The Race of Faith | Hebrews 12:1-3
Brian Hedges | February 16, 2025
Let me invite you to turn in your Bibles this morning to Hebrews 12.
Most of you have heard of John Bunyan, who is the famous Baptist tinker who became a preacher and an author and wrote that famous allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress. Some of you, perhaps, studied The Pilgrim’s Progress last semester; we had a class that was going through that book together. It’s the story of Christian and his journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, and it’s a wonderful classic in English literature and in Christian literature.
What many people don’t know is that Bunyan wrote something like sixty treatises or books of varying lengths, totaling something like two million words. And many of those books were imaginative books, allegories, or books that worked with illustrations or metaphors or word pictures from Scripture to teach basic Christian truth.
One of those was a short book called The Heavenly Footman. And it’s really a book that explores the metaphor of the race, the Christian’s race, and especially unpacking the language of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 9.
In this book, John Bunyan said, “They that will have heaven must run for it.” He characterized this running in the race as being one of speed. He calls it flying, of pressing, and continuing in our pursuit of God and pursuit of heaven. And he envisioned this race as something like an obstacle course. He said, “The way is long, and there is many a dirty step, many a high hill, much work to do; a wicked heart, the world, and the devil to overcome.”
That is characteristic of Bunyan and of the Puritans, and it really does tap into something that we find in Scripture. The Scriptures call us to this life of faith that involves struggle. It involves opposition, and it calls us to endurance. And that’s really the focus of the passage that we are studying together today, Hebrews 12:1-3. It’s all about the race of faith.
It comes as something like the crescendo, the climax of the great chapter of faith, Hebrews 11, which we’ve been in for about the last five or six weeks, that really gives us this description of the many Old Testament saints who lived by faith in the promises of God, even though they didn’t experience the full fulfillment of those promises, and how they endured by faith and continued to trust God even in the face of great suffering.
Now comes the application, with this exhortation that we find in Hebrews 12:1-3. In some ways, this kind of turns us into the last couple of chapters of this letter with a stirring call to live a life of enduring faith as we trust in Jesus Christ.
Let’s read the passage, Hebrews 12:1-3. Then I want us to see four lessons that we learn from the passage. Let’s read it. Hebrews 12, beginning in verse 1. It says,
“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, 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.
“Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.”
This is God’s word.
You have to remember the context of this letter. This letter to the Hebrews was written to Jewish Christians who had believed that Jesus was the Christ, that Jesus is the Messiah, but they are facing temptation and opposition and even persecution. So they are tempted to grow weary, to grow fainthearted, and to shrink away from faith in Jesus into the forms of Old Testament, old covenant worship.
It’s in this letter that the author is continually holding out Jesus as better, Jesus as supreme, Jesus as the one who has brought a new covenant and really has fulfilled all that came before in the Old Testament. And now he’s given them these many examples of those who lived by faith and he calls them to run the race of faith that is set before them.
Really, this whole passage (and really about the first half of Hebrews 12) is filled with athletic imagery. The word “race” is the word agon in Greek, the word from which we get the English word “agony.” And it’s a word that carries the idea not just of a race which someone would run, but of any kind of athletic competition. In fact, some scholars think this refers to the Greek pentathlon. These were the Greek games which included not just running, but also jumping and discus and javelin and boxing and wrestling. So it was this ultimate test of endurance in the games of the ancient world. It involved a strenuous struggle, an agonizing contest.
That’s the image that the author uses now to call his readers to an enduring faith in Jesus Christ.
He essentially gives us four lessons about the life of faith, which we can word in terms of exhortations: four exhortations for us this morning, as we think about our own race of faith. The exhortations are these.
1. Remember That You Don’t Run Alone
2. Remove the Hindrances to Running
3. Run with Endurance
4. Fix Your Eyes on Jesus
Let’s look at each one of those as we work through this passage.
1. Remember That You Don’t Run Alone
Just look at the opening lines of verse one. It says, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…”
That “therefore,” of course, connects us to Hebrews 11, and the cloud of witnesses that he has in mind are those saints who went before that are described in Hebrews 11 as those who obeyed God and sought God and persevered through faith. So Abel and Enoch and Noah, Abraham and the patriarchs, Moses and the exodus generation, and then the prophets and the kings and the judges and so on, who accomplished great feats by faith on one hand, but also endured great suffering through faith. This is the cloud of witnesses.
