The Crown of Life Received by Those Who Obey
20To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain those who are under the law; 21to those who are without law, as without law (not being without law toward God, but under law toward Christ), that I might win those who are without law. 22To the weak I became as weak, that I might gain the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some. 23Now I do this for the sake of the Good News, that I may be a joint partaker of it. 24Don’t you know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run like that, that you may win. 25Every man who strives in the games exercises self-control in all things. Now they do it to receive a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. 26I therefore run like that, not aimlessly. I fight like that, not beating the air, 27but I beat my body and bring it into submission, lest by any means, after I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected.
A few years ago I happened to watch the final of the 10,000-meter speed skating event in which Lee Seung-hoon was competing.
The run of the Dutch skater Sven Kramer, who went out as the last skater, was impressive, and because he crossed the finish line a full four seconds ahead of Lee Seung-hoon, I was thinking that Korea would take the silver medal.
But suddenly the arena began to stir, and an announcement came that the Dutch skater had broken a rule. The Dutch skater, who had been sure of victory, was shown live on television, his face twisted, throwing down the goggles he had been wearing.
Sven Kramer was disqualified because he entered the inner lane twice in a row. In the 10,000-meter race, skaters must go around a 400-meter track twenty-five times.
They must go around twenty-five times, entering the outer lane once and the inner lane the next time, but he made the mistake of entering the inner lane twice in a row.
So Lee Seung-hoon won the gold medal through the winner’s disqualification.
Sven Kramer was the world record holder, so no skater could beat him, and yet he lost the gold medal through his own mistake.
The Dutch skater would have trained as hard as he could for this race. But because of one small mistake, he could not stand in the winner’s place, even after setting a world record.
However hard he had trained, and however much he carried the hopes of many people, it all fell apart in an instant because he had not kept the rules.
I can understand how empty he must have felt.
Of course, that skater has other races ahead, so he will probably be able to hang a gold medal around his neck during his career.
Like this, in any competition, if you do not keep the rules, you cannot stand in the winner’s place even if you come in first. Lee Seung-hoon came in four seconds later, but because he raced by the rules, the chance came to him when the one ahead of him was disqualified, and he received the gold medal.
If even a medal the world gives can be received only by keeping the rules like this, then to receive the golden crown God gives, we must without fail live our life of faith by the rules God has set.
That skater can simply win the next race. But for us there is no more chance once life is over, so we must live our life of faith well now.
There is no chance to turn back once life is over. Whether you are poor or sick, rich or healthy now, I hope you will live a life of faith, knowing that your chance is while you are alive.
As I told you last week, Paul had a faith that could eat even the food of sacrifices and live the life of faith freely within God’s law.
Because he was spiritually in the truth, his faith was free. Yet he was doing his utmost to be patient and to restrain himself, and to live a life that sets an example for those whose faith was weak or who had not yet received Christ.
This is the attitude of a mature believer.
What those of you who carry out church work must know is this: when someone does not devote themselves according to God’s law but works by their own thoughts and plans, they may look full to people and seem to carry out a great deal of work, but they bear no fruit.
It is like the Dutch skater, who broke the rules of the race and could not receive the gold medal even though he crossed the finish line first.
Believers, too, if they break the rules God has set for the salvation of souls and put human righteousness first, will not receive a reward when they meet God on the last day of their lives.
Athletes who win a competition gain a great deal of prize money and honor.
Sadly, however, spiritual rewards cannot be seen with human eyes.
When Thomas could not believe that Jesus had risen, Jesus told him to see the hands that had been nailed, and to reach out his own hand and put it into Jesus’ side.
He was telling him not to be unbelieving, but believing, where Jesus was concerned.
Jesus did this because salvation matters that much, even though the kingdom of God is a world that human eyes cannot see.
Of course, salvation may not mean much to people who do not believe in Christ, but for Christians who believe in heaven, salvation is life that they must receive without fail.
If you will believe only after seeing the nailed hands of Jesus, only after putting your hand into his side and touching the wound of the spear, then in the end you should not expect a spiritual reward that cannot be seen.
So Jesus said that insisting on seeing before believing is, in the end, failing to believe that God is alive, is the unbelief that does not believe Jesus is the Savior, and is committing even now the great sin of grieving the Holy Spirit.
He said that faith, the right kind of faith, is to believe in the unseen spiritual world as though you see it, and to live out the way along which the Holy Spirit leads.
The spiritual world cannot be seen with human eyes.
That kingdom is an eternal world that we can see only through God’s special calling, and only when we put off the body.
That is why there is no chance to turn back after we have put off the body.
So, while you live, you must obey, keeping to the rules God has set for you.
To receive spiritual rewards you must live with more patience, more self-control and more obedience. Only then will you be able to see your own reward with your own eyes on the day you meet Christ.
Because the apostle Paul had been to heaven by the grace of God, he knew how good the rewards God gives are.
