God is holy, set apart, sanctified and He requires that we wholeheartedly seek after Him with nothing left to ourselves.  If we are going to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, we have to be wholeheartedly pursuing after Him in a holy, sanctified way that is set apart from the rest of the world so that it is obvious what we are pursuing and what we are doing.

In thinking about this pursuit after God, let us consider the word “devoted”, as we find it in Acts 2:42, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”  In this passage, being devoted is a pure, singular, diligent focus.  Let us contrast this focus with the absence of such focus in our culture.  Our minds are extremely distracted.  We do not have a “habit of attention”, where we turn the whole force of the mind to the subject at hand.  What we have is the “habit of laziness".  We must discipline our bodies and minds, making them slaves so that we can be presented before God.  Life should not be divided between sacred and secular.  Our hearts can and should be turned toward God no matter what we are doing. Everything offers an opportunity for continual dependence upon God.  We must learn to focus solely on God in all that we do.

We do not diligently force the whole mind to a subject at hand.  When we think about attention, it is in more of a passive sense rather than active sense.  We think about things that grab or keep our attention; not necessarily as a habit that we have to form or cultivate or develop, but something that is easily done, obtained with no difficulty.  As Christians, we must have a diligent, Spirit-filled focus on God that is an action, a habit, a work.  Tozer says it well in the opening chapter of The Pursuit of God saying, “Anyone who is committed to Christ must follow hard after him”.  Pursuing God is a work!  The Christian life is not a place of ease, which seems to be the idea, the lifestyle that pervades the American church.  Most Christians do not expect much from their faith.  Seldom is the Christian life seen or presented as (spiritual) warfare.  It often presents more as people on a luxurious vacation, not a warfare we are fighting or a race we are running.

At the heart of the word, “race”, is the Greek word “agon” from which we obtain “agony”.  In the New Testament, the Christian life is taught as an agonizing, grueling event that takes strength, endurance, perseverance and determination, habits that must be driven into it.  Nowhere is it taught that the Christian walk is a stroll down the greenway.  When we bump up against something that is difficult we tend to back up and form in our mind the idea that this cannot be God’s will.  If we are going to seek wholly after God, we must sober our minds to the biblically taught reality that the Christian life is a race, set before us and the pursuit of God is the prize, glory in which we get to partake, joy and shared love with the Father we get to have.

Seeking wholly after God must first be individually pursued then together corporately as a church.  This pursuit best presents itself in Hebrews 12:1-2, our text for today, where the writer encourages his recipients, Messianic (Christian) Jews, to stay the course, to lean into their troubles, despite the persecution raining down on them.  Their tendency was to quit, to rethink their theology, to distance themselves from the gospel.  As a church, we, like these Jewish Christians, must choose to stay the course, to stand firm in the truth of Scripture, as we follow wholly after God above everything else.  In our pursuit, as we move forward into the new year, may we be found by our Father to be good and faithful servants.

—-----------------

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,

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.

—-----------------

Pursuing wholly after God begins with a …

1. Holy Desire

a. Run the Race Set Before You

“Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us”.  A desire is a focus on something that is perceivably within reach, in this context a desire that is set apart towards God.  Because it is perceivably within reach, you have a desire to continue to wholeheartedly pursue it until it is accomplished.  Glory, Christ and God’s character that we can emulate are all within reach.   The race that is set before us is something we can see and because we can see it, we can set our focus on it.

If living the Christian life is the race, we must first ask ourselves, “are we qualified to run, to be in this race?”  In any race, the contestant has to qualify.  So it is with the Christian life.  Unless your salvation through faith alone in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is certain, unless you know Him, you are not qualified.  A.W. Tozer has identified a myriad of people who have a “spiritless faith”, effectively assenting to facts about God, facts about the gospel.  Again, in The Pursuit of God, Tozer says, “(my) fear is that most conversions are more mechanical and it results in a spiritless faith.”  As he looks around the church and takes account of what is going on, Tozer observes so many people being very content with so little faith and concludes that the only way you can be content with so little faith is to have no faith at all.  When God dwells within you, washes and regenerates you and converts you then that changes who you are and there is no way you can be content with such little faith!  His conclusion is that the church is filled with people who are not saved.

Consider again your commitment to evangelism, to sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ.  If you are truly saved, truly captivated with God, with a love relationship for Him then, you cannot be stopped from sharing your faith.  It is what defines the one truly saved.  Do you find yourself making excuses for not sharing your faith?  Do you find yourself doubting your ability to share your faith, to communicate the basic truths of what took place at your salvation to another person?  Do you find yourself without a burning desire within you to proclaim the truth? If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, the most obvious question you need to ask yourself is what it is you believed when you professed your faith in Christ?  Maybe you need to ask yourself whether you even have true faith. Do you know Him?  If your faith was removed from you, would people find you to be noticeably  different?  Would it change what you do and how you interact with people?  Our faith is a nonstop, continuous pursuit after Him.  It is a living, breathing organism that continues to grow.

