One Scary Truth

One Scary Truth Matthew 7:13-14 September 19, 2004 Given by: Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] In his novel, A Painted House, John Grisham describes a Sunday school teacher eulogizing a mean character named Jerry Sisco, who had been killed the night before in a back alley fight after he picked on one person too many. In the words of the little boy who had seen the fight with his friend Dewayne: "She made Jerry sound like a Christian, and an innocent victim. I glanced at Dewayne, who had one eye on me. There was something odd about this. As Baptists, we'd been taught from the cradle that the only way you made it to heaven was by believing in Jesus and trying to follow his example in living a clean and moral Christian life… And anyone who did not accept Jesus and live a Christian life simply went to hell. That's where Jerry Sisco was, and we all knew it.” One thing is clear about Jesus Christ: He never asked His followers to make a few minor adjustments or try harder to be more religious. He called His followers to a radical transformation. First in relationship with God, then in terms of behavior. And that order is fundamentally important. "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate, and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it." Matthew 7:13 We are coming to the conclusion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as we make our way through chapter 7 of Matthew. In the next 16 verses He talks about two paths, two trees, two claims and two foundations. In each of these teaching illustrations Jesus presents an “either-or” challenge. Each of the metaphors He creates will call for a choice on the part of His listeners. A choice between the right and the wrong, God and evil. Let’s look at verses 13 and 14. Here we have the two paths illustration. READ TEXT "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." It was the famed baseball player, Yogi Berra, who used to say, “If you come to a fork in the road, Take it!” Cute and witty, but hardly any help. It seems we always have to decide something: What color shirt should I wear today? Poplar Street or Eads? Subway or Hardees? Regular or Super-size? CSI or Law & Order? Bush or Kerry? Mathews or Kern? Which school, which major, whom to marry, where to live, buy or rent, career changes. But there is one choice, Jesus says that is more important than all others, because it will determine more than some momentary need or even a lifetime of consequences. How we face the choice before us will determine the ultimate of all issues—how we will spend eternity. A couple of things strike us immediately about Jesus’ teaching here. One, we are responsible for choosing. Salvation or destruction don’t just happen to us passively. God enables us to choose for Him, but the choice is ours. Deuteronomy 30:11-20 God spoke a similar word of choice to the Israelites through Moses as they faced the prospects of entering into the promised land of Canaan. The book of Deuteronomy was a lengthy sermon by Moses, rehearsing the law of God (deutero=second or twice; nomos=law). God was quite interested in sending an obedient people into Canaan. "Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach….See I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. This day I call heaven and 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 by 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…." It was the same kind of challenge to choose for the Lord that Moses successor Joshua presented to the people in Joshua 24. “Now fear the Lord and serve Him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods of the Amorites, in whose lad you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” When we stand before the Lord there is always the choice we face to love and serve Him or to NOT love and serve Him, turning rather to the gods of this world, which are really no gods at all. As soon as God shows up there is a choice to be made. As soon as you recognize Him for who He is, you have to decide for or against Him. There is no middle ground. Luciano Pavarotti: “When I was a boy, my father, a baker, introduced me to the wonders of song,” tenor Luciano Pavarotti relates. “He urged me to work very hard to develop my voice. Arrigo Pola, a professional tenor in my hometown of Modena, Italy, took me as a pupil. I also enrolled in a teachers’ college. On graduating, I asked my father, ‘Shall I be a teacher or a singer?’“ ‘Luciano, my father replied, ‘if you try to sit on two chairs, you will fall between them. For life, you must choose one chair.’“ “I chose one. It took seven years of study and frustration before I made my first professional appearance. It took another seven to reach the Metropolitan Opera. And now I think whether it’s laying bricks, writing a book—whatever we choose—we should give ourselves to it. Commitment, that’s the key. Choose one chair.”