Two roads lead to eternity: the narrow and the wide, the one that leads to heaven and the one that leads to a very hot place. Most people know this and don’t make a big picture decision to spend the rest of eternity as human BBQ. The sane among us don’t wake up and say that we want to live a hedonistic life and end up in hell before it freezes over. We know better than to play dice in a game with eternal outcomes.
Yet, unfortunately, it's not about our overall thinking about heaven and hell. It's about the little decisions that we make along the way; the little decisions that don’t seem to matter. Bit by bit we can forget our otherworldliness as we sacrifice our souls to the god of pleasure. The journey is a little mistier. What lies ahead is less clear. Soon we seem to hit nothing but dead ends as we make our way to the gutters of human possibility.
Thankfully, God is in the details. But being human, we don’t always know what those details are. We know where we want to go, but how do we find our way? Thomas called Didymus asked the same question in John 14 verse 5: “Master we do not know where you are going; how will we know the way? Jesus fielded that question with one of the most absolute statements on truth ever presented: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6).
Notice that Jesus does not just show us the way or even guide us on it. He IS the Way. Only a humble God could reduce himself to a road. But there’s more. Jesus declares in verse 21 of the same chapter: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” The path to the Father’s will, and thus to the truth and to life, passes through the heart of Jesus, a heart that forever beats and bleeds for his bride, the Church.
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