Straining Toward the Prize

I had just told you the one thing I counted worth having — to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, and to share his sufferings (3:10). And lest anyone think I imagined I had arrived, I said plainly: "Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own" (3:12). Hear the ground under my running. I do not press on to earn his love; I press on because he has already laid hold of me. He took hold of me first, on a road I was walking the wrong way. The whole race is the answer to a grip I did not initiate and cannot break.

So I gave you the posture of a life that is not yet finished: "one thing I do: 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" (3:13-14). Forgetting — not that the past is erased from memory, but that I refuse to let it set my pace. My sins do not chain me, for they are pardoned; my achievements do not satisfy me, for I counted them loss. Both lie behind. The runner who looks back stumbles. There is a prize ahead, the upward call, and I lean my whole weight toward it.

Then I said something that may unsettle the tender conscience: "Let those of us who are mature think this way" (3:15). Do you see it? To be mature is precisely to know you have not arrived — to press on rather than to preen. And where you think differently, I do not scold; "God will reveal that also to you" (3:15). Only hold to what you have attained, and walk in it. This is why I gave you a pattern to imitate (3:17), for we do not run alone.

But some do not run at all, and I wept as I named them — "enemies of the cross of Christ," whose "god is their belly," "with minds set on earthly things" (3:18-19). Their end is destruction because the belly, and the appetite, and the honor of this passing world are all they aim at, and all of it dies. Set your mind there and you go down with it. So weigh your desires honestly today: what does your mind set itself upon when it is left free to wander?

For here is the great turn, and the ground of the whole race: "our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body" (3:20-21). I write this in chains, in a body that aches and will one day fail — a lowly body indeed. Yet it is not garbage to be discarded; it is a seed to be transformed. The same power by which he subjects all things to himself will raise and glorify this frame. That is the prize I strain toward. That is why the belly cannot be my god and the past cannot be my master.

So run, beloved — not to be caught by Christ, for you already are, but toward the day you will see him and be made like him. Grace and peace to you in the straining.