The gospel is much more than a ticket to heaven. And if we are to continue in the way we started—if we are to NOT move on from the gospel, it means that the gospel becomes, over time, the driving force behind every part of our lives.

The world’s fastest man, for the moment, is American Noah Lyles. That’s because the title of world’s fastest man is generally attributed to the winner of the 100-meter sprint final at the Olympics, and Lyles won in the Paris games in 2024. His time was 9.79 seconds. To put that in context, it means Noah Lyle, if he were running in a school zone, he would technically be speeding.

The thing is, two people actually ran a 9.79-second time in that race in Paris. Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson got the same time, and it was only on further analysis that Noah Lyles was determined to be five one-thousandths faster. To put that in context, it means the physical margin of victory in that entire 100-meter race was roughly the width of a credit card or the thickness of an athlete’s jersey fabric as they leaned over the finish line.

There are many things you can take from that example, but for our purposes today, it points us not to the importance of the finish line, but the importance of the starting blocks. A world-class sprinter reaches one-third of their top speed within the initial five percent of the race, so the slightest error in the starting blocks makes all the difference in the world. When titles are decided by the width of a credit card, an athlete’s foot placement and explosive drive out of the blocks aren’t just technical details; they are the exact fractions of a second that separate the winner from the “also ran’s.”

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