He knew that rewards received in heaven are more precious than the power or honor of the world. That is why in verse 27 he confessed that he too was beating his body and striving to obey the Word, so as to receive this reward.
The apostle Paul said that after zealously preaching the gospel to others, he was afraid that he himself might be rejected.
That is because the sins we commit are not sorted into great sins and small sins. Sin is not divided into great sin and small sin; it is simply sin.
Someone may seem at church to have good faith, but if their life has not actually changed and they speak and act in ways that hide the glory of God, that becomes the sin of not obeying God’s word.
Because Jesus embraces holy believers who obey the Word, he does not give rewards to spirits that live such a double life.
That is why we must not worry only about the salvation of other people’s souls.
If you say you believe in Jesus but you are always losing your temper, getting angry, lying and living an emotional life that strays from the truth, that is not the life of a believer that Christ desires, and so you may be rebuked by the Lord.
People live as they please outside the Word, and yet they think that as long as they go to church they will be saved.
But look at Noah’s ark: only eight people went aboard it. Then you see that knowing the Word as knowledge is not what matters; living by that Word, that is, obeying it, matters more.
Heaven and hell certainly exist. That is why we must know without fail, from the Bible, what kind of people go to heaven and what kind of people go to hell.
Suppose you proclaimed the Word to thousands of souls, taught the Bible and preached Jesus well. They would be saved by hearing the Word you preach. But if you yourself, who preached the gospel, lived like the people of the world, you would not be saved.
That is how important your own salvation is, more important even than saving thousands.
That is why the apostle Paul confessed that while the salvation of other people’s souls is important, he was striving even harder for the salvation of his own soul.
Romans 6:1-2
1What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? 2May it never be! We who died to sin, how could we live in it any longer?
In Romans the apostle Paul said that we are those who died to sin.
What he means is that our flesh, which would sin, has already died on the cross with Jesus, so we cannot sin even if we want to.
You are holy believers who have been born again through Jesus Christ.
Because you are children of God, born again as believers, you have no flesh to accept those temptations, however much Satan tempts you with the power, honor and sexual immorality of the world.
Nevertheless, if someone sins along with the world, that person did not die on the cross with Jesus and still has a body that can sin. So they are someone who has no holy soul for Jesus Christ to save.
Now you will have understood clearly what kind of person is saved and what kind of person is judged.
I hope you will not forget that God the Son came to this earth to save each one of you, and that you will live a holy life.
Romans 6:12-13
12Therefore don’t let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. 13Also, do not present your members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God, as alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.
Paul commands you not to let sin reign in your mortal body.
Sin can rule only the body, not the soul, so like Paul we must beat our bodies and bring them into submission to the Word.
He also told you not to present your body to sin as an instrument of unrighteousness.
When you sin, your body becomes an instrument of unrighteousness that Satan uses, and when you are held by the Holy Spirit, it becomes an instrument of righteousness that God uses.
Whether you become an instrument of unrighteousness or an instrument of righteousness is your choice. That is why you must always strive to keep far from sin, and strive with the Word to drive off your own temper and the temptations that pull you toward the world.
Once you become an instrument of unrighteousness that Satan uses, Satan has dominion over you. Then, however much you want to get out of sin, you cannot.
That is why you must carry the cross with Jesus. Only when you become an instrument of righteousness, as a born-again believer, can you live as a child of God.
There is no great sin and small sin.
In the eyes of Jesus, a person who has committed murder and a person who has ignored the leading of the Holy Spirit and spoken and acted by their own thoughts and feelings are equally sinners.
It means that both have made the Holy Spirit groan and have hurt him, so the murderer’s sin is not the greater.
If you fear sin, sin will not have dominion over you.
For you are not under the world and unrighteous law but under the grace of God, and so Satan cannot have dominion over you.
Hebrews 10:26-27
26For if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more a sacrifice for sins, 27but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which will devour the adversaries.
In the Old Testament, when the people sinned, they brought an animal that could atone for sin to the tabernacle, laid hands on it to transfer the sin, and then killed it and sprinkled its blood.
Every time they sinned they killed an animal, again and again.
But since Jesus came into the world, sacrifices of atonement with animals at the tabernacle have no effect at all. Because Jesus offered his own body once for all as the sin offering, there was no longer any need to offer animals.
People who know that they are forgiven through the sacrifice of Jesus, yet do not fear sin and sin again and again, are sinning willfully, and so the writer of Hebrews says they have nothing to do with Jesus.
God made heaven so that people of faith could live happily forever, and he made hell to judge Satan and the demons.
But foolish people, rather than obeying God’s word, fell into Satan’s temptation and lived by human thinking, and so met the misfortune of falling together into the hell where Satan goes.
Jesus Christ keeps giving you chances so that you do not fall into sin, and he keeps telling you to turn back, through the Word, through people and through the Spirit.
Because Jesus gives everyone many chances to hear the gospel, no one will be able to excuse themselves later, when they meet the Lord, by saying they never heard.
