Luke 13:24 Commentary and Bible Study

‘Strive to enter in at the strait gate’, that is the narrow gate. ‘Strive’, said the Lord, struggle as if in a great contest. Our agonizing term in the English language comes directly from the Greek word. It is the very word that comes from the arena in which the gladiators fought, the term for that kind of assembly in which great athletic and combative contests were held, where runners would push themselves to the limit, and wrestlers would struggle and strain to overcome. It is a strong word: ‘Strive to enter in at the strait gate. It seems at first sight a little out of tune with the gospel. After all, the whole emphasis of the Bible is that there is nothing we can do to secure the favour and the blessing of God. There is nothing we can do to earn or to deserve God's favour and blessing. Scripture is clear that we are poor, lost rebels and sinners, and we deserve to die. We deserve to perish everlastingly, and there is no hope for us, and there is absolutely nothing we can do to atone for our past sins, and to claw our way back into the favour of God. It is impossible. We must be saved. We must be forgiven by the grace of God alone. We must come as humble, needy sinners, crying out for mercy, and he must give us a free pardon which we could never deserve, and a new beginning. This is the message of the Bible. It is repeated so many times, and yet there is this strange word here: ‘Strive to enter in’, and it's important to understand it. In fact, both aspects of entering in are in this very verse. We are to strive, but before us is a gate, a prepared entrance. It may be cluttered up with obstructions – which is more what the term strait means – but nevertheless it is still a gate. Gates are easy to go through. A high fence would be harder, but this is a gate, and everybody knows what a gate is. There is nothing terribly difficult about that. There is a way into the kingdom of heaven; God has made a way. Though you do not deserve to enter, though you are under the condemnation of God, this kingdom of mercy and forgiveness and new life and the blessing of God has an entrance gate through which you may go in. All the hard things have been done by Almighty God. Christ himself has come and he has suffered and died on a cross to take the punishment of our sin for us, so that we do not have to perish everlastingly, if we are among those who come to him and repent. Yet, in spite of that, here is this term, ‘strive to enter.’Why is this gate ‘strait’? The word means narrow, restricted, constricted in some way, and therefore difficult to go through, and yet it is a gate, a gate of mercy, and, as far as we're concerned, it costs nothing to come into the kingdom of God and to secure his forgiveness. This gate is strait because it is constricted. You can have one kind of aperture or gate, which is narrow because it was built that way; you can have another that may be rather wide, but it's become obstructed by all sorts of obstacles, and that makes it constricted and difficult to get through. That is the sort of thing which is in mind here. It is encumbered, obstructed, from our point of view, because, though it leads to the kingdom of heaven, though it brings forgiveness and new life, yet it is not to our taste to go through that gate. With our sinful hearts and our rebellious ways, the last thing we want to do is to go through that gate. There are things we don't like about it, and what this message means is: if you would have the free pardon of God, if you would have his love and conversion experience, and become a child of God on the road to heaven, you have got to do something about these obstacles. There are too many things that put us off.There is a beautiful story told of the father of Mendelssohn, the composer, who was a Jew, and he wanted to be educated. He wanted to learn, and he was poverty-stricken, had no money as a young man, had no prospects at all. Ah, but in some of the big European cities in those days, anybody – if they could only present themselves – could get a free education. Yes, they had to do work, they had to keep themselves, they had to live or starve, but anybody could get into the classroom, no matter who you were, and so he found his way to Berlin. But when he turned up there, he was ragged, he was sick, he was penniless, and he only knew one word of German, and when the city guard said, ‘What do you want?’, he could only say the one word he knew, and they let him in. He got into various institutions, and he got his education and he prospered, but it's a beautiful little picture of coming to Christ in a way. It's just like that. Oh, if you can get to Christ, you can have free everything, you can have pardon, you can have forgiveness, you can have life, you can have a new education in the things of God, you can relate to God and experience and taste his power and his goodness in your life. There are some people to whom this makes no sense at all because they don't think it's difficult to serve God at all. ‘Because I acknowledge God is there,’ they think to themselves, ‘I will be all right, I will go to heaven, I will be a child of God. I can describe myself as a Christian, just because I choose to. It doesn't have to make any great difference to my life; I don't have to become a fanatic like these churchgoers.’ You only have to say, ‘Okay, I accept this’, and that's it. But it isn't like that. In the early part of the last century there was a rustic Cornish preacher named Billy Bray, and he used to have trouble with this. He was a drunken young man who was converted to God, and his life was altogether transformed, and then he began to preach at the pitheads of the coal mines. He would go along, and so many of those men wouldn't listen. They thought, ‘What is this about Christ, about religion? I'm all right, I believe in it.’ They went on in their own chosen way of life. They didn't worship, they didn't serve, and so he would use this delightful illustration. He would tell them about somebody who worked in one mine all the week, and who then heard that the wages were higher in another mine. He liked working in the pit where he was, because the work was slow and easy, and the supervisors were lenient. He didn't like the sound of the other mine, but he went there and queued up to collect his wages. Well, who would try that on? Ridiculous! And it used to raise a great laugh from the miners that anybody would be so stupid, and yet when it comes to serving God we are just that dim sometimes. We don't seek the Lord or serve him, and yet we fondly imagine we can turn up at his door one day for the wages, for the reward, for the blessing, but you can't. You have got to get into the kingdom of heaven. You have got to be converted, you have got to go through that gate, or you remain an outsider.