HEBREWS 12:1-3 - Endurance Runner

Introduction

 This morning we come to one of the most often-quoted and often-preached passages in Hebrews. And for good reason—in these three verses, the author of the book distills everything in the first eleven chapters down into a powerful and moving statement of the supremacy of Jesus Christ over all things. It’s tempting to think of Hebrews 12:1-3 as the peak of the mountain that we have been climbing through the past eleven chapters—we’ve climbed through some rough terrain to get here, and the view we have of Christ and His work from here is breathtaking.

And if we examine these verses carefully we will see a very clear trail that connects us back to the larger flow of the author’s argument of this book—that we must not fall away from the confidence we have in Christ. Look with me again at our text—what words or ideas are repeated here. Verse 1 says that we are to “run with endurance the race that is set before us”. Verse 2 says that Jesus “endured the Cross”, and verse 3 calls us to consider Jesus who “endured such hostility from sinners...”

Turn back a page or so in your Bible to the end of Hebrews 10 that we studied some weeks ago, and you will see the same emphasis there:

Hebrews 10:36–39 (LSB)

For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise. For yet in a very little while, He who is coming will come, and will not delay. But My righteous one shall live by faith, And if he shrinks back, My soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul.

So I want you to pick up the flow of the argument of the book that brings us to our text this morning—the recipients of this letter were being tempted in various ways to abandon their hope in Christ and go back to their Hebrew roots; to give up on following Christ and return to the Old Covenant system of sacrifices and obedience to the Law of Moses. And so in many different ways and from many different angles the writer of Hebrews is urging them not to give up, but to endure. So after his call to endurance at the end of Hebrews 10 he takes the entire next chapter to load his readers up with example after example of faithful endurance—Old Testament saints who acted on the promises of God even when they had no visible evidence of them or could ever see how they could come true. They believed God and they acted on what they believed.

And I hope you can see why the author writes with such urgency—why does Hebrews 10:36 say that we have need of endurance? Because the one who does not endure, but shrinks back from Christ shrinks back to destruction.

Hebrews 10:38 (LSB)

But My righteous one shall live by faith, And if he shrinks back, My soul has no pleasure in him.

So here we are at the end of a truckload of examples of endurance—testimonies of saints who hung on to the promises of God. And as Chapter 12 opens, the author takes all of those examples, all of those exhortations to endure in faith, and loads all of it into that word at the beginning of the chapter: Therefore...

Hebrews 12:1 (LSB)

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, laying aside every weight and the sin which so easily entangles us, let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,

What the author is showing us here—and what the Holy Spirit is saying to us through this inspired Word—is that you are called to

Run the RACE of FAITH with the blood-bought ENDURANCE of Christ

And so the question before us this morning is: What does endurance in this race look like? What are the marks of that holy patience, that steadfast endurance that we saw in Abel and Noah and Abraham and Moses and Jacob and others? This is not an idle question—it is the difference between shrinking back to destruction and holding fast to the preserving of the soul. Are you running that race with endurance? Or are you shrinking back? Can you examine your life in light of the Scriptures and see this kind of endurance in your life? What does it look like?

In order to answer that question, look at the first verse of our text and

I. Consider the MANNER of the RACE you run (Hebrews 12:1)

Look at the first verse of our text, where we are exhorted to “run with endurance the race that is set before us”. There are three supporting phrases to that main command “run with endurance”—the first there at the beginning of the verse reminds us that we run

Surrounded by TESTIMONIES to God’s TRUSTWORTHINESS

We have a “great cloud of witnesses” surrounding us as we run this race. Now, there is a very common misconception about this “great cloud of witnesses” in this verse. You may have heard something along the lines of how you need to be faithful in your Christian life because “all of the great saints of the Old Testament are watching down on you!” That they are gathered around you to witness your race of faith.

But this really misses the context and flow of the argument—the author did not spend all of Chapter 11 naming all of those Old Covenant saints because they were watching you. His point was so that you would see in them all of the ways that God is faithful to keep His promises!

