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The Race of Faith: Understanding the Exchange Zone
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The book of Hebrews chapter 12 begins with a powerful image: "Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith."
To understand this passage, we need to look backward to Hebrews chapter 11—what Bible scholars have historically called the Hall of Faith. It's the scripture's gallery of the "OGs, the real ones." Beginning with Abel from Genesis and continuing through sixteen consecutive stories, we see people who walked by faith. By faith they conquered kingdoms, cracked open seas, shut the mouths of lions, and overturned the world. Yet some were thrown to the lions, sawn in two, and went to their graves. Hebrews tells us they awaited a day when all together—past and present—would rise to see Jesus and receive the inheritance they looked forward to by faith.
You are now caught up in the same race those sixteen people were running.
When you first become a Christian, the dominant analogy in the New Testament for the Christian life is a race. But most of us begin thinking of it as a sprint. You become a Christian with intense energy: "I want to get in the word. I want to know God. I want to be used on mission. I want my life to count for something that matters in eternity." You hurl yourself into the Christian life with burst after burst of energy.
But here's the problem with sprints: energy evaporates.
So a well-meaning discipleship-oriented Christian comes along and says, "Hey, the Christian life is not a sprint. It's a marathon."
A marathon is about rhythms and habits, not fast-twitch muscle response. You win a marathon by putting one foot in front of the other, mile after mile, 26.2 miles total. The question becomes: Can you be in the word day after day, morning by morning? Can you gather with the people of God with your family week after week, month after month, decade after decade?
That's how you win a marathon.
But here's the issue—and here's where Hebrews pushes against this thinking: both the sprint and the marathon assume the Christian life is primarily about the individual. We live in an extremely individualistic society. We think about me, me, me; I, I, I. We take selfies, not "you-ies." We don't think about families and generations.
But Hebrews 11 and 12 point to something entirely different.
The Christian life is not primarily a sprint, and it's not primarily a marathon. It's primarily a relay race.
If a sprint is about energy and a marathon is about rhythms, then a relay race is about the baton pass. Everything comes down to one tiny spot in the race called the exchange zone. Runners are typically in the exchange zone for about 1.9 seconds, and everything—everything—depends on who can perform in that zone.
Years ago at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, the American men's 4 by 100 relay team had three of the top ten fastest runners in the world on the same team. It was supposed to be a done deal. But we didn't win. We may not have even placed.
Here's why: it doesn't matter who has the fastest runners. The question is, who can pass the baton the best? In the exchange zone, something went wrong. The baton was dropped. Because the baton dropped, we lost the race.
This is what Hebrews is saying to us: You are positioned right now. The Bible says it is appointed unto man once to die, and then comes judgment. James says, "What is your life? You are like a mist, a vapor, a breath that disappears on a crisp fall morning."
God has plucked you out of eternity. He has positioned you in time. He has proportioned your gifts, your talents, and your resources. He has planted you in this house, in this church, for a span of years—maybe eighty if you're blessed. And then it will be gone before you know it.
Now you've got the baton. God is saying, "Tag, church, you're it." The question is: How will we run our race in the exchange zone? Will we pass the gospel baton from our generation to the next generation?
Listen to this: The gospel is always one generation away from extinction. If one generation does not pass it to the next, it dies.
Do you understand this? Does this make sense?
Let me speak to those of you under thirty-five years old. You are our best chance. You are our best chance.
What I'm going to beg you to do for the next few minutes is elevate your vision for your life. Elevate your vision.
When you read the Bible and church history—which is family history—you notice that God typically works through two things: the ordinary operations of the Spirit and the extraordinary operations of the Spirit.
The ordinary operations happen when the church does what we ordinarily do: preaching the word, discipling people, helping the poor. In these ordinary ways, the gospel advances, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. That's awesome.
But then there are moments in church history where the Holy Spirit works through what are called the extraordinary operations of the Spirit—what some call revivals or spiritual awakenings. Here's what I know: sometimes God will do more in a year than man with all his organizing can do in fifty years. God will just downpour an outpouring of the Spirit that catches people up.
