Commitment is easy to promise and hard to keep. Jesus warned that "no one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62), and Paul at the end of his life could say, "I have finished the race" (2 Timothy 4:7). Finishing is the hard part.
These five stories about commitment, retold in our own words, come from an Olympic stadium, a philosopher's parable, a Russian execution ground, a film set in the Canadian winter and a courtroom in apartheid South Africa. Each ends with a takeaway you can use in a sermon, a youth talk or your own reflection.
Stories in this post:
- "They Sent Me to Finish": John Stephen Akhwari, Mexico City 1968
- Water Pistols: A Parable About Token Commitment
- A Fresh Start: Dostoevsky Before the Firing Squad
- Black Robe: Bruce Beresford and a Missionary's Obsession
- "An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die": Nelson Mandela at Rivonia
"They Sent Me to Finish": John Stephen Akhwari, Mexico City 1968
The 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. The marathon is one of the last events, and the stadium is packed when the winner, Mamo Wolde of Ethiopia, runs in and crosses the line to a roar from the crowd.
Far behind him, out on the course, is John Stephen Akhwari of Tanzania. The thin air of Mexico City has given him cramps, and at about the 19 kilometre mark, as runners jostle for position, he is knocked down. He dislocates his knee and badly hurts his shoulder. Medical staff patch him up and urge him to stop. He refuses.
With his knee bandaged and bleeding, Akhwari gets up and keeps going, half running and half hobbling the remaining kilometres. By the time he finally reaches the stadium, more than an hour after the winner, the sun has set and most of the crowd has gone home. The few thousand people who are left watch a lone figure limp around the track, step after painful step, until he crosses the finish line, the last man to complete the race.
Afterwards a reporter asked him the obvious question. Why didn't you drop out? You had no chance of winning. Akhwari's reply has become one of the most quoted lines in Olympic history. His country, he said, had not sent him all that way to start the race. They had sent him to finish it.
Takeaway: Akhwari did not win a medal, but he understood what he had been sent to do. Christians have been sent too, and the Christian life is a marathon, not a sprint. "Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus" (Hebrews 12:1 to 2). We were not called just to start well.
Source: Widely reported Olympic history; official results show Akhwari finishing in 3:25:27, more than an hour behind Mamo Wolde's 2:20:26.
Water Pistols: A Parable About Token Commitment
This parable is often credited to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote sharply about comfortable, nominal Christianity. We have not traced this exact story to his writings, so it is retold here as a traditional parable.
Once upon a time, a fire broke out in a small town. The fire brigade raced to the scene, but the firefighters could not get near the burning house. The street was blocked by a crowd.
These people had not come to gawk. They had come to help. Everyone in town loved the fire chief. Their children had clambered over his engines on school visits, and his friendliness was legendary. So when the alarm went up, the townsfolk rushed out to support him.
There was one problem. They were fighting the blaze with water pistols. They stood around chatting with each other, and every now and then someone would lift a little plastic pistol and squirt a thin stream toward the flames.
The fire chief could not believe it. "What are you doing?" he shouted. "What do you think you're going to achieve with those water pistols?"
The crowd took this as a call to try harder. They desperately wanted to please him. "Come on, everyone," they told each other, "we can do better than this!" And they squirted faster. Squirt, squirt, squirt.
Now the chief was beside himself. "Get out of the way!" he yelled. "You're not helping. You're stopping us from doing what has to be done. This fire needs people who will give everything they have, people who are prepared to put their own lives on the line. This is no place for token efforts."
Takeaway: It is possible to be fond of Jesus, to turn up and even to cheer, while offering only a water pistol's worth of commitment. Jesus asked for more: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23). What would wholehearted look like for you this week?
Source: Traditional parable, often attributed to Søren Kierkegaard.
A Fresh Start: Dostoevsky Before the Firing Squad
Fyodor Dostoevsky is counted among the greatest novelists who ever lived. He later looked back on something that happened to him at the age of twenty-eight as the turning point of his life.
Dostoevsky came from a comfortable background in nineteenth-century Russia, but as a young writer he joined the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of intellectuals who discussed radical ideas, including the abolition of serfdom. In April 1849, he and other members were arrested. He was held for eight months in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, in a small, damp, dim cell, and interrogated again and again.
