The Narrow Road and Self-Control in the Bible
“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.Mathew” 7:13.
This passage is taken from the familiar Sermon on the Mount in Mathew chapter 7. To read the whole chapter, click here.
The small gate and narrow road that leads to life in the Bible are small and narrow, obviously. But what does that mean? I think it’s because they require self-control and discipline.
When I’m tempted to sin, what I’m really being tempted to do is throw off restraint. I want to do what I feel like doing. I want to do the easy thing. Or take the path of least resistance.
In effect, I don’t want to control myself. Self-control is one of the characteristics of love. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” Galatians 5:22, 23a.
It’s Not a Multiple-Choice Situation
Obedience is a narrow road because there are no options. The Lord tells me the one thing I need to do.
It’s not a multiple-choice situation if I want to walk in obedience and continue to be filled with the Spirit. “We are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him Acts 5:32”
And invariably, when I’m tempted to sin, not yielding to it requires self-control. Years ago, when I had a deep-seated pathological need to love and be loved, I would be tempted to obsess about some guy I was attracted to and convince myself he loved me.
This may not have been a problem if I wasn’t married at the time! (This is usually a normal human need, but for me it had become pathological, because it was rooted in childhood abandonment). To say no to this temptation required self-control.
Or when I wanted to respond to my children’s disobedience in anger, it required self-control to refrain from doing so.
Narrow Road in Bible Requires Self-Control
And when I was tempted to feel sorry for myself, I had to again exhibit self-control. The path to life is indeed the path of self-control.
Believe me when I say, I didn’t learn self-control easily or cheaply. I had multiple strikes against me. My personality type is naturally impulsive and compulsive.
My primary caregiver as a child made every decision, big and small, based on the emotion of the moment. And as alluded to above, my other primary caregiver abandoned me as an infant.
For these reasons and more, I spent years yielding to my emotions to try to meet my need in my own way, apart from God. But after many long, hard years of suffering, I finally learned the lesson. I’m a slower learner, I guess.
This post is intended to help you learn your lessons more quickly and avoid some of the pitfalls I fell into. As I’ve learned along the way, you can learn things the easy way through someone else’s mistakes, or the hard way through our own. Save yourself some pain, by learning from my missteps.
To read another post similar to The Narrow Road and Self-Control in the Bible, click here The Broad Way Gets More and More Narrow or here: Yeast in the Bible: Mixing Process No Fun.
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