Here is your invitation to life: “Go in by the narrow gate. For the wide gate has a broad road which leads to disaster, and there are many people going that way. The narrow gate and hard road lead out into life, and only a few are finding it.” (Matthew 7:13-14 – Phillips translation)

Jesus pictures for us a striking contrast. On the one hand, there is the narrow gate opening off the street into the conventional home of those Mediterranean lands in the first century. Through the narrow gate one moves along a compressed passageway leading between the close-set walls back into the inviting, open courtyard of the home. On the other hand, there is the broad, open plaza, or park, crowded with people.

“If you really want to enter into life,” Jesus is saying, “the fullest, most enjoyable and satisfying life, enter in at the narrow gate that leads along the constricted passageway into the heart and treasure of home, rather than striking out into the noisy, crowded, impersonal piazza, where everybody and his brother are congregated. Go in by the narrow gate, if you want to live.”

Now this is not just a parable for religious instruction — a travel pointer on how to reach heaven. Here, the Lord of all life is giving fundamental practical wisdom for everyday living: “Go in by the narrow gate.”

 “Renunciation is always the rule for the worthy life. We are so constituted that we must forego many roads in order to walk one narrow road . . . Football demands arduous practice and ‘a training table.’ Surgery asks six or eight years of preparation and a life long fidelity.” (G. Buttrick)

Wilma Rudolph was the 17th child of poor Negro parents who lived in Clarksville, Tennessee. Scarlet fever and double pneumonia left her a hopeless cripple. The doctors said that Wilma would never walk. But her mother was determined that this pitiful child should have her chance at life.

She worked as a domestic in a Clarksville home and took her only day off every week for two years to make the 90 mile round trip to Nashville by bus, lugging the crippled child to specialists. And every night when she came home tired from work, she fixed supper for the family, then spent an hour or so rubbing the little crippled limb as Wilma fell asleep, because she was determined that Wilma would walk.

It was a hard road, through a very narrow gate of stern personal renunciation, but into what a glorious kingdom it finally broadened out! For the little colored cripple, grown to womanhood, and a co-ed at Nashville’s A and I on an athletic scholarship, became last summer the first and only American woman ever to win three gold medals in Olympic track competition!

“Thou must go without!” thundered Thomas Carlyle, “Thou must go without.” Let this be the song thy soul sings to thee every day. “Thou must go without.” The musician before his instrument; the scientist bending over his microscope; the athlete working out on the training field: each knows that it is only by entering the narrow gate of renunciation and traveling the straight stern path of discipline that he may arrive at last at the fullness of life, the mastery, the victory, upon which he has set his heart. There is no other way.

Someone asked Budd Schulberg how he began writing and he answered: “First, I clean the typewriter. Then I go through my shelves and return all borrowed books. Then I play with my children. Then I find some friends to have a drink with. By then, it’s time to clean the typewriter again.” Yes, and no writing has been committed to paper.

Here is the invitation to life — all worthy living: “Go in by the narrow gate. For the wide gate has a broad road which leads to disaster, and there are many people going that way. The narrow gate and the hard road lead out into life, and only a few are finding it.”

If Jesus’ words of invitation to life apply to every worthiness, why do we think them inappropriate to the religious life? This is strange, indeed. We see the relevance of the Master’s message to art and athletics, to business and science. Then why do we despise the way of discipline in religion when we submit to it everywhere else?

Is it that we have misunderstood Jesus’ rebuke to the Pharisees? The Pharisees were narrow enough. No one could fault them on that. They were sternly disciplined enough. They prayed and fasted and did good deeds scrupulously, yet Jesus hotly criticized the Pharisees. “Don’t sound a trumpet when you give a beggar a quarter,” said Jesus. “Don’t stand on street corners and make long prayers to be seen and heard of men. Don’t make a public spectacle of yourself when you observe a religious fast, putting ashes on your head and wearing rags and looking forlorn in feature. People who do that way are play-acting. They want to impress other people with their religious devotion. They go through all the motions of accepted religious practice to be seen of men. I tell you, they have their reward, they have achieved their object of impressing others.”

