Mind Meld of A Different Kind

MATTHEW 7:13-14
“You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose that way. But the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it.

My journey into God’s amazing love
As a boy I bought the implicit teaching of those around me that only people who experienced our brand of Christianity would populate heaven. Jesus words today were one of our proof-texts. Then I began to realize that the gateway to eternal life was narrow because it was one man wide, not one Christian tradition wide. Jesus saw himself as the way, truth, and life through whom everyone must go in order to arrive at the Father’s House (John 14). Anyone who lived “Jesus is Lord”, however imperfectly or in ways disagreeable with my tradition, was a fellow traveler on this narrow road.

Then I began to notice the wide, wide love of Jesus. His words, “If I be lifted up, I will draw everyone to myself” began to sink in. The verse my narrow minded Vacation Bible School leaders led me to memorize, “For God so loved the world” had sown a seed that began to crack the rigid shell of “ours is the only way” thinking.

About the same time I fell in love with the words and rhythm of a hymn that reflected the lavishness of God’s love and his clearly expressed will that “no one should perish but have eternal life”. “Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above, would drain the ocean dry. Nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.”

So if this is the width and breadth of God’s love, and if his will for the salvation of all humanity compels him to offer himself in sacrifice on a cross, how could Jesus teach that few ever make it? Or does he?

I don’t think Jesus meant that only a few will come to the grand party God has planned while countless more writhe in hell. As he begins to wrap up the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus insists that following him and his teaching leads to life. His is the hard way, one that often provokes harassment and persecution because it is so different from the wisdom and ways of the world’s cultures. Few people, including many who sit in church each week, ever pay the price of traveling that difficult road. Most simply don’t get it. This doesn’t mean that they never will.

Like the thief on the cross next to Jesus, dieing breaths often clear the clutter off the broad path to expose the small gate and the narrow path. Even though barely a step or two may be left to walk, in his deep and broad love, Jesus imparts faith and accepts repentance. “Today you will be with me in Paradise!”

Father, I accept your call to difficult discipleship today. I will not travel the broad path through life, leaving moral and spiritual pain and death in my wake. Help me to faithfully call others to this narrow path, and warn them of the dangers of the broad path, but without ever becoming so graceless and miserly that I give up on your love for them. - Mike Leamon

Highway to Hell, or Stairway to Heaven

In 1970 Led Zeppelin released the famous song “Stairway to Heaven”. The song describes the pursuit of eternal security and peace through reason and meditation. Everyone finds their own path towards this nirvana if they try hard enough, with each road melding into one stairway to heaven.

Nine years late, the rock band AC/DC introduced the song Highway to Hell that made it to #17 on the charts and has been classified as one of the 500 songs that shaped Rock and Roll. The song describes life in the fast lane with “no more stop signs, or speed limits.” A freeway to the bottom with a destination of “the promised land: Hell.”

Both songs are accurate commentaries on the human struggle to find meaning beyond life. No matter how hard we try, we cannot create eternity. Our attempts produce stairways to nothingness and highways to emptiness. Only through the narrow gate [accepting Jesus as Lord] can we find meaning in and beyond this life. The narrow gate is easy to miss, the road is difficult and few follow its path. The road of self-determination is broad.

Karl Barth, the great neo-orthodox theologian quoted a song when asked what the greatest truth of the Bible he had discovered was. He said, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

Jesus, I thank you for loving me and providing me with the way to heaven. Thank you for reminding me it is not through human intuition or struggle that I can find satisfaction and hope, but in resting in your salvation. - Dan Jones