The Narrow Gate
In the beginning, there was peace.
Just like the God who made it, everything was right and whole and complete. We were at one with Him, with each other, and with the world around us. It was just how He wanted it to be: peaceful, beautiful, and very good.
But tragically, we were fooled into thinking it wasn't enough. We entertained the idea that we would be better off taking control for ourselves (Genesis 3:6). So, we took it. We rebelled, we wrecked the peace that had rested over our world, and we were repelled out into the wild, restless chaos of our own making.
Ever since then, without realising we’re even doing it, we've been searching for that original, perfect peace. We obsess over assembling our lives in ways we hope will recapture it, and sometimes we experience some sense of it, but it never stays. No amount of money, success, entertainment, sex, approval, self-discovery or comfort ever completes us in the way we need it to. The wide road of the world promises much, but it doesn’t ever seem to lead us to the wholeness we know we were made for.
It is into this mess that Jesus came. God's Son lived among us as one of us. He showed us what we had lost: peace, wholeness, and oneness with God and with one another. And through His life, His death and His resurrection, He made a way for us to regain it.
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
The only way we can ever know original, perfect peace and return to wholeness and rightness with God is through the narrow gate of surrender to Jesus. We must release our grip on our old, broken, sin-corrupted, selfish way of trying to live. We must accept that Jesus gave up His perfect life to settle the moral bankruptcy we owe to God for a lifetime of living our own way. We must allow ourselves to be united to Jesus in His resurrection by believing in Him and entrusting every part of us and our lives to Him by grace and through faith. And we must rise and walk with Him by the power of the Holy Spirit into a completely new, different life (Romans 6:5–11; 2 Corinthians 5:17). A life of peace, wholeness, and oneness with Him and with others. The life we were always made for. Life as it was meant to be.
Surrendering to Jesus isn't a one-time decision; it is a lifetime of rejecting the false promise of the wide road that ends in death, and instead following Jesus through the narrow gate that leads to life.
Turn away from the deception of the wide road: it won’t take you where you want to go. Give yourself to Jesus. Immerse yourself in His Word. Learn to love what He loves, to hate what He hates, to want what He wants, and to live how He lived (1 John 2:3–6). Allow Him to change you to become more like Him, and with the Holy Spirit's help, walk the narrow way to life (Romans 8:5–8).
As we walk with Him in this new life, we return to oneness with God. We can know peace with Him and with each other again (Romans 5:1). We are restored to completeness, to holiness, by Him (Hebrews 13:12). And while we still feel the painful effects of our sin and a shattered world, we have confidence that He is going to come back to make all things new: to return everything to wholeness again (Revelation 21:5).
Step off the wide road that promises you peace and wholeness but never delivers it. Come to Jesus, and surrender. Leave your old life at the narrow gate, and walk with Him into a new life that never ends.