Strive to enter at the narrow gate

Now, if you have a Bible with you tonight, we'd like you to open it at the Gospel of Luke and chapter number 13. Luke chapter 13, and we will commence reading at verse number 1. Luke 13, verse number 1, says, As they were present at that season, some had told them of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, nay, no, but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

For those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all that dwell in Jerusalem. I tell you, no, but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. He spake also this parable, A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none.

Then said he unto the dresser of the vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on the fig tree, and find none. Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground? And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it and dung it, and if it bear fruit well, and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down. And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath, and behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, could in no wise lift up herself.

And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity. And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight. Now just a couple more verses farther down the chapter.

Verse 25 When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door, and ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us. And he shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence ye are. Then shall ye begin to say, We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our streets.

But he shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are. Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth when ye shall see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out.

And they shall come from the east and from the west, and from the north and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God. And behold, there are last which shall be first, and there are first which shall be last. Now, we know that God will bless to us the reading of his word.

Now, what I had in mind really is that verse number 23. Then said one unto him, Lord, are there few that be saved? And he said unto them, strive to enter in at the narrow gate. So that's a question that was asked to the Lord, are there few that be saved? I don't know how you would answer that question if someone asked you, but I'll tell you how the Lord answered it.

He didn't tell him. He really didn't answer the question, but he said, what you are doing, you're occupied with others. And you want to know how many have been reached with the gospel.

But he's saying, you know, what you need to do is think of yourself. And that's the same in this meeting tonight. We're not interested in how many are saved or how many saved people even were at the conference.

Thank God for each one of them. But the question really, the answer to the question is, never mind. Take care of yourself.

Strive to enter in at the narrow gate. And I like this verse because it's a verse that stuck in my mind before I was saved. And the day that I was saved, I thought of it.

And it means to strive, to agonize really is the word. Let nothing stop you. Don't worry about others, how many have got salvation or how many haven't gotten it.

But think of yourselves and let nothing stop you from getting to the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. That was my attitude that day. And I'll tell you, that's the day that God saved me.

When I really was in earnest and I knew there was absolutely nothing that I could do for salvation, I trusted Christ and I saw that I could not do anything. But he did everything on the cross at Calvary. So why are people not saved? Why are you not saved? There are some here we know have been to the gospel meetings, and not just this year but years before and in other places, and they're still not saved.

And it's a very sad thing for someone to hear the gospel and it's been preached very clearly and very plainly and still just sit and let it go in one ear and out the other. But I hope tonight will be different. That this will be the night that you can look back to throughout all eternity at a time when God dealt with you and you were saved and you left the conference on the way to heaven.

That would be tremendous. I tell you, there would be joy not only in the presence of the angels of God, but there would be joy with your parents and with the Lord's people here. So what's the answer then? Well, no repentance.

That's why you're not saved. You see, the Lord was told at the beginning of the chapter, we read it, about those whose blood pilot mingled with their sacrifices. We don't know anything about that in the Bible, who they were sacrificing to, but it overtook them there and they were all slain.

And you know what the people thought? They thought, my, they must have been awful bad people. They must have been really bad people for God to allow this to happen. But the Lord says, you're missing the whole picture.

That's not the way you should be looking at it. He's warning you. Sinners are always warned before they're saved.

By faith, Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, prepared an ark for the saving of his house. God takes the initiative. God warns sinners.

And he said, what you should be thinking is, if I had been among those, and I had been slaughtered there on that day, where would my soul be? When an airplane crashes, sometimes it's a remote place, Africa, that big plane came down, what did you think about that? You say, well, that's awful. And I don't know, I hope nobody would say, well, those people must have done something to suffer this. But you see, God is saying, you should be saying to yourself, if I were me in that plane, where would my soul be? So God wants you to learn.

He wants you to be stirred up and to see that you're the one that needs to repent. You need to see yourself as God sees you. You're not looking at others, what happened to them or why it happened.

He said, look at yourself. You're the one that needs God's salvation. You're the one that's a sinner.

