Roads are important as they lead us from one place to another, and there are many types of roads with different purposes and conditions. We depend on roads to travel on daily, to get us from here to there. But with all the roads that we count to reach our destination, how are we doing on our spiritual road? We chose to go down a specific road, a road that will hopefully lead us in the right direction. This is no ordinary road but one that contains many hazardous conditions—perhaps some detours and delays—and it is not an easy road to travel. Only a SELECT FEW will travel on this road.
Matthew 7:13-14 starts off by giving us a choice – we can either select the narrow way or the wide way. When we have reached a fork in the road, which one do we take? To put it into perspective, one road looks more appealing than the other, at first glance. The “left” road looks very attractive, tempting, enticing, and the majority would choose to take it full speed ahead, but they fail to see the trap that is set before them as it will ultimately lead to a dead end. The road on the “right” looks less appealing, not to mention incredibly narrow requiring a considerable uphill effort as far as the physical eye can see, which may fail to realize where the road ends – far from death. What choice will we make? Many will choose the “left” way, but we must choose the “right” way. Remember how Lot chose wrongly when he saw how “appealing” Sodom and Gomorrah looked in Genesis 13?
Focusing on our own road and the challenges we must go through to travel on it, we can see that, on occasion, the road can be quite hazardous and we need to be cautious at all times, pay attention by not letting distractions get in the way, watch what we are doing, and watch out for what lies ahead so we are prepared. To elaborate on this analogy, there may be times when we may come across a road block. This happens quite often where we face a condition in our path and get stuck, but it is only a delay. As a result, we need to find an alternate route, such as a detour, which still leads in the right direction. We have to be careful that we don’t drift off course, meaning we must obey the signs and not try to put matters into our own hands, like finding a short cut that could lead us right into a “lake” if we’re not careful. We must realize our mistakes, as we are still human, and get back on track and find the connector that leads us right back onto the main road we are traveling.
The road of the world is difficult to avoid, that road on the “left,” as it will from time to time travel parallel with our road, and we have to make sure that it does not intersect, giving us an easy pathway to enter the wrong way! There will be many opportunities and temptations along the way—wrong signs that we must ignore and warning signs that we must heed—if we want to reach our final destination. We must be aware of U-turns as we are traveling on a one-way street. We need to avoid going back into the world as we have come out of it.
Isaiah 35:8 talks about this road in the future, the road that we are presently on, which will become a Highway of Holiness—a road to Jerusalem, to Christ—and the time will come when everyone will have that chance to travel that road. The New American Standard Bible translates it as: “A highway will be there, a roadway, And it will be called the Highway of Holiness. The unclean will not travel on it, But it will be for him who walks that way, And fools will not wander on it.” The unclean shall not pass over it, referring to those who choose not to be clean, who do not want to go the Way of Christ, but it shall be for others – those who want to live righteously, those who were blind and now can see, who were deaf and now can hear.
This is why we have chosen this road. We are still traveling on it and we will eventually reach our final destination and enter the narrow gate IF we remain focused, fruitful and faithful (Luke 13:24).
