Let us run with perseverance
the race marked out for us.
—Hebrews 12:1
In the 1994 Summer Olympics Carl Lewis won four gold medals.
He was confident that his first leap had been good enough to win the gold in the long jump. Odds were in his favor of setting a new world record with a second jump. But Carl chose to conserve his strength for other events rather than jumping again. His goal, he said, was to win gold medals, not to set records that wouldn’t last long.
When all is said and done, setting records—or winning gold medals for that matter—isn’t all that important. But the race you’re running is.
Those that compete in the games “do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever” (1 Cor. 9:25).
One sure way to fail is to give up.