I’m not fast, but I’ve watched the Olympics enough to know the importance of starting blocks. The runner braces him or herself against those blocks in order to push off into the race. It’s vitally important for them to brace themselves securely because often the rate at which they get out of the blocks determines the finishing order.

Paul tells us that life is like a race. We aren’t meant to casually meander through our time on earth; instead, like a runner, we are meant to push forward – to strain ahead for the prize. It’s a race to win.

Here’s where it gets interesting, though. We typically think of the gospel – that Jesus lived a perfect life, died a substitutionary death, and rose victoriously from the grace – as the blocks against which we place our feet. We are secure in that information, and because we are, it enable us to push off in order to run the race of the Christian life.

But the gospel isn’t the starting blocks; it’s the whole track.

We aren’t meant to push off on the gospel and the move into the real business of living, but to continually find our feet falling on that truth. To be driven in daily life, in as much as we started, by the cross and the resurrection. We don’t get over the gospel; we continually dwell and live in the gospel so that it permeates everything we do.

“Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him  and established in the faith, just as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness” (Colossians 2:6-7).