Sermon preached on Sunday, April 22, 2012 at Garden Valley Chapel during our morning worship service based on Matthew 7:13b-14.

Take your Bible if you will and open it to the seventh chapter of the book of Matthew where we return to verses 13 and 14.

It is here where we arrive at a major turning point in the Sermon on the Mount - the beginning of the end.

I invite you to stand in the reading of God´s Word. Read Matthew 7:13-14.

We began this passage of Scripture last Lord´s Day. It is one filled with contrasts - contrasts that continue onto the end of the chapter.

Here in these two verses, 13 and 14, our Lord deals with four contrasts: the two gates, the two ways, the two destinations, and the two groups.

Our Lord said it for a purpose - in order to move his hearers to flee from the wrath that is to come. That is what salvation means - to be saved by God from God and His wrath that is to come for those who enter the wide gate and thus walk in the way that is broad.

We who name His name should not shrink from following His good example.

We must tell people the truth: without Jesus as Lord and Savior they are headed for the eternal judgment of God.

Francis Schaeffer understood this well, for when asked at 71 years of age what kept him serving God with great intensity, in spite of his battle with cancer, he replied:

"...sorrow for all the lost, and this should press us on to be faithful tellers, regardless of the cost...to teach the eternal lostness of the lost without tears would be a cold and dead orthodoxy indeed. And to teach this without then a great emphasis upon the responsibility, in the light of this, to do all we can regardless of the cost that men might know the gospel, would be total ugly and opposed to the biblical message that those who are lost are my kind."

May it rekindle your soul to proclaim such gospel truth to enter the narrow gate and may it serve as a sober warning to test whether ye be in the faith.