Now, some people have supposed that by describing this as a cloud of witnesses that the author here imagines a great grandstand full of spectators, the spectators being the Old Testament saints, and that we run in their sight, in their view.
That’s probably not the image the author has in mind. I think F.F. Bruce in his commentary is closer to the mark. He asks,
“In what sense are they witnesses? Not probably in the sense of spectators watching their successors as they in turn run the race for which they have entered, but rather in the sense that by their loyalty and endurance they have borne witness to the possibilities of the life of faith. It is not so much they who look at us as we look to them for encouragement.”
I think that’s the idea here. They are witnesses to the possibilities of faith. They are witnesses to the faithfulness of God to believers. And in that sense, they are a cloud of witnesses, and we are to follow in their example as we run the race of faith.
Now, I think a great lesson of this passage is that we do not run alone, that we are a part of the church. We are part of the people of God, the people of God that transcends time and space and history, including the Old Testament people of God, and including, of course, the great saints who have lived since then, since the New Testament was written.
We need the church. We need the church in two senses. We need the church in its history, and we need the church in its community.
(1) We need the church in its history. The history of the church is there to show us the faithfulness of God and the example of those who went before, and there’s a very real sense in which today, even as we are gathered in this place as part of a local church, the body of Christ, that we are united with all the saints who have gone before.
Sometimes theologians speak of this as the mystical church, the mystical body of Christ. And there’s a sense in which as we are united to Jesus Christ himself by faith, we are also joined to all of those who are also joined to Christ by faith. We are part of one body.
One of the old hymns, “The Church’s One Foundation,” has a line that speaks to this. Speaking of the church, it says, “Yet she on earth hath union with God the three in one, / And mystic, sweet communion with those whose rest is won.”
That’s the idea here. There are some who have already run the race. They have seized the prize. They are now with God in heaven, and we have union and communion with them as we follow in their steps and we run the race that is set before us, remembering the history of their lives.
So, as I mentioned last week, I think one of the applications of Hebrews 11 is to read biography. Read the Bible, and read biography. Read the biographies of the saints, the stories of the saints in Scripture. Those stories are written for our learning, for our admonition, to help us in our life of faith. But also, read the biographies and the stories of saints over the last two thousand years who have also faithfully walked with God. What you’ll find is great encouragement for your own life of faith in Jesus. We need the history of the church.
(2) But we also need the community of the church. Notice here that the author not only talks about the great cloud of witnesses, but he gives the exhortation in the plural. He says, “Let us run the race that is set before us.” And he includes himself among them.
It is a call not just to individuals, it’s a call to all of us. It’s a call to all of us together to run the race of faith.
This has really been a thread to this letter, as the author has several times talked about the importance of community and of the church and the “one another” commands in Scripture. Remember, Hebrews 3 tells us to “exhort one another every day, while it is called today, so that our hearts will not be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin and we are led to fall away from the living God.” We need mutual exhortation and admonition.
You need people in your life who will exhort you, who will encourage you, who will pray for you, who will help you in the fight against sin, and in the race of faith. Hebrews 10 tells us not to “forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as is the custom of some people,” but rather we are to gather together. We are to meet together as the day approaches, and we are to do that so that we can stir up one another to love and to good deeds.
So you and I need the church, not only the history of the church, but we need the community of the church right now in our lives today.
John Piper one time said that eternal security is a community project, and he meant that the life of faith by which we continue to believe, we continue to walk with God, is not something we do alone; it’s something that we do with the help of others. So the first exhortation for us this morning is to remember that we do not run alone. We run as a part of the great company of saints, as a part of a church, and we need one another’s help in this race.
2. Remove the Hindrances to Running
The second exhortation is to remove the hindrances to running. You also see this in verse 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.” Or in the NIV, “Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.”
The idea here is that of the athlete who before competition would remove the entangling garments, so as not to be hindered in his run. In fact, in ancient Greek athletics, the athletes would compete in the nude. They would completely remove clothing so as to be completely unencumbered as they would run the race. Of course, this is a metaphor here for us. It’s a call to remove the things that would hinder us in our running.