If we are qualified to run, how well we perform begins to be affected by what we desire whenever we are running.  Tozer also says, “If there is a stiff or wooden quality to your faith or has developed in your faith, it stems from a lack of holy desire….  An acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people.  He waits to be wanted.”  This was God’s charge against the Ephesian church effectively telling them, “you have left Me and you do not want Me.”  Their failure to return to God, to love and wholeheartedly serve Him, would ultimately be the removal of their testimony to their community, to others regarding the gospel, not the loss of their salvation.  The same warning goes out to us, as well.

Can you truly say you have this acute desire for God, a longing after Him, panting after Him, sharing in the same increasingly intense desire, intense appetite for God, a longing to be with Him, to appear before Him that we find expressed by the writer in Psalm 42:1-2 and in Psalm 63:1?  Is He waiting to be wanted by you in this way?  Following after Christ, our mediator, He will walk us into the holy of holies, becoming one with Him, granting us permanent access to the presence of God.  As we follow Christ, our desire for God increases.

But, also, increasing our holy desire are…

​​​​​​​b. Our Witnesses!

“...since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,....” We have security in our salvation, assurance we have things hoped for, conviction of things not seen and we also have this encouragement of having a cloud of witnesses coming alongside so.  As we align ourselves in this race, as we are running towards this goal that is within reach, we have these spectators, all the Old and New Testament saints we find in Scripture, cheering us on.  In reading about their lives, we need to see and observe the reality of what was going on in their lives and expect, not be surprised when, the same things occur in ours.  Also, we need to see, in Scripture, how they dealt with the hardships, trials, sufferings and sins in their lives and apply in similar fashion to our own.  In working through these things, the habit of endurance needs to form so that we can press on towards the upwards call of Christ.

The Scriptures before us are witnesses of Christ.  We are witnesses of Christ.  These saints that have gone before us are witnesses of Christ, they blazed the trail for us and their lives are an encouragement; but, let us not focus on emulating their character, but rather on the God they desire, to follow wholly after Him, the longing to be with Him.  Their character is an overflow of their desire for God.  As Paul said, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1), we are to seek after the heart motives of these witnesses for Christ. Ponder the apostle John’s words found in 1 John 1:1-3, where he describes his personal witness of and relationship with Christ and his overwhelming desire to continue that relationship and to follow after Him.

Just as Jesus was before them, He is before us, He is…

​​​​​​​c. Our Example

“...let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith….”  Christ comes alongside us and tells us that He walked our walk, that He endured the same temptations that confront us and the Scriptures tell us how He did it; therefore, we must read them, pray to Him and know that He, and the Holy Spirit, intercede for us.  Maintain a singular, diligent focus on Christ who is ever before us, above the angels, always available to be our Mentor.  He is both the founder of our faith, having walked the trail before us, and the perfecter of our faith in that He embodied what perfect faith is.

Christ Jesus is the focus of this church. Are we ready to move forward into the new year with that focus?  As individuals, we must identify what distracts us from this singular focus so that we can individually run the race and that this body can run it together.  Remember, as individuals stumble in their focus, in their faith, the body is affected, the body stumbles, too.

In addition to having a holy desire to wholly pursue after God, we must also have a…

II. Holy Approach

​​​​​​​a. Lay aside unnecessary weight

“...let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely,....”  Keep in mind that we have not yet started the race, we are still getting ready.  In this part of our text, we are reminded there are two things that we need to focus on before we begin to run.  The first, unnecessary weight, has to do with our activity.  We have to be prepared when we show up to the race. We cannot have noticeable sins, wrong behaviors and habits that we know exist.  For the recipients of Hebrews, it was their legalism, the carrying of their laws.  For us, we have to identify where sins such as lust, sensuality, hatred, pride, strife, outbursts of anger, jealousy, covetousness, envy are obviously sloppy in our lives and cut them out.  They must be shed away from us!  In similar fashion, we need to identify poor behaviors and habits and address them.  The reading and studying of God's word being a primary habit to ensure is in operation.

Ask God to reveal what it is that needs to be corrected in your daily walk with Him all the while remembering that we have to be actively involved in this shedding, not passively asking God to remove them without our participation.  Things that God’s Spirit makes known to us in our hearts and minds that are wrong must cease through the exercise of self-discipline, knowing God will come along beside us.

Second, we must get rid of the obvious so that we can then hone in on our performance, sins we do not even realize are present, the sins that are before us.  Therefore, we must…

​​​​​​​b. Lay aside every sin

We need to have a sober understanding of the reality that we have depraved hearts. Our sins affect the way we think about sin in our lives.  When we come to faith, we are not completely delivered from indwelling sin.  Let us consider the covenant God made with Abraham, a covenant that included a great land, a great nation, great blessings and promised a son that through him a great nation would come.  In the promised blessing of son, Abraham took great delight but turned that blessing into an idol.  Seeing this idolatry in Abraham, God asked him to offer his son as a sacrifice, not that Isaac’s life was ever in jeopardy.  God needed to remove Isaac as an idol from the pedestal of Abraham’s heart so that God would reign there without challenge!  Sometimes, there are things in our lives that affect our performance, such that God will intervene to remove them.