It is clearer to see when we understand that the Greek word for “witness” here can also be translated “testimony”. We can have the courage to run our race of faith with endurance when we recognize such a great cloud of testimonies to God’s trustworthiness! This isn’t all the Old Testament saints sitting in a stadium somewhere watching you run; this is you being utterly surrounded by good reasons to trust God!

If God could sustain Abraham as an alien and stranger in his own land all his life, surely He can sustain you in your sojourn here in a land that you will never belong in! If God could split the sea in two and provide a way for His people to escape the armies of Pharaoh, then surely His arm is not shortened today as you face the opposition and turmoil of this world? If He was faithful to lift Rahab out of her sin and Gideon out of his cowardice and Samson out of his lusts, then surely He is able to lift you out of the mire of your sin and set your feet on the solid Rock of salvation in Christ? Run with endurance, Christian, because you are surrounded by testimonies to God’s trustworthiness—He will never fail you!

We run with endurance when we recognize that we are surrounded by testimonies to God’s trustworthiness—and verse 1 also reminds us that running with endurance also means that we “lay aside every weight” in order to run. Down in the tack room of the horse barn we have a bunch of different saddles—one of them is designed for long-distance rides; it’s called an “endurance saddle”. Unlike a typical Western saddle, an endurance saddle is far lighter (about ten to twenty pounds lighter), because when you are traveling on a seventy-five mile endurance ride, every pound counts!

In the same way, God’s Word reminds us here that in the race of faith that we run, we must run

Not OVERLOADED by the WORLD (cp. 2 Timothy 2:4)

Now, we may immediately take this to mean that we must not be weighed down by sin in our race of faith—but the writer goes on to speak separately of the “sin that besets us”. So I think the idea of “weight” here is not referring to things that are sinful, but good things that are not wrong in themselves that will weigh us down in our pursuit of the holiness Christ calls us to.

There are many good things that God gives us by His common grace in this world—things that are not at all sinful or harmful in themselves—but things that you may sometimes have to do without in order to run with endurance. As we read in our Scripture reading earlier this morning from 2 Timothy 2:4

2 Timothy 2:4 (LSB)

No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.

I remember hearing a story about a winter Olympic athlete who was training to compete in the biathalon—cross-country skiing and target shooting. She left her home and moved thousands of miles away to the Canadian Rockies where she could train year round. She lived in a little cabin with a woodburning stove, a cot and a toilet and nothing else. All day long she did nothing but ski and shoot, shoot and ski for three years. Because as much as she missed going without all the “comforts” of home, she had a race to run, and she was not willing to be weighed down.

Christian, what good things are you ready to lay aside rather than be weighed down by them in your race of faith? Work is a good thing—but are you willing to risk losing a raise or a promotion because you are willing to go to the mat with your boss in order to get Sundays off because the worship of God with His people on the Lord’s Day is your highest priority?

Do you find that you never seem to have time to spend in God’s Word and prayer in the mornings? Then are you willing to give up a half-hour’s sleep and get up earlier (or go to bed earlier?) Is your schedule just “too packed” to be part of the life of this church for Ladies’ Bible Study or Men’s Prayer Breakfast or one of the other small groups that meet? Is there really nothing in your schedule you can bear to lay aside so that you will not be hindered in the race of faith that has been set before you?

Consider the manner of the race you are running, Christian—running with endurance means running not overloaded by the world, and it means running in such a way that you are

Not AMBUSHED by SIN

Notice as well in verse 1 that running with endurance means that we are laying aside “the sin which so easily entangles us”. The Greek word “easily entangles” has the sense of “skillfully encircling on all sides so as to attack or assail or inhibit action.” Consider the sense of this word and you can readily acknowledge it if you’re being honest: Sin is really really good at snaring you.

You know this, don’t you? No matter how many times you’ve fought, no matter how often you have escaped the temptations and snares of sin, you will never completely kill it in this life. Just when you think you have mortified that sin, it finds a way to reach back out of where you buried it and catch you again.

