The Narrow Way

Summary:

Narrow-mindedness is seen negatively, but Jesus’s “narrow path” leads to a fuller life. In a polarized society, Jesus’s teachings call us to live centered on his principles, embracing love, forgiveness, and humility. The Sermon on the Mount emphasizes living heaven’s reality now. Followers must commit to Jesus’s way, beyond mere belief, for true transformation.

Transcript:

We are beginning a new series today and one that I am very excited about and I hope that all of us will make this conversation a bit of a priority. I know that all of us have other things to do and from time to time we get caught up in other things or on Sunday mornings we either aren't feeling well or have other things that are going on, and that is certainly understandable. But this sermon series is I think, significant enough for us that I want to encourage you to try and pay attention as much as possible, and then if you miss a week or forget what's going on, you use the online resources to sort of go back and check up on things so that we can all stay together with where Jesus is calling us. So want to just say that as we began to sort of set the tone for us, have you ever thought that something was one way only to find out that the way you understood it is not the full picture?

When I was a kid, my older brother decided that he was going to spend some of his hard earned money on buying a load of CDs from the Publisher's Clearing House. Anybody remember this? You would for a low price, I think maybe a hundred dollars or so, $80 send off to the Publisher's Clearing House and they would send you back like 30 CDs or something crazy like that. And when my brother decided that he was going to do this, I was talking to my mom about it, and I think that because she didn't want to turn around and buy me a few CDs, she made a deal with my brother that the only way for him to buy all of these CDs was if he let me choose three CDs that would belong to me. So that was the deal. My brother let me pick out three CDs.

The CDs that I chose were Hootie and the Blowfish was the first one. Alanis Morisette and TLC, the band TLC. Those were my three choices that I chose TLC, commonly known as TBAs. Left Eye and Chili were for some reason one of my favorite groups. They were probably the first all women group that I learned to appreciate and enjoy. They had a song called Waterfalls and that was probably maybe their most famous song of all. I'm not sure where they went from there, but I listened to that song Waterfall as an adult, and it's actually a quite sad song. It is a poppy song. It's got a good beat, a good rhythm, and it was one that was played on the radio all of the time, and so everybody just kind of listened to it and enjoyed it. But the song is about struggling with addiction and getting caught up in patterns that lead you to places where you're chasing things down that don't have the ability to deliver on what they're promising.

So the theme is don't go chasing waterfalls. If you're chasing a waterfall, eventually you're going to fall off of the waterfall and things are going to get a little bit hairy. When I was a kid though, I thought that song was about a guy named Jason and I was singing that song one day and I thought that the chorus of that song where it says Don't Go Chasing waterfalls was long flow Jason Waterfalls. That didn't make much sense to me either, but that's what I heard and that's what I sang until my aunt made fun of me. And then I learned that what I thought it was wasn't exactly the way that it was, which made more sense to me in the end. Have you ever thought that something was one way only to find out that how you understood it wasn't the full picture?

There's something in the scripture's, a very prominent passage of scripture that I think oftentimes we as the church don't grasp the full understanding of it. We don't have the full picture, and that is the reason why we are starting this series called The Narrow Way. From now until November, we're in August, happy first Sunday of August to you by the way, August, September, October, November, we are going to be looking at this passage, what is commonly known as the Sermon on the Mount, to discover what it says about who we are as a church and what does the way forward for us individually and collectively as the church look like. This sermon is a lengthy sermon. It fills up about three chapters in the book of Matthew, and it's one that is very important for us. We're going to begin today. We actually already began by reading what is essentially the conclusion of the sermon. I don't normally advise people to start at the conclusion. Some strategies of reading books say that you do that, but I wanted to do that today because I think this will help us maybe clear up or give us a better understanding of what Jesus is talking about here in this sermon. So we're going to read just a couple of verses and then that'll lead into what we just read in verse 15. But here is what Jesus says. Matthew seven verse 13, 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 is the road that leads to life and only a few find it. Would you pray with me? Jesus? I don't want to assume anything for anyone else, but I think for many of us, if not all of us, there's some sort of desire that we would discover. What does it mean to live on this narrow way? But Jesus, we confess that this is not something we can do on our own. So we need to be filled with and empowered by your Holy Spirit. So we pray, Jesus, capture our attention, our imaginations today and lead us however you desire forward. We join in today with the ancient prayer simply profoundly come. Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the things that my family enjoys doing is exploring wild places. When we were on vacation last week, we went to Yellowstone National Park. We had a tremendous time. We got to explore all of the wonderful features of Yellowstone, the hot springs, the geysers, the lakes, and the waterfalls. We got to see lots of wild animals and critters that we don't normally see running around here in Dallas. It was a magnificent trip. I would encourage you if you've never been to Yellowstone and you're considering it, make time to do it because it is a wonderful awe inspiring place. But a little bit closer to home though. One of the things that my family does, it's sort of one of our rules of our family, is that Thanksgiving week we make time to go down to Big Bend National Park, right here in the great state of Texas and Big Bend over the last several years has become one of my favorite places on earth.

