TWO GATES - Oswald Chambers
Our Lord continually used proverbs and sayings that were familiar to His hearers and put an altogether new meaning into them. Here He used an allegory that was familiar in His day and lifted it by His inspiration to embody His patient warnings.
Always distinguish between warning and threatening. God never threatens; the devil never warns. Warning is a great arresting statement of God s, inspired by His love and patience. This throws a flood of light on the vivid statements of Jesus, such as those in Matthew XXIII. Be careful how you picture Jesus when you read His terrible utterances. Read our Lord s denunciations with Calvary in your mind. Jesus is stating the inexorable consequence ” How can you escape the damnation of hell? ” There is no element of personal vindictiveness.
It is the great patient love of God that puts the warning. The way of transgressors is hard.” Go behind that statement in your imagination and see the love of God; God is amazingly tender, yet He cannot make the way of transgressors easy. God has made it difficult to go wrong, especially for His children.
Enter ye in at the strait gate. …” If a man tries to enter into salvation in any other way than Jesus Christ’s way, he will find it a broad way, but the end of it is distress. Erasmus said it took the sharp sword of sorrow, and difficulties of every description, heartbreaks and disenchantments to bring him to the place where he saw Jesus as the altogether lovely One, and, he says: ” When I got there, I found there was no need to have gone the way I went.” There is the broad way of reasonable self-realization, but the only way to a personal knowledge of eternal redemption is straight and narrow. Jesus says, ” I am the way.
There is a difference between discipleship and being saved. A man can be saved by God s grace without being a disciple of Jesus. Discipleship means a personal dedication of the life to Jesus. Men are saved so as by fire; they have not been worth anything to God in their actual lives. Go and make disciples, said Jesus. The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount produces only despair in a man who is not born again. If Jesus came to be a teacher only, He had better have stayed away. What is the use of teaching a human being to be what no human being can be to be continually self-effaced, to do more than his duty, to be disinterested, to be perfectly devoted to God? If all Jesus came to do was to teach men to be that He is the greatest taunter that ever presented any ideal to the human race. But Jesus came primarily and fundamentally to regenerate men; He came to put into any man the disposition that ruled His own life, and immediately that comes into a man, then the teaching of Jesus begins to be possible. All the standards He gives are based on His disposition.
Notice the apparent un satisfactoriness of the answers of Jesus. He never once answered a question that sprang from a man s head, because those questions are never original, they always have the captious note about them. The man with that type of question wants to get the best of it logically. In Luke XIII. 24 a certain devout man asked Jesus a question ” Lord, are there few that be saved? And Jesus replied, ” Strive to enter in at the strait gate,” i.e., see that your own feet are on the right path. Our Lord s answers seem at first to evade the issue, but He goes underneath the question and solves the real problem. He never answers our shallow questions but deals with the great unconscious need that makes them arise. When a man asks an original question out of his own personal life, Jesus answers him every time.
Our Lord warns that the devout life of a disciple is not a dream, but a decided discipline which calls for the use of all our powers. No amount of determination can give me the new life of God, that is a gift; where determination comes in, is in letting that new life work itself out according to Christ s standard. We are always in danger of confounding what we can do and what we cannot do. We cannot save ourselves, nor sanctify ourselves, nor give ourselves the Holy Spirit; only God can do that. Confusion continually recurs when we try to do what God alone can do and try to make out that God will do what we alone can do. We imagine that God will make us walk in the light; God will not, we must do the walking. God gives us the power to walk, but we have to see that we use the power. God puts the power and the life into us and fills us with His Spirit, now we have to work it out, not work our salvation, but work it out; and as we do, we realize that the noble life of a disciple is a gloriously difficult one a difficulty that rouses us up to overcome it, not a difficulty that makes us faint and cave in.
It is always necessary to make an effort to be noble. Jesus never shields a disciple from fulfilling all the require mints of a child of His. Things that are worth doing are never easy. On the ground of Redemption, the life of the Son of God is formed in my human nature, and I have to put on the new man in accordance with His life, and that takes time and discipline. Acquire your soul with patience.” Soul is my personal spirit manifesting itself in my body, the way I reason and think and look at things. Jesus says that a man must lose his soul in order to find it.