That lie can still pop out of your mouth before you are half aware of it. That lust can still grab you by the eyes and drag you away into the wrong neighborhood of the internet. That anxiety can still clutch at your heart and sink you into fear and unbelief. That bitterness can still lash out against your spouse or your child or sibling seemingly out of nowhere. That greed can still grasp at you and make you stingy and suspicious of others and unwilling to give of yourself. That gluttony can still send you back for your fourth helping and cause you to dishonor your body, the temple of the living God.

Now, this is not to say that sin is inevitable or that there is no conquering of our sins and lusts in this life. You really can, in the new birth purchased for us by the blood of Christ, be more holy than you ever thought possible.

But this is to say that you can never let your guard down. Sin is extraordinarily canny at ambushing you when you least expect it. It will freeze your prayers, wither your love, gut your Bible reading, drain your confidence. Running this race with endurance means that you are watching out for those ambushes of sin, and praying every day as our Lord taught us, “Lead me not into temptation”—Lord, show me where the ambushes are and steer me clear of them so that I will not be entangled and fall!

And as we move into verse 2 of our text, the Scriptures point us to your only reliable defense against the deceitfulness of sin; the only sure hope you have of running with endurance—you must

II. Look to the DEEDS of the SAVIOR you trust (Hebrews 12:2)

We are called in verse 2 to run our race of faith with endurance

Hebrews 12:2 (LSB)

fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

You run with enduring faith when you fix your eyes—when you look with an undistracted gaze—on Jesus, because

He BLAZED the TRAIL for your faith (cp. John 5:19-20; Mark 14:36)

Now, different translations supply a word in this verse that is not found in the original—you may find in your Bible that verse 2 reads that Christ is the “author and finisher of our faith”, but that pronoun does not appear in the original Greek. The idea here is not so much that Christ is the author of your faith (which, undoubtedly He is); what the author is demonstrating here is that Christ is the “author” of faith itself.

The word translated “author” in verse 2 carries the idea of a “trailblazer”, someone who creates or establishes something new. Looking to Jesus as the Author of faith means that you look to Him to learn how to run this race; you look to the way He depended with perfect submission and trust in His Heavenly Father during the days of His race here on earth. Everything He did, He did in submission to His Heavenly Father:

John 5:19–20 (LSB)

“Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing from Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in the same manner. “For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing; and the Father will show Him greater works than these, so that you will marvel.

And when He prayed in Gethsemane as everything within Him cried out to be spared from the will of His Father to crush Him for our sins, He cried out in perfect, enduring faith:

Mark 14:36 (LSB)

“Abba! Father! All things are possible for You; remove this cup from Me; yet not what I will, but what You will.”

This is your example of enduring faith, Christian—Christ Jesus your Savior who not only leads the way for your faith, Who not only made it possible for you to have faith by His death on the Cross, but Who has promised to perfect faith in you someday—He is the author and finisher, the One who will complete the good work He has begun in you until the Day when He returns in glory! (Philippians 1:6)

Christian, fix your eyes on the Author of your faith—He ran this race before you did, and He is with you every step of the way in your race!

And see as our text continues here that this endurance of faith that you have been given is a blood-bought endurance. Because Christ is not only that Author and Finisher of your faith, but see also that

He WITHSTOOD the HUMILIATION of the Cross (cp. Phil. 2:6-8)

“…the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame...

Death by crucifixion was designed to be not only one of the most painful, but also one of the most humiliating ways to die—the depictions of Christ wearing a loincloth on the Cross have less to do with historical accuracy than with avoiding the embarrassment and shame of depicting the naked helplessness of victims of crucifixion.

There was no avoiding that shame for your Savior on that horrible Friday afternoon—as the Passover crowds surged into Jerusalem they would all have seen Him, laughing at the humiliating indignity of His suffering. But God’s Word tells you here that He not only endured the Cross, He was not deterred by the shame of it—He thought nothing of it!

