Enter Through The Narrow Gate

So this morning, we're going to be moving on in our sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount to the passage that's probably familiar to you if you've been a Christian for any amount of time, really. It's a passage about the narrow path and the small gate versus the wide path and the wide gate. If I asked you what that passage meant, or if you'd heard it, or if you understood it, I think most of us would say, yeah, I think I understand pretty clearly. what that passage is about. If I had to boil it down to my own words, I'd simply say something like, that passage teaches us that if we want to go to heaven, then we need to follow the straight path and we need to enter at the narrow gate. And that there's no other way to enter into eternal rest. And we would say, that's all of it. And we would move on saying, we understand this passage of Scripture. There's not ambiguity, there's not uncertainty. This is what Jesus is saying and this is when we understand it. But Scripture is a funny thing.

There are these passages that are very simple, like this one. And then there are passages that are complex. And the similarity I find, at least in my own heart, and I think in yours as well, if you were to study Scripture and to describe it, you'd say that the simple passages we move quickly through because we understand them. And the difficult passages we move quickly through because we don't understand them. And the result is that we just move quickly through Scripture. and don't get out of any of it what we need. Because I understand it, and I got that. Our passage this morning, as I said, is a simple passage. But it's something that I think we need to take some time and consider. The real question before us is not, what does this passage mean, but which path am I on? And it's a question that if we answer quickly and without consideration, we're much more likely to be wrong.

And so my hope this morning is that our Heavenly Father will help us to follow the narrow path and to enter through the narrow gate with understanding of what it means to do those things. Would you please stand now as we read the Word of the Lord from Matthew 7, verses 13 and 14. This is the Word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So our passage compares a narrow path with a wide path. A narrow gate, a small gate, with a broad gate. It teaches us that the wide path leads to destruction and that there are many on it. It teaches us that the narrow path and the small gate lead to eternal life and that there are few who find it. So how do we determine which path we're on? How do we know? That's the main question before us this morning. So what can we learn about this analogy or this parable of sorts that Jesus gives us? What do we know to be true about narrow paths versus broad paths? Well, one of the things that you know if you've ever walked on a path is that narrow paths are harder to travel on, right? If you were to go to Eagle Creek or if you were to go to a state park and you were to say, let's go hiking, the paths would be raided.

Right? They'd be rated for how long they are. They'd be rated for how difficult they are. And what you can generally know is that the paths that are easier to travel, that have less ups and downs, that are a shorter distance, are wider and more well-traveled. Right? The same could be said of roads. When you get off of the highway and you get onto the back roads or you get out into the country, those roads are less traveled. Those roads are smaller. Those roads are bumpier. And so many of us would say, no, no, I would rather take the highway. I want to get there. Some of you know Daniel likes taking back roads. If he has to go somewhere, we could get there on the highway, but Daniel will take the county roads, and he'll go through the small towns. And there have been times that that's irritated me because I just want to get there. But Daniel will say something like, but you're going to miss all this cool stuff if all you do is take the highway. But Daniel, it's going to take longer.

Well, then we'll leave earlier. He understands the values or the things that there are things to appreciate on the narrow path. That it is often more remote. It often takes more time. It can be more dangerous. But there are very real reasons and good reasons to travel those roads. Some people like the difficulty. Maybe not of driving down country roads, but taking the more obscure path at the park. They want the harder hike. They want the narrower path because they like the difficulty. Or perhaps they like where that path goes. That path takes you farther away to something that's really cool. That you can only see from a distance on the main path, but if you take the less traveled path, the longer path, the harder path, you get up close and personal to the thing that is worth seeing. And so both beauty and difficulty, as well as what's at the end of these paths, motivate people to take the narrow, the small path. And these things all apply and cross over directly to our text. We'll come to that in a moment. What else do we know about narrow paths? Well, we know that the reason they're narrower, if you had to answer them, why are narrow paths narrow? Well, because less people use them. That really is the reason. The reason they're narrow is because less people travel on them.

