Paul's Locker Room

In this message, Michael Treat takes the college group into 1 Corinthians 9 where Paul uses the world of athletic competition to challenge believers to run the Christian life with total effort, brave self-control, confident purpose, and relentless discipline. He opens by grounding the passage in its cultural context, the Isthmian games held in ancient Corinth, and then unpacks four ways Paul calls us to run: run to win lost people, not just for our own spiritual benefit, run with brave and sacrificial self-control, abstaining from anything that hinders the race, run with confident purpose rather than aimlessly swinging at the air, and run with discipline, telling our bodies what to do rather than letting our bodies tell us. Michael closes by challenging the group that the whole point of spiritual formation and discipline is not just personal growth but evangelistic fruit, because if our lives look no different than the world around us, we have disqualified ourselves as witnesses.