Winners and losers

I don’t remember this shirt, I said to myself as I hung up the wash the other day. My husband likes to shop for his own clothes, especially at clearance racks or thrift stores, so sometimes surprises show up. You’d think I would have noticed him wearing it, although he does have a lot of gray logo shirts. But this one was philosophical: “Winners train, losers complain.”

Immediately I thought of Paul’s counsel to his spiritual son Timothy: “Train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come” (1 Timothy 4:7b-8). Some may have grown up with this translation choice: “exercise thyself rather into godliness.” The original text uses a Greek word, gumnazo, referring to the early Greek exercise or games in which participants wore their “birthday suits” (gumnos=naked). Try NOT to think of that next time you go by a modern gym!

Perhaps another way of saying this could be: “Get down to nothing between you and God. Strip away all pretense, all excuses, all fears, all whininess, all doubts, all barriers. Seek after the prize that God has for you and for you alone.” Hebrews 12:1 says similar things: “Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

The respected Bible teacher William McDonald remarked that the weights represent sin in any form, but especially the sin of unbelief. Instead, we need complete trust in God’s promises and complete confidence that the life of faith will emerge victorious. The race isn’t an easy sprint, he said, and neither is the Christian life of faith. But God calls us to press on with perseverance through our trials and temptations to grow into all He intends us to be and have. (Believer’s Bible Commentary, Nelson, 1995, p. 2202).

In other words, winners train, losers complain.