Jesus said, “Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” What was Jesus saying to us?
Before we explore the differences between the easy road and the hard road, we need to start with the realization that most of our lives we are traveling down a road called Grace. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel said, “Just to be is a blessing.” Our days are filled with particular blessings like food, home, people we love and who love us. Then we have the extreme blessing of forgiveness of our sins and salvation through Jesus Christ. Long before we contemplate whether we are going to choose the easy way or the hard way, we have already been traveling down a road called Grace.
Eventually we all face a choice. Choosing the easy road doesn’t lead you to anywhere you want to be. It is the path of least resistance. It is following the crowd. It is going along with the flow. It is what everyone else does. No one is going to yell at you if you take that road. No one will call you a bad person. The easy road just won’t lead you to the life you want to have.
Choosing the hard road is the better choice. It’s the road where you keep up your spiritual disciplines. It’s the road where you adhere to biblical standards of personal morality. It’s the road where you align not with any political perspective but with the word of God. It is a hard road, not only because it requires effort and sacrifice, but also because you don’t have the comfort of fitting in with everyone else. It is the hard road that leads to life.
In the end we want to choose the narrow gate and the difficult road. In the end there is no easy road. This life is difficult for everyone. So we pray not for easy lives but to become stronger people. We trust that grace, that same grace through which we have life in the first place, will sustain us and strengthen us for the life to which God has called us.