That is precisely why the author of Hebrews wrote these words. We live in a visible environment of opposition from the world, the flesh, and the devil. He admonishes us to look up and around us at the cloud of witnesses and recognize that we really are in our own friendly stadium where we can win if we listen.

Run the race without the impediment. Even as we are encouraged by the witnesses, we are to take responsibility for our own progress in the race. We are to take radical action at two levels. The first level deals with everything that hinders. The second level is sin itself.

We are to strip off everything that hinders. The original reference is clear. The Greek athlete ran the race with little or nothing on. Nothing was to impede, retard, or frustrate the forward movement. The word itself was used for the bulk of the body, an arrogant bearing with undue confidence, or any burdensome load. We are to take radical action to separate ourselves from anything that hinders. Understand that he is referring to things which in and of themselves are indifferent.

What are the potential hindrances? Everything! Things within us or things without us. It may be our own desire for food, sleep, or sex. Every one of them may be legitimate or a terrible drag on our progress as believers. It may be things outside us. Possessions or relations. Bowling balls, golf clubs, bass boats, or lake lots.

The call is for action. Put them off as one would put off a garment. This is the call for effort, struggle, battle, war in the Christian life. This is the agony that leads to the ecstacy. The very word for race is the Greek word agona. It means sometimes putting the knife to life to cut away what hinders.

This call for action corrects a misconception of Christian growth. Christian growth is not a passive observance. Some would understand the life of faith to be like standing on a people-mover at the airport. You stand on the movable walkway and it just carries you along. No personal effort or strain. Nothing could be farther from the presentation of the life of faith in the New Testament. There is no measurable growth in the Christian life without the cutting away, the sacrifice, the stripping-off of many things harmless in themselves but hindering me in my race.

In Buffalo, New York, is the Calspan Corporation's wind tunnel. Normally it is used to test the flow of pollutants in the air, but the company loans it to the down-hill racers of American's Olympic ski team. A 200 horsepower motor generates a seventy mile-per-hour wind. The skier stands on a platform which measures the changes in drag, or wind resistance, caused by his movements. Bill Johnson, the 1984 gold medalist, mastered his technique in the wind tunnel. He was able to decrease his drag from forty-three pounds to eighteen pounds. His incredible tucking in of his body in order to cut down wind resistance won him the gold medal.

In the contest of faith we are to do a similar thing. We are to weigh every movement, relationship, investment of time and life against its drag, its resistance, its impediment to the life of faith.