Hosanna Restoration Church

Perhaps you thought this would be a weight loss lesson. People spend fortunes and work like crazy at losing weight these days. It is certainly a good idea to stay healthy, but anyone who has worked at losing weight knows that it only works if you are disciplined in your eating and your exercise. I thought about using “Strip Down” for the heading, which might have peaked interest in other ways, but settled on lose the weight.

Having just looked at the cloud of witnesses in chapter eleven, God exhorts to get rid of anything that would stop our progress in the race that God has given us to run. As we study those in the hall of faith, we see great things accomplished, but we also see obvious things that hindered them along the way.

In the same way that we have to cut out certain foods and change our life styles in order to lose the weight we want to lose, we also need to be willing to put in the effort to run the race of faith. Some of the effort expended is in stripping off the things that hinder our progress. The other part of the effort is in replacing those things with actions or activities that are helpful.

For instance, we may need to strip off some television hours, and replace them with family interaction as well as time in our Bible and prayer. Or perhaps we have a mouth problem and we need to stop some of what comes out of it and at the same time replace it with more fruitful conversation. An example might be, stripping criticism and replacing it with compliments or positive words. Maybe we are prone to speak words of doubt; that will always hinder us. We need to remove that and replace it with what God says.

The truth is, it really does not take all that much effort to increase our trust in God. Just as it does not really take all that much effort to change our eating and exercising, it is a matter of desire. If we really desire to move to higher ground we can and we will. But it will take effort.

Of course there will always be things that try and get in our way. The devil is going to do everything he can to try and keep us from success. He wants us to feel like failures. But God will help us in every area. He will help us to lose physical weight as well as to overcome those sins that hinder us. Then we need to run the race with endurance. We need to be determined that we will not quit until we reach the goal.

We do this by submitting ourselves totally to God. Lay that thing at His feet and then resist the devil. Keep your ear open to God’s direction and He will see to it that the good thing He has begun in you is completed. Isn’t it time we stripped those things off and left them lying far behind us? If we do, they will have a lot harder time crawling back on.