This language of laying aside is a word that’s used many times in the New Testament, and it’s usually used in reference to laying aside or putting away sin, sometimes speaking about the sinful nature more generally and sometimes in a specific sense.
Here are a couple of examples.
Ephesians 4:22 says, “You were taught with regard to your former way of life to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires.” That word “put off” is the same word that’s used here for “lay aside.” So there’s a general sense in which all of us, when we come to Jesus Christ, we are taught to put the old life behind us. But then there’s a continual application of that in our lives as we lay aside specific sinful attitudes and behaviors.
So we read in 1 Peter 2:1, “So put away—” same word. “So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.”
Passages like that, and this passage here in Hebrews 12, are calling us then to deal with sin, calling us to repentance and to turn away from sin.
The theologian Michael Kruger has said that “the quickest way to ruin your Christian life is to be unrepentant about sin.” Sin will hinder you in your race, and all of us need to deal with sin.
But the passage says not only to remove the hindrances of sin, but it says to remove every weight. It’s not just the sin, it’s also the weight in our lives. This seems to be patterns of living, habits, behaviors, things in our lives that, while they may not be sinful in and of themselves, they become somehow a means of our stumbling in our lives.
John Wesley, as a young man, once asked his mother, “What is sin?” Her answer was profound and deeply searching to our hearts. She said, “Son, whatever weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes away your relish for spiritual things; in short, if anything inflames with the authority and the power of the flesh over the spirit, that to you becomes sin, however good it is in itself.”
You see, in our lives, we need to deal not only with sin, but we need to deal with the weights, and we need to lay those aside. In the same way as if you were running a marathon, you’re not going to run wearing a business suit and dress shoes, because that would impede your race. That would hinder you in your race. So in our lives, when we think about running the race of faith in faithfulness to Jesus, we need to ask ourselves a question. Are the things that we allow in our lives hindering us or helping us in the race of faith?
I think we need to ask better questions. Some of us, when we think about our amusements, our behaviors, our pastimes, entertainment, all that kind of thing, sometimes the question we ask is, “What’s wrong with it? Is it okay? Can I do this as a Christian?”
But a better question to ask is, “Will it help me run? Will it help me love Jesus? Will it help me love people? Will it help me delight in God’s word? Will it frame my mind and my heart for prayer and for worship? Will it help me deny myself and take up my cross and follow Jesus? Will it help me to cherish holiness? Will it help me do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with God?”
Ask yourself those questions. I think what many of us will find—and I include myself in this—we will find that there are things in our lives that if we laid them aside they would enable us to run with more freedom as we seek to follow Christ.
Here’s an exercise that I suggest that you do this week. Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. Make two columns, one column that says Sins and one column that says Weights.
First of all, just examine your heart and your life for any sins in your life that are hindering you from the race. And that would be any sin. Any sin in your life, anything in your life that you know in light of God’s word is displeasing to God and is sinful. Write it down. Resolve afresh, by God’s grace, to turn from that sin.
But in the other column, think about the weights. Think about the things you do with time. Think about your different forms of amusement. And listen, I’m not here to tell you what those things are, whether it’s a weight for you or not. But that’s something for you to ask in your own conscience and with the direction of God. Ask if it’s helping you or if it’s hindering you in your race. If you find it to be a hindrance, then lay it aside.
3. Run with Endurance
We are called to remember that we do not run alone, to remove the hindrances to the race, and then thirdly, to run with endurance the race that is set before us. That’s the end of verse 1.
This word “endurance” is an important word, and both the noun form and the verbal form of this word are used in Hebrews. It’s a word that literally means to stay under a burden or to stay under pressure. This call to endure and to endurance is something that we’ve seen several times in Hebrews already. Hebrews 10:32 says, “Recall the former days, when after you were enlightened you endured a hard struggle with sufferings.” So they’ve already had some experience with suffering, and they endured.
In verse 36 he says, “You have need of endurance so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what is promised.”
In Hebrews 11, Moses is a great example of enduring faith. “By faith, he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible.” That’s Hebrews 11:27.
Now we are called to run the race before us with endurance. And the example that’s set before us in verses 2-3 is Jesus. Verse 2 says, “He endured the cross, despising the shame,” and in verse 3, “Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself.”
