Press Toward The Prize

January 2

Man is called to press on. Jesus sets men free from sin and shame in order that they might accomplish two goals: 1. attain Heaven as their eternal home, 2. take others with them to Heaven. The first step toward that dual purpose of salvation is, of course, receiving Christ as Savior and Lord. The second, bringing others with us, can be a long and arduous process, but as Paul says in Galatians 6:9, we must not “be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap if we do not give up.”

Unless and until an individual opens his heart to Jesus and invites Him into the throne room of his life and allows Him to be sovereign over his heart and life, he cannot take even the first step toward either of those goals. All the effort expended in the behalf of temporal or spiritual goals are mere exercises in futility until the Lord of all becomes Lord over all of a man.

But the Bible tells us that on the great Day of Judgment there will be those who will protest. We who have an exaggerated sense of our own importance to time or to the Kingdom of God cannot begin to fathom our own unimportance. We cannot grasp the reality that it is our privilege to have the opportunity to gainfully serve our fellow man and to serve our God.

The self-important man will declare, “’Didn’t I cast out demons in Your name? Have I not prophesied and done many wonderful works?’ And Jesus will say, ‘I never knew you.’” Nothing we have done on our own, that is not under the blood of Jesus, can be accrued to our account. But when we have given Him our heart, when we have laid our life at His feet in full surrender to His purposes, He will give us labor to perform in the behalf of His Kingdom. The value of what we accomplish will be in direct relationship to the obedience with which we perform it!

Like Paul, we will say, “I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me…One thing I do: forgetting that which is behind, I strain toward what is ahead. I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Jesus Christ…” Philippians 3:12-14, 16.

When we have fully surrendered to Jesus and to His eternal purpose, we will spend ourselves in order that the Kingdom of Christ may be furthered among men. We will count our life’s purpose to be the promotion of His purpose—the salvation of souls—and we will press toward that goal all our days.