Part of “The Whole Story,” where I work through single passages and try to show what the text is doing. Each one stands alone.
A few Sundays ago, our pastor closed out a summer series on Hebrews 11 with Hebrews 12:1-2. As part of an illustration, he went for a run before church and hated it. But he didn’t stop because he was physically tired.
He explained that running (and exercise in general) is a mental game. It turns from “I can do this” to “Can I do this?” to “I can’t do this,” often within minutes and over and over again. I felt way too seen in that moment because I go through this roller coaster every day when I’m at the end of a set of reps during MTNTough. Ten seconds into a marching wall sit, 80 to go. I can. Can I? I can’t.
The coach on the screen starts the timer, and my desire for comfort kicks in. I don’t want to shake. I don’t want my quads to burn. I don’t want to sing the alphabet backward to get through it. I just want to be done.
All this to say, the race Hebrews 12:1-2 talks about, metaphorically speaking, is a mental challenge. Two verses give you a finish line and something to fix your eyes on. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you what to do when your eyes are fine and you still want to stop.
The next verse, Hebrews 12:3, speaks directly to this analogy, but in a much deeper way. It names the danger in that the fear is not that we’ll slow down:
3 For consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself, so that you won’t grow weary and give up.
A literal rendering of the Greek reads, “in order that you might not become weary in your souls giving up.” The phrase “in your souls” sits between the two verbs, and Cockerill argues that it qualifies both the exhaustion and quitting alike: “The race is not lost in the legs, but in the runner’s inmost being.”1 Read that quote again. English can’t hold both at once. A translator has to pick a side of the phrase at the expense of the other. But the preacher put it in the middle on purpose.
It’s worth sitting with this idea, because calling this a letter is a misnomer. Its author calls it a “word of exhortation” (13:22), and most scholars read it as a sermon intended to be read aloud rather than as a letter to be sent.2 You’re overhearing a man trying to keep people from walking away.
So the better question is what is he doing to people who are about to quit?
Two verses later, the pastor quotes Proverbs 3:11:
5 And you have forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons:
My son, do not take the Lord’s discipline lightly or lose heart when you are reproved by him, 6 for the Lord disciplines the one he loves and punishes every son he receives.
The quotation reads like a proof text for the point he’s building to. It’s doing more than that. The Greek word behind “lose heart” in verse 5 is the same word behind “give up” in verse 3. Two different English renderings, one word, two verses apart.
And the borrowing runs backward. Cockerill argues that the preacher chose the word in verse 3 in anticipation of the Proverbs text he was about to quote.3 He set the echo up like a softball pitch. The word was already waiting in verse 3 for a verse that hadn’t arrived yet.
Two verses apart is close enough to here. This preacher works that way throughout his sermon. He alliterates, plays on phonetically similar words, repeats key terms like a drumbeat, and marks his sections by echoing a word at the start and the end.4 He wrote for the ear, to be heard with all the same devices you employ during a presentation or a speech.
This seam is invisible in English; that’s why nobody typically preaches it.
And it means he didn’t change the subject at verse 4.
Verse 3 already told you what to do about the weariness: consider him.
The verb is stronger than it looks. Cockerill calls it a command that asks for arrival rather than effort.5 Arrival, meaning to come to the full realization of who he is. Mohler puts it plainly: hold Christ up as the model and keep looking.6
That’s the first answer, and it’s the one that gets preached.
Here’s the second. The hostility that verse 3 attributes to sinners, verse 5 calls the Lord’s discipline. Same pressure, two descriptions, two verses apart.
Be careful with the word. The Greek paideía covers training, instruction, guidance, reproof, correction, and punishment, all in one term.7 Talk about semantic range! Croy argues the discipline here is entirely non-punitive. Schreiner thinks that goes too far and washes out any reference to discipline for sin.8 This means we should read it as primarily formative without making it exclusively so.
