"You Christians are so narrow-minded!" - February 19
Have you ever heard someone say that about you or another Christian - "You Christians are all so narrow-minded"?
At first it might seriously sting to hear someone say something like that about you! Being narrow-minded is generally seen as a negative thing; it means that we're not open to the idea of doing things different ways. And especially here in America, being "open-minded" is usually seen as something positive because we live in a nation full of people from such a wide variety of countries, cultures, and ethnic backgrounds. But listen to what Jesus has to say about being narrow-minded (or maybe we could say "narrow-gated"!) in today's reading from Matt. 6-7 (ESV)
In Matthew 7:13-14, Jesus says, "Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few."
Most of the people in our country today want us to believe that it doesn't matter what you believe about God or the afterlife - "all roads lead to the same place". What matters instead is whether or not you're a good person, and being a "spiritual" person is basically just something that we do for the benefit of our health - not to really earn a place in the afterlife! But Jesus rejects that idea completely! He says that it does matter what we believe in this lifetime. Eternal life, and entrance through that "narrow gate" can only be obtained through faith in Him alone! Faith in anything else leads to destruction in hell, because nothing else is our Savior! Nothing else died for our sins on a cross and rose again!
So if we Christians are "narrow-minded" when it comes to the idea of salvation, we're only being narrow-minded because we care about the people around us each day who don't know about Jesus yet! Our goal isn't to beat them over the head with the fact that "our way is the only way to heaven"! Our goal is to share Jesus - the "narrow gate" - with them so that they can be in heaven with us too! Ultimately, it's a matter of loving the people in our lives enough to take a stand for Jesus so that they too can have a chance to take a stand for Him one day!