As Christians, our motivation to run should be Jesus; the One we fix our eyes upon. We look to Jesus as more than a role model, but nothing less than that. We look to Him as Savior! He is the author and perfecter of our faith. Read that again, I’ll wait. Did you catch that?! He authored our faith, he is the very creator of our faith.

The faith that we even have to begin this race does not come from us! It doesn’t! It is not some inner faith in our potential that sprung up from our core being. It came from Christ! He is the one who enabled us by His power to believe that He is God, He is our Lord, He is our Savior. He helped us to begin this Christian race towards Him (the person we belong to) and His Kingdom (the place we belong to). But that’s not all.

We are told in the same breath that the author is also the perfecter. We are not left to our own devices to start with His help and figure it out in our strength. No! He is the one who sustains the faith through every trial and tragedy, through the Bible memorization and beautiful moments, through communion and confession, through prayer and perseverance, and He will bring it to completion the very moment we die or He returns. How does He do this? Through the Holy Spirit that the Father lavishly supplies us with!

As we run, we do not look helter skelter, we do not even look at the cloud of witnesses, we are each and collectively called to look to Jesus. He too ran a race, with zero sin but infinite weight: the weight of his then present suffering, the weight of his then future suffering, the weight of eventually bearing our sins in himself! Yet, regardless of all this, he was still perfect and didn’t falter in the race.

And how was He able to run so well? He had his eyes set on the joy before Him. This gives us a tip that we cannot live this Christian life most fruitfully without knowing clearly where we are going and what our end result is. We can’t just throw our hands up and hope for the best. Because of the joy set before Him (GLORY and the fruit of His work), He was able to persevere, endure the trials, press on in the midst of suffering, knowing that the end is good.

We have the same joy set before us that He has, don’t you remember? 2 Timothy 2:12 says that if we endure, we will also reign with Him. We will be with God in perfect freedom and holiness and righteous and everlasting, delicious joy in a perfect kingdom with His perfected people and creation! Enduring the cross of daily crucifixion and all forms of suffering in this world is not by any means easy, and that is why we would need help.

The way we can thrive in this endurance and faith; this keeping our eyes on Jesus that despises the shame of our suffering, is through intimate relationship and fellowship with God and His people. What is so beautiful is that this cloud of witnesses includes faithful believers from all the ages and can even extend to our present time! We will collapse if we try to do it alone because we are made for each other.

So, as we try to heed this instruction from Hebrews, I encourage you to connect deeply in a local church as well as find a few believers that you can be transparent and honest with about your life. Seek help from them. Seek help through counseling. Seek help in the safety of a community. This will sustain you through the hard and continuous sin-and-weight stripping. Join together with faithful believers to run persistently as you remove unnecessary things hindering your fellowship with God. Have faith in Jesus. Endure the cross and despise its shame as you love God and people as light and free as you can, in God’s strength and power until the day where faith will turn to sight. That day, we will behold the King in His beauty and reign with him by His side.

I promise, you will see that the race—and more importantly, Jesus—was completely worth it.