The way to make a narrow path a wide path, you can spend your life cutting back the branches and the bushes and all of the growth. But if you want that path to be established, it just needs to be used more. You need more people to travel it. Our text tells us that the narrow path has fewer travelers. It tells us that there are few who find it. Have you ever been on a hike and thought, oh, well, we want to take that detour, that other path, and you're walking and you're walking, and all of a sudden you're like... Where was that path? Where was the trailhead? We missed it. We didn't see it. We're lost. Or maybe we're not lost, but we're not where we want to be. We're not where we intended to go. Because the narrow path is obscure many times. It has fewer travelers. It's harder to find. Maybe you've been on the narrow path and all of a sudden you realize, I'm not sure that I'm on the narrow path anymore. I think I might be following the rabbit's trail. Where the turkeys or the rabbits or the deer walk.

but not where the people walk. And I don't know that I want to be on that path because I don't want to go where the deer want to go. And so for those few travelers, the ones who are willing to endure the difficulty, who know where the path leads, and who can see the beauty of that path, they say it's worth it. They say we should do it. I'm going to do it. And one of the things that's true about those who travel narrow paths is that they know something and perceive some value that the majority of the people don't. You could think of going to the Grand Canyon. I've never been to the Grand Canyon. I've been close a number of times. I've never been there. But I know that you can travel around the rim of the Grand Canyon, that you can go to the lookouts that are right along the road or maybe just a little ways off of the road, and you can look out on the great expanse of the Grand Canyon. And there's a sense of wonder and there's a sense of amazement and there's a beauty that's there. But have you really experienced the Grand Canyon?

Wouldn't it be more memorable if you decided to take a day or three and hike down into the Grand Canyon with mules to carry your belongings and with a guide to get up close and personal, to get in and to see what it really is all about? Wouldn't that be more work? You didn't think I was going to say work, but it really would. It's hot out there. It's a carrier water, you know, and they don't have rest stops. And it's the kind of place that little kids aren't going to make it very well. It's the kind of place where those who don't hike very often aren't going to make it very well. However much you hike, by the time you go down, you say, oh, look, it's beautiful, we've come down, but then what do you have to do? You have to go back up. You're tired. You're worn out. And so why would someone do that? What's the point?

Because they perceive some real value that's worth the trouble, that's worth the hardship, some beauty in that situation that they want. And so they come back. Maybe the family went on a trip. And part of the family observed from the observation deck. And part of the family went on a hike. And they're going to come back with very different experiences. Which one of them is going to be more adamant that you go see the Grand Canyon? Isn't it always going to be the ones who went and trekked down inside of it? They're going to say things like, yeah, you thought you saw it, but man, if you'd gone down in there, you don't have any clue what you missed. And they'll show you their pictures that they worked hard to go get. And so in a very real sense, we can say that both of those paths, though they both are looking at a similar thing, you can go to the Grand Canyon and look from afar, or you can go to the Grand Canyon and you can travel down into it. We can say they went to different places.

They saw different things. They had very different experiences. And most people who go to the Grand Canyon don't go down into it, but go to the observation decks. Or maybe they take a helicopter tour through it. But they cling on to their comforts. They cling on to their safety that the wide path offers. And they say, this is enough for me. This is as far as I need. This is as much as I'm interested. This is as much as I will sacrifice or spend. So narrow paths are hard to travel. Narrow paths have fewer travelers. And the narrow and the wide path don't go to the same place. These are things that we have to keep in mind. That if you're going to be a Christian and obey what Jesus says here, that we ought to enter through the narrow gate. That we ought to walk the straight path. That it's going to be a harder life.

than taking the wide path. When Jesus tells us that we ought to count the cost of following him, then he describes following him as taking up your cross and following me. We should stop for a minute because those are just the kind of passages that we think we understand. And we blow right by them only to find out later when the cost comes, when the cross gets heavy, that we go, I didn't know about this. And so it would be good for us to remember that narrow paths are harder to travel. It'd be good for us to remember that narrow paths have fewer travelers on them. Time and again, Scripture warns us and talks about our relationship as Christians to the world. And it always describes us as coming out of the world, being separate from the world, being strangers in the world, being aliens, that this place is not our home. And so, if we love the world, or if we desire the things of the world, then we are on the wide path. The comfort of being on the wide path.

is that there is a real sense in which there is unity or community on that path. There's critical mass. There's a majority. You're not alone. You're not lonely. You don't stand out. You have your group. You have your people. And if we're honest, none of us like to be alone. I know some of you would say, I like to be alone. But if I gave you enough time alone, you'd realize that you don't want to be alone. There's no one who's ever been isolated for a long extended period of time and said, this is so much better. If I could just live my whole life this way. And you might say, no, no, I saw a TV show about guys who live on the side of mountains. My wife and I watched this show years ago called Mountain Men. And it was all about these people who just lived all by themselves. Except the irony of it, of all of it, is they're connected enough to the world that a TV show

has heard about them and is coming to videotape their life. And so this isolation that they project in the TV show, I say it's not quite real. Because here's the camera crew watching you do it. I think you're more connected to people than you might care to admit or acknowledge. And if that wasn't enough, if experience wasn't enough to prove the point, then I'd simply quote to you what God says in the first few chapters of Genesis, that it's not good for man to be alone. That it's not God's desire or intention for us to be alone. And so those in the world find their groups. They find their communities. They get together. This is what people do. It's inescapable. And so to follow Jesus means, in a very real sense, to step out of those communities and out of those places and out of those relationships. Because you're no longer traveling that same path. You're no longer going to that same place.

