Faith in the Fastlane - Crossing the Finish Line: Enduring Faith in an 'Always On' Culture

Building strong faith in today's distraction-filled world requires a marathon mindset rather than a sprinter's approach. Like marathon runners who train systematically, believers must develop consistent spiritual habits, proper pacing, and mental focus for the long journey ahead. The key challenges include navigating social media distractions and maintaining eternal perspective amidst temporary trends. Through intentional spiritual training, daily devotion, and focused dedication to what truly matters, we can build the endurance needed for a lasting faith journey.

Transcript

I want to read a scripture to you this morning. It comes from the book of Hebrews. If you have your Bible, it's in the New Testament towards the end. This is Hebrews chapter 12, verses 1 and 2. Actually 1, 2 and 3.

Give you a second just to get there again, I want to remind you it's a wonderful thing to bring your Bibles if you can. But here's what scripture says for us today. Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. For the joy set before him, he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and he sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

So here in the book of Hebrews, the author tells us that the only way to endure our faith is to focus on the outcome we want. And I think the outcome that we all want is to be with Jesus. If we're distracted by other things, there's always going to be potential to grow weary and to lose heart. Always. Do you know how runners train?

Have any of you guys ever trained for like a marathon? What? Two of you have trained for a marathon? Any of you guys, like, in high school when life was better and simpler and you didn't weigh as much, were you sprinters? Anybody in here a sprinter?

Adrian was a sprinter. Okay. Tim was a sprinter. I did a little bit of dill. Was a sprinter.

That is not a sprinter, Bill. So. So there are different ways to approach training, right? So some of you know that I was a runner in high school, and I was a bit of a unique runner because I ran track for distance, because I did the. Some of you won't understand these numbers.

1600 meters, right? Nobody knows what that is. 800 meters, 3200 meter relay.

Okay, so that's like a mile, half mile, two mile relay. Okay. All right. Anyway. But I also ran cross country, where every time we had a meet, we would run a 5k 5km, which is 3.2 miles.

So not only did I run distance in high school, but I was also a pole vaulter. And so pole vaulting means that you make very short sprints to plant a pole in a very tiny metal triangular shape to go as high and as far into a mat as you can. Okay? So I did Training for both of those things. But there's a huge difference in the way you train for each one of those.

Right. So a sprinter, when you're learning how to sprint, you're building sprinting muscles by doing squats. You do box jumps, high jumps, things like that, hill climb, sprints, core and upper body strength. You need to be able to pump your arms well. Then you have to make sure you're training on the track that you're going to participate on.

Right. You know that tracks don't shift, there's no bumps. Well, there shouldn't be if you're running on a good track and they're flat. Like, you've got to know the terrain that you're on. You have to get to know the surface.

You have to wear the right shoes. And the right shoes for a sprinter are not going to be the same shoes for a distance runner. The shoes for a sprinter have spikes in them. Right. You want to get as much traction as possible.

You have to focus on your reaction time and your form. You have to build up that stamina. You have to do lots of short races. It's never a one and done situation. The more races you do, the better you're going to get at it.

Then you have to train with weight. Sometimes when you're running, right. Have you ever seen those guys who, like, when we were in track, we had some really old school technology where people would wear a vest with rubber bands that was attached to another guy with a vest and they would run together and if there was ever any pull, it would like. I don't know how that helps people run better, but it was a thing. Sometimes you have weight sleds, sometimes you have weighted vests or the arm weights or ankle weights.

But all of those things build up your muscles so that you can sprint as fast as you can. You've got to eat clean, you've got to eat a lot of protein. You got to build those muscles. Distance runners are very, very different. Right.

You have to wear the right shoes, light, supportive. If you're running for a long time, you don't want to wear shoes that are going to cut holes in your feet or your ankles. And then you got to hit the hills. You can't run on a flat surface and think you're going to run a marathon. Well, because you will run a course that's ups and downs and the streets are going to be awkward.

