Stripping for the Race

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us. HEBREWS 12:1

Meyer was never content to leave his readers comfortable. After the great roll-call of faith in Hebrews 11, he pictures the heroes of the old covenant rising from the arena into the crowded tiers of a vast amphitheatre, looking down on those of us still running. And then comes the word he loved to press: run. Not sit still and be carried by the stream, not stroll like children coming home from a summer walk, but run, with the concentration of someone who means to finish.

Drifting

He knew that the great danger for most Christians is not open rebellion but a slow slide. In his chapter on the second of Hebrews he takes the epistle’s warning — lest at any time we should let them slip — in the sense the Revised Version gives it, lest we drift away. For every one who deliberately turns his back on Christ, he says, there are hundreds who drift. “It is the drift that ruins men.”

Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip. HEBREWS 2:1

He draws three portraits. A young man from a godly home never renounces his father’s God; he simply finds himself among colleagues who care nothing for religion, relaxes a little, and drifts until he is not sure he ever saw the shore. A businessman who was once upright gives way on small points under the pressure of competition, and the current carries him further than he ever meant to go. A professing Christian stops opening the Bible, not in a single leap but by yielding a little at a time. Meyer’s test is simple. Are you conscious of effort, of daily resistance to the stream around you and within you? If not, you are drifting.

Weights and sins

To run, you must be unencumbered, and here Meyer draws the distinction for which this chapter of The Way Into the Holiest is best known. There are sins, and there are weights. A sin is wrong always and for everyone. But “a weight is something which in itself or to another may be harmless, or even legitimate, but in our own case is a hindrance and an impediment.”

This is liberating and searching at once. Liberating, because it forbids us to judge one another: what is a weight to one is not to another, and each must decide for himself. Searching, because it leaves no hiding place in the plea that a thing is not actually wrong. Meyer asks whether there is anything in your life that takes the edge off prayer, that rises before you in your best moments with a sense of unease, that you would rather not look at closely. It may be a friendship too engrossing, a habit that saps energy, a pastime or a way of reading that absorbs too much. If so, it is likely enough a weight.

Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. 1 CORINTHIANS 9:24

He anticipates the objection that such stripping will leave life poor. Not so, he answers: the inner life “grows by surrender, and waxes strong by sacrifice.” The athlete gives up much that others enjoy for the sake of a prize he may never use. And God, Meyer says at the end of the chapter, never takes anything from us without giving something better.

The besetting sin

Meyer offers an interpretation of the besetting sin that many readers will not have met. It is usually taken to mean each person’s particular weakness. Meyer argues from the context — the long praise of faith in chapter eleven and the word wherefore that joins it to chapter twelve — that the sin which clings so closely is unbelief. If that is right, he says, unbelief is no longer a mere infirmity to be pitied, but a sin to be repented of.

He is careful to allow for honest doubt. Unbelief may spring, as in Thomas, from real intellectual difficulties, and such doubt keeps praying and stays among believers. But he thought much of the unbelief of his day had moral roots: the soul gets wrong with God and then says it is not sure there is a God. His counsel is practical. Put away known sin. Read the Bible even while you doubt it. Wait. Pray. Live up to the light you have.

Where the thread was dropped

In the address Where Am I Wrong?, Meyer gives the same searching counsel in more personal form. He imagines a conversation with a Christian who has had no conscious joy for years. Did you once have it? Yes. Was there some clear command of God you refused? And the answer comes slowly: yes, years ago, and after a while it faded from the mind. That, says Meyer, is where you went wrong, and you will not get right until you go back to the place where you dropped the thread of obedience and do the thing God asked.

If ye love me, keep my commandments. JOHN 14:15

It is a hard word, and a true one. But Meyer balances it in the same address with a warning against the opposite error. Some Christians, he says, bring darkness on themselves by endless self-examination, forever going back over their motives and their past consecrations. “We must not spend all our lives in cleaning our windows,” he writes, or in wondering whether they are clean, but in sunning ourselves in God’s light, which will soon show us what still needs to be cleaned.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. PSALM 139:23–24

Looking unto Jesus

The race is run, in the end, not by staring at weights but by looking at Christ. Look off unto Jesus, Meyer urges — away from past failure and success, away from praise and blame, away from the coins scattered on the track — and acquire the habit of looking up from every task to His face, as someone living by Lake Geneva looks up again and again to the snowy mountains across the water.

Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. HEBREWS 12:2

This, he says, is the only way souls are really persuaded. Argue with people about their weights, and they will cling to them tighter. Show them Jesus, and the weights begin to fall away, as snow slides from the branches when the sun comes out.

Reading him with care

Meyer’s reading of the besetting sin as unbelief is possible, but not certain, and the reader should not be troubled by preferring the older view. More important, his suspicion that most unbelief has moral roots is sometimes true and sometimes cruel. Many honest doubters are not hiding a sin, and they deserve patience, not a diagnosis. Meyer allowed for this; the reader should allow for it more generously still.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Apply Meyer’s test: are you conscious of daily effort against the current, or are you drifting? Be honest.

2. Ask the Spirit to show you one weight — not a sin, but a hindrance. Name it, and decide what to do with it.

3. Is there a command of God you once refused and have since forgotten? Go back to the place where you dropped the thread.

4. If you are prone to endless self-examination, stop cleaning the windows. Spend your next prayer time simply looking at Christ.

5. Choose a small reminder to look up to Jesus several times a day, from whatever work you are doing.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have drifted more than I have run, and I have carried weights I did not need.

Show me what to lay aside, and give me grace to let it go, trusting that You never take without giving something better.

Take me back to the place where I dropped the thread of obedience.

And keep my eyes on You, the author and finisher of my faith, until I reach the end. Amen.