I love the diversity of big bends, the desert floor, the mountain range, and everything in between. It is a beautiful and enchanting place, a place where I feel close to God every time that we go. One of the things that we like to do when we go to these places is to go on hikes, and one of the hikes that we have done the last several times that we've been down to Big Bend is called the window Trail. The window trail is up in the mountains in the center of the park, and it's called the window trail because the mountains make a window for you to peer out of and see the desert below, but the hike that goes down to the window is rather ordinary, at least for Big Bend standards. You're in the desert, there's beautiful colors, there's beautiful flowers, different vegetation than what we have here in Dallas, but pretty ordinary for the most part.

As you descend down into the canyon, which leads to the window, you're walking through a path that quite literally as you go gets more and more narrow. The walls around you get more and more steep and the path before you gets more and more narrow and you feel as if you are walking through this place where you can't really understand what is going on around you because all that it is is just a cliff, just walls on both sides of you. But once you get to the point to where the trail ends, and if you step too far, you will not be a happy camper because you will plummet to however far the dropoff is. But once you get to that point, you have this unbelievably wide view of the most wild and remote and beautiful places in the world. The picture do not do it justice.

I have a picture up here for you that kind of helps you see, and the most beautiful part of this picture I know is the little girl that I'm posed with, but just beyond that, you can see forever down into the valley, across the Rio Grande and down into Mexico for as far as the eye can see. Now, this hike is a great way for us to understand the narrow path that Jesus is portraying here. The way is certainly narrow and we are going to talk about what exactly that means, but for those who will walk in that way, we will discover this expanding and enchanting and wonderful God that leads us forward to places that we never imagined possible. But in order for us to start down this path, there are a few hurdles that we most likely will have to overcome. The first of those hurdles is our understanding of the term narrow.

If someone calls you narrow, they're not paying you a compliment, right? And they say you are narrow-minded. They're not saying that they love the fact that you are narrow-minded. Being narrow-minded means that you are closed off, that you cannot be told anything other than what you already know. If you are called narrow-minded, it might be by a person who thinks that you think that you are better than everyone else. Now, certainly that's not what Jesus is getting at here, and those are not things that Jesus would have us aspire to. The term narrow for Jesus is something that means so much more than what the negative connotations that we understand in our society. And the reason why this is important is because though it's called the narrow path, it actually leads to an expanding life, whereas the paths that we have in our culture and in our world have the illusion of being more wide, but actually are more narrowing.

So it's kind of a juxtaposition there. We live in a world of increasing extremes. It's like our society is kind of like a pendulum and it just swings back and forth from one extreme to another. The right side of things keeps getting more entrenched on the right side, and the left side keeps getting more entrenched on the left side. And when a society that is as diverse as what we have here in our country, what it should be doing is coming together to a table and figuring out what we have in common, understanding how our differences make us unique, but offer perhaps a different understanding of certain situations and come together to move forward together. What has happened in our country has been a shift to where both sides just want to win and they want to win and have it their way, and then they want to go on Twitter and brag about how they won and how the other side lost

The way of Jesus calls us to a different path. Living from a center now, not necessarily the center not talking about being a moderate, although if you have to pick between the two extremes, a moderate's not a bad place to be, but living from a center, meaning that the source of all that we do both in church and outside of church, both in our families politically in business, that we would live from a center. And that center is what Jesus taught and the formation of the Holy Spirit in our lives. All of us, especially today, need to examine. If we find ourselves too at home in any cultural ideology that is out there, more than likely we are in that place because something is as skew as far as it comes to us following the way of Jesus. And that's especially true when our cultural ideologies move us into places where we are tempted to not be loving and gentle towards our neighbors. So we need to learn to live from a center. That's what the narrow path is that Jesus is talking about. The next hurdle is the hurdle of the masses, and this is masses, both culture at large, but also the mass of the church because sometimes as strange as it might sound, the majority rule of the church can lead us into places that are askew according to the way of Jesus.

