When I was in middle school, my least favorite P.E. days were the days when we had to run the mile. Mile days were usually at the beginning and the end of the semester so that our teacher could see how much we had improved. Even though I was a super skinny pre-teen, I was incredibly out of shape. I would start off the mile run sprinting with my classmates, and only a block or so later, I would have to stop–doubled over with my hands on my knees while I gasped for air.

I usually came in dead last in my class. Occasionally, I might finish second-to-last, but I always crossed the finish line with a beleaguered walk and a promise never to run the mile again–at least not of my own free will.

Fast forward a lot of years, and I had a string of health issues that scared me. As a mom with two little ones, I decided I was going to take control of my health and be as healthy as I could be. Much to my own surprise, I decided to train to run a 5K. I had no hopes of being the best runner. I never even thought I would enjoy it. All I wanted was to be able to endure. All I wanted was to be able to finish the race.

The apostle Paul was a powerhouse of a person, and he had all kinds of advantages in his favor. He was born into the people of Israel, into the tribe of Benjamin. He was an expert in the law, and he also lived out his faith. He was so passionate about his faith that when the new Christian movement began, he did everything he could to stop it in its tracks. As for keeping the law, Paul says he was blameless. He had it all.

While on the road to Damascus, with his single focus on putting a stop to Christianity, Paul encountered the risen Christ. He fell to his knees and was blinded. A voice said to him, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” In an instant, everything Paul thought he knew was challenged. He went from being the one giving orders and telling people where to go to being utterly dependent on people to help him get where he needed to go. 

This morning we are continuing our sermon series on Power and the Christian Faith. Last week, Jeff talked about the way God shares power with us so that we can change our minds and our lives. We are not stuck living our life one way. God gives us the power to change and to live for him. This week, we will be taking a look at what gets in our way as we seek to follow Christ. Paul talked about the way he could have allowed his credentials, his training, his resume to be all-consuming. Jesus told a parable about tenants of a vineyard who allowed their pursuit of wealth and property to cause them to harm others and dishonor the landowner. Even though these two Scripture passages appear to have very little in common at first glance, I believe they teach us the power of what we pursue.

What is the goal of your life? What are you pursuing? And, even if we think we know the answer to these questions, what are we doing in pursuit of this goal? What we think we are aiming for and what we are actually doing aren’t always lined up, like when I say my goal is to get more fruits and vegetables into my diet, but I keep choosing chips or cookies instead. Before Paul’s dramatic conversion experience, he was pursuing righteousness, and he was doing a good job of it. He studied the law and kept it. He made decisions and sacrifices in order to keep the law well. And when he saw others not following the law, he corrected them. When he encountered the risen Christ, I believe Paul realized he had been pursuing righteousness for its own sake, and not because it was drawing him closer to God. Even though this passage from Philippians 3 is one of my favorites in the Bible, I think there was also some sadness and grief as Paul wrote it. He had been following a misguided goal, and he had thrown his own self into it. Here, Paul counts all of these pursuits as “rubbish,” a word that actually means dung or refuse, and comes from two words meaning “what you throw out for the dogs.”

Paul’s pursuit of righteousness for its own sake clouded his vision. He became a persecutor of the early Christian church because he thought by doing this he was working for purity in his faith and righteousness. When he met Jesus, his life was changed. He no longer saw the value of boasting in his credentials, his good law-keeping abilities, or his status. All of those things belonged in the burn pile when compared to knowing Christ as his Lord and the goal of his life.

Around 385 B.C., Plato wrote his famous work called The Symposium. In this piece, Plato imagines a party of friends and philosophy colleagues in which each of the people at the party offers a spontaneous speech about their topic of conversation. Much of the conversation is focused on the topic of romantic love, or eros, and bits of humor are thrown into the mix, too. For example, the character Aristophanes is pictured as having to skip his speech at first because he’s overcome by a case of the hiccups. After his hiccups have subsided, he returns to give his speech on romantic love, and he suggests the idea that people were each originally joined to another person, and then split in half from that person. Romantic love is the pursuit of this missing half. Near the end of his speech, Aristophanes says this, “Love is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete,” using the Greek word for “romantic love.”

