A Narrow Path

Imagine

Imagine for a moment, the best version of yourself. What would it be like if you were as patient as you’d like to be, as calm as you wish you were, as loving, as wise, as joyful…

What would that be like? How would your life be different? How would it affect the people closest to you?

I’d love to live up to what I imagine. I’d certainly be a better husband, father, and leader. I’d undoubtedly be happier. I’d avoid a lot of pitfalls and stumbling blocks.

Why can’t we get there, or even get close?

I guess the obvious answer is that we’re human, we’re sinful, we’re limited, and we’re pretty dumb sometimes, or at least I am.

But some people are able to get closer to the person they could be, while others don’t seem to make any progress at all. And in certain seasons of your life you might experience growth and change and maturity, while in others you stagnate or wither.

There are a thousand different sources of advice to be found - different books and courses and coaching sessions and products you can buy that are supposed to turn you into your best self.

But we’re here because we want to know what Jesus has to say - the only human who actually was His best self, the image of who people were created to be. If there’s a real answer to be found, a real way for us to move from who we are today toward the better version we try to imagine, Jesus is a right place to look.

In the Old Testament book of the prophet Isaiah these words appear: “But now, O Lord, You are our Father; we are the clay, and You our potter; and all we are the work of Your hand.”

This doesn’t just tell us that God is our creator. Generations of beleivers have understood from this that God is still working on us, continuing to shape and form our lives as the potter forms clay into what He intends.

We’re not finished and fired and glazed, we’re still being formed. Every day we make choices about how we live, who and what we allow to influence us, strive for certain priorities, and these form us. Or they deform us, if they run contrary to what our creator desires.

This will be a theme that runs through the rest of this year in a variety of ways. Formation. And to ease into this we’ll return to the Sermon on the Mount today, which we studied for a number of Sundays not all that long ago.

Here Jesus offers a choice. There are two paths we can choose. One moves us toward the best that we can imagine and beyond. The other to ruin.

To be formed properly means walking a narrow path, searching for the small gate that leads to life. What does that mean for us, for you? How do you walk the road to life?

Digging For Wisdom

It’s time to go to the scriptures to dig for some wisdom about this. I’ve only chosen two verses as the text today, but there’s a lot that stands behind all this. We started this morning with the Beatitudes, the best-known portion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and possibly also the most ignored. This is the beginning of a series of Jesus’ teachings that invite people to join a new kind of Kingdom, Jesus’ kingdom, which has a very different set of values than any other kingdom before or since.

It’s a kingdom where mercy and humility and forgiveness are prized instead of pride and power. It’s a kingdom where the ethical expectations are sky high - not only should you not murder you shouldn’t even indulge anger or bitterness. It’s a kingdom where lustful thoughts are nipped in the bud so adultery never crosses anyone’s mind. A kingdom where nobody makes promises or oaths because everyone speaks the truth and keeps their word.

It’s a kingdom where you endure hardship and persecution and turn the tables on oppressors with kindness, overcoming your enemies by loving them. Citizens of this kingdom help those in need as secretly as they can to avoid receiving praise, they pray simply and discretely, they don’t horde wealth or let money rule over them, they don’t worry about having enough for tomorrow because of their trust in God.

Jesus is making a big claim here. He’s telling people that this is God’s way to be truly human - this is how God’s Kingdom is supposed to be lived out. It’s not just how things will be at some future time, it’s how God’s people are called to live in our broken world now in order to better know God and bring healing.

All of this isn’t simply a claim, a choice is presented. There are two roads, Jesus teaches, and you and everybody you know are walking down one or the other, headed for one of two destinations: life, or destruction.

This wasn’t an original idea of Jesus’, by the way. Psalm 1 is an example of the same. It describes “the way of the righteous” who delight in God’s law, bear fruit, and prosper. And it contrasts that with the “way of the wicked” who are like the unwanted wheat chaff, blown into the wind to perish.

