Copyright 2017, 2025 by Shea Oakley<\/p>\n
All rights reserved<\/p>\n
It is God\u2019s love for us as His children that truly keeps us in Him and \u201con course\u201d towards Heaven, not a self-originating hyper-vigilance to stay on that course. It is true that we are taught in the Bible by our Lord Himself that we must \u201center through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction.\u201d However, what gets us through the narrow gate, and keeps us on the narrow road that gate implies, is not an obsessive and futile dependence on our own devices. In fact depending on our flesh rather than on divine enablement is a surefire way to find ourselves off the side of the narrow road and in a spiritual ditch.<\/p>\n
Christians are not immune from the general human tendency to try to figure out and avoid all the possible pitfalls of this life through self-effort and \u201cworldly wisdom\u201d rather than the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit. It is actually quite dangerous to assume that we are not operating this way at times (even many times) during our earthly pilgrimage. One way this faulty approach to our sanctification can manifest itself is in an extreme compulsivity to attempt to \u201cdot every \u2018i\u2019 and cross every \u2018t\u2019\u201d in our daily ethical life. We think, if sometimes only subconsciously, that if we just work hard enough, in and of ourselves, we can actually walk a perfect walk of faith simply by being mindful of what God expects of us and striving to fulfill those expectations.<\/p>\n
This is a lie of the soul, a trap, and, in the long term, a recipe for despair.<\/p>\n
It is true that the path to true spiritual life is a narrow one but the \u201cguardrail\u201d which ultimately keeps us on that path is the unmerited favor of God in Jesus Christ, not our self-effort apart from Him. A child of God must many times remember that the One who saved him is the One who sanctifies him. Our own attempt to start living the Christian life did not make us Christians, receiving the Son of God by grace through faith is what made us new creatures in Him. That same grace-empowered faith is the source of our ability to authentically live out the Christian life until He returns or we go to be with Him.<\/p>\n
Some may ask how we actually transfer the power source of our sanctification from the efforts of our flesh to dependence on the enabling grace of God. Certainly the answer is not a new form of self-effort, this time designed to stop using self-effort! Instead it is a gradually growing, faith-enabled, trust in our Lord, a surrender to Him that progressively dis-empowers purely self-centered effort while empowering Him to take the reins of our lives.<\/p>\n
I use the words \u201cgradually\u201d and \u201cprogressively\u201d here very intentionally.<\/p>\n
One of the biggest culprits that keep us fearfully dependent on our own energy in attempting to stay on the narrow road is our sense that we are not able to somehow immediately become the kind of Christian we often see described in the pages of the New Testament. We look at someone like the Apostle Paul, for instance, and we think that by emulating him we should be able to instantly begin living a life like his. The truth, however, is that Paul did not become the man he was at the close of his extraordinary life overnight. If we read the Scriptures carefully we see someone who grew to his deep level of maturity over a lifetime, even the part of that lifetime which followed his conversion. Paul knew, perhaps better than anyone, that true transformation was only possible through the received grace of God over a long period of time. After all he was the Pharisee\u2019s Pharisee before his conversion on the Damascus Road. Paul was all too aware how perfectionistic self-effort had deceived him into thinking he was right with God when he was anything but right with Him.<\/p>\n
It can potentially be a great relief to discover the truth that we need God to follow God, and that in actualizing this truth about Him He truly will begin to provide us with the power to change. It is primarily in grasping this reality that we become able to surrender to God and find in Him the only Source which enables us to walk that narrow path\u2026.for as long as it takes to lead us home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Copyright 2017, 2025 by Shea Oakley All rights reserved It is God\u2019s love for us as His children that truly keeps us in Him and \u201con course\u201d towards Heaven, not a self-originating hyper-vigilance to stay on that course. It is true that we are taught in the Bible by our Lord Himself that we must… <\/p>\n