If you just ran along a track, you're not going to be prepared for what's coming. Then you also have to Gradually increase the distance that you run. Right? If any of us went out today and said, you know what? I'm going to run 26.2 miles, we'd all drop dead.

I mean, there's just no doubt about it, all of us toast. We have to work up to it. You have to practice your pacing, you have to practice your breathing. And unlike a sprint, your breathing has to adjust as your strides adjust. Depending on whether you go up a hill, down a hill, it changes how you breathe.

You have to fuel your runs with the right food. Difference is you still have to have a high protein diet, but you also have to eat tons of carbohydrates because your body has to fuel itself for a significantly longer time. You have to practice a routine daily. And then I think one of the most important parts of running long distance is you've got to get your head right, because in a marathon, you have hours to think. You have to train your brain to focus on what's important rather than on how much your body is hurting.

And then one of the most important things about a marathon runner is you have to respect rest. The rest day, the recuperation day, is one of the most important things. After dozens of miles of training, your body needs to heal.

I would tell you that. I think our world trains us to be sprinters rather than marathon runners. We jump from one distraction to another. We tend from one crisis to another. But God wants us to train with endurance.

Scripture tells us this just now. No matter how busy and hectic we get, we should be ready with our bodies. We should train ourselves, our minds, our hearts, and most importantly, our spirits to go the distance so we don't grow weary and lose heart.

I think oftentimes in America, we go from spiritual high to spiritual high to spiritual high. I think when I was a kid, that was what I loved most, was going to events like camps or retreats or revivals where I felt closer to God. And it always felt like in between times, my faith didn't really make a difference to me. We've been trained in America to go from spiritual high to spiritual high. And we're not training for the moments that we feel like God has left us.

We have to be prepared to travel through the low valleys, too. As believers in Jesus, we have to train ourselves to run the race that he has prepared for us in advance so that we don't become entangled by the busyness of our world. We don't get wrapped up in our spiritual lives, don't fail because of how busy we get in a world that never powers down the long term. Victory is a soul at rest in our Savior. So there are two books in the New Testament labeled Timothy First Timothy and Good Job.

Good Job. So Timothy was a devoted follower of Jesus from the ancient city of Lystra, which is located in what is today known as Turkey. Timothy served not just as one of the Apostle Paul's companions as he went on his mission, but throughout his life in ministry, he acted as Paul's scribe. And a lot of people think that Timothy helped Paul write some of the scriptures that we have in the books in the New Testament. So in these two letters that were written by the Apostle Paul to Timothy to encourage him to lift him up, we get to see that Paul encourages Timothy to maintain his faith even when life gets hard.

They serve as this kind of pastoral care letter to Timothy. And these letters from the first century could easily be written to any one of us today. So we're going to open up this morning again in Second Timothy, chapter 4, verses 1 through 8. Second Timothy 4, 1, 8. Here's what it says.

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in the view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge. Preach the word, be prepared in season and out of season. Correct, rebuke and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry. For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race.

I have kept my faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness which the Lord the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing. So it's clear that Paul was writing this letter towards the end of his life. He was a prisoner in Rome and would eventually be killed for his faith and his testimony of Jesus. He was preaching a heresy that nobody wanted to hear, that Jesus was the son of God, that Jesus would save us.

And in this particular scripture, Paul does a couple of things. First, he encourages Timothy to remain faithful. He says life is going to get hard. He's literally writing for prison. Hey, I can remain faithful.

You too need to remain faithful. And then he begins to point to the fact that people are going to surround themselves with voices of distraction because they sound good and they promote something easy. Does that sound like a letter that could be written to us today? Just confessing Jesus, that's all you need to do. Nope, there's a lot more to it than that.

That's a part of something bigger. Paul reminds Timothy that no matter what tries to distract him from his calling, God wants him to fulfill his calling by giving God his full attention. Paul also points out that opposition, sorry, opposition will come, but we have to keep our heads about us in all situations. He calls Timothy to continue to tell the world of the life changing gospel of Jesus in even when things get tough. And that's hard to do, right?

