A brief excerpt from an excellent post at the "Ray Steadman.org - authentic Chrisitanity" webiste that can be read in its entirety at:
Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain in it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air; but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:24-27 RSV)
Sooner or later every one of us has to ask the question, "What am I here for anyhow? Through the normal, natural processes of procreation, why did I appear on the earth here in this scene, in this part of the world, at this time in history?" And, of course, the answer from the Bible is, God intends to use you. He wants you. He made you. He designed you with all the peculiar abilities you have and the unique talents and gifts he has given you that he might use you and that you might be useful and pleasing to him.
Now in this figure of a race that Paul uses, it is obvious you cannot do that if there is no self-discipline. There is always something about life that tends to derail you if you let it. There are temptations to turn aside, to give up, to rest on your laurels, to sit back and let life go on and enjoy yourself. But that will sabotage your Christian effectiveness. That is what Paul is talking about. Let me share these words from Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, speaking on the passage in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says we are to "hunger and thirst after righteousness":
People who really want something always give some evidence of that fact. People who really desire something with the whole of their being do not sit down passively waiting for it to come. And that applies to us in this matter. There are certain things in this life that are patently opposed to God and his righteousness. There is no question about that at all. We know they are bad; we know they are harmful; we know they are sinful. I say that to hunger and thirst after righteousness means avoiding such things just as we would avoid the very plague itself. If we know there is an infection in a house, we avoid the house. We segregate the patient who has a fever because it is infectious, and obviously we avoid such persons. The same is true in the spiritual realm. But it does not stop at that. I suggest that if we are truly hungering and thirsting after righteousness, we shall even avoid things that tend to dull or take the edge off our spiritual appetites. There are so many things like that, things that are quite harmless in themselves and which are perfectly legitimate. Yet if you find that you are spending too much of your time with them and that you desire the things of God less, you must avoid them. That is a common sense argument.
That, basically, is what Paul is saying. He is saying in his own life he did that. He limited his indulgences. He refused to give way to intemperance or to be lazy. He gave himself to what God wanted him to do. He worked at it and took time in planning in order to accomplish it.
All this is built around the figure of an athletic contest -- a race. This was a familiar thing to these believers in Corinth. Every three years the Isthmian Games (very much like the Olympic Games we are familiar with, which were also held in Greece), were held right outside the city. If you go to Corinth you can still see the areas where the races were run. The starting blocks where the athletes started out the races are still embedded in the stones. Paul is using this figure, because, to him, life is a race like that.
These Corinthians knew that every athlete who participated in the races had to take an oath that they had been training for 10 months, and that they had given up certain delightful foods in their diet to enable them to endure the race. They had subjected themselves to rather rigorous discipline in order to win. Paul says all that they are winning is just a fading, pine wreath, but, in the race we are running, the prize, the wreath, is an imperishable one.
He sees life this way. It's aim, as Paul understood it, is that we are here to run the race of life in order to be a useful and a pleasing instrument of God, to be used whenever and wherever he wants to use us. That is Paul's objective. When he woke up in the morning that is what was first in his thoughts; that is what set the tone of his day. He was ready to give up certain indulgences, if necessary, which were perfectly all right and proper for him at a given time. If they interfered with his objective to be what God wanted him to be, Paul said he would be happy to give them up. For him the great objective was to win the prize, which was the sense of delight that he was being used by God.
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