Christian, can you see the overflowing greatness of your Savior in this verse? When you burn with shame over the sins that so easily beset you, when you look back with heartbroken embarrassment over your past, see here that your Savior bore it for you shamelessly! He despised the shame that torments you; He looks down with contempt on the way the sins of your past humiliate you—His blood not only wipes away the penalty for your sins but He has conquered the shame and humiliation of them!

Fix your gaze on the deeds of your Savior who purchased your endurance with His own blood—not only did He blaze the trail for your faith so that you have His perfect example, not only did He withstand the humiliation of the Cross in order to free you from the penalty and power and shame of your sin, but all of these things are guaranteed to you because

He ASCENDED as your ADVOCATE (Matt. 28:20)

Hebrews 12:2 (LSB)

fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Christian, you can run this race of faith with endurance because you serve a Savior who has all authority and power in Heaven and on earth! He reigns as the Sovereign of all creation, is there anything He cannot or will not do for His children as they look to Him in this race? He sits at the right hand of His Father to intercede for you as you run, to bring your struggles and your weaknesses and weights and entanglements of sin before the Throne for grace to help in time of need; He intercedes for you as One Who ran this very same race, Who has set this race before you, and Who has all authority and power and strength to bring you to the finish line!

Fix your eyes on Jesus Christ as you run this race, Christian—He is the One Who set this race before you, the One Who endured all your shame and punishment on the Cross, the One Who reigns today over all things. You have in Him the power to run this race, and Verse 3 goes on to say that you have in Christ the power to

III. Endure the HOSTILITY of the ENEMIES of God (Hebrews 12:3)

Hebrews 12:3 (LSB)

For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary, fainting in heart.

We have seen that enduring faith means setting aside the weight of the world and entangling sin; we have seen that enduring faith means looking to the work of Christ for us, and here we see that enduring faith means taking strength somehow from Christ’s example of enduring the hatred of sinners.

I think there are at least two ways that we draw strength from Christ in the face of spiteful opposition and scorn of unbelievers in this world. The first is to remember, as Jesus told us, is that when you are confronted by this world’s hostility,

It is a SIGN that you BELONG to Christ (John 15:18-19)

Keep your place in Hebrews 12, and turn with me briefly to John 15:18-19 (page 902 in the pew Bible). Jesus says to His disciples on the night He was betrayed:

John 15:18–19 (LSB)

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated Me before it hated you. “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.

Are you bearing the hatred and scorn of unbelieving co-workers, neighbors, family members because you stand firmly and unashamedly for Christ? Then consider it a comfort, Christian, because it means that you really do belong to Him!

In his commentary on this passage, John Calvin writes:

For this one thought alone ought to be sufficient to conquer all temptations, that is, when we know that we are companions or associates of the Son of God, and that he, who was so far above us, willingly came down to our condition, in order that he might animate us by his own example; yea, it is thus that we gather courage, which would otherwise melt away, and turn as it were into despair. (Calvin, J., & Owen, J. (2010). Commentary on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews (p. 313). Logos Bible Software.)

Endure the hostility of the enemies of God by reckoning it as proof from the world that you belong to Christ—they hate you because they hated Him first. The opposition and hostility that you face for the sake of Christ is a sign that you belong to Christ, and

It is a STRAIN that drives you to Christ for STRENGTH

There is no doubt, Christian, that living under the constant hostility of the world around you takes its toll. To always feel like an alien and stranger, to deal every day with the realization that you will never really belong to this world, to sense the constant undercurrent of disdain and dismissal by those who look down on your Christian faith as making you weak or stupid or racist or hateful—these things will exhaust you over time. (The phrase “fainting in heart” there at the end of verse 3 carries the image in Greek of a bowstring that has been unstrung and lies limp from one end of the bow—useless, weak and in the way…)

But the author pushes us once more to fix our eyes on Christ in the midst of our weariness in this hostile world—

Hebrews 12:3 (LSB)

For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary, fainting in heart.

