The Olympics are with us and this afternoon Usain Bolt of Jamaica has won Gold in the 100 metres! He didn’t just win by a huge margin in that short race and break the world record, but he even started celebrating several strides short of the finish line! What a race and what an athlete!

I don’t know whether you take much interest in the Olympics, but let me tell you why I’ve found myself thinking back to the Munich games. It has nothing to do with sport, but I was in Germany that August, and you could not fail to know the games were on! I was an atheist, and cynical in my outlook, but all of a sudden I found myself hit with guilt over various events in my life. I tried to shake this off by telling myself that there was no such thing as right or wrong, but it didn’t work. Watching the Olympics on TV didn’t distract me, the friends I had been with had had to leave, and so I headed back home.

Someone mentioned God in a conversation in a way that made me realise that God was a reality for them. I began to wonder if it was valid to deny something that was a reality to someone else just because it was unreal to you. My atheism suddenly seemed much less well founded. At the same time my life seemed both pointless and difficult. I decided on a direct approach to God - if indeed there was a God. “If you are real,” I prayed, “and if you make yourself real to me, then I promise I will go your way.” With amazing arrogance I said to myself that after a week I could conclude there was no god. (How merciful God is!)

One morning about a week later I woke up and just knew there was a God who had created everything, including me. It was undeniable. It was as though I had been seeing the world in black and white and someone had turned on the colour. That much was wonderful, but with that was a vivid awareness that I had sinned against this God and there was no place to hide. My prayers for pardon seemed to bring no response - and you can scarcely imagine how hard that was to live with - but I tried to keep my side of my “bargain” with God as best I knew how.

Over the next six months various people tried to tell me about God’s way of rescuing sinful people through Jesus Christ, but I could not see what they meant. Then at a gathering in Birmingham it came home to me that Jesus Christ was alive. Then I found myself wondering why this guiltless Lord had been crucified. Could it have been for me whose guilt was undeniable? The idea seemed too good to be true, but Jesus Christ was now in the centre, where before he had been of secondary importance in my outlook. I had told God I would go his way, and even if I was less than certain of the truth of this “good news”, what could I do but ask this Jesus to take away my sins, to fill me with his Spirit, and to make me his own? And in his own marvellous way over the next twenty-four hours he let me know that he was indeed the Lord of all, that he had heard my prayer, that he had made me clean from head to toe, and that somehow I was ‘in him’.

The next evening I was standing in the corridor of a crowded carriage on a train for London. I was jammed up against a total stranger and I found myself telling this guy that I had just discovered that Christianity was true and that Jesus Christ was alive and could really take away guilt and make you a new person. Had he ever heard the like of that? “Funnily enough” he said, “we were in Munich last year at the Olympics when some young American kids told us just what you’ve told me.” ... The Olympics again!

So the coverage of the Beijing Olympics has been reminding me very personally how God is able to bring sinful, messed up people back into relationship with himself. God wants to make us new people through Jesus Christ. He calls us to turn back to him and to put our faith in Jesus who died for our sins and rose from the dead. In chapter twelve of the book of Hebrews in the bible we find Christians urged to live their lives like runners in a race. We are to keep our eyes fixed in faith on Jesus and not give up. Jesus has already won the race for us and is able to bring us through to a resurrection like his in the age to come. We see Olympic athletes single-mindedly pressing on in hope of medals. Jesus promises something infinitely greater to those who follow him. Keep pressing on with all your faith in him!

August 2008.