The Narrow PathSample

Best TED Talk Ever

In our culture, narrow is a negative term. It describes closed-minded, stubborn, holier-than-thou people. We do not aspire to be narrow; it is a characteristic to avoid.

Not so with Jesus.

Jesus tells us: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13–14).

The narrow way of Jesus gets to the core of what it means to be human and love well. It focuses our energy on what truly leads to the good life: a spacious kind of existence that makes room for God and others.

Admittedly, the narrow path is rarely taken because it demands much of us. As German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”But you and I also understand something intuitively: Things that matter most never come easy. The greater the demand, the deeper the payoff. The greater the challenge, the more profound the joy when it is met. The more we die to ourselves and yield to Jesus, the more we come alive. This is the paradox of the Jesus Way.

Jesus wants you to experience the thrill and satisfaction of the narrow way. The question is, Are you settling for less?

Over the next few days, we’ll examine how Jesus’s narrow path offers the life you truly desire. To do that, we’ll explore Jesus’s famous Sermon on the Mount, which is found in Matthew 5–7.

The Sermon on the Mount is essentially the best TED Talk ever given. The great leaders, preachers, and poets of history have been shaped by this message—everyone from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr. Name any historic speech, and you’ll find that Jesus’s sermon outweighs them all. Everything that’s been written or spoken pales compared to these soul-healing, world-changing, God-glorifying words of Jesus.

Slowly read Matthew chapters 5 through 7. We’ll look more intently at how to read these famous words in tomorrow’s devotional.

How would you define the “good life”? How would you summarize what Jesus says about the “good life” in Matthew 5–7?