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This year is the 100th anniversary of Eric Liddell’s 1924 gold medal performance in the Paris Olympics, later memorialized in the 1981 Academy Award winning movie, Chariots of Fire.
There are a number of memorable lines in the movie but none better than when Liddell is explaining to his sister why he must temporarily put off the mission field to participate in the olympics:
God made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.
Chariots of Fire (1981)
The thing is, apparently Eric Liddell never said this. These are the words of screenwriter Colin Welland. There’s not much about Welland’s religious beliefs on the internet. He was married though for 53 years before his death from Alzheimers, which is a good indication of something more at his core than secular humanism.
Still, I believe the line above was truly inspired by the Holy Spirit. It captures better than just about any single statement I have heard two components of God-inspired work.
The first is the teleological component: “God made me fast.” It’s unstated implication is inescapable: “Therefore He made me to run.” It was the implicit argument in what Liddell (fictionally) says to his sister in Chariots of Fire to explain why he should run, and it is a sound one.
Continue reading “On Feeling God’s Pleasure”