Our nation has had four of these moments. The first was called the First Great Awakening, happening around 1730 to 1740. Two men led it: Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield. Here's a fun fact from your history books: in 1730-1740, the most famous George W in America was not George Washington—it was George Whitfield. He was a weird-looking, overweight, cross-eyed preacher who wandered into fields and preached to sometimes sixty thousand people in open-air meetings. He was a total preacher stud.
Then there was Jonathan Edwards, the guy who wrote Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
Jonathan Edwards walked into a church in Connecticut and read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God with his back to the congregation—not to manipulate people with his voice, but to let the word of God stand alone. As he read it, an extraordinary operation of the Spirit fell on that church. Such a sense of the presence of God descended that people gripped the backs of the pews, fearful they would fall into hell as conviction of sin, the reality of God's wrath, and the grace of God overwhelmed them.
This outpouring metastasized across America. Our nation could never have been born as it was—it was born out of the First Great Awakening, this massive outpouring of the Spirit.
The First Great Awakening gave us Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield. Here's a fun fact: in 1730-1740, the most famous George W in America was not George Washington—it was George Whitfield. A weird-looking, overweight, cross-eyed preacher, he would wander into fields and preach to sometimes sixty thousand people in open-air meetings. He was a total preacher.
The primary voice was Charles Finney, alongside a man named Father Nash. Father Nash was the prayer warrior. Charles Finney would send him into cities a month before he went to preach, asking him to pray for the worst lost people in the city. There are stories of him praying with such vigor that he would get nosebleeds while interceding for unconverted sinners.
Charles Finney walked out into the middle of nowhere in rural Rochester, New York, and preached a series of sermons for about a month. One hundred thousand people started streaming to this little church. One hundred thousand people were saved—a massive outpouring of God's Spirit spanning sixty years. Millions of people in our nation were swept into the kingdom of God, changing the trajectory of the entire nation.
The primary voice was D.L. Moody, an uneducated shoe salesman. He was saved at eighteen years old and started preaching in a little church. Two elderly women, senior saints and prayer warriors, grabbed him after he preached and said, "Hey, we're praying for you to have a radical encounter with the Spirit."
He replied, "I don't know what you're talking about."
They said, "Well, just wait, you will."
Within a month, he was walking by a church and had an encounter with the Spirit so radical that later in his life he never talked about it. He only said, "What happened to me was so powerful that I had to ask God to stay his hand because I thought I was going to die." Just a radical outpouring of the love of the Father—both in North America and Great Britain, massive outpourings of God's Spirit. Changes swept across the nation.
The fourth one featured Billy Graham and Chuck Smith. This was the Jesus movement, the Jesus revolution. In 1966, faith in our nation was in such decline that the cover of Time magazine asked in bold letters: Is God dead?
Then Chuck Smith opened his Bible in California and started preaching verse by verse, exegetical Bible teaching through the Scripture. Unshowered, drug-addled hippies with no shoes started streaming into this church. God poured out his Spirit in such a radical measure that millions of college students across America were saved. In 1966, Time magazine asked, "Is God dead?" Five years later, the cover read: JESUS REVOLUTION.
The whole thing culminated right here in Dallas, Texas, with eighty thousand Christian college students and young adults gathered at Expo '72 at the Cotton Bowl. To this day, that is still the largest gathering of Christian college students in the history of our nation. If you look at the pictures, you see college students holding up one finger in the air because across the nation, what was sweeping college campuses was not woke pagan secularism—it was college students holding up a finger saying, "Jesus is the one way. He's the way, the truth, and the life. Nobody comes to the Father except through him."
Here's what I want you to notice. From the First Great Awakening to the Second Great Awakening: fifty years. From the Second to the Third: fifty years. From the Third to the Fourth: fifty years. If you take 1975 plus fifty years, you get 2025.
Right now, we're seeing tremors of something spiritually happening in our nation. Look at these statistics: Bible sales are up 41.6% since 2022. Religious app downloads are up 79.5% since 2019. Contemporary Christian music streams are up 50% since 2019. Gen Z and millennials are now the largest church attenders in America.
Everybody screams at Gen Z: "You're lazy, entitled, narcissistic, purposeless, video game addicted, porn addled, a waste of time." That's all anybody's been yelling at you.