It's easy to tell people how good God is when everything's going our way, but it becomes a lot more difficult when we're going through the mess of life, right?

Even when life gets tough. Paul reminds Timothy to continue to tell the world about Jesus. Be an evangelist, he says, even when it hurts, even when your life is messy, discharge your duties as a preacher of the gospel, even when you feel like you don't have time. These are hard words for Timothy to hear, but I think even harder for us today when we have filled our lives so full of things that don't really make sense, things that aren't really that important. But the most important thing that Paul does here is that he tells Timothy that running the race of faith is worth the reward.

Paul speaks in the terms of a crown of righteousness that will be his reward for his faithfulness. And not only his, but all those who are hoping to see Jesus will have this crown of righteousness. If we run this race we've been called to with determination and endurance of faith, we too can know that this crown awaits us. And Paul recognizes that that crown is coming for him sooner than it is for other people. Paul was one of the first martyrs from our church.

Not for our church or not the first, but one of them. As a matter of fact, Paul comes to know Jesus if you remember, as a result of being there at the murder of Stephen, who was our first martyr.

In this letter to his friend and his coworker for Christ, he tells Timothy that even as his life is coming to an end, he has no regrets about following Jesus and sacrificing the distractions of life for an eternity with God. So I want you guys to think about social media today. So our media intake habits may have started as simple as just hopping on Facebook back when it first came out. Let's just see what people are up to, right? Gonna check out the pictures of our friends grandparents and our grandparents grandkids and you know, our friends dogs and we're gonna you know, watch videos of cats which I don't understand but it doesn't take long for us to start from that small place of just I'll just get on and browse for a minute to wasting hours of our lives just doom scrolling, right?

Video after video, post after post like that. I agree with that mad face. I don't like that the same can happen in our spiritual lives. Many of us start really strong in our faith. Some of us grew up in the church like we went to Sunday school.

We participated in all the events of our church. We found a good spiritual place in our youth group and then we would go to worship every Sunday morning. But eventually we begin to get distracted seeking things like trends and friends and likes and approvals instead of pressing into what Christ has for us. Paul calls Timothy to be different from everybody else and I'm calling us to do the same today. We have got to be different.

We've got to lay our distractions down so we can claim the life that God has for us. And it's not easy, right? I don't know if you guys have been continuing on with the. The checklist that we did the first week. Anybody done that every morning since then?

I've done it every morning. Even went on a retreat every morning. First thing I did when I got up was turn off my alarm and then start that process of praying to God and then reading through the scripture of the day that I found on BibleGateway.com and. And then I would be thankful for at least three things. And my list always is more than three things.

It's a simple way to begin to refocus and I've been thankful for it and I'm going to continue to do it and I hope that you guys will too. The Bible tells us continually reminds us that a steadfast heart stands out in a scrolling sea of distractions. And the book of James confirms it. So James, chapter one, verses two through four says this Jesus, James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ to the 12 tribes scattered among nations. Greetings.

Hello everyone. Hi. He says, consider it pure joy. My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance Let that perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete. Not lacking anything, man.

That's great news. Hallelujah. Let per. Perseverance finish its work. Go through the crap, friends, is what he's saying.

Let perseverance finish its work. That sounds awful to me. No, I am not interested. Thank you, James. You can have that one.

But the fact is that true faith is not about avoiding trials. It's about being shaped in the trials. Perseverance is the continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, opposition. It's the ability to persist in the face of challenges, setbacks, and obstacles. And it requires a strong will, resilience, and the ability to maintain focus and motivation.

And it's really hard to maintain focus and motivation when the whole world wants our focus and motivation.

But these are words of hope for us. James is telling us persevere because it does something on the back end. When we learn how to persevere in the face of trials and distractions, we will become mature, complete, lacking nothing. I want that. Do you want that?