When it comes to the talking about not paying attention to the masses, we have some societal tropes out there that probably every parent has uttered to their child at one point or another. We say things like, if your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you do it? Just yesterday, two of my three children and I were having conversations about all of the things that their friends have and their friends do versus what they have and what they are able to do and how ridiculous they think that it is that they can't have all of the things and do all the things that their friends do. And what I know as a mature adult is that oftentimes your friends tell you they have and what they are able to do aren't the full picture of what they have or are able to do. And so you have to learn to see through those things and be able to understand when the masses are leading you astray.

That sounds easy, but it simply is not. Even for those of us who are adults, we struggle with this. If you walk into a restaurant during breakfast or lunch service or dinnertime and it's empty, there's not anybody else there. What is going to be your thought as you sit down? What's wrong with this place? What does everybody else know that I don't? If you are a person who is involved on social media, more than likely the posts that you interact with are going to be those that have other people interacting with them. The more followers a person has, the more trustworthy they tend to be according to our society. The larger a church is, the more people say that God is blessing that church, but that is not always the way that it actually is. And instead of us going towards the masses one way or another or being influenced by the masses, we need to learn to live from a center, a center that is centered on Jesus's teaching and the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, the way that Jesus is forming us.

If you think about this passage and what Jesus is saying here when he is talking about the narrow way, the masses might tell us that what Jesus is talking about here is heaven and hell, that the narrow way is for those that are going to heaven and the Broadway is for those that are going to hell. That is a picture of what Jesus is saying here, but that's not the full picture, and it doesn't get to the main point of what Jesus is leading us to here. And the reason why this is important, and this is something that we're going to be talking about most days, most Sundays from now until the end of November, is that what Jesus is calling us to is beyond accepting him as our savior and repenting of our sins. Now, that certainly is part of the narrow path, but in this sermon Jesus does not even mention that

What Jesus talks about here is a whole sermon on social status and greed and lust and desire and loving our enemies, and then he says, this is what the narrow path is. So it is much more robust than just focusing in on one thing. And why we are leaning into this is because the Sermon on the Mount is the most important and comprehensive set of teachings in the entire Bible, especially as it pertains to fidelity to the way of Jesus. The sermon on the Mount is the scale on which the fruit of the spirit is weighed. We have the fruit of the spirit. What God does in us love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, good as faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, those fruits are weighed on the scale of the Sermon on the Mount. This is the seminal teaching of Jesus and how he understands what does it mean to live in the kingdom of God?

The popular opinion, the opinion of the masses tends to be that the narrow gate leads to life and the broad is the way to destruction is that the narrow gate leads to heaven, the broad destruction leads to hell, and while there is some validity there, what Jesus is getting at is not about what happens when we die, but how we are living today in this moment. And if we don't get that right, then the Sermon on the Mount won't mean as much to us as it should. Pastor and author Rich Veloti wrote this, the narrow path is not about the number of people who will end up in heaven. It's about the number of people who will allow themselves to be formed by this subversive and ultimately redemptive way of Jesus.

The Sermon on the Mount isn't about who is and isn't going to go to heaven when they die. It's about who is and isn't living in the reality of heaven here today. The sermon is not Jesus separating Christians from non-Christians. It's separating followers of Jesus from those who ascribe to a certain set of religious beliefs. The Sermon on the Mount is not evangelistic in nature, although there certainly are compelling things about following Jesus here for non-believers, this sermon is about formation of people following the way of Jesus. Jesus is stating very clearly, if you desire to be my followers, this is what it practically looks like. It isn't how people achieve salvation. It's how the Holy Spirit works in people's lives to demonstrate salvation to the world. That's what the Sermon on the Mount is.

This is not an easy task. Part of the reason why we're spending so much time on this is because this is not something that is easy. It's not easy for a new Christian. It's not easy for a seasoned Christian. There are things that Jesus calls us to that our very high and lofty things that on our own we have no ability to accomplish. But that by the way is how if you are following the way of Jesus, if you are able to accomplish the things that Jesus is calling you to and your own strength, then odds are you are not following Jesus closely enough. That's why Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to us to work in our lives and to lead us to where Jesus desires us to be because we are unable to do it on our own. But Jesus said, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and it's the power of the Holy Spirit that allows you to be witnesses or in what we, as we are talking for the Holy Spirit to demonstrate salvation to the world through our lives in this lofty vision that Jesus puts forth, we find forgiveness for those who have wronged us.

