Not There Yet

After everything Paul has just written, the first thing he says here is that he hasn’t arrived.

That should be really freeing. This is the man who planted churches across the Roman world, wrote a big chunk of the New Testament, and met the risen Christ on a road to Damascus, and he says it flat out that he hasn’t obtained it and hasn’t yet taken hold of it.

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If Paul is still in process, then the pressure you feel to have arrived by now was never coming from God.

Then he tells us what he does instead, and the phrase is worth memorizing:

One thing. Not seventeen priorities held loosely, but a single aim that organizes everything else. Most of us are exhausted because we’ve never narrowed anything, and we’re pressing on toward a dozen goals at once while wondering why none of them are moving.

He describes that one thing in two motions. Forgetting what is behind, and straining toward what is ahead.

The forgetting isn’t amnesia, because Paul obviously remembered his past well enough to write about it in the previous paragraph. It means refusing to let what’s behind you determine what’s in front of you.

That cuts two directions, and both of them matter. Your failures don’t get to set your ceiling, and neither do your successes.

Some people are stuck because they can’t forgive themselves, and others are stuck because they’re still living off something that happened nine years ago.

The straining is athletic language. It pictures a runner leaning forward at full effort with everything extended toward the line, and it isn’t a relaxed image at all.

Then notice the prize, because Paul defines it clearly. It’s the call of God heavenward in Christ Jesus. He isn’t running toward a better version of himself but toward a Person who already took hold of him first.

That one sentence takes the desperation out of the effort without taking any of the effort away.