The Intolerant Christ
Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Matthew 6:24
In loving, compassionate intolerance Jesus says, “Enter ye at the strait gate . . . because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life” (Matthew 7:13–14).
His was the intolerance of a pilot who maneuvers his plane through the storm, realizing that a single error, just one flash of broad-mindedness, might bring disaster to all the passengers on the plane.
Once when we were on a flight from Korea to Japan, we ran through a rough snowstorm; and when we arrived over the airport in Tokyo, visibility was almost zero. The pilot had to make an instrument landing. I sat up in the cockpit with the pilot and watched him sweat it out as he was brought in by ground control. A watchful man in the tower at the airport talked us in.
I did not want these men to be broad-minded. I knew that our lives depended on it. Just so, when we come in for the landing in the great airport of heaven, I don’t want any broad-minded advice.
I want to come in on the beam, and even though I may be considered narrow here, I want to be sure of a safe landing there.
Christ was so intolerant of man’s lost estate that He left His lofty throne in the heavenlies, took on Himself the form of man, suffered at the hands of evil men, and died a shameful death on a cruel cross to purchase our redemption. So serious was man’s plight that the Lord could not look upon it lightly. With the love that was His, He could not be broad-minded about a world held captive by its lusts, its appetites, and its sins.
Having paid such a price, He could not be intolerant about man’s indifference toward Him and the redemption He had wrought. He said, “He that is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12:30). He also said, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36).
We have the power to choose whom we will serve, but the alternative to choosing Christ brings certain destruction. Christ said that! The broad, wide, easy, popular way leads to death and destruction. Only the way of the cross leads home.
Billy Graham, Unto the Hills: A Daily Devotional (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010).