One way of saying it is becoming a Christian. Some of you have grown up in the church and didn't have this experience. Some of you didn't grow up in the church and would be able to identify more with this experience. I didn't grow up in the church. When I became a Christian, all my friends changed fairly quickly because everything I did changed. My priorities changed. My desires changed. How I spent my time, how I spent my money, who I hung out with, it all changed. And I had to realize that somehow I can't mesh these two things together. I had these friends over here, and we were all at peace, and we did our things, and we got along. And now I'm a Christian. I'm different now, and I don't fit in. And so I have to go find my people, the Christians. And it turns out that there's less of them than there are those on the wide path. We could look at our society and say, well, it wasn't always that way, but now it is. And I'd say,

Christians have always been a minority. You might look back on the history of our country and say, no, no, no, we need to get back to the time when everyone was a Christian. And I'd say, you should actually go read the history of our country. There's never been a time when they were all Christians, where they all got along, where they all agreed, where they all said yes to all the same stuff. Even at the founding of our country, they were compromising and working out their differences and coming to a place that they could all stand together. And one of the primary things that divided the men, at that time, was whether they were Christians or not. Christians and non-Christians have this incompatibility that can't be ignored. It can't be ignored, nor should it be suppressed. So you have fewer travelers. And what I mean by that is not to say that there are no Christians, but what I mean to say is that the majority of the people that you will be around and the pressures that you will feel in your life will not...

the overwhelming majority of it will not be coming from other Christians, but from the world. They'll all be saying, this is okay, and this is good, and this is what's important, and we need to be about that. These are the things we need to care about. And you're going to be left like, am I crazy? Because I don't think that that's what we should be doing. I don't think that's what God says. And you're going to feel alone, and you're going to realize in that moment that the way is narrow, and there are few who find it. And that that sense of loneliness or isolation isn't untrue. And so we have to keep these things in mind. Also, that these paths lead to different places, right? When I was talking about the Grand Canyon, they were saying, we're all in this together. We're all going to the same place. No, that's not true. That's not true. Unless you just sort of gloss over and ignore what happens when we die. But if you take seriously and believe what the Scripture says,

about death and about what comes after death, then you realize we're not all going to the same place. Our ends will not all be the same. That when someone you know or someone you don't know passes away, you're going to have this thought well up inside of you are like, are they in hell? And of course, everything in the world would say, no, no, no, of course not. There's no such place as hell. But those are the whispers of the devil. The Bible tells us that hell is real and that it's appointed to man. wants to die, and that then comes the judgment. And so that perspective, just as an example, that when you hear of death, you go, heaven and hell, that person is at rest with Jesus, or that person has entered into their eternal punishment. It's an inescapable thought. The world doesn't think that thought. And the world doesn't want you to think that thought. The world wants you to say, all paths.

Wide, narrow, hard, easy. They all lead to the same place. But Jesus tells us that that's not the case. That the wide path leads to destruction. And that the narrow path leads to life. And so when you come up face to face with this reality, when you're faced with death, you think about it. But you also have to think about it with regard to your own life. Which path am I on? Where am I going? Depending on where you've come from, theologically or otherwise, there are different ways of processing that question. Some would say that if you go to church and if you've been baptized, then you don't really have to be concerned about this. You've set your course and it's irrevocable. You don't need to worry about that anymore. Other places would come and they would always have you worrying about it. That every time there's a sin, they're like, well, we don't know.

Maybe you need to get saved again, get baptized again, or pray the sinner's prayer again, come up to the altar again, or give a little more money again. Here's the thing about being a Christian. It's hard in many ways, and one of the ways that it's hard is that you will not always be so sure of your condition before God. Sometimes you be sure that you're a Christian, and you'll have peace, and you'll have rest, and we call that assurance. Other times, because of temptation, because of sin you've been given to, because of a growing conviction, because someone you care about told you so, you'll doubt you're standing before God. This happens to Christians. And in that moment, you're going, am I on the wide path or am I on the narrow path? Am I headed toward life or am I headed toward destruction? This passage is meant to get us to slow down at that intersection and think about it for a minute. Because that question left unanswered can be paralyzing.

