Matthew 7:13-14
The Narrow and Wide Gates
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. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
1 Peter 2:22
Jesus Committed No Sins
22 “He committed no sin,
and no deceit was found in his mouth.”
Acts 4:12
Jesus is Our Savior
12 Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.
John 1:14
Jesus is Full of Grace and Truth
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Maybe the greatest obstacle in better getting the gospel of Jesus out to more and more people, is our inability to live like Jesus did...We can write articles and things over and over about Him and have many, many answers about Him and His teachings, yet how we live our lives is much of the time, inconsistent with our Teacher...And how Jesus' followers live and conduct themselves is viewed by the unbeliever...
Author and Priest Brennan Manning put it like this, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians: who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle...That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”...
It is hard to live out and follow Jesus' teachings and the Way He went about His Life on earth...Author and apologist Ravi Zacharias puts it this way, "I have little doubt that the single greatest obstacle to the impact of the Gospel has not been its inability to provide answers, but the failure on the part of Christians to live it out."...
We know that there is only One Way to God...And that Way is Jesus...The gate to an abundant life is a narrow one...And Jesus tells us that only a few are able to walk through that small gate...So it should not be surprising we have our own troubles of getting out the good news in a better way...We have to live out our lives like we are, in fact, a follower of His...
But we, as followers of Jesus, know the difficulty of following Him...He is sinless and perfect in His Ways...G. K. Chesterton when ask what was wrong with this world, he said I am...Chesterton could provide many of the answers that people would ask him of Christianity, yet he knew he was unable to follow the perfect ways of Jesus...And he knew that the world was lesser for our inabilities to be more like Jesus...Chesterton like all of us sin...We cannot get around our sinful nature...Only One who walked the earth was able to walk around and talk to people and go about His day in a sinless way...
As we listen to and read Brennan Manning, Ravi Zacharias, and G. K. Chesterton, we can see that how we live our lives influence how others believe and perceive Jesus, Christians, followers of Jesus, and Christianity...We need to be better at walking the walk, after we talk the talk...And that in itself is a dilemma for man -with his sinful nature is flawed...And so, we need a Forgiving Savior...And we also need to be more forgiving, not only to the unbeliever, but to ourselves, in this respect...Be forgiving and have mercy on others...Jesus walked the earth ad was always forgiving people...And He is forgiving even today...