually a mixture of pain and determination. You’ve seen them in the rain, you’ve seen them in the cold, and you’ve seen them on a hot summer day. You have seen them suffering, and yet you drove right past them without offering to help. But that’s the way they want it, for they are runners. A unique class of people who are driven to punish their bodies in this way. Many of you know that I have been a part of this group for most of my adult life. In fact, many of you have passed me on the road and have seen that look on my face on your way to work in the morning.
For many runners, including myself, our running is never really a race against anything other than ourselves. It’s about overcoming yourself as you seek to run further or faster. Now if you are a runner then you know that different parts of your body begin to hurt the further you go. It might be your shoulder during the first mile, your chest or lungs during the second mile, and perhaps your legs in the third mile.
Soon all parts of your body will try to convince you that it’s time to slow down or even stop. And suddenly you start having these arguments in your mind: “Why am I doing this again?” “Do I really need to go faster or farther today than I did yesterday?” “Wouldn’t it be nice to stop and just walk the last ½ mile?” But the better or more serious runners have learned how to distinguish between real complaints and false complaints in their bodies. While they pay attention to the real complaints that could mean damage to bones or ligaments, they disregard the complaints of muscles that simply are not used to working that hard. They do this because they know they’ll be better for it. They see the payoff of better fitness and maybe even better overall health. This is what running is – a battle against yourself.
Oddly enough, faith is often like distance running. Keeping the faith is a battle against yourself. In our second lesson for today Paul says in verses 12-14, “…I press on to make it (eternal life) my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own…Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” That sounds somewhat like running, doesn’t it?
But it’s not exactly like running, because faith is not something we do by ourselves. Faith is a gift that God gives to us through His Holy Spirit. It is not something we acquire or earn on our own through hard work or patient endurance. The phrase that I have highlighted in this text: “made me his own” is a phrase that literally means to “grab” or “to take hold of.” And I like that phrase, because the Bible tells us that Paul, before he became a follower of Jesus, was headed down a road one day to a city known as Damascus, where he was determined to kill Christians. But Jesus had other plans for him as He blinded him on that road and in a sense grabbed him and pulled him away from his sinful life and into His grace. It’s not like Jesus said to Paul, “If you just run hard enough down this road to Damascus, you’ll earn your way into heaven.” Jesus made Paul and all of us His own through His death and resurrection. Jesus won the race for us when He said, “It is finished” on the cross. By becoming one of us and living a perfect life, Jesus won the race that God called Him to run without any help from us, and yet we get to share in the prize of eternal life that He earned, because of what He did.
It’s kind of like how every member of the Carolina Hurricanes hockey team got their names engraved on the Stanley Cup trophy this summer, including the owner, even though the owner and every member of the team did not play in the final game. Through His Word and our Baptism, Jesus reached down with His Holy Spirit into our lives and called us by name, He took hold of us, and made us into the heaven bound believers that we are today.
That’s what the Reformation was all about in the 1500s. Five Hundred years ago the leaders of the Church were telling people that you had to buy your way into heaven by purchasing these pieces of paper, called indulgences, from the Church in order to be forgiven. But a Germon monk named Martin Luther challenged the leaders of the Church by saying, “That’s not what the Bible says.” The Bible says that we are saved by God’s grace, through faith. This is not something we purchase or do on our own. It’s not like a relay race where Jesus came in and ran the last leg of the Christian life for us, after we did our part. Jesus did all the work, He ran the entire race for us to get us to heaven, without any help from us, by living a perfect life, dying on the cross, and rising from the dead.
So in this text, while Paul talks about running a race and straining forward to win the prize of eternal life, he is not talking about us earning our way into heaven. What he is talking about is you and I, as God’s children, remaining on the path to heaven and staying in the faith to which you and I have been called by God. God’s goal for you is to see you in heaven for eternity, and He wants you to make that your goal, as well.
And that’s the challenge. That’s the race. That’s the battle against yourself. For just as the muscles in your body hurt or complain whenever you force them to so some running, your sinful nature that you were born with complains whenever you take strides to live in accordance with the will of God. “What are you doing?” It will ask you. “Why are you giving money to the church? You earned that money and you should spend it on yourself. That’s what everyone else is doing and look how happy they are with their new stuff.” Or our sinful nature will say to us, “What’s wrong with watching a little TV with some inappropriate scenes or language in it? It’s not going to hurt you.” Or I’m sure we’ve heard our sinful nature tempt us by saying, “Why do you go to church on Sunday morning? Wouldn’t you rather sleep in? You’ve worked hard and you need to rest. So quit your running and relax, everyone else does it.”
Keeping the faith is like running, in that it’s a battle against yourself. To keep the faith is to agree with God that our old sinful nature is our own worst enemy. And if we don’t ignore it, but choose instead to follow its voice, we will eventually fall out of the race and our faith will be in jeopardy. So how do you silence that complaining voice that comes from inside you that tries to get you to turn away from God? Paul reminds us in Romans 6 when he said, “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” At your baptism, Jesus grabbed you, called you by name, and made you His child. In your baptism a connection was formed between you and Jesus, and as a result you can silence those temptations of your sinful nature by giving them to Jesus each day, asking Him to take them away. But when we do give in to those urgings of our sinful nature, we can confess those sins to Jesus and receive forgiveness on a daily basis so we can run the race of faith in peace.
Did you know that the average person takes about 4000 steps a day? That means in a year you will take 1.46 million steps. So how many steps do you think you’ve taken so far in your life? It might be interesting to calculate that number, but what is more important than figuring out how many steps you have taken is to think about how many steps you have left. Just as a runner does not stop halfway through a 5k race or a marathon to admire how far he/she has gone, but grits his teeth in determination as he thinks about or looks ahead to how many miles he has left, so Paul urges us today to press on in the faith toward the goal of heaven, no matter how many steps you have left or how difficult the course you are running may be, confident in your Lord Jesus who is with you and has already won the race for all of us.