Okay. I'm the only one who wants that. Good. So when we learn how to persevere in the face of trials and distractions, we will have the things that God has equipped us with. James is promising us something better than followers or fame or the little hearts that we get on Facebook.

He's promising us God's provision. God's going to provide for us, all that we need. We will lack nothing. But we have to persevere.

We have to build endurance for our lives, much like a marathon runner that we spoke of earlier. So why don't you go back in time with me? Okay? So just. We're not.

We're not in 2025 anymore. I want you to think of some of the sweet, sweet, cool viral events that happened that stole our attention over the last few years. I'm going to bring some to your attention, and they might spark some reminders for you. You ready? Anybody remember double rainbow.

Oh. All the way across the sky. No. What does it mean? Yes.

Maybe some of you know Grumpy Cat. Everybody remember Gangnam Style. Very demure, very mindful. You guys won't know this because you're all babies, but the Ice Bucket Challenge, Remember that? No, you don't.

You don't. You're too young. There was a mannequin challenge. Flossing. People flossing everywhere they went.

Not like flossing, but like the. I can't do it. I can't do it. Maybe that was it. Okay.

Salt Bae, right? Everybody remember Salt Bae. This one is a little more recent. Sweet, sweet. Breakdancing.

That happened at the 24 Olympics, right? Ray Gunn. We all remember Ray Gunn. You guys remember when the vine app disappeared? Fidget spinners.

Where did those things go? Girl? Dinner. Girl. Mass.

Those are things, right? Men, when was the last time you thought about the Roman Empire? Right? Like, so these are all things that were viral for us, right? What more can you think of?

Anything else that was big time. You young people, you guys are hip. Tell us some of the viral things that we should know about as old people eating Tide pods. Okay. What?

Cinnamon. Oh, the cinnamon challenge. Yeah. You guys. Okay, no, you shouldn't do it because you'll die dancing ba.

Oh, that's from like 1999. Good job, Jeff.

Planking, that was. I'm going to talk about that. Yes, right, yes. Planking was a good one.

Oh, Pokemon Go. Listen, that's still cool. You don't know.

So all of the things that I. Oh yeah, here's an ancient one. The whole boom and CB radios years ago. Yeah, that is an ancient one. You are not wrong.

What's your handle?

All right, I'll trust you on that one, guys. Good work. But all of these events were some of the biggest Internet wide moments of the past few years. And these moments broke through every type of media, right? It may have started on TikTok or Vine or Twitter or whatever, but they soon became national news via the traditional news media.

Some of it ended up in TV commercials, some of them ended up on big news stories. Everybody is planking in the Grand Canyon or on Arches at Arches national park and causing problems. There are things that happened because of these Internet wide events. So whether you knew all of them or just a few of them, or even just one of them, we've all seen something, right? I bet many of you here, if you didn't know every one of them, you probably knew the majority of the things that we talked about here.

Every one of these moments and trends were some of the most popular, most talked about, most newsworthy over the last few years. But where are they now? You don't hear about anybody doing the Harlem Shake anymore, do you? Right. When was the last time you heard the song Gangnam Style?

Outside of a wedding, right? Do you randomly plank anywhere you go? Like the Grand Canyon or the top of the Eiffel Tower? No. Nobody, nobody does these things.

Okay, It's a good one. It's a good one. But the world, friends, is seeking to distract and entertain us, to dull us into this state of complacency. Social media and entertainment are engaged. They seek to engage us in things, not to enlighten us about things.

We've got to seek some freedom from distractions in order to become the people that God needs in this world to make a difference. So the world is seeking followers for pay for pay per click, viewers who mindlessly ignore what's going on around them. Because we're so focused on things that are inches from our faces, the algorithms of our lives seek to keep us distracted and subjugated for the sole purpose of media companies and stockholders making money. Culture conditions us to chase after what's trending rather than what's eternal.

But as we've seen, our distracted world is pretty fickle. If we aren't careful, we end up spending our whole lives chasing things that will soon fade instead of what lasts forever. We've seen companies who have traded in distractions come and go, right? Remember MySpace? I wasted so many hours playing games on MySpace.