We deal with the great massive phases of Redemption that God saves men by sheer grace through the Atonement, but we are apt to forget that it has to be worked out in practical living among men. Ye are My friends,” says Jesus, therefore lay down your life for Me, not go through the crisis of death, but lay out your life deliberately for Me, take time over it. It is a noble life and a difficult life. God works in me to do His will, only I must do the doing; and if once I start to do what He commands, I find I can do it, because I work on the basis of the noble thing God has done in Redemption.
God demands of us our utmost in working out what He has worked in. We can do nothing towards our redemption, but we must do everything to work it out in actual experience on the basis of regeneration. Salvation is God’s ” bit,” it is complete, I can add nothing to it, but I have to bend all my powers to work out His salvation. It requires discipline to live the life of a disciple in actual things. Jesus knowing that He was come from God and went to God . . . took a towel . . . and began to wash the disciples’ feet.” It took God Incarnate to do the ordinary menial things of life rightly, and it takes the life of God in me to use a towel properly. This is Redemption being actually worked out in experience, and we can do it every time because of the marvel of God’s grace.
If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments.” Jesus puts that as the test of discipleship. The motto over our side of the gate of life is All God s commands I can obey. I have to do my utmost as a disciple to prove that I appreciate God s utmost for me, and to learn never to allow ” I can’t ” to creep in. Oh I am no saint, I can’t do that.” If that thought comes in, we will be a disgrace to Jesus. God’s salvation is a glad thing, but it is a holy, difficult thing that tests us for all we are worth. Jesus is bringing many sons to glory, and He won’t shield us from the requirements of sonship. He will say at certain times to the world, the flesh and the devil Do your worst, I know that ” greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.” God s grace does not turn out milksops, but men and women with a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ. Thank God, He does give us difficult things to do! A man s heart would burst if there were no way to show his gratitude. I beseech you, says Paul, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice.
A stout heart tae a stae brae, i.e., a strong heart to a difficult hill. The Christian life is a holy life; never substitute the word ” happy ” for ” holy.” We certainly will have happiness, but as a consequence of holiness. Beware of the idea so prevalent to-day that a Christian must always be happy and bright ” keep smiling.” Preaching along that line is merely the gospel of temperament. If you make the determination to be happy the basis of your Christian life, your happiness will go from you; happiness is not a cause but an effect that follows without striving after it. Our Lord insists that we keep at one point, our eyes fixed on the strait gate and the narrow way, which means pure, holy living.
Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me.” It seems an amazingly difficult thing to do to put on the yoke of Christ, but immediately you do put it on, it makes everything easy. At the beginning of the Christian life, it seems easier to drift, to say ” I can’t,” but once you do put on His yoke, you find, blessed be the Name of God, that you have the easiest way after all. Happiness and joy attend, but they are not your aim, your aim is the Lord Jesus Christ, and God showers the hundredfold more on you all the way along.
In order to keep a stout heart to the difficult braes of life, watch continually that worry does not come in. Let not your heart be troubled,” is a command and it means that worry is sinful. It is not the devil that switches folks off Christ s way, but the ordinary steep difficulties of daily life, difficulties connected with food, and clothing, and situations. The ” cares of this world,” said Our Lord, will choke My word. We have all had times when the little worries of life have choked God’s word and blotted out His face to us, enfeebled our spirits, and made us sorry and humiliated before Him more so even than the times when we have been tempted to sin. There is something in us that makes us face temptation to sin with vigor and earnestness, but it requires the stout heart that God gives to meet the cares of this life. I would not give much for the man who had nothing in his life which made him say I wish I was not in the circumstances I am in. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world ” and you will overcome it too, you will win every time if you bank on your relationship to Me. Spiritual grit is what we need.
Enter ye in at the strait gate.” I can only get to heaven through Jesus, no other road; I can only get to the Father through Jesus, and I can only get into the life of a saint the same road.
