The Race and the Crown

Everyone in the church at Corinth had stood at a race and knew how one ends. Paul says it plainly, they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize, and then puts the command in the plural to all of them: So run, that ye may obtain. He is borrowing the picture for its effort, and he defines the effort two verses later with no glamour on it: I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.

So we bring you the chapter as it stands, because we have wanted the crown and not the training, and we have been careful to call our comfort wisdom. Make us temperate in all things, in the flat sense that phrase carries: food, money, the hours we sleep and the hours we throw away. Keep us from recommending to other people a road we have quietly stopped walking. And we are not asking to beat anybody in this building, because there is nobody here we are running against.

Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. The wreath handed out at those games had dried to nothing by winter. Paul, near the end and writing from custody, says where his went and who else is on the list. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing. One receiveth the prize is how a footrace works. Not to me only is how this one finishes.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 223 is Shield and Lifter (Psalm 3:3).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two