Few Find It

It occured to me this morning, as I was thinking about the words of Matthew 7:14 ("Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it."), that how can only a few find the way when Christianity is the world's most dominant religion? Then I realised that in order for that statement to be true (which it is, simply by virtue of being in the Bible), then the vast majority of todays 2 - 3 billion Christians can't have found the way.

Matthew 7.14 doesn't come with any qualifying statements. It simply says that few people will find the way to life. It doesn't say that few will find it until Christianity becomes the major religion of the West, or that few will find it until the Roman Catholic Church comes to power - it simply says that few people will find the way. Period.

This is quite a thought provoking statement. There are currently 2 - 3 billion people who call themselves Christian in the world. 2 - 3 billion people is not a few people, therefore most of them haven't found the way. They must therefore be living deceived. This may help explain why the mainstream church always seems to be missing the mark - either legalistic, lukewarm, over-orthodox, or all three. It may explain why the church has never been a large corporate body of Bible-revering, God-fearing, holy, saintly souls.

It also completely damns the Roman Catholic Church, as well as today's new "church-growth" movement, as there are many, many followers of the RCC, and they all believe pretty much the same thing. Therefore they must all be wrong, because they can not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called "few". As for the church-growth movement, seeking to get as many people as possible into the church is doomed to failure, simply because only a few will find the way to life.

Having said this, this doesn't take away the importance of witnessing to the lost, or meeting with other saints. Far from it. Just because only a few will find the way doesn't mean we should stop spreading the word, it simply means that only a few will pay any attention to us. If we stop spreading the word, then "few" will become "none". And that isn't the idea at all. What's more, it is important for saints to meet together. In fact we are told to. It simply means that these meetings will be small in number - massive "revival gatherings" and ten-thousand-member churches are statistically highly unlikely to be filled with God-fearing saints.

That's an incredibly sobering thought. Especially when you then keep reading and get to 7:21 - 23:

21 "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.
22 "Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?'
23 "And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'

Do you do the will of the Father in heaven? Are you guilty of lawlessness? If so then you have some very serious work to do. The gate is narrow and the way is difficult and few people actually find it.