For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
Hebrews 5:12-15
One of my favorite cartoons shows a marathon runner bent over from exhaustion – 10 feet from the starting line! The starter yells to the runner “You didn’t train for this marathon, did you?”
Next week I officially begin my marathon training. I have a 16 week training plan and this Sunday will be 16 weeks out from the start of the marathon. My training for the first week calls for 4 days of running culminating in a Saturday run of 10 miles for a total of 26 miles.
If I hadn’t been running for several months already I could not start on this plan. I began running (again) last April. Running as a term is probably generous. I started out walking. I could not run a mile without having to stop or walk. A marathon was the farthest thing from my mind. Even a 5K race seemed daunting. But I knew I needed to get in better shape, and I knew from experience that eventually 1 mile would turn into 2, and 2 into 3 and so forth. I ran a 5K at the end of May, a half marathon in September and since signing up for the Pittsburgh Marathon at the end of September I have logged 350 miles – including a few 10 milers. Over the course of the next several weeks I will ramp my weekly mileage up to 40 miles with weekend long runs up to 20 miles. Between now and the marathon I will run close to 500 more miles.
Right now (middle of January) fitness centers are full over America with well meaning individuals trying to fulfill their New Year’s resolutions to lose weight and get in shape. Few will succeed. In the next few weeks crowds will return to normal as many give up thinking that the goals they are trying to achieve just can’t be accomplished. Many want to be in marathon like training shape immediately, expecting to see miraculous results right away and get disillusioned by how much work it takes and progress seems so slow. If I would have started back in April trying to run 5 miles every day, I would never have got this far.
Many of us as Christians try to run the Christian race without a proper training foundation. We decide it’s time to get serious with our faith (a good thing) but then set goals to lofty to achieve. We throw ourselves into ministry without the proper training, (or none at all). We think we can minister without the proper exercise of a consistent time of scripture reading and prayer. Before long we are burned out and frustrated wondering why we did not succeed. And we quit.
Hebrews is right (of course, it’s in the Bible). Many of us should be teachers by now – we’ve been Christians for a long time. But we have failed to lay the proper foundation that will allow us to move on and grow. We want to be marathon runners but we haven’t learned how to run that first mile. It may be time to go back to the gym, get in the Word of God, take it slow and purposeful and lay that foundation. We have a lot of miles to run, but we don’t have to run all those miles today.
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