And then, if that were not enough, he uses another illustration. He said, there's those 18 upon whom the tower and Siloam fell and slew them. So if you go back to chapter 12, you have what we call a natural death, although death is not natural.

It's an invader of our bodies since sin came into the world. Then you have a violent death, and that could happen any moment, especially in this land, the way things are going. It could be an accidental death, that happens.

Maybe on the way home. You know what? David said, there's only one step between me and death. I often wonder where that step will take place.

Will it be under my bed tonight? Will it be under the car on the way home? We don't know. But he said, do you think that they were debtors to God more than other debtors? No. But we can tell you tonight there's one that paid your debt.

We're all debtors to God. We've sinned against the God of heaven. Every sin is against God.

Adam and Eve sinned against God. That was obvious. They had been given a direct commandment, and they broke it.

But then we see two brothers born into the world, Cain and Abel. And Cain slew Abel, his brother, and God confronted him with it, and he said, am I my brother's keeper? Maybe he thought he had just sinned against his brother, but God says all sin is sin against God. And we need to have those sins forgiven, but we need to repent to see ourselves as God sees us and turn away from our sins and turn to God.

Then we read of a tree. Very easy to understand what the message is here. Here's a tree planted in a vineyard.

We're not going to go into all the details. They do not concern us now, but, you know, that tree was planted there to bear fruit. You know, and that's why mankind was brought into this world, to bear fruit for God, to produce something for God.

But the Lord came down to his own here, and for three years he labored among them, a little over three years, and he said, you know, here's this tree, and there's no fruit. And the man that owned the tree, we illustrate that by God himself, and he said, cut it down. Why cometh it the ground? I know I could have been cut down on various occasions, could have been out into eternity, but God is merciful, and the Lord says, no, no, give it another opportunity.

We'll fertilize the tree. Maybe it will grow better and produce fruit. But he came back and there's no fruit.

Let's try it again. God is long-suffering, not willing that any should perish. That's one of the great attributes of God that I appreciate.

As some of you know, I was quite a lot older than these little ones here, you younger ones, 33 years of age. God was long-suffering, and I really appreciate it, but this tree, it didn't bear any fruit. Cut it down.

You know, God could cut any one of us down at any moment. Well, you say I might have a deathbed. You know, I had a brother that lived in Ireland.

He was 15 years younger than I was. He heard the gospel the same as I did when I was a young fellow. But he didn't do anything really obviously bad in his life as far as I know.

He was kind of a loner actually. He wasn't like his big brother, that's for sure. He was kind of a loner, but, you know, he had retired.

And he was fit as a fiddle. He got a pass over in Northern Ireland. When you get a certain age, you can get a pass, and under certain hours you can ride buses.

So he decided to go down to one of the seaside places, but he never even got on the bus. Collapsed right there and never spoke another word. Didn't have an opportunity to speak to him.

So sad. You know, that could happen to anyone. God is merciful.

And even though you have sat through gospel meetings for quite a few years, some of you, he's still merciful, not willing that any should perish. And then, you know, we read of another incident that the Lord spoke about. It was about a woman, and she was bent over.

Sad to see someone that can't in no way straighten up. I've told the story when I was in Japan. There was a whole busload of ladies, and they were all bent over.

I felt so sad for them. And they straightened up and then right down again. They couldn't straighten themselves.

I don't know if I was working in rice paddies or what it was. They were all bent over, but it was kind of a sad thing. But when I read about this woman, I thought of it in another way.

And I'm applying it. That each one that's not saved is burdened with their sins. You need to be lifted from your sins.

And, you know, they can't do it themselves. It doesn't matter what they do. They can do all the good works in the world, and we need people that like to do things for others, but that's not salvation.

It's not how much you give. Bill Gates, that's what he's depending on. I know a man that talked to him and asked him.

And he said, well, I've given to charity. The man told him, you need to know Christ is your Savior. You don't need money for that.

Become poverty stricken. Nothing in my hands I bring simply to thy cross, I claim. Absolutely nothing that we can do.

