The Christian Life Is A Race

You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion is not from him who calls you (Galatians 5:7-8).

The Christian life is a race. There’s a beginning and an end. There’s also a path on which to run, and a prize to obtain.

The beginning of the Christian race is, of course, conversion. The end or finish line is the final judgment. And the prize? Well, it’s nothing less than eternal life itself, what the Bible refers to as “the crown of life,” held out for those who endure all the way to the end (James 1:12).

What is the path on which we run? That’s the gospel. What God has done in Christ Jesus to free sinners from their bondage to sin—this is the track. The Christian life, then, is a gospel race. Or as John Bunyan says in his classic allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, it is the “race of saints in this our Gospel-day.”

Yet what does it mean to run this race? Here’s where Paul’s answer may come as a surprise: believers run the race by obeying the truth of the gospel (5:7). The track is gospel truth, and obedience to it is how we run.

Adapted from Galatians: Gospel-Rooted Living by Todd Wilson