Narrow Way, Matthew 7:13-14

1. Read Matthew 5:20 together. How how is it possible for your righteousness to exceed the most religiously devout and hard working people, such as that of the Scribes and Pharisees?
2. What is the difference between the "full assurance of faith" talked about in Hebrews 10:22-23 and the false assurance of those traveling along the wide road?
3. What is the cost of discipleship? In what ways will your life get squeezed when you follow Jesus?
4. What are some of the costs of non-discipleship if you stay on the wide and roomy road?
5. What people do you catch yourself comparing yourself to in order to justify yourself and feel better about your own "goodness"?
6. What is the source of your goodness? How do you know?

Practice: Reflect and ask whether you have truly felt "squeezed" or challenged in some way along the road, not in terms of general suffering, but in the sense of dying to yourself. Write down ways you have been challenged just this year, ways God has grown you and drawn you to himself, things you've relied on him to overcome. Ask him to search your heart and show you where you still need to give yourself over to him.

Today we are returning to the Sermon on the Mount and really to its conclusion. It’s a pretty heavy text and it separates all the people listening to the sermon. It is quite divisive.

Jesus, in the last part of the sermon, is really wanting to make sure you know what’s at stake in his teaching.

The whole sermon is an invitation into the kingdom of God and life with God that lasts forever.

What does it mean to be good? How good do you have to be? Who is good?

Everyone, universally, assumes they are good in some way. But you have to assess what Jesus is saying about all the good people.

This is a high standard. The whole sermon begins on this issue of who is getting in. Who is good enough to get in? How good do you have to be?

What we’re talking about is what Jesus is offering vs religion. The Pharisees were the elite religious people. They reduced whatever it meant to be good to a lot of lists, morality, lines you do and don’t cross. What it became was a monument to human achievement. Jesus is saying your best is not enough. Your best is not transforming, it’s actually deforming.

Even for the best among us, shooting for that human kind of goodness actually deforms us into interesting ways, turning us into something self-righteous, self-oriented, self-sufficient.

Jesus is showing us a life unattainable by human beings.

Chapter 5, verse 3 starts out by saying who is blessed. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The ones who know they are not good enough and never will be.

Jesus knows the people listening to this sermon will miss that. It’s not an easy truth. All people throughout time are confused by this. Whether you were there on the hill or you’re hearing it now.

There is much about the sermon that will warm and fill your heart while you’re reading it. And the sermon has made an impact throughout time and history and culture on morality, whether believers or not. So there’s a real possibility you hear the sermon and become inspired by it. You want to be a little “good-er.”

What Jesus is offering is not a new list you can add to what you’re already doing. It won’t get you where you want to go. It won’t get you to the good life.

There are four short sketches Jesus gives to help them understand the difference between what he’s offering and what other people offer or try to achieve.

You can be deceived right up to the very end. That’s part of the scary thing in this text. You can be deceived right up to the last second, right up to the doors of heaven. You can think you’re on the road and be left out.

Jesus sets up the idea of insiders and outsiders from the beginning. He’s distinguishing between them. Then as you go a bit further, you see how the deception works. Some of the outsiders just pretend to be in. Then you have people who are “insiders,” but they are self-deceived. They believe they’re in, but they’re not. Then you get to the last group where you really have two groups, hearers and doers. They look like they’re the same until the storm shows up and wipes one of them out.

There are lots of ways to miss the point of this sermon.

This is about as heavy as it gets in your Bible. At the end of this, when the distinctions are made by God (not by us), we see that to miss it is absolute failure and catastrophe. In the first sketch, you end up destroyed, then cut down and thrown into the fire, then excluded from the kingdom, then collapsed when the storm comes.

There is a clear distinction between who is in and who is out. Jesus is going to establish that from the start, and then fine tune it.

There are two gates, two roads, two destinations for these two groups. But the good life is only on one road. It doesn’t matter how many roads there are if there’s only one that goes in. Everyone else is on the same road going to the same place.

People in our culture believe all roads lead to the same place. This is the part of the sermon where you really have to settle into who is really in charge. If you like the idea of him being king, but not the reality of him being king, you won’t like it.

As I was meditating on this, I saw how Jesus depicts all of us as travelers. The gates suggest the idea of entrance. Then there is the road that you have to actually step down and travel. You are stepping down that reality in life once you enter. Then it ends up in a destination. Not just places, but as reality. It’s not just that you end up in a location, but end up becoming a kind of person. The road you’re traveling is turning you into someone. You don’t just end up somewhere, but you end up a certain kind of person.

C. S. Lewis says in eternity you end up becoming an everlasting horror, or an everlasting living being.

You don’t enter one gate and end up on a different road. They don’t end up in the same place.

Jesus describes the wide gate first, because that’s the one most people enter.

Notice that you’re commanded to enter the narrow gate. You’re not commanded to enter the broad gate. You’ll find yourself on that road naturally. If you don’t want to be on that road, you have to find a way out of it.

Dallas Willard says something about discipleship here, because the two roads have to do with discipleship and what it costs. Dallas Willard talks about the cost of non-discipleship. You say it’s a hard road following Jesus, but there’s a harder road not following Jesus.

Willard says there’s no good reason to doubt you’re on the right road. Once you enter the narrow gate, you should know you’re on the road. That’s not something you should be wondering if you’re on the road. Either gate you enter is decisive and transformative.

It’s very tempting to assume the narrow and wide gate distinguishes good and bad people, but they’re both the same.

