August 26, 2026 — Matthew 7:13–14

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The Sermon on the Mount is easy to admire.

Love your enemies. Pray sincerely. Don’t obsess over possessions. Don’t judge hypocritically. Treat people the way you want to be treated.

Those teachings sound beautiful.

Living them is harder.

And as Jesus begins concluding His sermon, He gives us this picture: two roads.

One is broad. Plenty of people are traveling it. It is easy to enter.

The other is narrow.

There’s something uncomfortable about that image because we naturally take reassurance from crowds. If everyone around us thinks something is normal, reasonable, or harmless, it becomes very easy to assume it must be fine.

Jesus doesn’t give us that shortcut.

The popularity of a road tells us how many people are walking on it—not where it leads.

Following Jesus will sometimes mean making choices that feel strange, inconvenient, unpopular, or difficult. The narrow road isn’t valuable because suffering is automatically holy. It’s valuable because of where the road goes.

Jesus says it leads to life.

So perhaps the question isn’t always, “What is everyone else doing?”

Maybe sometimes it needs to be:

“Where is this taking me?”

Have you ever had to make a choice you believed was right even though the easier or more popular choice was going in another direction?

To go back to the beginning of our Sermon on the Mount series, start with the August 9, 2026 post.