But Jesus elaborates a bit here on the nature of these roads. One way is easy. The road to destruction is wide and easy to travel down. It is a road where anything goes - you can travel it however you want. No boundaries, no requirements, no effort.

The other road is narrow, and harder to walk. It’s boundaries are clearly marked. It takes effort and attention to stay on that road - you can’t simply walk it however you please.

This should make some sense, intuitively. It’s almost always easier to mess something up than to do it well. To create something of value - to make beautiful art or nicely renovate a room or restore an old car - these have to be done with some care and skill or the final result will be a mess. Not that you won’t make mistakes and learn things along the way on any project, but one of the things you’ll learning is that there are way more wrong ways to go about something than there are right ways.

So it is with life. That should be pretty obvious - aren’t there more ways to get a bad result than a good one?

But that’s contrary to so many of the messages we receive every day in our culture. The wisdom of this age is that everyone ought to do whatever they feel is exciting or gratifying or enjoyable. You do you. Follow your truth. We are living in a time that has disdain for tradition and boundaries and praises the freedom to live according to our whims.

For this to make sense you’d have to beleive that almost any way of doing things works out well , or that nothing really matters, so who cares?

Jesus does not agree. He presents a way of living, the way of the Kingdom of God, which sets the bar for righteousness as high as it goes. And then He says that there is a path leading to life that is hard and narrow, and a path to destruction that is easy and wide.

So what does it mean to choose life? How do you walk the narrow road?

Does it mean to profess that you have faith in God, go to religious services, and do specific religious acts publically, like showing charity or praying or following certain rules?

Nope. Because some of Jesus’ most determined opponents did all of those things, and they did them better than you and I do them. Jesus often sparred with and tried to warn certain Pharisees and teachers of the law - priests and religious teachers - that they were on the wrong road. They were headed for destruction, particularly because they were using religion for their own gain rather than allowing it to shape them to bless others.

So choosing life is more than a claim to believe a certain thing, a label you apply to yourself, or engaging in different kinds of religious activity.

For Christians the road to life certainly requires professing that we beleive in Jesus, becoming part of His Church, and doing certain things the Church has always valued. But the road Jesus calls us to walk toward life is still more narrow than that.

The harder road, Jesus’ narrow way, requires certain things that don’t come naturally to us. One is humility. It requires that we acknowledge that God is God and we are not, and that we desperately need God’s help and guideance to do any good thing.

Another is obedience. This road is narrow because to walk it we must limit ourselves to the things that God has revealed in the scriptures to be good and true. You can’t believe whatever you want and behave however you want. You have to learn what God consideres good and train yourself to do only those things.

Does that sound harsh and limiting? That’s totally understandable - who here just really loves to be told what to do?!

But it sure does help to be told what to do when we want a certain result. I’ve built or helped build BBQs and couches and beds and cabinets and a bunch of other things that came to my house in boxes with instruction booklets and alan keys, and I’ve never resented the instructions for telling me that there was only one right way to put the thing together. I get that if I want the intended result, I have to follow the intended process.

Do you have an intended result for your life?

The vision Jesus presents in the Sermon on the Mount is for a life that resembles His own - a life that that is increasingly marked by peace and joyfulness, kindness and courage, service and wisdom, purpose and power. It’s a life the rests on trust in a good God, and which doesn’t fear death because it knows that God wins, and life triumphs. It’s a life empowered by love, and which spreads this love to others.

That’s real. That’s a result you can experience - one that Christians across the world and two thousand years have experienced, however imperfectly.

But they didn’t experience by by accident, or by beleiving whatever they wanted or doing whatever seemed good in the moment. They walked the road that lead to life by letting the Bible’s teaching shape their beliefs, and by adopting practices and patterns that shaped their lives.

The path that leads to life requires formation. Not permisivveness, not tolerance of all things, not pursueing every desire of the human heart, not self-love, dead religion, hypocrisy, or false ambition, or other easy things that don’t need to be learned or cultivated. It requires effort - effort to resist what is harmful, and to practice what will allow God to form you. It’s narrow, because there are a lot more ways to mess something up than there are to do it well.

