If I were in your shoes, and a new preacher came to town and presumed to stand in this sacred place where the word of God has been so faithfully proclaimed by your pastor, I would want to know, Who are you? Not your name. Not your address. Not your job. Not your education. But what do you stand for? What are you committed to? What’s your standard of truth? What’s your authority? What’s your aim in coming here?

So, let me begin with three statements about my commitments that I hope encourage you to lean in.

First, I come with a total allegiance and submission to the Bible — the Christian Scriptures — as our only infallible authority. That means I come to you with no authority except what I am able to see in the Scriptures, to savor in my own soul, and to show in the power of the Holy Spirit for your upbuilding. If you don’t see what I say in the Bible, don’t believe it just because I say it.

Second, my life mission statement is this: “I exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ.” That means I’m not in Anaheim, California, nor in this church, willy-nilly or aimlessly or to tickle anybody’s ears. I am here on a mission. My aim in this message is to speak God’s word to you in the hope and the prayer that your passion for the supremacy of God in every area of your life will soar, with joy, through Jesus Christ.

Third, I am driven by a particular truth that became clear to me from Scripture about 57 years ago (when I was 22 years old), which has a profound and pervasive effect upon the way I think and feel about the glory of God and the joy of the human soul. That truth is this: God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him, especially through your suffering in the path of love.

In other words, when you experience the living God himself (not his precious gifts, but himself) through his Son, Jesus Christ, as so satisfying to your soul that no suffering in your life can rob you of that satisfaction in God, you make him look great! Which he is. I call that kind of joy “serious joy.” You can hear what I mean by “serious joy” in Paul’s phrase in 2 Corinthians 6:10: “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.”

Running with the Saints of Old

I invite you to look with me in the Scriptures at the book of Hebrews 12:1–2. And what I hope to show is that this kind of joy is the spring of love — and I mean radical love for people, especially the kind of love that is very costly. So, the question I am trying to answer is this: How can I be set free from selfishness so that — at any cost to myself on this earth — I will love other people in a way that makes Christ look great?

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1–2)

We’re not going to focus on everything in this text, but rather almost entirely on these words in verse 2: “for the joy that was set before him he endured the cross.” But let’s at least get these words situated in the flow of thought so they don’t dangle in isolation.

Chapter 11 celebrates the faith of Old Testament saints who, though they are dead, yet continue to speak (Hebrews 11:4) — that is, their lives remain a living witness to us about the value of living by faith. So, you can see in Hebrews 12:1 that the writer pictures us as running our own race, with the lives of these saints, as it were, crying out to us, “You can do this! You can make it the end! We ran our race by faith. We finished it by faith. You can finish your race the same way. Don’t give up. Don’t throw away your confidence (Hebrews 10:35). Don’t quit!”

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses [all those stories from Chapter 11], let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. (Hebrews 12:1)

In other words, life is a marathon. It’s not a one-hundred-meter dash. It is long, and there are hills that make your muscles burn to the point where they are screaming at you, “You can’t finish this!” And all these witnesses are saying, “Yes, you can.” There may be hills and sleet and wind in your face. But the book of Hebrews is written to help us finish in faith and love. Hebrews 12:12–13 says, “Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet.” Hebrews 3:14 says, “Hold [your] confidence firm to the end.” It’s worth everything. You can make it.

The middle of Hebrews 12:1 tells us not to run this marathon with an overcoat on, and not to use performance-enhancing drugs. Do you see that in the middle of verse 1? “Let us lay aside every weight, and sin . . .” In other words, “Don’t be stupid and don’t cheat.” It would be stupid to wear an overcoat while running a marathon, and it would be cheating to use drugs. Lay aside every weight and sin. Lay aside everything illegal and lay aside every legal thing that doesn’t help you run. Run to finish!

I tried to raise four sons and one daughter in the Lord. I recall times when they wanted to do something I disapproved of. They would ask, “What’s wrong with it?” and with this text in my mind, I would say, “Don’t ask, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ about your music, your movies, your parties, or your habits. Ask instead, ‘Does it help me run the race? Does it help me run with all my focus and energy and love for Jesus? Does it help me be the best Christ-exalting marathon runner I can be?’” I would say, “Don’t set your sight, son, on the minimal standard of avoiding cheating. Set your sights on the maximal standard: How can I be the most devoted, Christ-exalting marathon runner possible?”

“Get to know Jesus Christ. Go deep with Jesus until he is the supreme treasure of your life.”

The main point of this text is this: Run! “Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.” Get rid of all the sins you can. Get rid of all the weights and hindrances you can. Take hold of the marathon of your life, and don’t just set the pitifully low standard of, “What’s against the rules?” But rather, ask yourself, “How can I train, eat, think, and dress to be the best runner possible? How can I live my life and finish my course with maximal, Christ-exalting, people-loving faith”?

Running Like Jesus

Verse 2 now gives us perhaps the deepest answer to that question. You are going to face the hills, the cold, the wind, the burning in your legs, the thundering of your heart, and the thoughts of hopelessness about finishing — you are going to face them like this:

. . . looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2)

You are going to look to Jesus as you run. And what you are going to focus on as you look to him is this: He too ran. His race was 33 years long, and it ended with a horrific gauntlet of opposition and suffering — namely, the unspeakable torture of the cross and the immeasurable shame of such a death. He ran it. He finished it. How?

