God has been very good to me all my life.
I was raised by loving parents in a good Christian home. I attended a solid, Bible-teaching church and received a good education at a Christian school. I married a wonderful and beautiful—and incredibly patient—wife, and we have an awesome daughter.
I’ve been blessed to spend my life serving God by leading and teaching His people.
Even if my life ended today, I would have no complaints. God has given me far more than I deserve.
But while I am deeply thankful for all God has done, I have a growing passion for whatever years He gives me:
I want to finish strong.
The Goal of Finishing Strong
One passage God has used to refocus my life is 2 Timothy 4:6–8:
For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.
As Paul neared the end of his life, he looked forward to the reward that awaited him for faithfully serving Jesus.
Interestingly, heavenly rewards are not participation trophies. Paul could look back over his life and identify three things that characterized his faithfulness.
Those three things have increasingly shaped how I think about the rest of my own life.
Fight the Right Fight
Not every fight is worth fighting.
When Paul says he fought “the good fight,” he wasn’t simply saying that he did a good job fighting. Nor was he talking about some cause he personally decided was good.
He fought the good fight.
Paul didn’t get to pick his battle. His letters and the account of his ministry in Acts make it obvious what his fight was:
The gospel.
I have wasted a lot of life fighting a lot of good battles—politics, issues, church stuff, and things that seemed terribly important at the time.
Some of those things may have been worth caring about. But they were not the good fight.
I want to devote my remaining years to the fight that matters most: the gospel of Jesus Christ.
After all, only the gospel is the power of God for salvation.
Run Your Course
The word Paul uses for “race” pictures a course or path.
The point is not simply that Paul ran. He ran the course God had laid out for him.
That’s what I want to do.
I want to finish my course.
I want to run the race God has set before me—not the race someone else thinks I should run.
I want His voice to direct every turn and twist in the path. I want Him to tell me when to brake and when to accelerate. He calls the pit stops. He tells me when to stay on the track.
The course belongs to Him.
My responsibility is to run it faithfully.
As Hebrews 12:1 puts it, I want to “run with endurance the race that is set before us.”
Keep the Faith
I hear people say all the time, “You just gotta have faith!”
Okay. But faith in what? Or, more importantly, faith in whom?
Paul said he had kept the faith.
That meant he had guarded it against attack and decay. But it also meant that he had lived in obedience to it.
Paul didn’t try to change the truth to accommodate his culture or his circumstances.
There was no “your truth” and “my truth.”
There was the faith.
Jude described it as “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).
We live in an age of relativism, and truth has become one of its casualties. But God’s Word has not changed.
So I want to learn it more deeply.
I want to teach it more clearly.
And I want to live it more carefully.
I want God’s Word to transform me—and, through my teaching, to be used by God to transform others.
I pray that God will keep me from becoming like so many we hear about who, somewhere along the way, changed their message.
By His grace, I want to remain true to Him and to His Word.
May He enable me to keep the faith.
It’s Never Too Late—or Too Early
I don’t know where you are in life.
You may be farther down the road than I am. Or perhaps you haven’t made nearly as many trips around the sun as I have.
Either way, finishing strong isn’t something you begin when you get old.
Finishing strong begins today.
Start where you are.
Ask God for the grace to fight the right fight, run the course He has given you, and keep the faith.
Then, however many miles remain, keep going.
May His grace not be in vain in our lives.
Let’s finish strong.