BETTER THAN LIVING INSIDE YOUR CLOSED DOOR

‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.’ MATT 7.7,8 NIV.

Wisdom is taking what is on offer – the treasure in the field. It’s not religion or institutionalism or accruing merit to be worthy of Jesus. It’s living in the incarnation – Paul called it Christ our life.

HIDING
We cannot receive if we are not asking and we are contained in stagnation if we are living behind locked doors. I mean the locked doors of our perspective and in some cases the prisons of our partisan gospels.
Jesus urges, ‘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’ Matt 7.13,14. Why is the gate narrow? Because it is not a gate of self-effort.

FOLLOW THE LIGHT
Following the crowd and taking our lead from doing what everyone else is doing is not always a good thing. Just because the majority believed the world was flat did not mean that it was. Just because many people do not believe in climate change and our part in its causation does not mean it is not real and that we are not culpable. History and science show that we are.  Sooner or later reality will front us if we do not front reality and we will have to give up inventing our own truth to prevent ourselves being drowned or burnt to death in a bush fire.

UN-LIFE
The wide gate does lead to destruction but not always of the dramatic kind. It can lead to a slow death. The broad road can lead to our living of a life that is not alive – of the kind that lacks spirit and life and leaves us dead men walking and talking.

The life of sons and daughters of God is not somewhere else. It is here, with you and in you. This is the life in which we are invited to participate by Jesus. Such a life is a thing in itself – not just a comfort for hard times. Jesus Christ is life Himself and He made a Way for us to participate in infinite life – the life of the trinity.
‘On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20.
RESOLUTE
If you as a person represent truth and life and you have the courage to persist with the dissemination of ideas that break the bondages of common myths – myths in which friends and acquaintances and people who just follow the crowd have a vested interest in maintaining, expect to be opposed by often good, but deluded people.
If you commit yourself to undoing the misunderstanding that ordinary people just coast along with - because their powers of comprehension are not great – you will stand for the truth. But be labelled as a rebel.
If you are a lot like Jesus you may lose your life for gifting people with life.
PURE IN HEART
If you are intent on following Christ and not content to live in the conceit of attempting to persuade Jesus to live by your ‘light’ you will be opposed by those who say they walk in the light but who live in confusion. But you will be on the side of the Light that puts out the darkness.
‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’ John 1.5 NIV.
We are talking the Truth who is not a disembodied abstraction but the truth who is Christ our life and the truth who is our Father and the Spirit who are the Source of all truth.
SANCTIFIED INERTIA
In following in the footsteps of Jesus, you will also pit yourself against the father of lies and the inertia that calls itself ‘our perspective’. This is the common opinion that binds the unwitting in a coma of conformity. It is the mindless accommodation to the conceit that Jesus called the Wide Way: The opposite to the living way that leads to infinite life.
‘Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it’ Matt 7.14 NIV.
The narrow way can be found because it is among us in plain sight. ‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened’ Matt 7.7,8 NIV. This is Real Life – Christ in you expressed as you.