Listen to me: That's not your destiny. That's not your destiny.
Here's how I know. Look at every awakening. When Jonathan Edwards started preaching in the First Great Awakening, he was thirty. George Whitfield was twenty-five. Charles Finney was twenty-nine when he preached in Rochester. D.L. Moody started preaching at eighteen and was leading worldwide revival when he was twenty-four. Billy Graham started preaching when he was eighteen years old. The Jesus movement? Wall-to-wall hippies in their teens and twenties.
If you raised your hand earlier, these are not the years to spend your life drinking and playing Xbox and watching porn and scrolling TikTok three hours a day. These are the years to consecrate yourself for the purposes of God. THIS IS RIGHT NOW, MAN. You're our best chance.
Let me ask you a question. When I was sixteen years old, somebody asked me this, and I am doing right now what my answer to that question was. Here it is:
What would you attempt with your life if you knew that God was with you and you could not fail?
What you need is a God-glorifying vision for how you can spend your life for something that actually matters. Then go out and attack it with a ferocity previously unknown to mankind, knowing that the wind of the Spirit is at your back.
Now let me speak to those of us over thirty-five. We have a job to do.
Let me read you what might be the saddest verse in the Bible. It's from the book of Judges:
The people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work the Lord had done for Israel. And Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110... And all that generation were also gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.
Think about what that generation saw. They watched their fathers slaughter spotless lambs and smear the blood on the doorpost. With their own eyes, they watched the angel of death pass in front of every place where the blood of an innocent lamb had been spilled. They watched Moses hold a stick in the air and God crack open an ocean. With their own feet, they walked through on dry ground. They saw the manna in the wilderness. They saw the Jordan River split open. They saw the walls of Jericho fall. They started as slaves and ended in possession of a promised land.
But here's what they did: They had the baton and they dropped it. They did not pass the knowledge of who God was or his works to the next generation. As a result, that generation spiraled into godlessness and opposition to God throughout the entire book of Judges.
Listen, we have amazing things happening. We have people sitting on stairs just to hear the Bible preached. We may baptize towards three thousand people this year. The digital reach from Lakepointe—by the end of the year, like six hundred million person reach on Bible teaching via digital. Insane things are happening.
But listen: If we drop the baton, that next generation arises who will know nothing of the Lord.
Hebrews 11, the Hall of Faith, devotes almost half its word count to three men: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. A grandfather, a father, and a son. Why? Because throughout the book of Genesis, a phrase serves as the spine: "These are the generations of." It appears ten times, culminating with "These are the generations of Jacob."
The point of Genesis is generations. When God wants to generate something, his plan is to do it through generations. This is the point.
We're doing the opposite in our nation right now. We're breaking down men, then trying to get the government to do what fathers are supposed to do. The government says, "We'll provide for you, we'll protect you, we'll educate you, we'll decide right and wrong for you." We don't need that. We need less government. We need more godly fathers. That's what we need.
With Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we see something beautiful: Abraham was the first believer in his family. His father was a pagan who worshiped false gods. He received a bad baton.
Abraham was a blessed mess. He was a chronic liar. He had three wives. He lied about his wife being his sister. Jerry Springer stuff. But he was the first believer in his family, so he at least handed a baton of faith to his son Isaac.
If your life is a mess, listen: You're the first believer in your family tree, and your entire lineage will be different because you chose to bend your knee to the lordship of Jesus. You're going to hand a different baton than you received.
Because Abraham did that, here's what happens: Abraham's ceiling becomes his son's floor. Isaac takes the baton from where his dad was and runs farther and goes faster. Isaac was like his dad in waiting on God's promises, but instead of taking another wife and having an affair like Abraham, he prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife. He had one wife his whole life. He was faithful. He was a believer and a man of prayer. His dad's ceiling became his floor, and he moved on.
After Isaac comes Jacob. In Genesis 25, when the time came for his mother to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb. The first to come out was red, and his whole body was like a hairy garment. They named him Esau. But what's interesting is that archaeology continues to confirm what theology was always saying. They dug up evidence that confirmed Esau had existed.
