<p>9:24 <i>Do you not know that they that run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Run like this, so that you may attain the prize- </i>There is only one who so ran that He received the prize thanks to His own efforts- and that was the Lord Jesus. But we are in Him, and should run like Him. But we must read this emphasis upon one receiving the prize as an intended contrast to what Paul has just written- that salvation was a matter of being &quot;a <i>joint </i>partaker&quot; of the hope contained in the Gospel. We are to run <i>as if</i> in a race where only one gets the prize- even though that prize is in another sense a matter of 'joint partaking', a prize received jointly. For Paul felt that the nature of his eternity was tied up in the salvation of his converts. He doesn't want them to think that this idea of joint partaking meant that they were not to run well themselves. They were to run, as he himself did (:26), as if it was a very personal race with an individual, unique prize at the end of the course. And yet in another sense, that prize is a collective matter, a 'joint partaking'.</p>