Jesus said something that I am not sure I fully understood until lately. It’s the famous verse where He says, “Narrow is the way, and difficult is the road that leads to eternal life.”
I understand the narrow part, that Jesus is the way to God. He is God’s love and flesh, paying the price to redeem my soul. It’s the “difficult” part that I’ve never quite gotten my arms around. So this week we identified that, or at least I attempted to give my interpretation of what Jesus meant.
The difficulty is not about some moral discipline, abstaining from certain activities that Christians have deemed unacceptable. The difficult part I think at least finds it’s expression in how difficult it is to not find yourself living a life to please other people.
To follow Jesus is to please Jesus. And I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, that following Jesus can not only not please the people around you. It can actually make these people quite irate and dangerous.
So today we talked about the importance of courageous dissent: the ability inside each person to follow Jesus whatever the cost, whatever the consequences. We talked about the ten must-haves that we must constantly retain in order to have the courage to follow the path that God has laid out for us. One of the biggest misconceptions about Christianity is that Christians are into conformity: looking alike, living alike, thinking alike, eating alike, dressing alike. Nothing can be further from the truth. You’ll find out what I mean in today’s talk.