What the preacher does with it is the part worth slowing down for. He tells them what the hostility is doing to them. God is dealing with you as sons (v. 7). Cockerill reads this as God’s use of opposition to strengthen his sons and daughters in obedience, and he’s careful to distinguish it from punishment for sin Christ has already cleansed.9 Lane presses further into this, though: sharing God’s holiness isn’t available apart from that correction.10
Then verse 4, which keeps the whole passage honest: you haven’t yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. Oof. It’s a rebuke, and an oddly gentle one. Their persecution was real, but it hadn’t turned lethal like the ones at the end of Hebrews 11.11 He tells them their suffering is smaller than it feels and more meaningful than they know, all in one sentence.
Some of you aren’t worn down by your sin or what’s happening to you. You’re worn down by obedience, by the honest effort of trying to do all the right things, and that’s even harder to say out loud.
You keep showing up in a friendship that takes more than it gives. You keep your integrity intact, sometimes by telling the truth when lying would be easier, sometimes by choosing to be alone and avoiding places of temptation rather than giving in, showing up, and getting yourself in trouble. You pay your bills, taxes, and debts, even when people who don’t do so get the same results.
And you’ve done the math. The math won’t leave you alone. Obedience costs; it keeps costing, and the receipts don’t ever come.
Mohler names the connection Hebrews is already making. The pull to avoid the cost of following Jesus and the pull to give in to sin are the same pull.12 That’s how the preacher moves from hostility to discipline without skipping a beat. He’s describing one exhaustion from two angles.
This means that your tiredness is evidence of something. Verse 8 is blunt about it. The absence of discipline is what’s truly alarming. If nothing about following Jesus has cost you anything, that’s the sentence to sit with, since it likely means you’re not really following him.
So what would change if you read the thing you’re most tired of as the place where you’re being treated like a son?
The preacher ends on a strange note.
The weariness he named in verse 3 was in the soul. The remedy he gives in verse 12 is physical.
12 Therefore, strengthen your tired hands and weakened knees…
Cockerill hears a boxer in it, hands dropped, knees buckling, and the instruction is to get the hands back up.13
Then he quotes Proverbs one last time:
13 [A]nd make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated but healed instead.
And he changes it. In Proverbs, it’s a father talking to one son, but here the preacher makes it plural.14
He’d left the first Proverbs quotation alone. Verse 5 is still my son, singular, speaking to the one exhausted person about why it hurts. But the walking he hands to the room.
The preacher makes it the responsibility of the congregation, and that’s the picture of grace a church living on mission for the gospel should paint. You may deal with the exhaustion and weariness that come with your obedience, but in God’s economy, we all support one another in doing the right thing and urge each other to do so (Heb. 10:24-25).
Your legs were never the problem. They’re just the part everyone else can see.
Theologetics is free and stays free. If you want to support the work, founding membership is $5 a month or $50 a year. Members get The Monthly, a longer piece that doesn’t go out to the main list, plus the archive of this year’s best writing sorted by topic instead of by date.
I’d like to hear from you in the comments. What’s the obedience you’re most tired of right now? Not the hardship. The obedience.
Gareth Lee Cockerill, The Epistle to the Hebrews, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 612.
Anthony T. Selvaggio, "Preaching Advice from the 'Sermon' to the Hebrews," Themelios 32, no. 2 (2007): 34.
Cockerill, Hebrews, 613.
Selvaggio, "Preaching Advice," 38-39.
Cockerill, Hebrews, 612.
R. Albert Mohler Jr., Exalting Jesus in Hebrews (Nashville: Holman, 2017), 197.
David L. Allen, Hebrews, NAC (Nashville: B&H, 2010), 580.
Thomas R. Schreiner, Hebrews, EBTC (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2021), 384n622.
Cockerill, Hebrews, 616.
William L. Lane, Hebrews: A Call to Commitment (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2004), 164.
Paul Ellingworth, "Hebrews and the Anticipation of Completion," Themelios 14, no. 1 (1988): 7.
Mohler, Exalting Jesus in Hebrews, 198.
Cockerill, Hebrews, 629.
Cockerill, Hebrews, 630n68.