We’re now engaged in the most massive sporting event that happens on our planet—not the Olympics, but the World Cup. As a newly minted soccer fan over the last decade, I’m still learning to understand and appreciate the ‘beautiful game.’ One thing, however, is clear—when the final whistle blows, every match has only one winner.
Success in life is more difficult to measure.
Indeed, some of us never arrive at a final answer or even believe there is an answer. What we thought was success as a single 25-year-old isn’t how we now define success as 40-year-old, and maybe won’t be how we define it as a 70-year-old.
The apostle Paul writing in the first century to Christians in the Greek city of Corinth used this winning image from the precursor to the Olympic games held in Corinth:
Don’t you know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. (1 Cor. 9:24-26)
Paul says that success in life is knowing the goal, then disciplining oneself to reach it. We’ve all known people who began life with great potential, then took their eye off the finish line and ended in moral or spiritual tragedy. Paul is also honest enough to say success is not guaranteed—even for him:
Therefore, I do not run like a man running aimlessly. No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” (1 Cor. 9:27)
As his life was nearing its end, Paul wrote a final letter to his young protégé Timothy and uses this same athletic metaphor to sum up his life:
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. (2 Tim. 4:7)
Kept the Faith?
What is Paul talking about when he equates success in life with “keeping the faith?”
Faith is one of those elastic words that anyone can stretch to fit his or her own ideas or agenda. Here is one of the Bible’s famous definitions of faith:
Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. (Hebrews 11:1)
It is exactly this “confidence” that many people are seeking today. We don’t want to live aimless lives. How will we know if we’re deeply successful? Are there things in life worth me inconveniencing myself? Even worth giving up my personal ambitions or preferences or what I think will make me happy? Worth my blood and sweat and tears?
The Greeks Paul was writing to were deeply immersed in this dilemma. About 500 years earlier—just about the time the Olympic games were first organized—Plato taught that this world is an imperfect copy of a real, perfect world beyond our senses.
Plato’s famous illustration imagined a fire in a cave, which casts shadows of various objects onto the walls of the cave. Our world, Plato said, is like living in this cave. We only can see the shadows on the walls, not the real world outside the cave. In the almost 2,500 years since, we humans have explored everything from new age crystals to mind-altering drugs to escape this shadowy world and find true reality.
Faith in a Person
Christians understand Paul’s “kept the faith” as one’s primary allegiance in life lodged in a person—Jesus Christ. The Bible speaks of Jesus as “Lord,” i.e. one’s ultimate authority in life.
Over the centuries, however, this simple faith statement that “Jesus is Lord” has not been enough for some. They went on to define faith more specifically as including allegiance to a set of doctrines, allegiance to a certain lifestyle or worldview, or even (as many white evangelicals now do) allegiance to a political party.
1. Faith in Jesus cannot be proved. One might reply: “prove to me that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and then I’ll believe.”
Just because no one can prove to you that God even exists, or that Jesus is God’s Son and was raised from the dead, doesn’t eliminate faith. On the contrary, it makes faith possible. If I have incontrovertible evidence, then there’s no need for faith. No one has faith that the earth is round: it’s incontrovertible! Faith lives only where there is freedom to choose.
The Bible tells us that one coming day Jesus will indeed reveal himself in glory instantly across the heavens, and every knee all across the planet will bow and declare him Lord. Then it will be too late for faith. On that day, faith will be replaced by sight, and the time for choosing will be past.
2. Faith in Jesus involves “things hoped for” and “things unseen.” Remember, faith is “evidence of things unseen.” There is a strong rational component to faith.
Did you know that the largest identifiable group of young people involved in cults come from conservative churches? If we don’t teach our kids to question us about their faith, then they won’t question anyone else either when they meet them on a college campus or on the Internet. God gave us intelligence as an ally to our faith, to insure that our precious faith is not deposited in worthless objects. Faith in “Jesus as Lord” for many is the end of an honest and significant intellectual journey.
3. Faith in Jesus is more than feelings. Unfortunately, some equate strong faith with always feeling emotionally up and bouncy. Yet the author of the book of Hebrews goes on to list a litany of faith heroes; many went through horrendous experiences of suffering. Most are not the happy stereotypes interviewed on Christian TV shows who say, “My life was in the pits but since I’ve got Jesus, everything is fantastic.”
If this is faith, I observe that many people drop out as soon as things don’t go their way, or if they stop feeling good about God or themselves, or even if they don’t feel “faithful” anymore. I don’t know if it amuses or saddens the Lord to watch us assume our feelings toward him must be just right, anymore than how we’re feeling when we turn the key determines whether our car will start.
4. Faith in Jesus is personal. The debilitating danger of religion is convincing us that the essence of faith is going through certain motions, attending certain worship services, or even saying the right words or thinking the right ideas.
While the Christian faith is indeed built on ideas and I’ve spent my working life teaching and defending these ideas, the essence of faith is not ideas, but a Person. Religion which moves anything into the center of life other than the Person of Jesus Christ ultimately becomes cancer to the living faith Paul is describing.
How Do You Define “Success?”
Some years ago I took an off-shore sailing class in Santa Barbara. A young woman in her 20’s became my sailing partner for two days. She gave me her card which was not a business card, but one she’d printed on her own with her name and then this sentence: “There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
With our instructor, she and I were to sail 20 miles over to the uninhabited Channel Islands off the coast, find a place to anchor and spend the night, then return the next day. During the 24 hours of the voyage, I saw that this definition of success indeed fit her. She didn’t like others telling her what to do, even the instructor!
Is this success—to spend your life your own way? One might argue this is the American Way—at least for those fortunate enough to have choices about how to spend their lives. If you have the money and skills and time to spend life in your own way—what could be better?
But something doesn’t ring true. If you do exactly what you want all your life, when you near the end, how will you know if you’ve been a success? You might answer: “Well, it’s obvious—I did exactly what I wanted to do.”
Yes, but that assumes that there’s no objective measure of success. There is nothing outside of ME, no bigger scheme in the universe that my life might fit into other than ME. Even in Plato’s cave, the point of the parable is to escape the cave and find reality, not remain in the shadows forever and self-define reality however you want while still confined in the cave.
Paul appeals to us:
“All your life you’ve been looking for the way out of the shadows; you can have confidence you’ll find that reality in Jesus Christ. All your life you’ve been looking for God to be personal and intimately connected to your life rather than aloof and distant; you can have the confidence that this access to God is exactly what Jesus Christ came to offer.”
In Jesus Christ, we can have confidence we’ve found the one Person who offers access to reality and access to God.
