How Are You Getting In?

Why is the gate narrow?

Belief is difficult. It goes against everything that we see in the natural.

Most people don’t or won’t sacrifice their lives for an enemy.

When they do we call them heroes.

People Don’t Come Back From The Dead

Physically-

Spiritually - We are born spiritually dead therefore we must be reborn spiritually alive through Jesus Christ.

The Christian faith, simply stated, reminds us that our fundamental problem is not moral; rather, our fundamental problem is spiritual. It is not just that we are immoral, but that a moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God. Herein lies the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus' offer to us.

Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive. --Ravi Zacharias

C. The Wide path is easy.

You just keep on believing what you have always believed and doing what you have always done. You remain a spiritual dead person walking. The problem is that path leads to your eternal death and destruction.

Talking the Talk is easy. Walking the walk is difficult.

When we come to Jesus, we confess Jesus as our Lord and Savior we receive that right and privilege to become the sons and daughters of God.

Once we receive the right to be called a child of God, Paul tells us that we need to live into what we have already been declared, righteous.

This is where the walking the walk becomes difficult because what God wants us to do and what our “old man” wants to do are at odds. This is why we must pick up our cross and follow Jesus everyday. We must nail our flesh or old nature to the cross everyday if we want to live into becoming more like Christ.

The Wide path doesn’t care if you talk your talk and walk your walk.

The those on the wide path are living into who they are unfortunately that again means eternal death and destruction.

Things Don’t Go The Way We Want or Think-

The final reason that the narrow gate/path is difficult is because things don’t go our way. We want something so we ask God and for whatever reason we don’t receive. We want a loved one healed but the die. We want a large bill paid off but the repo-man comes and takes your car. We want a loved one to become a follower of Christ but all they ever do is mock Christ. When this happens enough times we become jaded and following Christ becomes more difficult until finally we give up on Him. We walk away from Him.

Those wide path can manipulate the situation to their will. They don’t have to say, “Not my will but thy will be done.”

Jesus could have manipulated the situation in the garden of Gethsemane so that he did not have the “drink the cup.” He tells Peter as much when Peter cuts of the ear of the high priest in Matthew 26:53

English Standard Version Chapter 26

Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. 53 Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? 54 But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?”

On The Path

How do we get on the path to righteousness?

Except Jesus. He is the only way onto the path that leads to righteousness and God the Father.

How do we stay on the path to righteousness?

Knowing and realizing that

Jesus is the only path to God the Father

, reminds us of what Peter said, “ "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.

Look to Jesus.

When Peter gets out of the boat to walk on water, he doesn’t start sinking until he get his eyes off Jesus and onto his situation.

When you walk in the woods, there is path that clearly marked…on good days. But, on bad days or at night time the narrow path between two trees is hard to find. We can and do get off the path.

To stay on the path you must keep our spiritual eyes focused on Jesus Christ. The Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.