The narrow gate

THE NARROW GATE
We are offered a choice in life to go down one of two pathways, the pathway to life or the pathway to destruction or ruin. There are many metaphors of this choice in the Bible, starting in Deuteronomy when God offers Israel a pathway to life or a pathway to death, one of blessing and one of cursing. Paul talks in the epistles about walking in the Spirit or walking in the flesh, and also about the spiritual mind and the natural mind. In the following Scripture Jesus speaks about the narrow gate and the wide gate. The narrow gate leads to a fulfilled life and the wide gate leads to a destroyed or wasted life. We have one lifetime on this earth and it does not have to be wasted. This choice lies before us all the time.

Matthew 7:13 Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate to destruction (ruin, waste) is wide and the way is easy that leads to it, and many enter in by it. But the gate that leads to life is narrow and the way is hard, and those who find it are few. 

When we enter through the narrow gate we enter into THE LIFE. When we enter in through the wide gate we can enter into A LIFE. There are two words for life in the New Testament in the Greek language, Zoe and Psyche. Zoe is spiritual life – that means Eternal life. Psyche is the word for soul and that means a soul life or a sense life including the experience of our five physical senses. We can experience both of these lives, because we are spirit, soul and body.
Entering into THE LIFE is Eternal life – zoe - we are in the most fulfilling place we can be, within the fulness of God’s life. In this place are able to manage every other aspect of our life because of our hope and expectation of God working with us and within us.

When we enter in through the wide gate we can enter into A LIFE (psyche) which we choose and which is short term and where all things pass away (lead to destruction or waste)
(apolleia – used about 15 times in the New Testament as ruin, loss or waste, not as hell). We are talking about a here and now lifetime on this earth, either as a time of spiritual fulfillment, conscious that we have God with us in every aspect of our life, or a life of relative or mediocre fulfillment and conscious of experiencing the waste of time, money, effort and concern. 

The wide gate
The wide gate can be as wide as a person wants it to be where a diverse number of scattered non-defined ideas and activities go back and forth through the gate and don’t last very long. The wide gate can be narrowed down as much as people want in order to focus on their ideologies or meaningful activities that have intensity but still have a limited energy that fades or wastes away. 
Most people would settle for a relatively fulfilling earthly life entering through the wide gate if there were some worthwhile goals and sufficient focus (EG, family life, or success at work or at other skills or creative pursuits – they put themselves through relatively narrow gates and feel they are who they want to be in that space). But through that wide gate there is will also be a logjam of stress and disorder because other random and unpredictable things always get in the way and lead to too much scattered focus. So let us look at focus.

Focus – wide gate focus and narrow gate focus
Matthew 6:22 The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is single (haplous -  sharply defined - focussed), your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad (ponerous – corrupted, unclear), your whole body will be full of darkness…
In the physical realm, our eyes get drawn to what grabs our attention – a shiny object. But seeing does not only mean physical eye sight. Seeing something can mean understanding something conceptually or at a deeper level seeing something spiritually. This is spiritual vision enlightens the mind and soul, and the heart…
This is where focus is important as we can only physiologically or conceptually or spiritually focus on one thing at one time. A Personal worldview is an individual's philosophy about how life should be and about what forces influence human living. That is what takes their attention and gives them their personal perspective – A POINT OF VIEW! People have been taught one way or another many different stories of what life is all about and they get drawn to certain values and persuasions through what is affecting them in the circumstances that they are in. But because the gate is wide and there is too much distraction their vision becomes scattered instead of focussed. 
This can cause us to fail to see what we need to see even if it is right in front of us. We are going to look at a situation where a physical focus can seriously affect a conceptual focus.
The basketball players on stage and invisible gorilla - Daniel Simons experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

The Narrow Gate - Our Goal
When we enter in by the narrow gate and our eye is single it is like a spiritual laser beam. Laser beams can have what is called a coherence or wholeness of one or more kilometre without scattering, and so entering by the narrow gate allows us to get an eternal quality of accurate vision to know what we need to avoid focussing on because it is a distraction to staying faithful to God’s will for our lives., for what he wants us to see. We are given grace to see what is going on and what is going wrong so that we can take responsibility. We can replace the unhelpful for the purposeful and meaningful. The Holy Spirit draws people towards Jesus, expressing the heart of the Father who draws us to his Son, and draws us away from other distractions and influences. 
John 16:13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth… he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine;

We are being trained by God in the spirit, the soul and the body. 
1Thessalonians 5:23 May the God of peace sanctify you completely (set you apart completely for God’s purpose – His goals for your life), spirit soul and body…
Spirit – Revelation to bring light and truth.
Soul   -  Light and truth to bring Love peace and joy.
Body  - Wholeness – to bring rest recovery and restoration. (Vagus nerve stimulation from the brain to the plexus points of the body)

That is the part of the power of what I call Presence Prayer where we are trained by The Holy Spirit to learn focus. 
Presence prayer is sitting quietly focussed upon the love and goodwill of God towards us, his thoughts and intentions for us and his work in the supernatural world of the unseen on our behalf. This is surrendered faith, cooperative faith, shared faith with God.

When we focus on the life of the Spirit we inhabit that place of communion with Jesus and the Father and Holy Spirit. Their thoughts towards us then become the influence upon our life. We get their point of view.
This needs to be connected to a present moment reality that is always available – feelings might come and go and time might pass away, but zoe life and God’s Eternal time (kairos) never disappear, they remain coherent and whole.
At the narrow gate there is a two-way flow of exchange of zoe life between us and God because of our mutual clear focus of shared intention to be there for one another. We are there for Him and He is there for us.
Remember Father’s love for you is as great as it is for Jesus – you are one in the bond of the love of The Holy Spirit. See yourself as part of their circle of love. You are not an outsider, you are an insider. Anything less than that is not the Gospel (Hebrews 4:16). See yourself standing in a prayer huddle with Father, Son and Holy Spirit and receive their faith, and believe. 
This is part of presence Prayer. 
Romans 8:25 the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we should, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts (Jesus) knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.
When you are focussing on God with that single eye of faith God is focussing on you as the apple of his eye.
Psalm 17:8 Keep me (that means shield and protect me) as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wing…