Could in no way straighten yourself up. Ah, but the Lord could do it. The Lord came from the glories of heaven, went to the cross of Calvary, so that sins could be forgiven.

And I'm glad I can tell you, my sins are all forgiven. Past, present, and future. Because there was one who loved me so much that he went to the cross of Calvary.

I didn't deserve it. I deserved to be in the depths of a burning hell. And I'm glad I came to that conclusion, that there wasn't one bit of good in me.

Nothing at all. How about you? Is there some merit in you that would cause God to save you? Why does God love sinners? Is there something that he sees in them? Well, Mr. Sidney Maxwell, one of the older preachers, he used to say, I wonder what he saw in me to suffer such deep agony. And then he gave the answer, absolutely nothing.

Just a penniless sinner on the way to hell. And yet the Lord Jesus, he's the one that can raise you up. And this is what he wants to do soon.

No repentance. No response, even though he gives you opportunities. No release from your sins, even though you may not have committed a lot of sins.

One sin put Adam and Eve out of the garden. Just one sin. Shows you what God thinks of sin.

Now we come over to my next page here. And verse 25, it talks about the door being shut. I want you to think of the door of salvation.

The Lord is a door. But here the door can be shut, and they're standing out. And they're even calling him Lord.

We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our streets. Sure, we know who you are. We know all about you.

We say today we learned all these things in a Sunday school. I learned them too. Thank God I did.

But that's not salvation, just knowing about the Lord Jesus. And he said, you'll see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom. But he said, I never knew you.

No relationship. You need to have a relationship with the Lord if you're going to be saved. You know when Noah went into the ark, he's a man that found righteousness in the eyes of God.

Here's a little picture of the Lord. This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. Who was saved in the ark? All who were related to him.

Every one of them has three sons in their lives. There's nobody else. They all had to have a day when they entered the ark.

Others could have entered it. Mr. Scherzner, I preached with him a couple of times, and he would say, it was big enough for elephants to go in. And what he meant, the way he was applying it, it doesn't matter how big a sinner someone is, they can still enter the door.

You know, there was no one born inside the ark. Absolutely nobody. There's nobody born on the way to heaven.

It doesn't matter how good they are, or all the works that they do, or go to church, or even go to a gospel hall every Sunday. That's not salvation. We need to have a relationship.

We need to be born into the family of God. And that's something that we'll never forget. The time when we were born into God's family.

Why, I go back to that. All alone, in the presence of God, wanting to be saved, striving to enter into the narrow gate, and saying to God, it doesn't matter, this is all that matters, is my salvation. I don't care about anything else.

And you know, that's when I found out that Christ was a savior and I was a sinner. All the verses I knew couldn't help me. It's just a simple thought.

Sinking. Down to hell and not able to do a thing about it. Just like Peter when he was sinking in the water.

That's what I was thinking about. But I remembered what Peter did. He said, Lord, save me.

He was perishing. And the Lord stretched forth his hand and caught him. And I thought, that's me.

I'm sinking down to hell and can do nothing about it. But the Lord Jesus has done everything. So we need to have that relationship.

And then I call the next one with which I'm going to close. No refuge. I know you're not whence you are.

Depart from me, you workers of iniquity. There's only one work that could save them. There wasn't a work that they could do.

It was a work that Christ, in love to the soul, has done on the cross at Calvary. Imagine someone loving you so much. I just read in a couple of sisters in Ireland, and one of them sends me cuttings out of a newspaper that she thinks I might be interested in.

Some of them I am, and some I'm not. But I wouldn't tell her. She gets great delight in doing it.

And she's an old lady. She's older than me, so it's no spring chicken. But anyhow, there was a man in one of the stories.

He got the Victoria Cross. It's the greatest honor you can have on the battlefield. And do you know what happened? There was a box of grenades or something were hit.

And they were going up. And he threw himself right on top of the box of hand grenades. And he was blown to pieces.

I tell you, the men that were with him at that time, they'll never forget. The man that died in their place. Sad, isn't it? War is a sad thing.