Then, down into chapter 12, Hebrews 12:7, we read, “It is for discipline that you have to endure.” So there is a need for endurance in our lives.
This is part of the race: it is to run with endurance. I think there are at least two ways that we need to express this in our Christian lives.
(1) First of all, in what we might just call plodding daily faithfulness. This is the discipline of “showing up.” It’s that staying power in the long obedience and the commitments that we have made to Christ and to others.
All of us need this to some degree in our lives. If you are single, you need the discipline of being faithful to God’s call to abstinence and to faithfulness as a single person. But if you’re married, you need the discipline of staying engaged in marriage as a loving partner. We need this in parenting. We need this in our work and education and service within the local church, and all these different ways.
Especially in our faith, we need the discipline of just showing up and just plodding, daily faithfulness.
I find it inspiring to read about examples of people who accomplished great feats by just being faithful to do the next thing day after day after day.
I’ve recently been reading a book that’s called Book Notes by the author Brian Lamb. It’s really just a series of excerpts from interviews that Brian Lamb did with authors and historians and biographers, and he talks to them about their process of writing and about the research, about specific works they did. I was intrigued when I read about Shelby Foote, who was the great author of a famous three-volume trilogy on the history of the Civil War.
Shelby Foote got the contract to do this in the 1950s. It was originally to be one volume, and as he began the research, he realized it needed to be a three-volume project. So the publisher agreed to allow him to do the three-volume project, and he spent twenty years writing this, from 1954 to 1974, and this was his method: five hundred words a day that he wrote with a dip pen. This is an old-fashioned pen that you would dip in the ink, you know, every few words, scratch out those words, five hundred words a day. He would write those words, then he would type it up and he would set that page on a growing stack of paper.
He did this for twenty years. Of course, along the way, he’s doing all kinds of research, and he talked about the research and how important it was even to visit battlefields on which these battles were fought in the Civil War, to visit the battlefields at the right time of year. He said if you visit, you know, the battlefield of Shiloh in the winter or in the summer, you’re going to miss what really happened, because that battle was fought in April. So you had to visit the right time of the year so that you would see what those soldiers actually saw and experienced.
I read stories like that of people who devoted twenty years to one great project, just working at it day after day after day, and I find stories like that inspiring. It’s not that I want to write a three-volume work on the Civil War, but I want that kind of daily faithfulness to the tasks that God has called me. And you need that as well. This is just the discipline of showing up, of doing the next thing. It’s staying power.
(2) But we also need endurance in another way. We need faithfulness under pressure. We might think of this as the discipline of holding up. This is when you continue to be faithful when it gets really hard. It’s when you stay faithful to your marriage vows even when marriage is proving difficult. It’s when you stick with parenting and stay engaged as a parent even when parenting feels really, really hard and wearisome and tiresome. It’s when you are faithful to Christ even when there’s pressure to compromise. It’s holding up under pressure.
Of course, the great stories of the saints that we have already seen in Hebrews 11, it’s those who are faithful to Christ even in the face of suffering, even in the face of death.
All of us need this as well. This is part of the race. It’s holding up when the pressure is on and being faithful even in those times. That’s what it means to run with endurance.
4. Fix Your Eyes on Jesus
So how do we do that? How do we then run with endurance? I think the real answer to the question, the key to it all, is found in the fourth exhortation, which is to fix your eyes on Jesus. We get this in verses 2-3. Notice verse two: “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.” And then he restates the exhortation in another way in verse 3. “Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.”
The way to not grow weary or fainthearted is to consider Jesus, to fix your eyes on Jesus. In fact, that’s the way the NIV words verse 2. “Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and the perfecter of our faith.” So Jesus is the great model, the great example, and to run the race set before us with endurance, we need to fix our eyes on him.
There are two things the passage says about Jesus in relationship to our faith.
(1) First of all, it says he is the founder or the pioneer of our faith. This also is an important word. We’ve already encountered this in the letter to the Hebrews. It’s in Hebrews 2:10, where it says that “it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.”
This word, archegos, is a word that really carries the idea of the first one into a territory, into a new realm, into a new environment. So sometimes it’s translated as pioneer or even as trailblazer. It carries the idea of someone who goes before us as the forerunner, and that’s what Jesus is. Jesus is the one who has marked out this race of faith and the whole pattern of our Christian lives. He’s done it in his own life.