To be proactive in the removal of idols from our lives that affect our performance, to reduce the times when God has to intervene, we ready ourselves by making no provision of the flesh (Romans 13:14), by identifying desires where you end up giving into and cease allowing them to linger, and we have to grieve the sin in our lives (Ezekiel 9:4).  The true believer grieves over his sin.  A.W. Pink says, “It is not the absence of sin but the grieving over it which distinguishes the child of God from empty professors.”

Consider: do you see your sin(s) as a grievous offense against God?  Do you understand the reality of what God did for the sin that you are committing?  God had an eternal plan before the beginning of time, He then stepped out of Heaven and came to earth, subjected Himself to every possible mistreatment and abuse, then sacrificed His life so that the sin (you are committing) can be forgiven.  Instead of grieving over that sin, we typically offer excuses for it, we overlook it, we minimize it and sometimes we do not even call it sin.  How can we expect to be called a good and faithful servant when we do not see our sins for what they really are?

Idols in our lives typically have a deep taproot that has to be dug out.  If we want to run a good race, we have to spend a concentrated amount of time thinking about what actually encumbers us: both obvious things and the reality of our own hearts.  We need to grieve it and give no provision for it.

Finally, following wholly after God, in this race, we must have a…

III. Holy Attitude

​​​​​​​a. God gives us realistic expectations.

At the very heart of expectations is the fact that they are beliefs.  They come to us through a thought process of examining the evidence before us; however, this comes with a problem in that we, with our flawed hearts, often misread the evidence that is before us.  Because we have flawed hearts, because we have personal biases, our expectations become things that are based on wrong assumptions, on things that are unrealistic.

Many times, our fears, worries, anxieties, and depression are derived from either unrealistic or unmet expectations placed on ourselves because we did not correctly examine the evidence presented to us.  The cure? Communication, forgiveness and biblical love.  How do we know?  It is exactly what God did.  He laid out very clear, realistic expectations.  In Hebrews 12:1, we see, “...let us run with endurance…”  He did not hide the fact that the Christian life is a long run that is grueling, agonizing, trying, difficult and filled with suffering (Philippians 2, Romans 8:36).

We should not be surprised at what we will encounter!  Faith is not a vacation, but rather a race!  We are runners in a long, hard race. We have this false idea that we receive Christ and then we can rest; so, we are easily frustrated with God and we want to hold Him accountable for everything that happens in our lives, we want Him to meet our expectations.  Yet, He has very clearly given us (His) realistic expectations, hiding nothing from us.

​​​​​​​b. We have to remember the prize.

“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 12:2).  Because Christ saw the manifestation of the character of God in His flesh, because He saw Himself resisting temptation, He looked forward to sitting down at the right hand of the throne of the Father and chose to walk day after day, in mistreatment and abuse, towards the cross and sacrifice never turning aside for the joy that was set before Him.  He was solely focused on the Lord and the glory of returning to His seat at the right hand of God, where He was before He came to earth.

Our joy is found in Him, in our obedience to Him, in Him manifesting in our lives the character of God.  What a miracle to know that we can love an inkling of how Christ loves us!  This is the joy set before us, our hope of glory in Christ. We should long to be united with Him, to worship Him, to say to Him, “my Lord and my God”.

In closing, let us consider one more quote from Tozer: “We never need to be downcast in this life, because Jesus is the Joy of Heaven and it is His joy to enter into sorrowful hearts.” Christ is our joy and He is our inheritance.  As a church, we can emulate Christ.  We can correctly and rightly represent Him in Clayton, North Carolina.  This is the testimony we should have.  We should “glow”!  We should be a beacon of light to this community.

This prize is set before us: the very inheritance of Christ.  Can we enter 2024 as a body together pursuing wholly after God?  Can we encourage one another, pray for one another and can we individually walk in this way?  To do this, we have to wholly pursue Him.  In order to do that we have to have a holy focus, that being Jesus and this great cloud of witnesses testifying about Him.  We have to have a holy approach, which means we have to diligently work on the sin that we see and the sin we know exists within our hearts and we have to have a holy attitude, with clear expectations knowing it will be long and hard and always remembering the prize of Christ Jesus that is set before us.

Teddy Roosevelt said, “with great victory comes great sacrifice”.  In these verses in Hebrews, God tells us to run a great race takes great endurance.

Are you ready to join the leadership of this church and run?

—-----------------

Selah

• If your faith was removed from you, would people find you to be noticeably different?  Would it change what you do and how you interact with people?

• Do you have an acute, holy desire for God or is He waiting for you to be wanted?

• When you look at and consider the sin in your life, do you minimize or make excuses for it, or do you grieve in your heart, understanding its offense to a God who has done everything for, including the giving of His life, so that you can be forgiven?

• Are you ready to follow wholly after God, to run with endurance the long, hard race to Christ, who is our prize?