My Problem, His Solution

In the book of Deuteronomy Moses gives a farewell speach as he hands over leadership to his successor, Joshua, and he tries to convince His people to be faithful to God - to walk a narrow road in their time and place.

New International Version (2011) Chapter 30

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

What do you think the people chose?

Well, in the moment, nobody yelled “You know what, I think I’ll go with the curses and the death, thanks!”

But choosing life is less about the moment of decision and more about how you spend each day afterward.

As time went by those people who listened to Moses chose death more often than life. Tragedy and disaster followed them because of it, though God regularly rescued them and gave them fresh chances to do things His way instead fo their own.

God still does this. Jesus endured the cross to pay the price for all sin - we can receive forgiveness and gain a new start as often as we need it. But we’d be much better off, and we would grow much closer to the people we ought to be, if we didn’t stray on to the broad road so often.

I’m often struck by the line in the gym Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing that goes “prone wander Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love…”

We wander off the narrow path easily. Sometimes we do it willfully - we just stubbornly decide we don’t care what God or His Word might say, I’m going to get what I want in this moment. I’ll break my word, break my wedding vows, break a friend’s heart, break my whole life apart. If you haven’t done it I bet you’ve seen it.

But more often we don’t willfully abandon the narrow way, we don’t even notice we’re wandering, but one day we realize that God seems distant, and His way doesn’t seem as important. Or maybe you experience it as being weighed down or spiritually exhausted. Those don’t tend to be times we’re at our best, full of the fruit of the Holy Spirit, people of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. In this state we often make decisions we regret.

Some of that is our sinful human nature. But it’s also amplified by our modern world. We live in a time of tremendous noise and distraction, constant encouragement to do things on our own terms, and the disintigration of community, especially community that comes with any kind of accountability.

No wonder “small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” There are quite a few things stacked against us, including an enemy that wants us to wander.

But there is still a road that leads to life, and the Church exists to help people find and stay on and, when needed, get back on that road! The traditional practices of the Church support this - they help form us so that we remember the importance of the road we’re on and sustain our efforts to walk it well.

We need these things integrated into our lives more than ever in order to be formed properly in this world. And so I come into this fall season with a desire to do these core things better, to do more to model and encourage and remind and help and nag, if need be, so that, as a community, we live more like people trying to walk the harder road.

Growing up I learned the kids song that went “Read your Bible pray every day, pray every day, prayer everyday and you’ll grow, grow, grow…” That kind of sums this emphasis on formation. To truly engage with scripture regularly so that we come to know what God says is good and right, as well as the depth of His love for us. And to pray deeply and engage in prayer for one another so that we tap into the strength and wisdom to walk this road well.

So it’s all about the basics this fall, though I’ll try some different ways to approach this, ways to get us doing these things together, and ways to learn how to make the most of the time we choose to take seeking God in this way. More on that next week. This week we return to the choice. Have you been choosing life, lately?

Conclusion

You might be stepping into this fall and not feeling very alive. It might be habit, rather than hope, that brought you in today. Or maybe you don’t have any habits that are helping you right now. The good news is that God can work with that, that He desires good for all of us, and that by following Jesus we can be formed and become more like Him, closer to the people we imagine we could be.

But we will have to choose to live more narrowly. You can’t do whatever you want all week, roll in here on a Sunday, and expect deep life transformation. Not that God couldn’t do it, but Jesus taught that things actually change when we walk that narrow road, caring deeply about what God says is good - not what our inner desires say, not what the world says, but what the revealed truth of our scriptures say. And for the strength to actually do those things, the practice of prayer is not negotiable.

If you’ve got all this down pat and you’re doing great, that’s wonderful, and I’m sure you’ll be a great example and help to the rest of us. But if you’ve been wandering, if you’re depleted, if you’ve been going with the flow of this world and it’s getting you down, this would be a good day to chose life. I’ll start by inviting the Holy Spirit to help us know our own hearts and take the right next step toward wholeness…