Running the Race : Eric Liddell -- Olympic Champion and Missionary

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he espoused cannot be said to be popular or even well-understood in our sceptical and secular age. Most people would blink in genuine amazement at a man who sought seriously to live by the Bible and devote himself to the spread of its message. It seems out-dated to so many; a curio; a vestige of a past age; a distant enchantment or perhaps nostalgia? for an era irretrievably lost. And yet There is the fascination concerning someone who seemed so guileless yet so assured. There are many biographies of sportsmen today. They seem to appear every week as sports practitioners achieve celebrity status at an increasingly young age and are grist to the mill of a media-driven lust for the sensational. There are also many Christian biographies. There are very few which bring together the sporting and the Christian. But that is the case with Eric Liddell. And that, at least in part, must account for the fascination. Another factor is this: that he achieved, posthumously, a celebrity status through being depicted in an award-winning movie Chariots of Fire (1981).