Think about just for a moment as I run through this list, how much at odds this puts us not only with our culture at large, but in a lot of even Christian culture as we know it, forgiveness against those who have wronged us, fighting against materialism and greed, seeking a trust that replaces anxiety,

Being trustworthy and honest, blessing those who curse me, maintaining a sexual ethic or sexual integrity, loving our enemies. This is a very lofty vision. This is not for the faint at heart, but for those of us who are able to journey down this path, what we will discover even in these very difficult things is that on this path, there is an unmatched, an ever expanding view of God and a blessedness and a peace which we cannot otherwise understand stand. And that is the beauty of the narrow path. We are entering into a new season as a church, not just because we're doing a new sermon series. Actually, the sermon series is kind of a response to the new season that we are entering into. We have a bunch of new faces around here which opens up to new experiences and new opportunities, and we are in the process of working through all of that.

And what does that look like? Since May, if you'll remember the middle of May, which is when we celebrate the day of Pentecost, we have been praying specifically for a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And what we have been experiencing as God has moved us is that where we are moving is to focus in on four areas as individuals and as a community. These four areas are, first of all, the area of prayer, which prayer is a big word. It encompasses not only when your hands are folded and your eyes are closed and you're offering words to God. It includes silence. It includes worship coming together as we do on Sundays, praying for others. Prayer is a very large umbrella, but devoting ourselves to prayer, devoting ourselves to companionship, creating community with one another, devoting ourselves to work, being engaged and involved in our community, both in ways that we've done in the past and in more ways in which we will do in the future.

And last but not least, being guided by a banquet mentality, meaning that we are focused in on hospitality. Jesus said that when you throw a banquet, don't just throw a simple party, but pull out the biggest spread that you possibly can. We want to be known as a church that every time we have some kind of gathering, it's not just a get together, it is a banquet, it is a feast, it is a party because that reflects the hospitality of Jesus. So that's where we are moving. However, the truth is that we could build a great church with all the bells and whistles and with all of these aspiring values, but if that church is not full of people who are living the narrow way, who are following Jesus as closely as possible, then it really doesn't amount to much. B. Brendan Manning is one of my favorite authors. He wrote books back in the eighties and early nineties. One of the favorite passages that I have read from him that I recall often says this, and I want you to just sort of sink to what he is saying here because this is not, again, not easy words for us. But here's what he says, littered along the shoulders of the highway to holiness, and I put their in parentheses. The narrow way for what we are talking about

Will lie, the skeletons of our egos, the corpses of our fantasies of control, the shards of self-righteousness, self-indulgence, spirituality, and selfish ambition. The greatest need for our time is for the church to become what its seldom has been, to become the body of Christ with its face to the world, loving others regardless of religion or culture, pouring itself out in a life of service, offering hope to a frightened world, and presenting itself as a real alternative to the existing arrangement. For our purposes today, we could say that what the world needs most is for followers of Jesus to commit themselves to this narrow way. So the question that I want to leave us with today is this. How important is it to you to seek to pattern your life after the way of Jesus? How important is it to you to pattern your life after the way of Jesus? That question might be different for all of us. I want to point out just three quick things. If you are a person who is just not sure about following Jesus, you, for whatever reason, haven't quite made up your mind that that's something you want to do, maybe you have made up your mind and it's not something that you want to do.

I want to encourage you over the next several weeks to just consider, is there anything compelling in this sermon that could change my mind? Maybe you're a person who at one point decided to follow Jesus, and that's something that is just sort of limited to Sunday morning gathering together as a church. And you think about it sometimes during the week, but it's really just more for Sunday mornings. I want to encourage you over the next few weeks to wrestle with the question, what is Jesus calling me to next? And maybe for some of us, we've committed to following Jesus, we've made up our mind. There's no doubt about it. We are doing everything within our ability and trusting in the Holy Spirit to work in our lives, to lead us forward from wherever we are over the next several weeks. I want to encourage you to consider what are the blind spots that you have in your life as it pertains to following the way of Jesus? And the reality for us all, no matter where we find ourselves today, is that how we answer these questions will determine if we are journeying towards a freedom

That the world can neither give nor take away, or if we are journeying somewhere. Other than that, would you pray with me, God, sometimes for either convenience sake or because we want to make things appealing to the masses, I, we will often settle for the low hanging fruit when it comes to living in your kingdom. And while there is no judgment for anyone who is struggling to determine their way forward or their commitment to your kingdom, and while you offer us an unending grace, regardless of how deep or shallow we live, I pray that you would help each of us discover fresh and new, the blessedness that comes from living according to this way that you have prescribed for us. I no doubt it is hard. No doubt we will need to rely heavily upon your spirit working in us. But whatever it costs us, help us Jesus to see that what we receive in return far outweighs whatever we might lose. So God, help us to lose our lives for your sake, that we may find the life that you have called us to live. In return. We ask these things, Jesus, in your name and for your sake, amen.