- The Lord told Jeremiah to tell the people to make their choice in Jeremiah 21:8 – “Furthermore, tell the people, ‘This is what the Lord says: See, I am setting before you the way of life and the way of death…” Josh McDowell: “…in my relationship with my own children, I have hammered home the idea that within every negative precept - every “Thou shalt not” -- there are always two positive principles. One, God gives them to protect us. And second, He gives them to provide. He’s not a cosmic killjoy who wants to take the fun out of life. One [illustration] is the story of a high school guy who wanted to go swimming with his girlfriend at midnight. The neighbors down the block had a pool, and he knew it. So they ran down there and scaled the fence even though there were No Trespassing and Do Not Enter signs. Just as he hit the diving board, the girl yelled, but it was too late. There was only a foot of water in the pool. He broke his neck, and he’s in therapy to this day. He didn’t realize that the signs on the fence - the precepts - would have protected him. Just before the famous showdown between God and god of Baal and its followers on Mt. Carmel, 1 Kings 18:21 records, “Elijah went before the people and said, ‘ How long will you waver between two opinions? If the lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.” God is all about presenting us with a choice. And when we look at the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 7, we realize that the stakes are high, because in the balance is the eternal destiny of our souls. There are only two roads that people can travel: 1. The one that seems EASY. 2. The one that seems HARD There are a couple of things about this short teaching in verses 13 and 14 that we should take note of. First, would you notice that there are only two roads the people can travel. Unlike a lot of the advice you pick up in our culture that “there are a lot of ways to get to God,” or “there are many roads, but they all lead to the same place.” Brothers and sisters, I want to remind you that that is a lot of hooey! You know Shirley MacLaine can climb out on a limb and say anything she wants to say. She can claim she has all this esoteric understanding about God through her crystals and her so-called “gift”, but if her conclusions don’t correspond to what God has revealed about Himself in His Word, then somebody’s wrong! And my money’s on God being right, and not some egocentric Hollywood actress! And there are the Deepak Chopras and the Ron Hubbards running around with a hundred conflicting ideas about God and religion, and they’re selling their books and their seminars and their pockets are full of the money of the fools who think men are smarter than God. "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death" Proverbs 14:12 Two roads—that’s all—Jesus says. One road seems easy and the other one seems hard. Because we have a sinful nature, the path of least resistance is always the wrong path. The Bible teaches that “there is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” You see, the real question here is, Who are you trusting? God or yourself (or, worse yet, some other sinner who thinks he has it figured out apart from God’s Word). It’s our stubbornness, you see, our pride. We just don’t want to take orders from anyone—not even the master of the universe! Roger Staubach who led the Dallas Cowboys to the World Championship in ‘71 admitted that his position as a quarterback who didn’t call his own signals was a source of trial for him. Coach Landry sent in every play. He told Roger when to pass, when to run and only in emergency situations could he change the play (and he had better be right!). Even though Roger considered coach Landry to have a “genius mind” when it came to football strategy, pride said that he should be able to run his own team. Roger later said, “I faced up to the issue of obedience. Once I learned to obey there was harmony, fulfillment, and victory.” These roads are entered upon through either of two gates: 1. One that is WIDE 2. One that is SMALL There are two roads—one seems easy, the other seems hard. Please notice, the godly road “seems” hard. But it isn’t. To get onto the road we choose to travel we have to pass through a gate. It might help you—it does me– to picture a toll booth on an interstate highway. To get onto that allegedly faster, smoother, straighter highway, you get over to the right and ahead of you there are 8 or 9 booths. You choose. If you’re like me you try to pick the one that will take the least time, but I always get behind the driver who needs to get change and then he has to have a receipt; or else it’s the nervous lady who’s never done this before and she’s getting all her questions answered by the person in the booth, and then she drops her money to the pavement… Jesus says one of the gates is wide. It’s popular. It’s attractive. It looks, like its corresponding road, EASY. Therefore everyone chooses it. You know when everyone chooses a road, the grass on the edges gets trampled and the path gets wider. But Jesus said to choose the smaller gate. Two roads diverged in a wood - And I took the one less traveled by - And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost Dwight Moody wrote: “I thought when I became a Christian I had nothing to do but just to lay my oars in the bottom of the boat and float along. But