Our scriptal text today comes from the book of Hebrews chapter 12 and verse 1 through 3, reading from the new living translation of the scripture you'll there find these words.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the

sin that so easily trips us up, and let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.

We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith.

Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame.

Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God's throne.

Think of all the hostility he endured from sinful people.

Then you won't become weary and give up.

We're talking today about run the race, run the race, run the race.

Here the Hebrew writer speaks to us about our responsibility to remove things that slow us down and things that trip us up.

There are certain things that we need to get out of our life and they're not necessarily sins, but they're weights.

The weights are those issues that we carry in our life that slow us down. So not everything is a sin, but it can be a weight. It's not to say that watching television or surfing the net is a sin, but it can certainly

be a weight. It can slow you down in your Christian development. So there are a lot of things that you have to be able to distinguish that while this may not

be sin, this is a weight, this is impeding or slowing down my progress.

It's slowing down my development.

And when you're running, you want to remove all of the elements that could slow you down.

I have a deep appreciation for being able to read the Bible in paraphrases. In fact, the first Bible

that I ever read through as a probably when I was maybe 12 years old, it was a living Bible.

That's, it's not a translation, it's a paraphrase.

But there are certain things that you lose in a paraphrase that it doesn't give you the full

nuances of the biblical meaning and context that you'll find from the original Hebrew and Greek from a literal translation.

And so in studying things that from the original language, for example,

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