MT 7:13-14 “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.”

Have you ever noticed that the broad path requires little integrity, character, or self -control? It’s well-beaten, alluring, captivating, and welcoming. It’s almost as if it beckons you. It calls your name and tells you to give in, do what everyone else is doing, take the easy way. Relax. Indulge. Treat yourself. You deserve it! No doubt, the broad path has its sinfully delicious moments along the way. But it has a sneaky way of chopping your character at the knees before you even realize it. Integrity soon falls by the way side. Honor and nobility are clearly not needed on this commoner’s path.

Oh the other hand, the narrow road leads to life, and not just life, but the abundant life! The narrow path undeniably requires integrity, courage, hope, faith, honor, nobility, patience, self-control, obedience, diligence, perseverance, character and discipline. In this day and age, these are not exactly popular words. But then again, the narrow road has never been popular.

In The Road Not Taken, the famous words of Robert Frost, say it best:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear Through as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads onto way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

I don’t know about you, but when I come to a crossroad, I want to be able to take the narrow road every time. To do this, I must fight with everything in me to resist the sin nature. I must indulge, not in a worldly sense, but in a spiritual basking of the scriptures to build up my faith and fortify my inner man. I have to plan for the snares and patch up the weak spots in my character, knowing the enemy is on the prowl. I need to pray like a mad woman so that I don’t join the ranks of regret and slip into walking that alluring, yet entirely self-debasing, well-beaten broad road. When I am at that crossroad, torn with indecisiveness, may the image of the glorious cross of Christ burn in my mind. So that I too can proclaim from my inmost being the narrow road has made all the difference.