Daily Devotional
"Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many."
Matthew 7:13
Jesus has been teaching for three chapters. He has addressed anger and lust, prayer and worry, money and judgment, and the golden rule that summarizes the Law and the Prophets. Now, before he steps down from the mountain, he gathers all of it into one imperative. Enter. Not consider. Not admire. Not file away for later. Enter.
D. A. Carson and R. T. France both note that the grammar here is not soft. This is a command to a crowd that has just been dazzled by the most beautiful ethical teaching in human history, and Jesus refuses to let them walk away merely impressed. Leon Morris observes that Jesus makes no room for the sympathetic bystander. There is no third gate for people who liked the sermon.
Notice also what Jesus does not say. He does not begin by telling us what the gate is. He tells us only that it is narrow, and by implication, that it must be looked for. The wide gate needs no directions. It sits at the end of an obvious spacious road, and the crowd is already streaming through it. You can reach it by doing nothing at all. That is the point. Nobody drifts through the narrow gate by accident.
So the first question of the week is not whether your road is pleasant. It is whether you ever turned aside. Jesus is not asking how you feel about your life. He is asking where it is going.
Today's Challenge
Where would you say your life is heading right now, and what actual evidence would you offer for that answer? Is there a place where you have been admiring the teaching of Jesus without obeying it?
Prayer
Father, I am good at being impressed with Jesus and slow to obey him. I have read his words and nodded and gone on walking the way I was already walking. Do not let me be a bystander this week. Show me where I have been drifting with the crowd, and give me the will to turn aside. I want to enter, not just to admire. In Jesus' name, Amen.