I soon found that I would have to go against the current.” Romans 12 reminds us that we are swimming against the tide of this world when we are trying to serve the Lord, because all the rest of the world is in rebellion against God—even though many of them don’t even recognize that truth. Our life in Christ is a continual commitment to NOT be “conformed to the pattern of this world, but [to] be transformed by the renewing of [our] mind.” Don’t let this world squeeze you into it’s mold, turning your mind and heart from devotion to the Lord. Know this—especially those of you who have recently committed your lives to Christ—you have chosen an unpopular road, with a restrictive, narrow gate, and you’re not going to have a lot of company. There are only two kinds of crowds that are traveling 1. MANY 2. FEW That leads me to my next observation about this teaching. Jesus refers to two different groups traveling. The one crowd is a BIG crowd. This is the group that has passed through the wide gate and is traveling the wide road. More than a hundred years ago, Soren Kierkegaard warned that the age of the crowd was upon us. In such an age, said Kierkegaard, people would not think of deciding for themselves. They would follow the advice given to children going off to a party: "Look and see what the others are doing and then behave like them." Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe? Consensus asks the question: Is it popular? Conscience asks: Is it right?” Face it, Christians, you are a minority, and you always will be (vs 14) Chuck Colson is fond of saying, “Never confuse the will of the majority with the will of God.” The two roads lead to two opposite destinations: 1. DESTRUCTION 2. LIFE Then we come to the one observation that makes all the difference. There are two roads, two gates, two crowds, but what really matters most is that there are two destinations. The cost of obedience is nothing compared with the cost of disobedience. A drunken man got on the bus late one night, staggered up the aisle, and sat next to a woman who was clutching a Bible. She looked the wayward drunk up and down and said, "I've got news for you, mister. You're going straight to hell!" The man jumped up out of his seat and shouted, "Oh, man, I'm on the wrong bus again!“ Jesus says in no uncertain terms that the broad path, the crowded path, the path that has the easiest entrance and the one that most people choose is the path that leads to destruction. But for those who choose the unpopular way of righteousness through Christ, there is the reward of LIFE. That is life eternal and life abundant. There are only two religions that people can choose from: 1. FOLLOWING JESUS 2. NOT FOLLOWING JESUS I want to close with the truth that seems the hardest for people to believe. There really aren’t a lot of religions in the world. From God’s point of view, there are only two religions. One of them is following Jesus. This is the road to life and not destruction. We are all sinners, but Jesus has made a way for wayward sinners to get onto the right road. If the Lord is adamant about anything, it’s that His way is the only way to life. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me." [webmasters note: John 14:6] The only other religion in the world is NOT following Jesus. There simply are no other choices. We face a holy God with our need for forgiveness and salvation, and He says, trust in my Son—He is the only way. There is a bottom line, and there is an inescapable choice to be made. All that God intended for the people He loves can be ours if we choose to obey Christ. "Whoever believes in him [Christ] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son." John 3:18 Henry Blackaby wrote of a tragic experience: “The first funeral I ever conducted was for a beautiful three-year-old. She was the first child born to a couple in our church, and the first grandchild in their extended family. Unfortunately, she was spoiled. While visiting the little girl's home one day, I observed that she loved to ignore her parents' instructions. When they told her to come, she went. When they said, "sit down," she stood up. Her parents laughed, finding her behavior cute. One day their front gate was inadvertently left open. The parents saw their child escaping out of the yard and heading toward the road. To their horror, a car was racing down the street. As she ran out between two parked cars, they both screamed at her to stop and turn back. She paused for a second, looked back at her parents, then gleefully laughed as she turned and ran directly into the path of the oncoming car. The parents rushed their little girl to the hospital, but she died from her injuries. As a young pastor, this was a profound lesson for me. I realized I must teach God's people not only to recognize His voice but also immediately to obey His voice when they hear it. It is life.” C.S. Lewis – “When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over. ..This time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. That will not be the time for choosing; It will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side.”   [Back to Top]