Which Way to Heaven?Two roads and two destinations

Both roads are marked HEAVEN

The comfortable reading of this passage is that the narrow way is church and the broad way is the nightclub. Read it that way and it costs nothing, because it is always describing somebody else. But this is about you. It is about your choice, about your eternal destination.

The contrast is between Christ’s standards and false religion. A contrast that cannot be discerned by how the two roads are marked, because both say “this is the way to heaven.” Satan does not signpost a road “to hell” to make it easy. A sign like that deceives no one. Both roads are marked for heaven, both are crowded with the religious, yet only one of them arrives at life.

Strip the names off the world’s religions and two remain. One says God has done all of it in Christ and there is nothing left for you to add. The other says you contribute — some rules, some ritual, some works, some goodness in you that is worth crediting… The second one comes in a variety of packaging, yet it is always the same deception, and the same end: an eternity in hell.

Man-made systems of religion are based upon the fact that we don’t really need a savior – we have the capability and the capacity to develop our own righteousness. On the other hand, the religion of Divine accomplishment is Biblical Christianity, and it stands alone, claiming that we have been saved by grace alone through faith alone as a gift of God, not by our own works or contributions (Ephesians 2:8-9).

The law came to show us our sinfulness, but when self-righteous, ego-centered man saw that he was sinful by the law, he didn’t want to face his sinfulness. So he set the law aside, reinvented a new system that accommodated his shortcoming, and then, on the basis of the man-made system, affirmed to his own mind that he was righteous.

Scripture keeps putting two options in front of people

This is not a new severity introduced in the Sermon on the Mount. It is the shape of every call God has ever made – a call for a decision, an ultimate choice.

When the crowd thinned out in John 6:66 the question came to the twelve in the same form. Peter articulated his choice and answered, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Making no choice is a choice. Everyone is born on the broad road.

Two of everything, all the way to the end of the Sermon

The pairs of choices keep coming: two trees, two kinds of fruit, two builders, two foundations, two houses, one storm that tests both. The clear-cut decision is the whole issue at the climax of the Sermon, expounded on and restated from six different angles.

Before you get on the road, you have to go through the gate.

Seven requirements true of everyone who gets through

The requirements are cumulative. Each stage adds another requirement to the one before it. By the end, a single person comes through a single opening with nothing in their hands.

1. 1

   You must enter

   The verb is a command, not an invitation to consider. There’s a sense of urgency here — it demands a point of action right now. Do it now! Enter now! Jesus says, “You must enter this narrow way. If you’re going to be in My kingdom, you’ve got to come on these terms.” He demanded immediate action. It is an absolute command without an alternative.

   Admiring the Sermon on the Mount does not equate to entering the gate. It is not enough to listen to preaching about the gate, it is not enough to admire the ethics — you’ve got to enter it. Hell will be full of people who thought the ethics were beautiful, but never entered the gate. And there is no postponing it, no shelving the demands for some future kingdom.

2. 2

   You must enter this gate

   Enter in at the narrow gate. There is a wide gate, but we are not instructed to enter that one because it leads to destruction. If God had named a thousand ways, all thousand would be worth preaching, but Acts 4:12 leaves one name, John 10:9 leaves one door and 1 Timothy 2:5 leaves one mediator. Christ and Christ alone: it is that narrow, it is that prescribed. There are no alternatives. The narrowness is not Christian arrogance or selfishness. A holy God has the right to determine the basis of salvation, and He has determined that it is Jesus Christ and Him alone, and that’s the way it is.

   Thus, you must enter by an act of the will, an act of faith. You have to enter on God’s terms through God’s prescribed gate. And Christ is that gate. He is that way.

3. 3

   You must enter alone

   A turnstile admits one. Families do not go through abreast and neither do congregations. Israel assumed the road was traveled by inheritance — Abraham, ancestry, circumcision, everyone aboard together. People still assume it, and simply date their boarding from the day they joined a church. Nobody has ever been saved in pairs. One believer may draw another, but the transaction itself admits one at a time — everyone’s salvation is exclusive and intensely personal. For a religious man it means stepping out of his own crowd and saying goodbye to it.

4. 4

   You must enter with difficulty

   People hear all the time that getting saved is easy. But the reality is, it is very difficult to be saved. It says at the end of verse 14, regarding the narrow gate, and regarding the narrow way, “Few there be that find it.” That implies looking, and nobody has ever slipped and fallen into the Kingdom of God.

   Asked directly whether only a few would be saved, Jesus answered the question underneath it — why — in Luke 13:24: “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.” The verb in Greek is agonizomai. It is the athlete agonizing for the victory (1 Corinthians 9:25), the laboring fervently in prayer (Colossians 4:12), the fight (1 Timothy 6:12). Many will seek, and will not be able to enter, because when they find out what the striving costs, they are not willing to bear it.

   One of Satan’s pervasive lies in the world today is it’s easy to become a Christian. But it’s not easy. It’s not easy at all. It’s a very narrow gate. You go through all alone, and you go through agonizing all the way over your sinfulness.

5. 5

   You must enter naked

   You cannot get through a turnstile with luggage. The narrow gate is a gate of self-denial, and it does not admit a man holding his own righteousness in one hand and his holdings in the other. The rich young ruler searched honestly, he came to the right person, he asked the right question — and was told to sell what he had and give it away (Matthew 19:21). He went away grieving. He came to the gate with self-righteousness in one hand and his money in the other, and would not put either down.