The pattern, as you see in verse 2, is the pattern of suffering and then glory. “For the joy that was set before him he endured the cross, despising the shame,” and now he’s seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
So here’s the pattern: suffering, then glory; death, then life; crucifixion, then resurrection; self-denial, but then great fulfillment and joy. I mean, that’s the pattern. And listen, brothers and sisters, that pattern is the pattern of the Christian life that we have to live every day.
It’s not just suffering in the world now and glory hereafter. We live out that death-resurrection pattern every day as we deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Jesus. And in losing ourselves, losing our lives, we find real life. We find real joy in Jesus Christ, and we experience the power of the risen Christ working in us through the Holy Spirit. But Jesus is the one who’s gone before. He’s blazed the trail of faith and of faithfulness and of endurance and of obedience. We are to follow in his footsteps. He is the founder of our faith.
(2) But he’s also the perfecter of our faith. That means that Jesus is the one who brings our faith to completion. He’s the one who began the good work in us, he’s the one who completes that work in us—Philippians 1:6—and in Hebrews he is the one who brings God’s plan and God’s covenant to perfection by himself becoming perfect in his humanity through his obedience and through his suffering, and then through his final sacrifice on the cross, he perfects us. Hebrews 10:14: “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.”
It’s Jesus in this capacity as the founder and the perfecter of our faith, the one who goes before us, who marks out the way, who blazes the trail, and is the one who completes the good work that has been begun in our own hearts and lives—it’s in that capacity that we are to look to Jesus.
Just think for a minute about what this exhortation means. It’s in the present tense, so it means keep on looking to Jesus. Keep on fixing your eyes on Jesus. It means that Jesus is to be in our sights all the time, that we keep our eyes on him.
I can’t read that passage without thinking of that great devotional masterpiece by the Puritan Isaac Ambrose. It was called Looking unto Jesus. He wrote it in 1653 after a serious sickness, and he wrote for his own meditations, thoughts about Jesus, and talked about how to look to Jesus by trusting in him and delighting in him and desiring him and loving him and enjoying him. And he said,
“I beseech you, come warm your heart at this blessed fire. O come and smell the precious ointments of Jesus Christ. O come and sit under his shadow with great delight. O that all men would presently fall upon this gospel art of looking to Jesus.”
That’s what this passage is calling us to: to fix our eyes on him. It is to make Jesus Christ the magnificent obsession of our lives, that honoring him, knowing him, trusting him, being like him is our one primary and constraining goal that governs everything else.
Are you in the race? Are you running the race of faith? Listen, friend: you don’t run alone, you’re a part of the church—the church historical, the church today. Run, locking your arms with others. Remove the hindrances to your running. Examine your heart this week for sin and also for the weights that are holding you back. Remove those hindrances. Then run with endurance by showing up to your daily tasks of obedience and faithfulness and by holding up when it gets hard. And through it all, keep your eyes on Jesus Christ. Let’s pray together.
Father, I pray that your word would stir up our hearts and that by your Holy Spirit you would press home these exhortations, these truths, so that there would be an appropriate response on our part as we think about the life to which you’ve called us. Lord, would you especially help us to fix our eyes on Jesus today, to look not so much at ourselves, to not look at others, but to look at Jesus himself with our eyes firmly and steadfastly focused on him. And may we, in seeing him, be given the strength and the power and the grace that we need to take the next step of obedience, whatever that is in our lives.
Lord, as we come to the Lord’s table today, our prayer is that in coming to the table, this also would be a means of grace to us as we consider what Jesus Christ has done for us in his suffering and death to redeem us from our sins. May we remember that this Christ whom we serve has suffered far greater than we ever will, that he has suffered the very wrath and judgment of God that our sins deserved so that we could be freed and so that we could be restored to a right relationship with you. So, Lord, help us embrace Christ this morning with all of our hearts trusting in him and his finished work as we take these elements at the table.
Would you draw near to us today by your Spirit? Would you give us the grace that we need, each one of us with our particular needs and burdens this morning? And may you be glorified in our continuing worship together. We pray in Jesus’ name and for his sake. Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
