Daily Devotional

Put the whole passage back together. Two gates. Two roads. Two destinations. One gate wide, one narrow. One way easy, one hard. One ending in destruction, one in life. And standing over all of it, a command: enter.

If you have felt the objection rising all week, you are reading the passage correctly. If the gate is that narrow and the road is that hard, who is strong enough to walk it? Be honest about the commands. Be honest about the opposition. Be honest about your own heart drifting. On those terms, none of us makes it.

That is exactly where the gospel meets you. You do not conquer the hard road by gritting your teeth and trying harder. You walk it by grace, one step at a time, leaning on the one who walked it perfectly ahead of you and then died in your place. Jesus kept every command that fences us in. Jesus believed and spoke every truth that narrows our thinking. Jesus took the hardest road any human being has ever walked, and he did not take it for himself. He endured the cross for the joy set before him, and the joy set before him included you.

He is not only the one who commands you to enter. He is the gate. I am the door, he said; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved. I am the way, and the truth, and the life. The narrowness of the gate is simply the singularity of Christ.

So if you belong to him, hear this. The difficulty of your road is not a sign you took a wrong turn. It is the road to life, and you are not walking it alone or on your own strength. Your standing at the end does not depend on how well you climbed but on the one who carried you. And if you have never gone through that gate, come. It is narrow, but it is open. The one who commands you to enter is the same one who gave his life to make the way in. The hard is what makes it great, and the greatness at the end is him.