Jacob does better than Isaac. He walks with intimacy with God and becomes the one who births the 12 tribes of Israel. God gives him the name Israel—that's where it all comes from. Jacob becomes a nation.
Watch what happens: because the baton was passed from Abraham to Isaac, from Isaac to Jacob, each generation's ceiling became the next generation's floor. And that is the opportunity that we have.
Every week when I stand on this stage preaching, there are actually three men preaching to you: Jerry Howerton, Rick Howerton, and Josh Howerton.
My Papaw Jerry was born in abject poverty in the Ozark Mountains, son of an egg farmer. He didn't always have a house and grew up for part of his life sleeping in somebody else's garage. It was a rough life.
But somewhere along the way, when he was a teenager, he bent his knee to the lordship of Jesus, and Jesus began to change Jerry Howerton's life. He found a cute little girl who loved Jesus and married Doris Howerton. Because he bent his knee to the lordship of Jesus, he was faithful to one woman his entire life. He worked hard—was a truck driver for part of his life, worked himself into three heart attacks and spinal stenosis. He was the kind of guy who knew how to swing a hammer.
Later in his life, Jerry's goal was to be the first Howerton to graduate college. At 50 years old, he achieved that goal. He got a Bible degree and became a country preacher in little country churches in Missouri and Kentucky, all over the place. He never pastored a church of more than 200 people.
But because he bent his knee to the lordship of Jesus, his ceiling became his son's floor. He passed a different baton to his son than he got handed.
My dad, Rick (though people call him Rick, his real name is Ricky), is probably the best man I've ever met. My dad has a spirit of Barnabas in him—you can't be within 100 feet of my dad without being encouraged in the Lord and given strength and courage.
Because Jerry passed him a different baton, my dad grew up around the word of God, grew up with the worship of God, hearing the things of God. He went to Bible college, found a cute girl who loved Jesus when he was in college, and married my mom, Julie, one of the greatest women you're ever going to meet.
My dad took Papaw's baton and also became a pastor. He planted a church in Nashville. I was the second pastor of that church. He literally handed me his baton—his ceiling became my floor. I pastored that church for 10 years.
Then came December 2018. I stood on this stage and Pastor Steve Stroup announced that I was going to be the next pastor of Lake Pointe Church. People all over the country were like, "Josh? Who? Wait, the Josh Howerton?" I was 34 or 35 years old at the time, and people were surprised. Usually a church this size looks for somebody who's 50-ish.
But here's the thing: when I was 34, 35 years old, I didn't have 10 years of experience pastoring a church. I had 80 years of experience pastoring a church loaded into me by Jerry Howerton, Rick Howerton, and Josh Howerton. In three generations in my family, one man's ceiling became the next generation's floor.
For every man and woman of God, for every father and mother, for every spiritual father and spiritual mother, we have a job to do: pass a baton to the next generation so that they go farther and do better than we were able to do. They will swing axes for the kingdom of God long after all of us are hugging Jesus. That's our job.
We're all in on that at Lake Pointe—in families and spiritual families. You don't know it, but you're actually doing significant things to make that happen in the students at Lake Pointe Church.
There's a young woman named Sammy from Mesquite, Texas. Growing up, she didn't really know Jesus, and that made it a really difficult faith journey. She just didn't believe there was a way she could be forgiven.
One of her friends, Maya, invited her to church after Sammy reached out about struggling with self-image and self-harm. Sammy walked into church and saw people her age lifting their hands, worshipping God. She thought, "I want to live like these people. I don't want to be stuck in my sin. I want to be able to hear what God has to say to me."
During a service, Sammy felt a calling. She recognized: "I am broken and I am in need of a savior." She raised her hand and committed her life to Christ. Her whole life changed after that.
She became aware of financial concerns at a young age—her family couldn't afford camp that year. But through scholarships and the willingness of others to give, her insecurity was flipped over. When people give so willingly, it teaches you so much about their heart and their willingness to serve God.
Jesus really has transformed Sammy inside and then out. And that's what happens when we pass the baton—when spiritual mothers and fathers believe in and disciple the next generation. They go farther. They do better. They change the world.