On a freezing morning in December 1849, the prisoners were taken from their cells and loaded into carriages. They had no idea where they were going and assumed any sentence would be fairly light. The carriages stopped at Semyonovsky Square. There the men were lined up, and an official read out their sentence: death by firing squad. They were offered a cross to kiss and a priest to hear their confessions, and they were dressed in white execution shirts.
The first three prisoners were led forward and tied to stakes. The soldiers raised their rifles and took aim. Dostoevsky was in the next group, waiting his turn.
Then a drumroll sounded. A messenger arrived with word from Tsar Nicholas I: the death sentences were commuted. The whole execution had been staged as a cruel piece of theatre. Instead of dying, Dostoevsky was sent to four years of hard labour in a Siberian prison camp.
That same day he wrote to his brother Mikhail. Looking back, he said, he could see how much time he had wasted on trivial things, on mistakes and idleness, and how little he had valued life. The thought made his heart bleed. Life, he wrote, is a gift and a happiness, and every minute could be an eternity of happiness.
Years later, in his novel The Idiot, Dostoevsky has Prince Myshkin describe a man in exactly that position, waiting to be shot. The man thinks that if only he did not have to die, he would turn every minute into an age and not waste a single one.
Takeaway: Dostoevsky received his life back as a gift, and it renewed his commitment to live it well. In Christ, every believer has received a similar reprieve: "the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life" (Romans 6:23). A life given back is a life worth giving away.
Source: Dostoevsky's letter to his brother Mikhail, 22 December 1849; The Idiot, Part 1, chapter 5.
Black Robe: Bruce Beresford and a Missionary's Obsession
Bruce Beresford is one of Australia's most successful film directors. His best-known films include Breaker Morant and the Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy. But he has said that one of the hardest films he ever made was Black Robe (1991), the story of a young French Jesuit missionary travelling deep into the wilderness of seventeenth-century Quebec to reach the Indigenous peoples there.
The film was shot in the bitterly cold winter of the Saguenay and Lac-Saint-Jean region. The weather made filming a logistical nightmare: snow, ice, short days and freezing rivers.
Yet Beresford said the greatest challenge was neither the weather nor getting the history right. It was making the priest's passion believable to a modern audience. The young Jesuit was utterly consumed by one goal: bringing people to heaven. Beresford observed that very few people today take that idea seriously. His job, as he saw it, was to convince the audience that, for this man, it mattered more than anything.
Takeaway: A secular film director understood that the missionary's commitment only makes sense if eternity is real. Paul said much the same: "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Corinthians 15:19). Do the people around us see a commitment in us that only makes sense if Jesus is who he says he is?
Source: Interview with Bruce Beresford, reported on signis.net.
"An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die": Nelson Mandela at Rivonia
Nelson Mandela is now remembered as one of the great statesmen of the twentieth century and South Africa's first democratically elected president. But in 1964 he was a defendant in the Rivonia Trial, accused with other anti-apartheid leaders of sabotage against the government. A death sentence was a real possibility.
On 20 April 1964, instead of giving evidence in the witness box, Mandela made a long statement from the dock. In it he explained his life's struggle. He said he had fought against white domination, and he had also fought against black domination. He had held up the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all people lived together in harmony and with equal opportunities.
Then he ended with words that have echoed ever since: "It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."
Mandela was not sentenced to death. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Counting from his arrest in 1962, he spent twenty-seven years in prison before his release in 1990.
Takeaway: Real commitment is not proven when things are easy. It is proven when it costs something. Mandela's words echo the commitment of the early Christians, who "did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death" (Revelation 12:11). What are you committed to that you would still choose if it cost you everything?
Source: Nelson Mandela, statement from the dock at the Rivonia Trial, 20 April 1964; see the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
Final thoughts
An injured runner who would not quit, a crowd armed with water pistols, a novelist handed back his life, a missionary whose passion puzzled a film director, and a prisoner ready to die for his ideal. These stories about commitment ask the same question from different angles: are we in this to start, or to finish?
What is one commitment you made to God that needs renewing today?
More stories you may like:
- Stories About Perseverance, Failure and Success
- Stories About Discipleship and Evangelism
- Best Stories About Courage
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.