Text: Hebrews 12:1–2
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
Follow the White Tape
He is risen!
He is risen, indeed!
This morning, God in his providence provided us with the perfect text for Resurrection Sunday, and we didn’t even have to do anything. If you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn to the Hebrews 12, and we will be taking up the first two verses together.
I’d like to frame our time in these two verses with a story from an event in WWII that you probably already know I am very interested in, the Normandy Beach invasion, or D-Day. This was arguably one of the more important turning points in the war for the Allies—as they went on offense, aiming to retake France, and ultimately Europe, from he Axis forces.
You probably know the story: The Allies planned for two years for the operation, code-named Overlord, which was a massive amphibious assault of the French coast, straight into the teeth of entrenched German positions, complete with buried mines, razor wire, vehicle barriers, and fortified machine gun and artillery positions.
Many, many men died as waves of soldiers jumped out of their landing boats, and hurled themselves into machine gun fire. More were grievously wounded and killed by those landmines as they won the beach and attempted to take the hill overlooking it.
The heaviest casualties obviously came from those first waves of brave men, many of whom discovered the hidden mines by stepping on them and dying. As they progressed in the operation, at great cost, they began to clear safe paths through the minefields and obstacles, which engineers marked with white tape that basically signaled “Follow through here.”
And so paths were laid for those who came behind at the cost of blood and suffering and young lives, ultimately resulting in the beach being taken, and the war turning.
This morning, Hebrews 12:1–2 is pointing us at the white tape. It’s preaching to us: “Here is the path you are to follow. One who bled and suffered and poured out his life has walked this path before you. Others have already followed after him, and they are watching. Run this way, and run with endurance. Don’t fall back. Don’t step off to the left or to the right. Run!”
And so we open the Scriptures this morning that God might spur us further up and further in to the glorious, indestructible joy of his Son, who ran his race to the finish line, who endured shame and wrath and death to bring us God’s approval, love, and grace.
We learn that we were not made to sit, to coast, to wander through a life with no meaning—but that the God who made us has laid before us a race to run, and run with endurance to the end.
But we learn as well that we are emphatically not trailblazers or explorers, but rather pilgrims following after a great host who has gone before us, who were themselves following after the great Trailblazer, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Look with me, if you would, at Hebrews 12:1–2; this is the Word of the Living God:
“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.”
-Hebrews 12:1–2
There are three parts to this text—a what, a why, and a how.
The what is an imperative, or a command: Run.
The why is the witnesses: Run because you are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, who have gone before us in this same race.
The how is help in obeying the what. How can I run this race? And we’ll find four very practical helps here.
And what we find is that all three of these things—the what, the why, and the how—all orbit around the trailblazing glory of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, and enthronement. Let’s take each of them up in turn.
What?
The center of these two verses is the imperative at the end of verse one, “…let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.”
I know it doesn’t seem like there’s much there, but this is one of those statements in Scripture that you can filter your whole life through. It’s the kind of statement that separates whole systems of view the world—of what people are and what success looks like and if there even is such thing as success and failure.
From this one imperative, we learn that our lives aren’t a random meandering through a meaningless series of events. No, there is a race that was set before us by someone. Who? God. Your life, then, has a defined goal, end, finish line. It has defined boundaries. Races are not run in indeterminate directions: They are run to somewhere and along a predetermined route.
In a race, you are not allowed to go wherever you want by whatever route you want. That would be like what kids used to do in my high school gym class during the mile run, where they’d cut across the course at the bottom of a hill where they thought the coach couldn’t see them in order to cut off half of the distance.
No, there are boundaries in a race; if life is a race, there are boundaries to our lives. In other words, we are not our own. We are not self-defining creatures. We are, rather, dependent creature, created things.
The Lord has defined the boundaries of our lives, determined the times and places we live, spoken us into his story at the exact place he desired. He has stretched out the span of our lives, from the moment of our conception to the moment of our last breath. Listen to David in Psalm 139:
For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.-Psalm 139:13–16
We are on a track, and God is the one who sketched out that track. So what does success look like in this race we find ourselves? Running strong to the end in faith.