Mark the words in the middle of verse 2: “For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross, despising the shame.” Surely you will agree that the marathon Jesus ran was a marathon of love. In these last several hundred yards of the marathon, nails were in his hands and his feet, and he was speared in his side, and a crown of thorns was put on his head. It was the greatest act of love that has ever been performed in the history of the world because he was dying for our sins, not his own.

My question for my life (and your life) is this: How can I run like this? How can I be set free from my selfishness so that — at any cost to myself — I will love other people in a way that makes this Christ look great? The central answer of this verse is that the greatest act of love that was ever performed was performed “for the joy that was set before him.”

So, perhaps you can see where I got the title for this message: “Where Does Radical Love Come From?” Hebrews 12:2 teaches us that Jesus was sustained through the cross and through the shame of it by the joy that he anticipated at the end of his marathon. That does not mean that there is no powerful sustaining experience of joy in the marathon itself (but only at the end).

I say that because the book of Hebrews defines faith, by which we run the marathon, like this: “Faith is the [substance] of things hoped for” (Hebrews 11:1). That means the full, complete, all-satisfying, everlasting joy in God that we are hoping for at the end of our marathon becomes, in some measure, an experience right now, by faith, in the midst of our “cross” and our “shame” — our marathon. That’s why it has such selfishness-killing, cross-bearing, shame-enduring power.

What if someone says, “Doesn’t that turn the love of Christ at the cross into selfishness? If he’s just seeking his own joy at the end of the race, is he loving us?” The answer is this: In being sustained through the cross by the joy at the end of his race, he’s not being selfish, because selfishness is when you use other people to get your own happiness without any regard for their happiness. But nobody calls it selfishness when you’re willing to die to include other people in your happiness. This joy, which Jesus hoped for and was sustained by, was precisely designed to be shared by everyone for whom he died.

That means that, for you and me in all the sufferings of our marathon, it is not selfishness but love to be sustained by the hope of everlasting joy in God — into which we are bringing as many people as we can. That’s what the marathon is for — joy in Christ, sustaining you through the sacrifices of love. It makes Christ look so satisfying that others want to go with you.

Content to Be Plundered

So, let’s ask this question: If this joy set before us — this spring, overflowing from the future back into the present — is so powerful in producing and supporting the sacrifices of love, and if this is not only the way Jesus was sustained in the greatest act of love but the way we should be sustained in our acts of love, are there examples elsewhere in the book of Hebrews that would show us what this experience is like? Yes, there are. I’ll show you two.

First, consider Hebrews 10:32–34. Listen for echoes of “for the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross”:

Recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.

Anaheim, where you live, and Minneapolis, where I live, need to see Christians like this more than anything. Some of them had been thrown into prison. The others had to decide whether to identify with them and risk the plundering of their property as fellow Christians or go underground and save their skin. Compassion — that is, sacrificial love (which corresponds here to Jesus’s cross and shame) — conquered fear, and they had compassion on those who were in prison.

How did that happen? How did they become people like that? How did they overcome their selfishness in their love for comfort and security? The answer is that joy streamed from the future hope back into the present and sustained them and empowered them for love. Let’s read it in verse 34: “For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.”

This was the joy that was set before them. They might lose their reputation. They might lose their houses. They might lose their positions. They might lose their lives. But those things were not the spring of their joy; that was with Christ in the future, streaming back into the present by faith, making love possible. If this world is your treasure rather than the immeasurable pleasures of being with Christ forever, you will not be able to love in a way that makes Christ look great. But if Christ is the all-satisfying joy set before you, you will.

Happy to Be Deprived

Here’s the second example. Hebrews 11:24–26, which is a description of how Moses was able to choose the hard path of loving the people of Israel rather than staying in the comforts of Pharaoh’s palace:

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God [like Jesus chose the cross] than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. [There are sinful pleasures, but they’re not the ones we’re after, because they only last eighty years or so.] He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.

This was the joy set before him. More precious, more satisfying, than all the treasures of Egypt was the reward of finishing his marathon with Israel through the wilderness — through the cross, the shame — and joining all those Old Testament witnesses in the presence of the Messiah.

Go Deep with Jesus

So, my concluding plea is this: Get to know Jesus Christ. Go deep with Jesus until he is the supreme treasure of your life and the all-satisfying joy set before you at the end of your marathon.

• Go deep with the vastness of his wisdom, far greater than Solomon’s.
• Go deep with the greatness of his power, upholding the universe with his mind.
• Go deep with his majesty, this very day above all governments and armies.
• Go deep with the tenderness of his kindness — blessing children and everyone like them.
• Go deep with the uniqueness of his words — no one ever spoke like this man.
• Go deep with the length of his patience, perfect toward all penitent sinners.
• Go deep with the suffering of his love, even for enemies.
• Go deep with his mercy, touching lepers and putting ears back on to attacking soldiers.

Get to know him until he is the joy set before you at the end of your marathon.

If he becomes that for you, three things will happen: First, your joy even in the sufferings of this life will overflow. Second, that joy will sustain a life of sacrificial love for others. Third, that joy-sustained love will make Jesus look like the all-satisfying Savior that he is.