The Narrow Gate: Part 1 The Choice Is Ours

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

~Matthew 7: 13-14

These verses were the focus of my daily devotional earlier this week.  It should be very familiar to most Christians.  As I read through them, I realized probably for the first time, just how much is packed in just those two verses.  Another thing I realized is just how relevant these two verses are as we look at where we are in our world today.  

We are in a mess today.  I'm fifty-four years old, and in my time on this earth, I've never seen things as bad as they are right now.  We've been divided by political party.  We've been divided by class.  We've been divided by region.  We've been divided by race.  We're now being divided by whether we're vaccinated or not vaccinated.  We've got a political class that benefits by dividing us, and we've got a media that fans the flames.  We're angry with each other.  We're shouting at each other.  We decide in an instance if somebody is good or bad based on how they voted--so half the country feels the other half of the country is uneducated and evil and vice-versa.  And we're allowing this to happen, because we've put politics and politicians in the center of our lives instead of God. 

It's easy to get swept up in this when we're assaulted from all sides 24 hours a day.  It's always easiest to take the path of least resistance, and we all have an opinion--we get caught up in it and before we know it, we're fighting with one another.  But we have to make a choice about how we're going to live our life, and how we're going to interact with our fellow man.  Are we going to allow hate and anger to guide us . . . or love?  

That's what Jesus was talking about.  We've always had this choice.  Since the Garden of Eden, we've had a choice to trust in God, or go off on our own and do things our own way.  We can continue through the wide gate--view the world through this secular lens to our certain destruction, or we can chose life.  One path is wide and easy to travel, and the other is narrow and difficult.  It's our choice.  It always has been our choice.

There's a lot in these two verses.  I'm going to unpack it one point at a time over the next few weeks.  I hope you'll join me, and share your thoughts as we go along.  Hopefully we'll discover something we can use in our everyday life as we look at these important verses together.

~TEC