Finish Strong
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. (2 Timothy 4:7)
In these troubling times, it is easy for believers to get weighted down by the anxieties of life. The great Satanic reset and the globalist agenda are formidable foes that can engender fear and consume our thoughts. If we are not careful, the chorus of commentary from conservative pundits and prophecy experts, accurate though it may be, can turn into a crescendo that shakes our world and causes us to lose focus.
We all know the routine. You sit down to read a few articles about the WEF, CBDC’s, the WHO, etc., and before long you have spent several uninterrupted hours surfing the net. The joy and enthusiasm that once characterized our Christian life can begin to dim over time as we lose sight of our purpose in this world. How can believers stay on course with so much negative news dominating the headlines?
For nearly twelve years, I worked full-time in the academic arena. My responsibilities were split between classroom teaching and administration. For five of those years, I served as the Director of Baccalaureate Programs at a large Bible college. Our school offered three different bachelor’s degrees, all of which targeted adult learners who had accumulated a certain amount of college credits but for various reasons had dropped out before completing their degree. Our school gave them an opportunity to apply those previously earned credits toward a four-year degree.
The concept is called an adult degree completion program, or ADCP. The prospective students we were trying to recruit into our ADCP all had similar stories. They began their college careers full of hopes and dreams, but something happened along the way, some crisis or hardship, financial issues, etc. Somehow life got in the way, and they never completed their degree.
The school is in a large city with multiple freeways, and the provost decided to invest some of the school’s marketing budget in billboards along the interstate to promote our ADCP bachelor’s degrees. We spitballed various slogans that might motivate adults to re-enroll in college and finish what they had started. Eventually, we settled on “Finish strong!”
The response was amazing. The billboards had only been up a few days when the phones at the school starting ringing. As people sat in traffic on the busy freeways, they looked up and saw an advertisement picturing an adult wearing a cap and gown walking across the graduation stage with the caption, “Finish strong!” Whatever else may have been going on in their lives at that moment, whatever pressures and stresses they were facing at work or home, the billboard tapped into their desire to finish what they had started—in some cases decades earlier.
One of the great joys in my life was presiding over several commencement exercises where hundreds of adults received their bachelor’s degrees. Some of them were in their sixties and seventies! The pride on their faces was unmistakable as they accomplished their long-awaited goal of earning a college degree.
Make no mistake: the Christian life is a battleground not a playground. Like the Apostle Paul, we must fight the good fight of faith and finish the race of life strong (2 Timothy 4:7). The signs of the times, troubling as they are, serve as a reminder that the stage is being set and Christ is coming soon. But even if His return is delayed, we must keep looking up, not at billboards or ad campaigns, but at the eastern sky, and remember that Jesus Christ could return at any moment. Do not quit. Do not give up. Do not be discouraged. Finish strong!
“Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:1–2).
In these troubling times, it is easy for believers to get weighted down by the anxieties of life. The great Satanic reset and the globalist agenda are formidable foes that can engender fear and consume our thoughts. If we are not careful, the chorus of commentary from conservative pundits and prophecy experts, accurate though it may be, can turn into a crescendo that shakes our world and causes us to lose focus.
We all know the routine. You sit down to read a few articles about the WEF, CBDC’s, the WHO, etc., and before long you have spent several uninterrupted hours surfing the net. The joy and enthusiasm that once characterized our Christian life can begin to dim over time as we lose sight of our purpose in this world. How can believers stay on course with so much negative news dominating the headlines?
For nearly twelve years, I worked full-time in the academic arena. My responsibilities were split between classroom teaching and administration. For five of those years, I served as the Director of Baccalaureate Programs at a large Bible college. Our school offered three different bachelor’s degrees, all of which targeted adult learners who had accumulated a certain amount of college credits but for various reasons had dropped out before completing their degree. Our school gave them an opportunity to apply those previously earned credits toward a four-year degree.
The concept is called an adult degree completion program, or ADCP. The prospective students we were trying to recruit into our ADCP all had similar stories. They began their college careers full of hopes and dreams, but something happened along the way, some crisis or hardship, financial issues, etc. Somehow life got in the way, and they never completed their degree.
The school is in a large city with multiple freeways, and the provost decided to invest some of the school’s marketing budget in billboards along the interstate to promote our ADCP bachelor’s degrees. We spitballed various slogans that might motivate adults to re-enroll in college and finish what they had started. Eventually, we settled on “Finish strong!”
The response was amazing. The billboards had only been up a few days when the phones at the school starting ringing. As people sat in traffic on the busy freeways, they looked up and saw an advertisement picturing an adult wearing a cap and gown walking across the graduation stage with the caption, “Finish strong!” Whatever else may have been going on in their lives at that moment, whatever pressures and stresses they were facing at work or home, the billboard tapped into their desire to finish what they had started—in some cases decades earlier.
One of the great joys in my life was presiding over several commencement exercises where hundreds of adults received their bachelor’s degrees. Some of them were in their sixties and seventies! The pride on their faces was unmistakable as they accomplished their long-awaited goal of earning a college degree.
Make no mistake: the Christian life is a battleground not a playground. Like the Apostle Paul, we must fight the good fight of faith and finish the race of life strong (2 Timothy 4:7). The signs of the times, troubling as they are, serve as a reminder that the stage is being set and Christ is coming soon. But even if His return is delayed, we must keep looking up, not at billboards or ad campaigns, but at the eastern sky, and remember that Jesus Christ could return at any moment. Do not quit. Do not give up. Do not be discouraged. Finish strong!
“Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:1–2).
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