I believe the width of the gate in the closing track of that album is an allusion to Jesus' words which can be found in Matthew's gospel (7:13-14) and again in Luke 13:24, where Jesus urges us to take, or to enter through the narrow gate.
"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction and many enter though it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."
I'd love to write about these verses and tell you about some amazing insights I've had and blow you all away(hopefully) with my profundity, but I can't.
It's pretty basic really. I have no amazing insights.
Instead I stand at the narrow gate that is a way onto the narrow road, the difficult road (as the NKJV has it), and I know it leads to life, but I can't even see the path properly from here, and I can only imagine what that life that it leads to might look like.
And this narrow gate is always the way back onto this road. It is the gate I started through at the age of 6, when I said a prayer at 'Uncle' Andrew's invitation at Dales bible week, and it is the gate I return to at the age of 46, and it is very familiar. It is a gate I have used so many times over the years and through the miles, after hopping the fence for that wide and easy road and having found that the destruction it leads me to might have started out sweet but is now sickly with a bitter aftertaste.
It is the gate my parents called to me from, to come and join them on the narrow way, way before 'Uncle Andrew' invited me, and many times after. It was a gate marked out by my heavenly Father as my destiny before even the world was formed. And the difficult road, no matter how far it travels never leaves sight of the gate. It is the gate that will close behind me at the end of the age, the door on which some will bang and beg for an opening, but once shut it will be shut forever.
I am finding this fundamental to the pattern of discipleship to which I am called. You see, wherever a choice to return to the road is hard, wherever it is the narrow gate and not the broad road, there is an opportunity for renewal and transformation. These opportunities, so often in the form of repentance (a word which has the image of an about face change of direction embedded in it's meaning), they prove to be a portal into the life God has for you. But from the outside the perception is that this choice is hard and difficult. Well maybe, but Jesus tells us, It leads to life.
The broad road is inviting, in contrast to the narrow gate which seems foreboding and uninviting. We know the price for entry into the narrow gate will be a hard slog. Jesus does nothing to sugar-coat it. it is the narrow way. The difficult path. In contrast the broad road has broad appeal, the appearance of ease, however: it leads to destruction.
Many walk that way.
Not so the narrow way.
It is the road less travelled.
Few find it.
Those that do find it, however, walk that way, and they are led to life. Dare I venture, life in abundance.
And we see elsewhere in Jesus teaching that what we consider to be a hard yoke, turns out to be an easy one, and what seems to be a heavy burden, turns out to be a light one.
That's because that gate we enter through is Jesus himself. (I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.~ John 10:9)
And he is the road too.
We are, especially us evangelicals, very, very familiar with John 14:6. It is one of a handful of verses I could quote to you by being told the reference. Second or third place to John 3:16.
“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me."
~John 14:6
And who is he, the 'him' that Jesus delivered one of his best remembered lines to?
That's right. Good old 'Doubting' Thomas, without whom we may not have had these words, asking questions, as a doubter is want to do, but asking them in all honesty and sincerity, and getting the most direct answers as a result.
“Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?” which he said in response to Jesus' assertion "And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4 You know the way to the place where I am going.”
-How can we know the way?
-I AM the way.
There is so much more to unpack here but I don't wish to go there right now.
Jesus is the way in and the way itself.
It is here that I return, again and again and again. That is why, after a hard season of losing my way, I have found myself back at this gate, wanting back in on the life it leads to.
I'm stood at the gate, handing over my entangling sins, my desires, my pretensions and all that is hindering. I need to make room for that easy yoke.
A sinner stood at the gate of the grace I never really left, and realising, it is really this simple. Lay it down and take up your cross once more.
Nothing in my hand I bring.
Simply to thy cross I cling.
And one foot in front of the other , once more.