It can become the seedbed for great frustration and bitterness toward God because you don't know how to sort these things out. In that moment, even the Christian, when he doubts, feels as though the promises of God are not for him. That God didn't mean him. That he meant other sinners, but not him. Some of us would come and we would worry in that way. Some of us would come to that question and say, well, of course I'm a Christian. Why would I even wonder about that? We say, well, because of these huge, enormous sins in your life that you're not repenting of. You say, well, yeah, but everybody sins. We minimize it. We just say it's not a big deal. And so we are complex. How do we figure out if we're on the wide path? How do we figure out if we're on the narrow path? Well, one of the things I'd ask you is to go back to the things we've covered so far and describe honestly your life. The narrow path is a harder road to travel. Is your life a harder road to travel?

Now, here's the thing. The wide path is not an easy road to travel because everybody's full of sin. So there's sin over on the wide path and it causes problems. And there's sin on the narrow path and it causes problems. And so the question is not, is your path hard at all? But is it hard? Is the difficulty connected to your love for Jesus? Is the difficulty connected to your love of Jesus and your desire to follow him? There are many things that Christians do with their lives and commit themselves to that are difficult, that don't make any rational sense. You say, why would you do that? That doesn't make any sense. And at this point, in this late day in our society, things like, why would you get married, fall into that category? Why would you stay in a marriage that's difficult? Why would you submit to your husband? Why would you have children?

All of those things bring difficulty. And we could just go on and on listing more and more of those things. And you say, it doesn't make any rational sense to do them. It doesn't make my life easier to do them. In a lot of ways, it makes it more difficult because it exposes my unwillingness to follow God, my inability to follow God, my own weaknesses and shortcomings. So is your life hard? Is it hard because of your faith in Jesus Christ? How else do you know if you're on the narrow path or the wide path? Who do you have community and fellowship with? Who are you most at peace with and who do you get along with? And I'm not talking about your personality. I'm saying who do you feel the deepest connection to? Who are you willing to go to and talk to and cry with when you have trouble or they have trouble? If it's not Christians, then you're on the wide path.

I know you'd like me to be more gray, more ambiguous, but if you have the deepest and strongest connections to the world and not to the Lord, then you're on the wide path. When people go on vacation, we enjoy the vacation, we enjoy the adventure, we enjoy all of the things that go on, but at some point we say, I just want to go home. I just want to sleep in my own bed. I just want to be at the place where I'm comfortable, where I don't have to be concerned about being in someone else's house or using someone else's stuff or their vehicle. I just want familiar. That sense of familiarity, that sense of like, I can let my hair down. This is where I can be at home. That's what I'm trying to get at. Is that with Christians? Or is that when you're away from them? Do you just like play the game of...

doing what you're supposed to do when the Christians are around, but really it's a drag and a hassle. And what you really look forward to is when you can get away from that. Where now you can speak and now you can act. And now you can go after the things you want without having to worry about what God says. That's how those people traveling the wide path, that's how they live. And they assure themselves that they're Christians on the wide path. If you went to an unbeliever and you asked them, I shouldn't say an unbeliever, but if you went to people and you said, do you believe in God? Most people would say yes. Now, what they mean by that could be a lot of different things. Inevitably, it is a lot of different things. But if you just ask them a simple question, do you believe in God? You'd come away thinking, well, everybody's a Christian. Apparently, everyone's a Christian. But then if you slowed down and you looked at their lives, their priorities, the decisions that they make,

the way they spend their time, the way they treat people, their knowledge of Scripture, you might come away thinking, I don't think as many people are Christians as think they are Christians. Meaning, they think they're Christians, they've decided to be at peace, but there is not peace. In just a few verses right after this, in Matthew 7, and this is verses 21 to 23, Jesus says this, Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. And so this issue of self-deception, of thinking of ourselves as on the narrow path, when in fact we're on the wide path, is a danger that we all need to attend to.

