Limping Toward the Finish Line

¹Therefore let’s also, seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let’s run with perseverance the race that is set before us, ²looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising its shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

³For consider him who has endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, that you don’t grow weary, fainting in your souls. ⁴You have not yet resisted to blood, striving against sin. ⁵You have forgotten the exhortation which reasons with you as with children, “My son, don’t take lightly the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by him;

⁶for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines, and chastises every son whom he receives.”

⁷It is for discipline that you endure. God deals with you as with children, for what son is there whom his father doesn’t discipline? ⁸But if you are without discipline, of which all have been made partakers, then you are illegitimate, and not children. ⁹Furthermore, we had the fathers of our flesh to chasten us, and we paid them respect. Shall we not much rather be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? ¹⁰For they indeed for a few days disciplined us as seemed good to them, but he for our profit, that we may be partakers of his holiness. ¹¹All chastening seems for the present to be not joyous but grievous; yet afterward it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. ¹²Therefore lift up the hands that hang down and the feeble knees, ¹³and make straight paths for your feet, so what is lame may not be dislocated, but rather be healed.

¹⁴Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man will see the Lord, ¹⁵looking carefully lest there be any man who falls short of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you and many be defiled by it,