2 Corinthians 1:10
10who delivered us out of so great a death, and does deliver; on whom we have set our hope that he will also still deliver us;
Paul preached the gospel with every ounce of his strength because he wanted to save even a few souls.
If he could preach the Word, he did not refuse even when the place was the council, and he gladly went even to a place where he might well die and preached the gospel there.
So hard was it for the apostle Paul to preach the gospel that he said that in Asia his affliction weighed on him beyond his power, so much that he despaired even of life. To preach the gospel Paul went hungry, was imprisoned and beaten, nearly died when his ship was wrecked, and was mocked.
Paul, who had come from a good family and had a good education, gave up a comfortable life because of the Christ he met at Damascus and walked a hard and fearful road.
It was not that Paul was needy because he had no property, or persecuted because he lacked Roman citizenship. He had the finest education, the finest family and the Roman citizenship everyone envied at the time, and he was a strict follower of the law, recognized by the Jews.
Yet because of Christ, that man threw away all the power, wealth and education that the people of the world so long to have, and chose the path of suffering.
But the apostle Paul had seen heaven, more certain, holier and more beautiful than the finest education, family, law and wealth.
When he met Jesus in person, the Master of heaven and the King of kings, he realized that everything of the world that he had possessed was corruptible.
When he realized that only the crown of life Christ gives is the incorruptible crown of glory, he could offer even his own life with joy.
No one lives in this world for hundreds of years.
Because we must all leave this world someday, a person who lives knowing where they will go after death is blessed. That is why Paul is doing his very best to send every soul to heaven.
Then what have you given up for Christ?
A proud heart, a hot temper, human wisdom, greed for the world: which of these will you say you gave up for Christ?
You should think about it now, for the day will surely come when you make your confession before Jesus.
1 Corinthians 9:21
21to those who are without law, as without law (not being without law toward God, but under law toward Christ), that I might win those who are without law.
To those under the law Paul acted as one under the law, to those without law as one without law, and to the weak as one who is weak. In all this he was doing his utmost to save even just a few.
I have heard some people misunderstand this word and say that they drank with a drinker in order to evangelize them, or that, to share the gospel with someone who goes off to have fun when they should be at Sunday worship, they went off to have fun with that person.
But this is not preaching the gospel; it is a sinful act that keeps the other person from coming to Christ.
The life of someone who believes in Jesus but drinks and does not go to church is already no example. Even if they told an unbeliever about Jesus, simply being there together watered down the gospel and led people to mock Jesus.
That is why those who evangelize must live lives of self-control.
Paul had the spiritual authority to lead people, but he approached them with an understanding of the circumstances they were in.
Because he was mature, when he dealt with people who were weak in body he met them with an attitude that understood their weakness, and when he dealt with those who were weak in faith he showed a love that embraced even their weakness.
And because Paul knew the law perfectly, he could explain Christ, the one who fulfilled the law, to strict followers of the law in the simplest and most accurate way. He opened their hearts not by worldly methods but by the gospel alone.
1 Corinthians 9:24
24Don’t you know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run like that, that you may win.
As I told you at the beginning about the 10,000-meter final, every competition in the world reviews the video to pick out a single winner.
But when Paul said that one receives the prize in a race, he did not mean that only one person receives a prize. He meant that everyone who has run by the rules in their own lane receives the prize for running that lane to the end.
Whatever lane they ran in, God will place crowns on all the believers who obeyed his word, and he will commend them.
So to think that you cannot do it because you are poor or weak in body is a wrong choice: you are giving up the reward yourself. Even if the conditions you have been given are worse than other people’s, you must run hard.
The world competes for its own honor, but the spiritual race is run for God. That is why every believer can win, even though they do not all run under the same conditions.
How much patience and self-control are you exercising for Christ?
Do you really want eternal life?
How much are you holding back your temper and ruling yourself, to set the example of a believer who shares the gospel?
If you feel nothing when you worship God and have no joy even as you do God’s work, now is the time to pray for a full faith.
God wants to bless us not with the things of the world, which soon wither and rot, but with the things of heaven, which never decay.
When Adam ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and covered his body with leaves, the leaves soon withered. When God saw it, he made garments of animal skins and clothed them, covering their shame even though they were sinners.
And the world makes wreaths of laurel leaves that soon wither and puts them on the winners, but God blesses us with a shining crown of life that never withers.
Believers have a clear reason for having faith.
This finite world is used as a process of receiving Christ in order to live in the infinite world. So if we obey the Word, a day of wonderful blessing will surely come.
We must never let go of Christ until the day we put off the body and meet God in spirit. If, the harder things get, we lift God up all the more in praise, and the more afraid we are, the more we call on his name in prayer, the Holy Spirit will accomplish it all.
The obedience you offer now will be piled up before you as countless rewards on the day you see the face of God.
May you look forward to the day you receive the crown of life, and run with all your strength, looking only ahead.