And the reason is because in the end, that path, that wide path and that narrow path do not lead to the same place. The wide path leads to destruction. And there are many who will be comfortable as they head to the slaughter. They won't even know what's going on. One of the things that I like to do, and I've learned a little bit about, is butchering. I don't know if you know that or not, but I like butchering. chickens or whatever. I think it's fun. So you don't have to think it's fun, but I think it's interesting. And so one of the things I learned a long time ago was that when you take an animal to the butcher's shop, the good butcher shops don't kill them right away because the animal's all flustered because it's been on a trailer and it's been doing something strange. It's kind of worked up. And if you kill, it's got all these hormones and chemicals and stuff in the meat makes it tougher, doesn't taste as good, that kind of stuff. So what they do is they calm the animal down. They bring them in. They're kind of all out of sorts. They bring them in. They feed them. They give them water. They let them sleep. And a day or two later, once they've calmed them all down, now what's coming? Like what's on the other side of that door is death. But what they work to do is convince the animal that everything's fine. You're just in a new pen, but it's a good pen.

And there's a sense, and it's not sinful, but there's a sense in which that animal is being deceived. It's being lied to. If it only knew what was on the other side of the door. And there's a very good reason there's a door there. Because depending on the animal that's being slaughtered, if they see other ones being slaughtered, they figure it out. And they're very unpleasant to be around and dangerous. And so the whole point is to mislead the animal, to coax them into, everything's fine, isn't this food good, and here's the water, and it's comfy and dry. So we go through the door. And then it all changes. May it not be true of us that we're like sheep being led to the slaughter, completely unaware of what's going on, having convinced ourselves that we're on the narrow, on the small path, the narrow path, and that we're going through the narrow gate and that there's nothing to be concerned about. So how do you figure out if you're on the wide path or the narrow path? Is your life harder or are there burdens in your life that you carry because you're a Christian?

The answer to that question for all Christians, to varying degrees, it's not always as hard as it could be. But over time, the answer to that question for every Christian is, yes, there are burdens in my life and hardships as a result of, a direct result of my faith in Jesus Christ and my devotion to him. Many of you are young and may not have the years and decades of experience to be able to look back and to have had the opportunity to make sacrifices for the Lord that you will get to do in the future. or more of. But to those of you who are older, those of you who can point to the things that have been difficult and the burdens that you've carried, you can take comfort and say that those burdens that we carried, that we in some instances invited into our lives, are evidence that we're on the narrow path and that we're pursuing life. You'll also be able to look back and you'll be able to say my relationships and the people that I'm around and the people that I love and the people that have

carried me through those times and the people that I've carried through their hard times. There may not be many of them, but there's a friend who sticks closer than a brother. And it's in those times of difficulty that you find out who they are. There's not a bunch. Proverbs is full of warnings that tell us that when the difficulty comes, all of the friends scatter. And so yes, it has fewer travelers on it, but your connection to those few travelers is strong and able to endure hardship. And the truth is, it has endured hardship, I'm sure. Those relationships, part of the reason they're strong is because they've been through hard times together. One of the things on the narrow path when you're hiking out in the woods is you think, man, nobody's walked on this path forever. And then as you're walking down the path, kind of, you know, through the briars and the difficulties and the swamp and whatever you're around, every once in a while you'll see evidence that somebody else has been there recently. Maybe it's just their footprint in the mud, you know?

Maybe you can see where their rope was tied up around, you know, their old fire pit or their rope was tied around the tree where their hammock was at. You see some evidence that there was someone here and you go, they were here recently. Like they might only be a mile ahead on the path. But because the path is so difficult, I can't see them and I don't know they're there. You show up to the trailhead and you're like, oh, there's four cars in the parking lot. And as you get down the road, you're like, I don't think those cars belong to anybody. But then you see that it does. That there are travelers.

other people on the path going through it and traveling the same roads you're traveling, and it ought to be a comfort to you. It encourages you. You think, maybe if I yell loud enough, if I really get into a pinch, if I yell loud enough, maybe they'll hear. Christian life is the same way. You often feel alone. You feel like no one else has suffered or no one else has gone through what you've gone through. But Scripture tells us a different story. In Hebrews 11, it recounts for us, all of these people who've gone through these terrible things, seeking after the kingdom of God, the city with foundations. And then in Hebrews 12, right on the heels of that passage, it says, Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, so many other people who've traveled this path, not as a group, but single file, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and sin that so easily entangles us.

and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. So when you get to the end of the path, and you're all sweaty, and you're all dirty, you may be all cut up, you may be all wet, you may have a sprained ankle, whatever it is, how sweet is it to talk with the people at the end of the path about the path and what you saw. I saw a bobcat. I saw a bear. We were terrified that it was going to come into our camp and eat all our food and destroy us. Oh yeah, one time I was on a path and that happened. There's a deep bond and a fellowship there. And that's what Christians have with one another. And so you ought not to take lightly the relationships and the fellowship that God's given to you. Because there are deeper and more meaningful relationships on that narrow path than there ever can be in the world. Those relationships can endure hardship, can endure suffering, can endure sin, because they're able to forgive.

