To spiritually prosper, we must value what God values, in the order and priority with which God values it. One of the areas in which our culture disagrees with God as much as anything is the value of wisdom. Proverbs says that wisdom is worth more than gold or silver (3:13-15), but how many believers today spend more time thinking about becoming wiser than they do their retirement number?

Yet if we want to prosper and thrive in Christ, we have to stop conforming to the pattern of this age (which values money over wisdom), but be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2).

I want to spend a few weeks excerpting from The Life You Were Reborn to Live. This is from the last chapter, and since it’s the last, I haven’t had any podcasters ask me about it or bring it up much, but I believe it is crucial.

I wanted to qualify for the Boston marathon about as much as I have ever wanted to do anything in my life. When I hit my mid-forties, I figured it was time, so I lost weight; I ran speed workouts. I ran long distances, which in the Pacific Northwest sometimes meant running two hours in non-stop rain. I failed to run a fast enough qualifier in my first three attempts but finally got to the place in my fitness where I thought, I should be able to do this.

During my fourth marathon I hit mile twenty-five with sixteen minutes to spare. Sixteen minutes to run one mile (I had been averaging 7:45 miles) and I was in! I started to get dizzy—really dizzy—and non-stop pleaded with God, “Please don’t let me pass out. I’m almost there!”

I crossed the line in 3:22—8 minutes to spare—and saw my name listed on the finisher’s sheet with the coveted “BQ” (Boston Qualifier) listed next to it.

And then the race director shattered our hearts when he said, “I guarantee you that the course is 26.2 miles, but we had to make some last-minute changes to the course to accommodate road improvements. While I am one-hundred percent confident of the course’s length, we didn’t have time to get a proper legal verification, so our marathon can’t be used as a Boston qualifier this year.”

I had done the work. I had suffered the pain. I had run the race. But it was all for naught because I ran the wrong course. Fortunately, I repeated the effort in the Seattle marathon a few months later and qualified that way, but what if I hadn’t? I invested so much effort and time and endured a lot of pain, but if you don’t run a verified course, none of that matters to the Boston officials.

What life goals have you given much effort, energy and attention to? A certain kind of family? A certain academic or vocational achievement? What if, at the end of your life, you find out that you ran the “wrong” race? You neglected to run the course that counted, that really mattered?

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