Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize?  So run that you may obtain it.

It’s not always, possible, taking him out of context, in little snippets, to catch the sustained passion in Paul’s writing.  This passage comes at the end of a chapter where Paul defends, defines, lauds even , his freedom.  Defiantly he asks those who challenge his authority – wanting to question his status, to place him under the Jerusalem church:  ‘Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? ‘ And in those remarks we hear echoes of his earlier remarkable claims that all things are permitted to him; all things are lawful .

But such freedom brings its own costs and demands.  ‘For though I am free from all people – or from the law of Moses – I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more.’

It’s this tension between radical freedom from all laws, demands, controls on the one hand and the deep inner discipline which rules his life in the gospel as the slave of Christ on the other, which defines Christian existence for Paul.
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