Sermons

God through His Word offers us a solemn choice, and we must make the right one. There are two gates: a narrow one that leads to holiness and life and a broad one that leads to destruction. The narrow one is the way of faith, God and Christ. How do we enter upon the narrow way? We come in the way of guilty sinners; Adam's sin is imputed to us upon conception. We are not born on the narrow way that leads to life. We are offended by the Gospel; we must be born again. The narrow gate is conversion. We receive a warrant or a command in our passage today to enter. There is a narrowness in God that coheres with His holiness (Lloyd-Jones). We cannot by nature approach a holy God. Man has always needed a high priest who offers a blood sacrifice. We have little sense of God's holiness. H. Reinhold Niebuhr says that modern man conceives of a god without wrath, with man not dead in sin, where there is no judgment, and in which there is no cross. C.S. Lewis says we seek a heavenly grandfather instead of a father. Modern man conceives a god of his own making. We must strive to enter by the cross, counting the cost of a more difficult life. The cost could be our families, our friends or our occupation. The narrow way leads to life, yet few find it. The world seeks satisfaction in this life, hating the light of truth and not being concerned with eternity. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that all the horrors of the 20th century resulted from man forgetting God. We are living in Vanity Fair, the City of Destruction. Three types of men will hear the response of Christ, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ First are those who are palpably wicked; second are those who are moral people, but without any sense of sin; third are those who are superficially wicked. The question of eternal weight is, "Are you one of the many, or of the few? Are you ready to approach the judgment throne?"