The word translated consider in this verse appears only here in the entire New Testament—it is a word that describes reckoning, considering by way of comparison (it’s the Greek word where we get our English word analogy—to discern or learn something by way of comparing it to something else.)

And so surely at least part of what this means for us is that we ought to look at the way our Trailblazer dealt with hostility. He is the “Author” of our faith; He is the One we look to in order to understand what faith looks like when it comes under fire.

And so how do you do that. Christian? You look to the Word of God! Go over the accounts of His life in the Gospels over and over, trace His every step through His ministry, take notes, memorize His words. Lay aside every distraction from reading the Word, head off every scheduling conflict that would pull you away from coming into His presence in worship on Sunday, prioritize your time so that you are able to fix your gaze on Christ in His Word and with His people.

And then, when you see the hostility Christ endured, when you have carefully considered and thought through what happened to Him in this world, then go to your knees in prayer! Set the opposition and hostility you have encountered alongside what Christ endured, and your first prayer will be a prayer of thanksgiving and gratitude for what your Savior bore for you!

What shame or contempt or scorn is too hard for you to bear once you have fully grasped how your Savior was despised and forsaken by His own people? What sorrows over being excluded or sidelined for your faith are too much for you to take when you see the Man of Sorrows Himself, acquainted with grief in a way that you will never fully appreciate? What taunts or threats or insults can touch you when you remember how your Jesus was despised and stricken and afflicted? Fix your eyes on Jesus, the Scripture promises, and you will not grow weary in this wicked old world.

Beloved, is this the endurance that characterizes your faith this morning? You are surrounded on every side by testimonies to God’s trustworthiness—are those testimonies a bulwark for you in the storms of uncertainty in this life, or are you constantly besieged by the unbelief that says God can’t be trusted to come through for you?

Are you able to look at all of the good things that God’s common grace has given you in this life and say that there is nothing you would not lay aside if it hindered your faithful endurance? Or are you clinging to your work or your recreations or your social commitments or your finances or whatever it might be, because deep down inside you would rather run this race of faith dragging your possessions and entertainments and social circle behind you like a sack of concrete?

Are you constantly on the lookout for the ambushes of sin, scanning the race course ahead of you moment by moment for signs of temptation that will blow up in your face and knock you off of your feet? Are you ruthless in rooting out sin and seeking the holiness without which no one will see the Lord? Or are you so certain that you are such an expert at battling sin that you are safe from being tempted or tried, that vigilance in seeking holiness is for those who aren’t as strong in their faith as you?

If God’s living and active and authoritative Word reveals in you this morning that you have grown weary in your race, that you have been fainting in heart, that you have been making truce with your sins and you have been weighed down with the allures of this world—then hear what this Word says to you today: Fix your eyes on Jesus Christ!

Look to the One Who made your faith possible—the One Who is not only the Author of faith but the One Who promises to perfect it in you! The One Who took your sin and shame and guilt and rebellion and desertion and bore it shamelessly on that Cross so that you would be forever free of that shame before Him! The One Who has paid for every failure, every time you have screwed it up, every time you have been weighed down by the world and ensnared by sin, the One Who suffered all of that agony and humiliation and punishment under the wrath of God because of the joy of His exaltation at the right hand of God—where He rejoices to intercede for you!

Fix your eyes on the One Who delights in being the Perfecter of your faith—the One Who does not just “cheer you on” from His Throne as you run your race, but Who has sworn to personally bring you across the finish line—the resurrected and reigning author and finisher of your enduring faith, your Savior Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

Ephesians 3:20–21 (LSB)

Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or understand, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION:

Write down something you learned from this morning’s message that is new to you, or an insight that you had for the first time about the text? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Write down a question that you have about the passage that you want to study further or ask for help with: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Write down something that you need to do in your life this week in response to what God has shown you from His Word today: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________