Walking Blameless When the Promise is Barren
You know that mile. The one where the road stretches out into a gray ribbon and your lungs start to burn with a familiar fire. Your legs feel like lead, every stride a negotiation with gravity, and a little voice inside your head starts its litany of doubt. Why are you doing this? What's the point? It's just another mile on another day, and nothing feels different, nothing feels changed. This is the loneliness of the long-distance runner, and it's also the loneliness of a long-haul faith, those seasons where you've been putting one foot in front of the other for years, praying the same prayers, walking in obedience, and the promised land still looks like a desert. You feel the ache not just in your muscles, but deep in your spirit, a soul-level barrenness that questions the very purpose of the race.
Luke opens his gospel with a portrait of this very ache, introducing us to a priest named Zacharias and his wife, Elisabeth. And the Spirit is careful, through Luke, to give us their spiritual resume right up front. They weren't spiritual slackers. They weren't cutting corners. The Word says, “they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.” They were the real deal. They kept the pace, year after year, decade after decade. But notice the brutal conjunction that follows this commendation: “And they had no child, because that Elisabeth was barren, and they both were now well stricken in years.” Their obedience was perfect, but their reality was painful. Their faithfulness was blameless, but their arms were empty. This isn't a story about God withholding a blessing because of sin; it's a story that forces us to wrestle with a God whose timing and purposes are so much higher and stranger than our own.
And here’s the thing. Right before he tells us their story, Luke tells his friend Theophilus *why* he’s writing it all down. He says he had a “perfect understanding of all things from the very first,” and he’s writing it in order, “That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.” That word, certainty, is the solid ground beneath the runner’s feet. Our confidence in this race isn't based on whether we get the thing we’re praying for today, or tomorrow, or even in this lifetime. Our confidence is anchored in the ordered, declared, eyewitness testimony of God’s faithfulness throughout history. Zacharias and Elisabeth’s long, barren walk was just one chapter in a much larger, absolutely certain story that God was writing, a story that proves His promises are always good, even when our personal circumstances feel like they’re not.
And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless. And they had no child, because that Elisabeth was barren, and they both were now well stricken in years.— Luke 1:6-7, KJV
Running Your Course, Not Earning Your Crown
Any serious runner gets obsessed with the numbers. We track our pace, our heart rate zones, our weekly mileage, our personal records. It’s a world of performance metrics, a constant striving to be better, faster, stronger than we were before. And if we’re not careful, we drag that same exhausting mentality right into our walk with God. We start tracking our spiritual performance. Am I reading enough chapters? Is my prayer time long enough? Did I serve enough this week? We turn faith into a grinding effort to be righteous enough, to prove our worth, to earn the prize. But that kind of religion always breaks under the pressure of real life, because you can never perform well enough to silence the accuser or to fill the void of your own barrenness. You end up exhausted, convinced you’re failing, because you’re running a race you were never meant to run: the race for your own justification.
But look at Zacharias. He’s in the temple, not because he was the most holy priest that week or because he’d clocked the most hours in the Torah. He was there simply because it was his turn. The scripture says he was there to execute his “priest’s office before God in the order of his course.” He wasn’t running to earn God’s attention or to twist His arm into giving him a son; he was simply showing up for his assigned leg of the relay. This is the beautiful release of the Gospel. You’re not running *for* God’s acceptance; you are running *from* it. You’ve already been accepted in the Beloved. Christ ran the qualifying heat for you, and He didn't just qualify, He won the whole thing. Now, your job is simply to run your course, to be faithful in the small, daily assignments He gives you, not out of a desperate need to perform, but out of a deep and settled love for the one who has already given you the victor's crown.
The text tells us that his specific duty, chosen by lot, was to “burn incense when he went into the temple of the Lord.” This wasn't a task he earned through merit; it was a grace he received by chance, by the sovereign ordering of God. And that incense, my friends, represents the prayers of God’s people ascending to the throne. Think of the profound beauty in that. Here is a man with a deep, unanswered prayer of his own, a man living with decades of disappointment, and his God-given task is to be the vessel for the prayers of others. He is called to minister from his own place of profound lack. This is the upside-down kingdom. God doesn't wait for you to have it all together before He uses you. He meets you right there, in the middle of your barrenness, and invites you to serve from that very place of weakness, so that His strength, not yours, gets all the glory.