   It is wonderfully expressed by the Lord in Matthew 18:3, where He says, “Except you become as a little child, you can’t enter the Kingdom.” What marks a child is utter dependency and empty hands.

6. 6

   You must enter repentantly

   Turning from sin to serve the living God is not a later stage of discipleship arranged at leisure; it is part of coming in. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, that great preacher, said, “You and your sins must separate, or you and your God will never come together.”

   In a Jewish context, the whole preparation for the Messiah’s arrival was a purging of the heart of its sinfulness, which is what the crowds at the Jordan were seeking when they were baptized by John the Baptist. Not one sin is kept back and carried through.

7. 7

   You must enter in utter surrender to Christ

   Salvation is not addition. Nobody is made new by adding Christ to a life that carries on exactly as before. Salvation is transformation. The whole message of 1 John is that the truly redeemed show it: sin confessed and love made visible in obedience (1 John 2:3-5).

   Somebody says, “Well, I’m a Christian,” and there’s no sign of obedience in their life, they may sincerely believe they are a Christian, but they got on the wrong road. Sure, it was marked “heaven,” and sure, it may have been marked “Jesus,” but it isn’t the right road.

What the wide gate lets through

Everything. The crowd goes through together. No stripping, no repentance, no surrender — bring the baggage. Pride, self-righteousness and self-indulgence all travel comfortably, and not one of them fits through the other gate.

The road past it is easy living. No curbs and no boundaries, room for any theology and tolerance for any conceivable sin, provided you love Jesus in some general way or are religious about something. No humility required, no need to study the Word of God, no internal standard required. It takes no character at all to stay on it. It is a dead fish going downstream — the current does the work — and Ephesians 2:2 calls it the course of this world.

There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.

Proverbs 14:12

It is easy to get on, easy to walk, and crowded the whole way. It only gets difficult at the very end, when it’s too late. It ends up in hell.

Nobody walks it barefoot

The word behind “narrow” in verse 14 means pressed together, confined. A narrow path on a precipice. It is hemmed in on both sides by the chastening hand of a Father who will not let His children wander, which is why Ephesians 5:15 says to walk carefully, with your eyes open.

The terms are disclosed upfront. The big crowd following Jesus in Luke 14:25-33 was told to sit down first and count the cost, the way a man counts before he builds a tower or a king counts before he goes to war. They were told plainly that whoever does not give up all his own possessions cannot be His disciple. Try that at the end of a service and see how many come forward. The ones who do will be the ones who should — who want to make the right commitment.

There is persecution on this road, and John 16:33 does not soften it: “In the world you have tribulation.” You declare war on hell the day you start, and hell fights. This has never been offered as a soft option for the weak-hearted.

Many. Few.

Asked how many end up where, Jesus gave two words: Many — Few. The masses are on the road of human achievement. It has been like that through the whole of redemptive history. But the believing have always been a small remnant. That is why in Luke 12:32, Jesus calls them a little flock — the word is the one used of the mustard seed, smallest of all the seeds.

Matthew 22:14 states it without decoration: “many are called, but few are chosen.” The one apparent exception in Scripture is during the Tribulation, which is still future, when Revelation 7:9 describes a great multitude, which no one could count, redeemed out of every people, tribe, tongue, and nation, and that the whole nation of Israel will be redeemed as well. But for this age, the word few is reiterated, and the reason given is not that the gate is too small. Men love their darkness and would rather hold onto their own sin (John 3:19).

The religious people who thought they were on the right road

In Luke 13:25-27 the people locked outside are not atheists. They knock, and they argue their case, and their case is a good one: we ate and drank in Your presence, You taught in our streets, it is us. The answer is that He does not know where they are from.

²²Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name, and in Thy name have cast out demons, and in Thy name done many wonderful works?’

²³And then will I profess unto them, ‘I never knew you: depart from Me, ye that work iniquity.’

Matthew 7:22-23 · KJV/NKJV

Prophecy, exorcism, miracles, all of it in His name, and all of it from people on the broad road. Whatever the many are, they are not irreligious. They are mistaken, and they stay mistaken to the last moment, when death takes them away from this world. There is no more horrifying scene in Scripture than people certain they are saved, finding the door shut in their faces forever.

It empties the aisle

A church that preaches this gate the way Christ described it will lose people, and the ones it loses will be those most convinced they belong. Every demand in it cuts against something the modern church has learned to sell.

• ✓Entry alone cuts against the group — the family, the membership roll, the tradition inherited from believing parents.
• ✓Entry with difficulty cuts against the easy decision — the raised hand, the signed card, the prayer repeated after somebody.
• ✓Entry naked cuts against the retained baggage — the possessions, the reputation, the record of good in a man that he still means to mention.
• ✓Entry repentant cuts against the cherished sin nobody intends to give up.
• ✓Entry surrendered cuts against a Jesus added to a life that is not going to change.

Preach that and the building empties. Preach the wide gate with a Christian label on it and the building fills, everyone leaves encouraged, and nothing has been risked by anybody. The comfort is real. It also runs the entire length of the road and expires at the door.