And so as your life goes on, you'll find that you have deeper and more meaningful relationships with fewer people, but that those relationships are able to endure and bear up under heavy loads. Don't trade that in for superficial relationships, for the sorts of things that happen on social media. It's not worth it. In 2 Corinthians 6, Paul says, don't be bound together with unbelievers. Don't be bound together with them. And yes, this passage is about marriage. But the only reason that it can be true of marriage is because it's built on the foundational reality of the relationships that Christians have with one another and the separation that they have with unbelievers. You're going different places. We're traveling different paths. Do not be bound together with unbelievers. For what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? Or what harmony has Christ with Belial? And what has a believer in common with an unbeliever?

Don't be the believer who gives up their faith and loses their saltiness so that they can have something in common with the unbeliever. You're going to stand out. Increasingly so. And that's as it should be. The other thing I'll tell you about the wide path is while there's a certain level of fellowship, it's superficial, the wide path is not monolithic. Everybody doesn't get along over there. You don't gain a bunch more friends by going over there. In fact, the fighting's worse over there. Because the fellowship is not as deep. It's not founded. On the solid rock of Jesus Christ. It's built on sand. You can see this. Politics is a great example of this. The world is really good at arguing vehemently and adamantly about politics. Really good at it. And they can get really nasty. And they can do really harmful things to each other. And so there's a lot of division on the wide path. And not all division. There's not just division between the narrow and the wide path. There's division on the wide path as well. And it's more destructive division because it's leading to destruction.

So enter through the narrow gate. It's small, it's narrow, but it leads to life. The longer you pursue this, I'll tell you, the stranger you will become to the world. The stranger the world will become to you. When I was a youth pastor, and Mary was in the group, remember way back when we were young, I thought, I'm going to keep up with these kids. I'm going to keep up with what's cool. I'm going to know what all the worldliness is that is a danger to these kids. I failed. I failed. Part of the reason I kept up with it at that point was because I still liked it too much. I was still too enthralled with the worldliness that the kids were captivated by. I thought, oh, wow, yeah. No, no, but yeah. There's this battle inside of you. And as I've gotten older, I've just went, no. That's just not life. It's dangerous.

It's destructive. And so I don't think it's a failure that I no longer keep up in detail with those things. I think it's more helpful to be able to say, as an older man and a father now, those things lead to destruction, son, and you ought to stay away from them. I want you to stay away from them. Come over here and join me in the things that have the blessing of God on them that will keep you from death. Join me on the narrow path. Walk with me through the narrow gate. And I trust that the older I get, the more true that will be. And if you've had a grandma or a grandpa, some old godly person in your life, isn't that what you appreciate most about them? It's how different they are than you. How settled their priorities are and in some ways just how simple their life is. Because they're not trying to love the world and keep up with it anymore. They've come to terms with the fact that this world's not their own. It's not their home. And that it'll be okay when they leave it.

Because they'll leave it for a better place, for eternal rest and life by the side of Jesus. And so walk the narrow path. Seek after life. Do it the rest of your life. And know that there will be a paradox that goes on. The more you do it, the more you'll realize the worldliness that's still in you. You'll realize how much more you want to be on the wide path or how much more you actually are on that path, even though you don't want to be on that path. And then trust God to help you to work through it, to persevere. There have been times where I've been out hunting, tracking a deer, and you get into this place in this briar patch where you're just like, I can see the blood. I know this animal came right through here. There is no path and there is no way out. And I'm getting poked and torn by thorns in all kinds of different directions. It's quite miserable. You can't go backwards. You can't go forwards. You can't go anywhere. What you want is a machete, but you don't have one.

So what do you do? You follow the blood. Because I want what's at the end of that trail. So I go where it leads me. And I think all the while, am I crazy? Did anything ever walk this path before? And the answer is yes, because there's evidence of it. And the same is true of Christians. The path that you're walking, you're not the first down. And you won't be the last. And when you get to your destination, you won't be sorry. You won't be sorry. Let's pray.