The Narrow Road

I’m starting to understand why Jesus said following him is a “narrow road.” It’s not just that it’s sparsely populated; it’s because it’s so easy to veer off in either direction. 

Pretty much everything we can get wrong about following Jesus has an opposite, but equally wrong counterpart. 

I’ve been talking lately about humility and glory - how on one side, we can be prideful and  obsessed with our own glory, but on the other side, we can try so hard to look humble that we actually hide the gifts God wants us to use for his glory. But there are so many other examples.

On one side of the road you can be legalistic, doing good works to earn God’s favor. But on the other side, you can avoid good works altogether and not realize that obedience is a part of Christian life. 

On one side, you can be so wrapped up in talking about God’s love and forgiveness that you avoid speaking the hard truths about sin and judgment. But on the other side, you can be so zealous for truth that you use it as a weapon and forget to love. 

On one side, you might neglect the word of God and think you can know God without knowing the Bible. But on the other side, you can be so obsessed with your own knowledge of the Bible that you forget to worship God instead of the words on the page. 

On one side, you might be too in love with the world, chasing all kinds of pleasures that only serve to pull your heart away from God. But on the other side, you can throw away all kinds of good gifts from him just to appear holy. 

I could go on for pages. Pretty much every issue that Christians face, whether deep theological issues or practical “how to live your life” issues, has another side of the pendulum. These things have been the root of so many conflicts and divisions throughout the years of church history. 

I heard Jen Wilkin say once on a podcast that so many conflicts in the church have come from trying to make an “either-or” out of something that the Bible presents as “both-and.” (She probably said it much more eloquently than that, but since it was on a podcast I have no idea where to find the original quote.) 

And that, I think, is where the narrow road comes in. The Way of Jesus is the middle ground on all these issues. But not “middle ground” like a watered-down, compromised version of truth. “Middle ground” like an intricate melding of seemingly contradictory truths, which in the sovereignty of God are actually able to co-exist. 

It’s like what Spurgeon said about predestination and freewill; that they’re two parallel train tracks running into the distance, and at the furthest point of what you can see they appear to be one. 

So in the big-picture sovereign plan of God, opposites attract and eventually become one. But in everyday life, we are still going to be torn between two. We will always live in tension between grace and truth, love and judgment, legalism and licentiousness. 

Life is going to feel like a swerving drive or a swinging pendulum sometimes. You probably will, now and then, fall into the ditch on one side of the road, then overcorrect and go into the other ditch. 

This is why it’s so important to be in Christian community; when one of us goes too far to one extreme, someone else can be the balancing force, and all together we look a lot more like Christ. 

And there is grace no matter how many times we swerve off the road. I love Isaiah 30:21 for this: “Your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ whenever you turn to the right hand or whenever you turn to the left.”

I was in the middle of writing this when I ran across this quote from Blaise Pascal: 

“I do not admire the excess of a virtue like courage unless I see at the same time an excess of the opposite virtue…We show greatness, not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.”

And of course, the only one who can touch both extremes of each virtue and fill all the space between, is the narrow Way himself - Jesus. 

Only Jesus was “full of grace AND truth.”

Only Jesus could be so tender towards sinners and so tough on sin.

Only Jesus could be perfect in humility and in authority.

And so only by trusting Jesus will we ever be able to stay on the narrow Way.