So Christians, hearing these words of Jesus have obeyed Him all right, but they have exceeded His instructions — even to the point of a more horrible disobedience.  “Don’t make a show of your prayers,” says Jesus, and Christians have stopped praying. “Don’t give ostentatiously,” and they stop giving. “Don’t parade your fasting,” and they cut out all bodily discipline for religious purposes.

So, in the church we have developed a more horrible form of 20th century Pharisaism which says not as the Pharisee of the first century, “I thank thee God, that I am not as this publican, but rather, ‘I thank thee, Lord, that I am not as this Pharisee.’” Priding ourselves on our undisciplined life as if this were the epitome of religious excellence.

In Fellini’s controversial film, The Sweet Life, depicting the orgies of contemporary Roman Café Society, the principal character, Marcello, is a young man who will not at first take part in the shameless immoralities of the aristocratic Roman fast set, but he is content to go along with them and watch to get a vicarious thrill out of seeing them do what his conscience will not let him do. The play depicts not only the ultimate unsweetness of this unrestrained, tasteless life, but also it shows the slow, gradual corruption of Marcello’s taste and conduct through association.

1. S. Lewis, in hisAbolition of Man,affirms his faith in certain realities of human existence as being inherently worthy or unworthy of the devotion of the human heart. So, Lewis holds that it is right and proper to teach and train the young to love some things and to loathe other things. For example — to believe that it is a sweet and noble thing to die for one’s country: that deceit and dishonesty are loathsome things, both in contemplation and in practice. Therefore, the proper conditioning of the taste and moral sensibilities of people, Lewis holds to be one of the highest functions of education. He doesn’t go for the current cult of relativity in taste and the dour debunking of emotional values in favor of a sterile and fallacious intellectualism.

Jesus never intended that His disciples should be devoid of all discipline simply because the Pharisees made the most common forms of religious discipline in their day the channels of their revolting self-display. Rather, Jesus took it for granted that His disciples would fast and pray and give alms and work righteousness — but for the right reasons — to express their obedience and devotion to God, and to keep themselves in such physical and spiritual trim that they would readily respond to their God’s commands.

A disciple is one who learns, and discipline is both the learning process and the practice endured to achieve a given goal: character and proficiency in Christian service. An ignorant disciple who does not know what his master taught is a contradiction in terms. An undisciplined Christian who does not practice the way Jesus taught is none of His. He has not entered into the Life, because he has not come in at the narrow gate.

Jesus’ comfortable words: “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden and I will give you rest, are dependant for their validity upon our fulfillment of the last part of His invitation: “Take My yoke of discipleship upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” The rest He gives to the heavy-laden is available only to those yoked to Him in faithful, daily discipline of genuine discipleship.

What then is there for the conscientious Christian disciple to do in our kind of a world? Withdraw from the evils and temptations of society and live a ghetto-like existence? No. Our mission is in the world. We cannot perform that mission unless we remain in the world and exist as a part of that world.

But we become corrupt through association with the dissolute — unless, unless to the world we become the salt which has not lost its savour, unless we keep up our daily discipline of Christian exercise: Bible Study, prayer, stern self-denial and bodily discipline, and soldierly obedience to our Lord’s commands for courageous Christian service. These rules for Christian living are no sterile rote, no meaningless legalism. Our spiritual life and vitality depend upon them.

In a letter to a colleague whom he was dispatching as a missionary to North America, John Wesley wrote:

“Dear George:

The time is arrived for you to embark for America. You must go down to Bristol where you will meet with T. Rankin, Captain Webb, and his wife. I let you loose, George, on the great continent of North America. Publish your message in the open face of the sun, and do all the good you can.

I am, dear George,

Yours affectionately,

                                                                          John Wesley

Christ does not force upon us the disciplined life. He calls us and invites us to choose it. He will have no forced obedience. But when we take it as our best opportunity of entering into life, He sets us free. He lets us loose on new continents of the world, new hemispheres of the mind, new planets of the spirit, to go where the destroyers and death are, but not as scavengers to wallow in the world’s muck, but as shining saviors. Yet, even with Christ, there is no other way than the narrow gate and the straightened pathway of discipleship. Enter ye in at the narrow gate.