Remember the great need of the Hebrew Christians receive this letter and us: Persevering faith. That’s what they needed; that’s what we need. Faith to reject our own self-authored stories and live faithfully in God’s story. In this metaphor, the left step and right step of the race is faith. Faith is movement towards the finish line.
That’s the what of this text: Run. Don’t meander. Don’t wander. Don’t shrink back. Run to the end of your God-appointed race in faith. Why?
Why?
The why to this what is right there 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, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us…”
-Hebrews 12:1
This is a glorious truth, and one that we probably don’t consider enough: You and I live our life, run our race, with an audience. Who? The saints who have gone before us. They surround us and they testify to us.
In Hebrews 11, the word “witness” is used five times, and it doesn’t just mean watching, but an active “amening.” The saints who have gone before us are with the Lord—to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord—and they are witnessing us from that location. But they are also witnessing to us in their witnessing of us. How? By their lives of faith. By the races they have run before us.
They are like those soldiers who cleared the way and left the white tape to follow on Normandy beach. They’re witnessing to us as they witness us running, saying, “God supplied the faith for me to run my race; he will supply it for you. Don’t stop!”
Run your race by faith, because they were sustained in their race by faith, and the are watching. So when you stumble, when you are weak, when you falter, when you sin, when you feel like the finish line is far away—look to the great cloud of witnesses and imitate their faith by faith.
Look to father Abraham, trying to take the fulfillment of God’s promises into his own hand, taking Hagar to be his mistress. And look at God’s continued faithfulness to him in spite of this failure. Look to God giving him Isaac, the son of the promise, in spite of his sin.
We could point to a thousand examples of this: They ran in faith, through failure, through weakness, through suffering, through want. They ran, and God supplied the endurance. They crossed the finish line; we can make it in that same faith.
How?
How? The text gives us at least four helps, four practical “hows,” in running our race:
1. Learn from the witnesses.
The first is what we’ve been doing together for the last month in Hebrews 11: Learn from those who have gone before.
We ought to be students of the Word of God, because we will find in it that the same weakness runs in the veins of every son of Adam and daughter of Eve, and yet God’s faithfulness and saving grace proves stronger than all of our weakness.
If we look to their races and look to the way in which they made it to their finish lines, we will find ours within reach by the same faith that lived in them.
2. Lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely.
This race is a race of repentance, not of superhuman perfection.
There is this insidious lie that our flesh loves to use to keep us shackled to sin’s mastery, the lie that we are at sin’s mercy. But listen, Refuge: We are Christians, and so we are not at sin’s mercy, we are at God’s mercy.
Sin is not your master. You are not a slave of sin. Christ is your master. You are a bondservant of Christ.
And so we don’t live like trembling pagans, trying to manipulate the gods with our rituals and incantations and offerings into giving us good and not evil, but like joyful sons of God, running to his throne, running headlong into the holy places by the grace of God, for mercy and help in our time of need.
We live like we have a High Priest in the holy places, one who has shed his blood and thrown down death, an immortal Advocate.
So this race is a race is of faith—faith that believes God’s forgiveness. And so this race is a race of repentance. When we confess our sin, when we say to God, “God, you saw that thought, that desire, that action. Forgive me. Cleanse me. Accept me. Help me. Grant me renewal and strength to overcome,” we know by faith that we are not losing ground because of our confession of sin, but rather gaining.
We know that as we admit our sin, we are not putting rocks in our pockets, but taking them out.
We lay aside our sin in confession and repentance, and we lay aside every weight. We don’t ask, “Can I get away with this? How close to this line can I get?” We ask, rather, “Is this practice in my life—this decision, this relationship, this habit—helping me run with endurance, or is it hindering me?”