And it came to pass, that while he executed the priest’s office before God in the order of his course, According to the custom of the priest’s office, his lot was to burn incense when he went into the temple of the Lord.— Luke 1:8-9, KJV
What You See From the Trail
When you're out on a long run, your gaze matters. If you stare at your feet the whole time, you’ll miss the sunrise, but you also might trip over a root you never saw coming. If you stare too much at the steep hill in the distance, you’ll get discouraged before you even begin. We do the same thing in our spiritual lives. We get so fixated on our own stumbling feet, our repeated sins, our lack of progress, that we forget to look up. Or we get so overwhelmed by the mountain of troubles ahead—the bills, the diagnosis, the broken relationship—that we lose all hope. Our daily life is the trail we run, and it's often messy, rocky, and uneven. But Christ offers us a completely different place to fix our gaze, a sight that changes everything about the path we're on.
This is the stunning promise Jesus makes to Nathanael, and by extension, to every one of us who follows Him. He looks at this new disciple and says, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open.” He doesn’t say, “If you run hard enough, you might one day push heaven open.” He says that from this moment on, because of Him, you will *see* it open. This isn't a future reward for a race well run; it is a present reality for all who are in the Son. The work is finished. The veil is torn. The sky is ripped open, and the barrier between God and man has been permanently demolished by the cross. You don’t have to run toward an angry God hoping to appease Him. You get to run with a loving Father, under an open heaven, with full and constant access to His grace.
And what do we see through this open heaven? We see “the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” Jesus is invoking the image of Jacob’s ladder, the dream of a connection point between the earthly and the divine. He is declaring, “I am that ladder. I am the bridge. I am the only way.” All the communication, all the help, all the grace, all the mercy that flows from the throne of God to you, and all your prayers, your worship, your cries for help that flow from you to God, they all travel upon the person of Jesus Christ. So when you're on that long, wearying run of life, feeling utterly alone and cut off, you must remember this. You are not alone. You are standing on the very spot where heaven touches earth. You are in communion with the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit, right now.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.— John 1:51, KJV
The Certainty Under Your Feet
So we bring it all home. We have to build our house on the rock, not on the sand. Luke began his entire gospel with a declaration of his purpose: to lay out the evidence in an orderly way so that we could have certainty. This faith we profess is not a flimsy hope based on feelings or a motivational speech we give ourselves on the hard days. It is a rugged, unshakeable confidence built upon the bedrock of historical, verifiable, eyewitness testimony to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Word of God is the solid track beneath your feet. It doesn't shift when you get tired. It doesn't crumble when you stumble. The promises are true whether you feel them or not. Your run might feel chaotic, but the course was laid out with perfect understanding by the God who sees the end from the beginning.
The temptation, every single day, will be to abandon this certainty. The enemy of your soul will whisper that your barrenness is proof of God's absence, that your weariness is a sign of your failure, that the heavens are brass and your prayers are bouncing off the ceiling. He will tempt you to return to the exhausting treadmill of religious performance, to start measuring your worth by your spiritual mileage again. Do not listen. To go back to that is to trade the open sky of grace for the suffocating confines of a law that can only condemn. It’s to willingly put back on the chains of guilt after Christ has already run the race to set you free. Don't trade the certainty of the Gospel for the anxiety of your own effort.
It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.— Luke 1:3-4, KJV
So, my friend, when you lace up your shoes tomorrow, whether for a literal run or just for the marathon of another day, remember this. You are not running to earn a love that is already lavishly yours. You are not running toward a distant, closed-off God. You are running, walking, and sometimes crawling under an open heaven, upon the solid ground of His certain promises. The weariness you feel is real, but the presence of the living Christ is infinitely realer. He is the path, He is the prize, and He is your companion for every single stride. So breathe deep the air of His grace, fix your eyes on Him, and just take the next faithful step. He’s already at the finish line, and He’s also right here with you now.