It’s nature
You have accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior several years ago. You are now engaged in a personal walk of faith as you daily seek to follow Jesus and to faithfully live with God as His “servant” in the role of personal service to which He called you. Right now your role may just be to worship God and to be as good of a person as you can. You believe that you have been “born again” with a transformed heart and a redeemed spirit. You have been given the gift of the Spirit in your personal heart and mind to help you to personally obey the Spirit in His direct instructive work to enable you to glorify God through your cooperative and devoted works of worthy service. You hope that your works, as simple as they be, will please God and be rewarded by Him. When you appear before Him for His judgment of your works you hope to hear His personal remarks of “well done good and faithful servant” (Matt. 25:21-22). Your role of service has been expressed on a path of personal chosen works of love for God and works of kindness and the sharing of personal resources with your church and needy members of your family and the poor residents of your community. You have conducted these works of service step-by-step on your path to righteousness in Christ and eternal life with God and the Spirit in your daily walk of faithful surrender of yourself to God and the loving care that you have given to others in their time of need.
The path upon which you are walking in your life of faithful service is a “straight and narrow” one. It seems to be cluttered with various obstacles to your easy forward movement and hills, such as new roles of service. There are many bumbs and holes, like old habits, that can hamper your progress and cause you to stumble or fall in your walk. There are many distractions near the handrails, like kites or balloons or drones with blaring message that seek to draw you off of the “straight and narrow” path, ads from worldly merchants. They offer you easier ways to achieve what your heart and mind wants from moment to moment as you move through your days. Some of these ways actually take you back into some of the pleasures and comforts that you enjoyed before you began to follow Jesus on your personal path of faith. These distractions are very prevalent and appealing. While you are walking on your “narrow and straight” path, you can often see and hear the crowd of people who are easily moving through their daily lives on the ‘broad way” of available choice comforts and pleasures and safety that the authorities of this world offer to everyone. Moment by moment and step by step you realize that this “straight and narrow” and cluttered path though the world’s jungle of personal options for your life is not like the “broad” and curving and smooth highway that many other people, including some of your relatives and friends and neighbors and associates seem to be using in their journeys. You may not always think about the basic benefits of your “straight and narrow” path over the “broad” highway in your personal struggles to keep moving forward in your daily life. You may not always realize that the foundation of your “straight and narrow” path is really the gracious love of God, your creator, and the personal sacrifice of His Son, Jesus, who paid the price for your redemption from a life of sin on a “broad” highway. You may not always realize that the guard rails on each side of your “straight and narrow” path are really the transforming and enabling power of the Spirit and the dynamic wise guidance of God’s instructive words and laws in the inspired documents of the Bible. It is these factors of a strong divine foundation and wise divine guidance that enable this “straight and narrow” path to take you through the threat of nature disasters, like a tornado or a huge brush fire or a flood or a bridge collapse or an earthquake or the death of a spouse or a divorce or a serious accident or illness or a new spiritual assignment from God or Satan’s personal daily temptations. You have no control over such matters in your life. The only control that you have when you encounter such circumstances and temptations on your “straight and narrow” path or “broad” highway is how you are going to respond to the challenge.
A challenge on your path
Imagine that as you are carefully walking on your “straight and narrow” path and come over a hill, which may be a new challenging role of service in your life, or a natural disaster or a severe personal problem. You are suddenly confronted by a missing view of a surrounding forest that has been replaced by a view of a deep rocky chasm, a dark sky, and a swaying suspended bridge of planks that you recognize as your personal path of faith service. You can see that the planks rest on two steel cables with two other steel cables serving as handrails for your safety. You notice that these two cables are bound together by other short vertical cables every four feet to securely hold the bottom supporting cables and the top safety and guiding cables together, as with the Trinity and the Bible. You now see that you could cross, step by step, the one hundred feet of suspended path above the deep chasm of rock that separates its sides and serves as the bed for the stream that flows beneath the wooden planks upon which your feet must stand as you would move forward through this challenging and unexpected episode in your journey. You can see the “broad way” to you left with a wide sturdy bridge across the chasm that you face and the crowds of friends and official care givers who have come from distant places to help the victims of these disasters survive and move through these “storms” in our lives. You may have some relatives and friends who are with you on your path, particularly when you are facing a major crisis in your life, but the walk is still yours to take. You are faced with the same challenging situation that Peter faced when he was in boat with other disciples, and they saw a figure who looked like Jesus who was walking on the waters of the Sea of Galilee. When Peter asked Jesus to prove that He was Jesus by commanding him to “come to” Him “on the water”, and Jesus said “come” (Mathew 14;28), Peter fastened his eyes and heart and mind on Jesus and took a step out of the boat and began to walk step by step on the water toward Jesus on the churning waves beneath his feet on a new path. When he took his eyes off Jesus and focused his attention on the water and the new path on the water rather than the solid ground of Jesus, he began to sink beneath the surface of the Sea and he cried out for Jesus to save him, which He did.