We live as if we are aiming for something, for the finish line of enduring faith. Number three…
3. Aim for endurance.
He says to run this race with endurance.
One of my favorite short prayers in the Scriptures is Paul’s prayer for the Colossians, that they might be strengthened with all power, according to God’s glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy.
What that prayer tells me is that endurance and patience are a part of what it looks like for God to pour out his strength in us. This life is a long game, in other words. It is a race measured in decades, not minutes, and it is a race where it doesn’t matter how spectacularly you started, but rather: Did you finish?
So we remember in this race that the Lord Jesus knows our frame, that we are dust. He knows that we are weak things. He knows that. He isn’t, therefore, looking for spectacular displays of religious fireworks so much as—dare I say?—boringly faithful lives of faith.
Plan your life to be a patient one. Be methodical. Maybe you won’t read the whole Bible this month. But can you chew on a chapter today? Maybe you won’t be perfected this week. But can you repent of impatience to your kids today? Your gossip online? Your greedy refusal to give?
See, we love to do highly visible, spectacular things, because we are proud Pharisees praying loudly from our own little street corners. We want to be seen and known and perform and do the kinds of feats of strength that will win us renown.
Yes, cultivate godly ambitions. Yes, aim for holiness. Yes, aim for radical fruitfulness. But remember that God made a world where fruit comes over months, not minutes. Embrace plodding faith. Finally, number four:
4. Look to the One we all follow.
Yes, we look to the great cloud of witnesses, but we don’t stop there. We look past them to the one who went before all others: The Lord Jesus Christ. Verse 2,
“…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.”
-Hebrews 12:1–2
There is One whom we all follow—Adam to Abraham to Rahab to David to Daniel to Peter to Paul to John to Chyrsostom to Ambrose to Augustine to Knox to Calvin to Luther to Edwards to Brainerd to Bavinck to Van Til to you and to me.
Every life of faith is a life in imitation of, following after, and in the strength of the One who went before: We are all following him.
He is the founder and perfecter of our faith.
We have been crucified because he was crucified.
We are counted righteous because he is righteous.
We are alive because he rose again.
We are hidden in the holy places of heaven because he is seated there on his throne.
Look to Jesus in your race of faith, because Jesus is the founder and perfecter of our faith. What does that mean? Well, do you have faith? He is the founder of that faith. As Paul exults in Ephesians chapter two, it is by grace we have been saved, through faith, and this not of ourselves, lest any should boast.
And he is the perfecter of faith. He is the one who began it, Paul tells us in Philippians, and so he will bring it to perfection, that is, to completion, on the day of his coming in glory. He is working in us by faith to will and to work for his good pleasure.
As we look to Jesus, he shows us that Immanuel Kant was wrong—that we don’t run this race of faith in some kind of disinterested and plastic altruism. No, we run this race of faith—even the suffering and dying of this race—for joy.
Why did Christ endure the cross? Why did he come and suffer and bleed and die and bear the spit and curses of his creatures and drink down divine wrath? Why did he breath his last on Golgotha? For joy.
He endured the pain of death on Friday for the joy of resurrection glory on Sunday. He endured the whip and the nails and the thorns for the sons and daughters and eternal glory of his eternally expanding Kingdom.
As it was for our Lord, the pain of this race is preparing for us an unimaginable weight of glory, a cascading ocean of indestructible joy.
And yes, we may know this now by faith alone—not by sight. But because Jesus is ruling, seated at the right hand of the throne of God, we know that faith does not mean uncertainty. It does not mean potentiality.
No, we know by faith that this joy is planted in the soil and will spring up to bloom and cover the earth. We are not running this race in order to make our future hope and inheritance a more-likely possibility, but because it is a certainty in light of his present heavenly reign.
So, Refuge: Run. Repent of sin, lay aside the entangling weights of distraction and half-heartedness. Remember the great cloud of watching witness who have gone before, and follow the white tape to glory that was laid down by our Lord at the cost of his own body and blood.