Vines are the thing of a past, right? None of this life that we've created in our time is permanent. And I promise you this morning that spiritual stamina outlasts the fleeting trending topics. We have to keep our eyes on the eternal prize, right? Because an eternal perspective dulls the allure of momentary digital fame.

We don't have to seek approval or popularity when we trust God with our lives. When we trust in God, rather than the fleeting moments of our lives that distract us, we can know that we have strength to avoid disasters. So I am a little bit of a gamer.

I started gaming with Joshua and then my best friend from high school, and then with Price and then with some other friends. Now my son and I game together for a while I even tried streaming. I was super cool. I spent hours playing video games and tried to engage with an audience that just really never showed up for me. Now, I'm not sure if any of you are like me, but when I was trying my hand at streaming, I began to follow a ton of other streamers to see what they were doing so I could replicate some of their success.

Oftentimes on Friday as I'm reading my homework for school or working through writing papers or something like that, I I would have my TV streaming twitch the whole time while I was working on stuff for seminary. Now I used to follow the streamers who were funny. I didn't really follow the ones who used all the found language, and many of them do, but I tried to find the ones who were fun to watch. That didn't have all the drama. But during this time, there was a famous Internet gaming streamer called Dr.

Disrespect. Now, I didn't really follow Dr. Disrespect. You guys know this guy, okay? But I would always come across some of his stuff.

And he's funny. He wears this fake mullet, always wears sunglasses, has a mustache which very few people should have. But he was a huge personality and made millions of dollars by basically streaming his whole life. He gamed every single day and eventually became incredibly famous and started making money. And when he did, he got distracted by his fame and eventually made some terrible decisions that impacted his whole life.

When you're famous and people begin to like you, make you offers of money and fame and sex, it's hard to stay focused on what really matters unless you have a strong spiritual foundation. So for Dr. Disrespect, after some pretty big mistakes and falling for some type of distractions in his life, he lost access to multiple streaming platforms, lost agreements he had made with professional sports teams. He lost access to millions of dollars and nearly lost his family. And today, you can still find him streaming, but his audience is not as big as it once was.

The same thing happens to some of our religious leaders, too. How often do we see headlines of pastors or religious leaders or worship directors and people within the church who fall into the trap of focusing on what's temporary rather than what's eternal? If we focus on the now, the flashy, the new, the trendy, the meme worthy, we are going to end up missing what's really important in our lives. We might forget the foundations we laid on our faith in the God who is bigger than the news and what's new. When the whole world is filled with pitfalls and distractions, all it might take is one brief moment of weakness and our lives might be forever changed.

That's why if we focus on what's eternally important, our foundation will be stronger and will never be shaken. James, chapter 1, verse 12 says this. Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.

Each of us in here today, I think all of us really need to work to refocus on heaven's crown rather than earthly metrics of success.

Paul was imprisoned and facing death, and he had no regrets. Why? Because he invested in eternal rewards, not earthly approval. He finished his race well, and that was all that mattered to him, no matter what friends we have to keep running that race. If we're faithful and we prepare for the race ahead, putting away the distractions of our world, we're going to cross the finish line with a faith that won't power off.

As we prepare to end this morning, I want to read one more scripture from the Apostle Paul that he wrote in the book of Philippians. In Philippians 3, 10, 14, he says this. I want to know Christ, yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow attaining the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.

But one thing I do Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

God has called all of us in the same way. My prayer for us today is that we, like Paul, are willing to push ourselves and train our spiritual bodies for the race ahead of every one of us. My prayer is that each of us can be found faithful to complete the race that God has for us through Jesus Christ, and we follow his example. May our lives never be too busy for us to follow into the place where Christ leads us. May God help each one of us to slow down, to refocus and run with our hearts this race of faith.

And may we each evaluate our own distractions and commit this week and always to pursuing the things that truly last. May it be so today and always. Let's pray.