(From my ghost-writing in The Fight of Your Life.) The world’s most famous steam locomotive was an engine built in 1923, and bore the name “The Flying Scotsman.” It was the first train engine to clock at 100 miles per hour, an amazing speed in that day. So, when a speedy missionary named Eric Liddell was decorated one of the fastest men in the world a year later, this steam locomotive shared its name with the athlete. Eric’s life was made more widely known to audiences in America through the 1981 movie, Chariots of Fire.
Eric had the most unorthodox running style ever seen in an Olympic race. With his head thrown back, his mouth wide open and his arms flailing at his side, he was such a gaudy sight, that serious athletes from other countries would laugh at their first sight of this speedster on a race track. One British newspaper stated that he was the ugliest runner to ever win Olympic Gold.
The most famous line from the movie was when Eric’s sister, Jenny, begged him to give up his athletics to return with the family to their mission work in China. Eric said to her,
“God also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure. “
Actually, in real life Eric never said this. The line was put into the script by the screenwriter; however, it has been the most favored quote from the movie. Perhaps it is because it is not at all an inaccurate description of the passion of his life. This statement reveals three acknowledgements about the grace of God in Eric’s life.
First, Eric ran because he sensed it was his identity. Though Missionary was his vocation, Runner was who he was born to be.
Second, Eric Liddell had been blessed with a God-given power. Though he certainly prepared for the Olympics, his speed was not the result of exhaustive training. It was a physical blessing from God, and he expressed it as a gift from God, no matter how unorthodox or ugly.
Third, the statement reveals Eric’s strategy for his life. He didn’t run out of a sense of obligation nor condemn himself if he came in second. Instead, he ran as if Christ Himself were running in him. The movie captured this relationship in his face, for during a race he would start with a fierce determination in his eyes that eventually yielded itself to a smile as he slid into overdrive and headed to the finish line.
Eric Liddell is an illustration of the grace of God for our lives. We overcome our enslaving strongholds in the same grace that Eric Liddell ran his way to Olympic gold. We do it by three gifts of grace: the Identity, the Power and the Strategy of Grace.
First, grace has granted us a new identity. Christ is our life (Col 3:4). When we came to Christ, we came to a cross, and we died in Him. We came to a death in our spirit. Therefore, as spirit-beings, we no longer live, but Christ lives in our spirit (I Cor 6:17). His life, in place of ours, is our new Identity.
Second, if you think you are going to fiercely determine to strong-arm your stubborn sin problem away, it will not happen. We do not fight by re-committing to self-discipline. We overcome our strongholds the same way we were saved, by grace through faith. Grace is the invisible, supernatural power of God that influences and transforms our hearts, and is then reflected in our lives.
Third, the Law exposes but Grace delivers. The Law doesn’t help me with my sin. It only points out my sin, and then condemns me. The Law does not make me stronger. It only makes me discouraged and defeated. Grace is God’s strategy to deliver me from sin. Grace trains me where the Law fails to change me (Titus 2:12).
As long as you continue to have a wrong perception of WHO you are in Christ . . . and as long as you trust in your own strength of self-discipline . . . and as long as you read the New Testament as law and say, “This is what I must do for God today,” then Satan and your flesh will keep you bound in a life of defeat.
Oh, that we might know the Identity, the Power and the Strategy of Grace. For then we would make a change at the level of Identity.