The Apostle employs a very graphic word here, which is only very
partially expressed by that 'reaching forth.' It contains a condensed
picture which it is scarcely possible to put into any one expression.
'Reaching out over' is the full though clumsy rendering of the word, and
it gives us the picture of the runner with his whole body thrown
forward, his hand extended, and his eye reaching even further than his
hand, in eager anticipation of the mark and the prize. So we are to
live, with continual reaching out of confidence, clear recognition, and
eager desire to make our own the unattained.
What is that which gives an element of nobleness to the lives of great
idealists, whether they be poets, artists, students, thinkers, or what
not? Only this, that they see the unattained burning ever so clearly
before them that all the attained seems as nothing in their eyes. And
so life is saved from commonplace, is happily stung into fresh effort,
is redeemed from flagging, monotony, and weariness.
The measure of our attainments may be fairly estimated by the extent to
which the unattained is clear in our sight. A man down in the valley
sees the nearer shoulder of the hill, and he thinks it the top. The man
up on the shoulder sees all the heights that lie beyond rising above
him. Endeavour is better than success. It is more to see the Alpine
heights unscaled than it is to have risen so far as we have done. They
who thus have a boundless future before them have an endless source of
inspiration, of energy, of buoyancy granted to them.
No man has such an absolutely boundless vision of the future which may
be his as we have, if we are Christian people, as we ought to be. We
only can thus look forward. For all others a blank wall stretches at the
end of life, against which hopes, when they strike, fall back stunned
and dead. But for us the wall may be overleaped, and, living by the
energy of a boundless hope, we, and only we, can lay ourselves down to
die, and say then, 'Reaching forth unto the things that are before.'
So, dear friends, make God's aim your aim; concentrate your life's
efforts upon it; pursue it with a wise forgetfulness; pursue it with an
eager confidence of anticipation that shall not be put to shame.
Remember that God reaches His aim for you by giving to you Jesus Christ,
and that you can only reach it by accepting the Christ who is given and
being found in Him. Then the years will take away nothing from us which
it is not gain to lose. They will neither weaken our energy nor flatten
our hopes, nor dim our confidence, and, at the last we shall reach the
mark, and, as we touch it, we shall find dropping on our surprised and
humble heads the crown of life which they receive who have so run, not
as uncertainly, but doing this one thing, pressing towards the mark for
the prize.