But to think of someone like that had such a love for his comrades that he was willing to die for them. But you know, if that touches our heart, how much more should it touch our heart than the Lord Jesus died for poor sinners? His friends were likely fairly brave men, too. They were on the same regiment.

But I'm sure their hearts were touched. Someone took their place. And that's what you have here.

It tells us the kind of people that are in the kingdom. And there's Abraham. Why would he be there? How would he get into God's presence? Well, Abraham believed God.

It was counted unto him for righteousness. He took God at his word. That's what we need to do.

Take God at his word when he says we're sinners. Take God at his word when he says I'm a savior. The savior of sinners.

And then there's Isaac. How would he get into God's presence? Well, he knew the worth of the sacrifice. When he was going to die, there was a sacrifice brought that took his place.

Associated with the sacrifice, he knew there's a ram that died in my place. And I can tell you I know there's one who died in my place, the Lord Jesus. And then you have Jacob.

You see, he was some kind of a person. But if you read the end of his life, what does it say? He blessed both the sons of Joseph and worshipped leaning upon his staff. Staff speaks of pilgrim character.

He knew he was going out into eternity. And he worshipped. Wonderful thing to be able to worship.

It's not what they call worship in many places today, but an overflow of the heart for what God has done. And he said, you know, they're coming from every direction. It doesn't say north, south, east, and west, but it says east.

They're going to come from the east. Do you know who came from the east of the Lord? The wise men. I tell you, it'd be wise tonight if you would come to see the Lord.

The Lord put Adam and Eve out to the east of the garden, but he brought mankind back from the east when we get into the New Testament. And then it says from the west. Well, you read about the centurion.

A few centurions came from the... I'm talking about in relation to Jerusalem, the west. They came. Not worthy to come under thy roof, I'll tell you.

People thought he was a great man, a centurion. Must have been impressive, likely, when he had his uniform all on, but he said, I'm not worthy. But the Lord says, you're worthy of salvation because you're taking that low place.

What about the north? Well, I think Saul of Tarsus would be generally speaking from the north. And here's a man that was persecuting the Christians. How could he ever get into God's kingdom? Ah, you see, he acknowledged he was a sinner.

God dealt with him on the way to Damascus. And, you know, he believed what he was preaching, what happened to him, could work for others. What must I do to be saved? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and maybe you'll be saved.

No, you'll definitely be saved. No as a sinner coming to him. What about the south? Think of the Ethiopian eunuch.

He gets saved. He didn't get saved in Jerusalem, though. In the previous chapter, you know, you have Saul of Tarsus.

Saul watching Stephen. And they sent Stephen back, as it were, to heaven like the parable. We will not have this man to reign over us.

And God was setting Israel aside. So that when the eunuch went up to Jerusalem, there was nothing there. It was gone.

God wasn't telling people to go to Jerusalem. He was on the way back through the word of God that he was saved. And then the next chapter, I like the next chapter because that's when God raised Saul of Tarsus, we know him as Paul, to go out to the Gentiles.

Wonderful that the gospel ever came out to us. So may God help you to see that you need to repent. You're not saved because you've never repented of your sin.

You've never acknowledged your sinner before God and turned to God for salvation. God has given you opportunity after opportunity, but there's no response. How sad that the God of heaven and the Lord Jesus would deal with you.

Sure, you could be saved, and yet it doesn't seem to bother you. Just keep sitting on. There's four lepers outside Samaria, and they said, if we sit here, we perish.

We need to come to Christ for salvation, be released from your sins, have a relationship with God, born into his family, and then have a refuge that you can go into and be saved and safe for all eternity. Remember, there's one who loves you, a God who loves you, and a Christ who died for you. You didn't deserve it, but he died on the cross.

He had you in view. Paul could say, the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Could you not take that in tonight and see that it was for you? He said, it was for me.

Yes, also me. My Lord, open your eyes to see your lost condition and to see that the Lord Jesus, in love to your soul, paid a great price of redemption there on the cross at Calvary.