Aristophanes was so close, and yet so far! Over the course of our lives, we pursue wholeness and completion. We have a sense that something is missing, or isn’t quite right, or that there’s more out there than what we know. But, our completion isn’t found in romantic love. We can find joy from other people. We can find a person who is a right person for us. But, we aren’t wandering around as half-persons looking for the right half-person to complete the puzzle. Instead, I’m more inclined to go with Augustine on this one. He famously wrote, “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”

Paul had pursued righteousness with his whole self, but when he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, he realized he had been pursuing the wrong thing. In Matthew, Jesus tells a parable about tenants of a vineyard. Tenants worked the land for the landowner, and the harvest belonged to the landowner. Somewhere along the way, the tenants decided they didn’t like the arrangement anymore, and they wanted to make the vineyard their own. They didn’t want to give the harvest to the landowner. They wanted the land for themselves.

When the landowner sends servants to collect the harvest, the tenants beat the servants. They even kill one of them. The landowner thinks perhaps the tenants will respect his son, but instead the tenants kill the son too. They think if they do away with the heir to the land, they will get to keep the land for themselves. Somewhere along the way, they made wealth their goal. They made the vineyard itself their goal, rather than the relationship they had with the landowner. Jesus says the landower will take the land away from them and give it to people who will work the land for him. 

And then he says this powerful word, “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” When I was younger, I would read verses like this, and I would become afraid. I would worry that I would make a mistake, and God would take the kingdom away from me too. Over the years I’ve realized it isn’t as much about doing the right thing as it is about pursuing the right goal. If we are striving for the wrong things, we will bear fruit that doesn’t look like the fruit of the kingdom. It’s not that God is just waiting for us to slip up so that God can punish us. Instead, God so longs for a relationship with us, God so longs for us to pursue union with him, that if we aren’t going to pursue it, he’s going to invite people who will–even people who might surprise us.

The problem is: the world around us encourages us to look for fruit like promotions, higher pay rates, climbing up the ladder, owning a bigger house, driving a better car. And none of those things are bad in themselves, but it can become so easy to pursue those things as though that’s what’s going to complete us or make us whole. We might think: “If only I could get in with the right people,” or “If only I had popular friends,” or “If only I had x, y, or z…then I would be complete.”

God is urging us to remember our goal, to remember what we are supposed to strive for. God is urging us to pursue love, to pursue the fruit of the Spirit, to pursue the journey toward Christ that draws us into perfect union with God. The annoying thing is that we don’t always recognize what we’re doing as things that keep us pursuing the right things. Sometimes, moving toward the goal looks like setting out chairs on soup kitchen nights. Sometimes, it looks like washing the dishes after a meal, or cleaning the toys in the nursery after kids have played. Moving toward the goal of love might mean sitting next to someone at church who is alone, or welcoming the person who came through the door who you’ve never seen before. 

Love might look like showing up, like following through on what you said you would do. And the fruit of this love isn’t glamorous, so we might miss it at first. But, as we pursue love, as we pursue God who so loved the world, we will find the world transforming around us, even if it starts in small, subtle ways. 

As the traditional African spiritual song says, “In the morning when I rise, in the morning when I rise, in the morning when I rise give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. You may have all this world. Give me Jesus.” That’s it. And what tremendous power there is in a life that is singularly focused on pursuing the love of God! 

When I started running, I had a hard time accepting that I would never be fast. I’m a perfectionist. I want to do well at things, and if I have to work twice as hard, I will. But, no matter how much I trained, I was never as fast as most people who were running. Once, Jeff ran a 5K with me. I had been training for a couple of years, He had just barely started running. He ran the 5K in under 30 minutes, and it took me 38 minutes to cross the finish line. I had to ask myself why I was running. Was I running so that I could win, or was I running because I wanted to be healthier? Was I running to win, or was I running to finish the race?

I found so much freedom when I decided to let go of that need to be #1. I wonder if our restless hearts might find that same relief when we lay down the pursuit of all those things that will never satisfy and instead pursue love–not the kind of love Aristophanes of the philosophers at the imagined party waxed on and on about, but the kind of love that transforms us and transforms the world. 

In order to begin that pursuit, we need to start here, checking in with God, the one who embodies Love. We need to tend to our relationship with God so that we know what it looks like to care about what God cares about. We need to get our hands dirty and do the not-so-glamorous work of discipleship by serving, listening, giving, helping, and loving. May God remind us every day of what it means to live with love so that we might be people who pursue love with our lives.