You have a picture in mind of people who won’t go to heaven. That’s not what Jesus is talking about. Even that group would say they’re not the worst. That’s the deceitful trick that keeps them out of heaven.

The very best people are on this wide road. The reason it has lots of people on it is not just because it’s easy, but because it’s also spacious. There’s lots of room. Nobody is wondering if they’re getting in on that road. There’s no limit or curb or anything to hang you up. There’s room on the wide road for any way you want to think about reality.

There was a lady who had a prison ministry here at Hillside years ago. She would write back and forth to the prisoners. One person she connected with had done double-digit murders. When she described what it means to be good, the guy said, yes but at least I haven’t raped anyone.

You tend to think you’re happy with yourself and that you’re scoring points. We want to define good. We determine based on whatever this system is that we’re good enough.

You can see in this whatever good or bad is in your life that there is a denial that exists in the way of achievement and the broad road.

Remember in Luke 18 where there is a Pharisee and a tax collector both praying. The Pharisee says, at least I’m not like that guy.

Your good turns sour. What you thought was good was really just an arrogant act that puts you in a good light while you demean others. That’s not what people on this road do. They don’t try to leverage people and manipulate. The broad road is me saving myself. And it doesn’t matter how you conclude what saving yourself means.

I have a New Testament professor I stay in contact with. He wrote his dissertation and got his doctorate in Scotland. He was in this village of 800 people, and at this church with 35 people in it. In order to keep your name on the church membership roster you had to take communion twice a year. It was like clockwork that everyone from the town came in for these two services each year. You could be living like a hellion, but you showed up for two things, and you think this system works.

You see the arrogance? You think you get to define good.

The broad road narrows. The narrow road broadens. What the broad road narrows down to is you or me. That’s why it leads to destruction. It’s not about God or for God but about you and what you’ve done. You really don’t need him for anything, but to open the door.

That’s why it narrows down is because it becomes about you.

Destruction is a weighty word at the end of this sermon. Hell means not being with God. For all its horrors, it literally just means your life is ruined, wasted, worthless. What started out as spacious and accommodating becomes crushing. If you step on a bug, he died of narrowness.

Why is hell torment? Because anything that’s all about you is going to be tormenting at the end of the day. You still want everything that you wanted, but now you don’t even have any inclination to know what’s good in the end.

C. S. Lewis said, The sentence imposed on him is being what he is. That’s what hell is. The characterization of the lost is the rejection of everything that is not simply themselves. It was all around you on the road and it’s still all about you in eternity. He says the dammed are, in one sense, successful.

There’s a kind of defiance at the end because you get locked into this thing you’re becoming. In the end, you’re just more selfish than ever. Lewis says the doors of hell are locked from the inside not the outside. You couldn’t survive in heaven because there’s no room for God within you. Just like in this life, but it’s more plain there.

What I want you to see is that both roads point to heaven. The broad road leads to destruction, but doesn’t point there. Your “goodness” and deceit makes you think you’ll end up in the right spot. You can see the arrogance of thinking you define who gets into heaven.

The shock of Jesus’ message was that no one thought the broad road was going to get you there. All that work and all that trying don’t get you there. You think you’re entering and you’re not.

John Bunyan’s book Pilgrims Progress. Christian is heading toward heaven and Bunyan does a great job of depicting Matthew 7, meeting all these characters. One of them is ignorance. They have a conversation. Christian is just eaten up. He can’t wait to see Jesus and meet him because of the sacrifice Jesus made. But ignorance talks about heaven differently than Christian does. Christian is trying to explain things to him. But Ignorance says, I will never believe that my heart is bad. When they get to heaven, there’s a river to cross. The king comes out to greet Christian and Hopeful. They look back and see Ignorance coming. You see him bound and carried off. Christian says, “Then I saw there was a way to hell even from the gate of heaven as well as from the city of destruction.”

You can get right to the very end, think you’re going to be in heaven, and there’s still yet a door left to hell.

Then there’s the narrow way. And it doesn’t take much to unpack this.

It’s not just narrow in the sense that it’s difficult. It’s crushing. You’re being squeezed. It’s not about you. What’s being squeezed out is you, your “goodness.”

You have to be commanded to see the good in your life as inadequate. You can’t enter on your own merit.

We went to a concert recently. To get in the gate, we lined up and squeezed in through this gate. They have a little desk and a little box where everything you have has to fit in this little box or it can’t go in. One of our friends with us couldn’t fit her purse in there and had to haul it all the way back to the car.

When Jesus talks about being poor in spirit, it’s nakedness. You’ve got nothing to take through. You’re getting in because of Jesus. You’re not good enough and you can’t save yourself.

Jesus is the way. You’re relying on him to get in the gate. It’s restricting. Along the way, you become something completely different. This narrow road gets broadened into a life where you are transformed.

C. S. Lewis had this picture of a guy bringing in a lizard that has soiled his garment and ruined his life in so many ways. He wasn’t getting in with the lizard. Finally, he tears it off and crushes it. And immediately it turns into a white, glorious horse that carries him into eternity. The ugly thing becomes something beautiful.

Remember in the Narnia series in the last battle that they were in a war that looked like they weren’t going to win. They get backed up to this stable and thought they were trapped, but it opened up into a huge and joyful place where its inside was bigger than its outside.

The only way you get into that gate is that Jesus did it for you. Remember in Luke’s gospel that Jesus is on a journey to Jerusalem, to the cross. When you come to him, you trust that he took the narrow way for you.