So, what is your next step, forward toward the end of your path across the chasm or backward toward your past? You take a deep breath and move forward to the near end of your “straight and narrow” path that is slowing swaying in a breeze that is blowing through the chasm that now lies next to the toes of your shoes. You slowly look down at the stream and then across the chasm at the other end of your suspended “straight and narrow” path. You slowly and carefully place your right foot on the first plank. You are relieved when it holds your weight. With both hands on the two steel cables that can hold you up if any of the planks fail to support your steps, you slowly and carefully place your left foot on the second plank and take another deep breath of relief as you realize that this swaying “straight and narrow” path is fully supporting your weight without you having to secure your movement with the strength of your arms. This time you don’t look down, but only ahead at the far end of your swaying “straight and narrow” path of wooden planks on two steel cables that stretch across the deep chasm beneath your feet. The attention of your eyes is on the four feet of space between the two six foot tall steel beams through which the four cables pass before they are securely anchored in the rocky edge of the chasm. But, the distracting appeals of the world’s merchants and powerful agents of the Devil are always there at the corners of your eyes and only an arm’s reach away.
Your progress on your path
So you proceed to move forward step-by-step onto the planks that are attached to the steal cables that support your path. the gracious love of God and the personal sacrifice of His Son Jesus. Your initial steps seem to be quite easy as your hands slide along the guardrails of the transforming and enabling power of the Spirit and the dynamic wise guidance of God’s instructive words and laws in the inspired documents of the Bible. Occasionally you encounter a loose plank upon which you should place your right foot. It has been affected by a bad habit that you still enjoy doing from time to time although you know that its choice in your daily activities doesn’t please God. As you repent of this sinful habit,, the Spirit forgives you and secures its plank firmly to God and to His Son so that the next time you encounter this tempting habit you can step on it without fear of stumbling or falling in your faithful walk on your “straight and narrow” path. This is part of the Spirit’s forgiving and cleansing work (see 1 John 1:9) of sanctification in the life of God’s faithful servants. So you move on step-by-step in your walk of faith across holes of sinful habits and unloving selfish choices that God allows you to navigate through His grace and enabling power until you encounter a bigger barrier to your forward progress. It is a plank that has been actually abused so many times that it is no longer in one piece. It has been split in two, and there is only half of it still loosely resting on the two steel cables that form the divine foundation for your suspended path across the chasm in your life. The split in this plank represents a persistent sinful addiction that has captured your thoughts and will for most of your daily life. You have fought against it many times, but your resolution to stop it is not very consistent. You have been able to step over the gap when the broken plank was still above solid ground, but now it was slowly swinging on two cables above the empty space of a deep chasm. So you lifted your eyes to heaven, said a quick prayer for God’s support as your firmly gripped both of the guard rails of the Spirit and the Bible in your hands and carefully placed the ball of your right foot onto the five inch piece of plank that would have to support your weight while you move your left foot to the next complete and secure plank in your path. Step-by-step your moves were successful and you were able to take two more steps to get each of your feet firmly set on two solid secure planks of faith on your path to righteousness in Christ and eternal life with God and the Spirit. The successful negotiation of this challenging move marked your eternal victory over this deadly addiction, which was probably one of sexual immorality. It is the most serious sinful addiction (see 1 Cor. 6:18 & 10:8).
So you carefully continue your walk of faith on God’s divine path to righteousness in Christ and eternal life with God and the Spirit. You are able to navigate across the various holes from former bad habits that previously attracted your attention and the persistent appeals of the world for the devotion of your heart as you keep your eyes focused on the goal posts at the end of your suspended swinging path and Jesus your personal “Lord and Savior”. Your victorious navigation over the vast hole and the broken plank of your sinful addiction was accomplished with the help of the Spirit and the guidance of the Bible as you walked step-by-step on the planks that were supported by God and His Son. Jesus gave you great confidence that your effort would not be in vain, because Jesus himself is the “founder and perfecter of” your “faith” (Hebrews 12:2) and you can “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace in time of need”, as the writer advises us in Hebrews 10:16. Although your walk of faith is not yet over at your current stage in your life, you are now confident that the “narrow and straight” path upon which God has placed you for your step-by-step journey through your life is a good path. In fact, it is the best path for a person’s physical and spiritual journey through life when compared to the ‘broad way” upon which most people in the world are making their journey.
Let’s talk about this
Which path are you consistently on in your daily journey through your life? What kind of experience are you having on the “straight and narrow” path? What draws you off of that path to the “broad way” of the world? How do you seek to trust in the Spirit and follow the guidance of the Bible in your daily personal choices? How well are you doing in getting rid of your bad habits and trusting the Spirit to power you into a more “righteous” daily life? What major spiritual crisis have you faced in your life? How did you navigate your way through it? What do you recommend to your relatives and friends and associates regarding the path that they are choosing for their daily journey through life? What is there about the “straight and narrow” path that makes it a good path for you? Let’s talk about this.