took these two phrases out on the street and you asked people who just knew nothing about the Bible. You asked them to identify the phrase that was authentically spoken by Jesus and identify the phrase that was added to the Bible many years later by some medieval scribe. I don’t think that people would have much difficulty making their selection. Most would naturally ascribe to Jesus the very popular phrase termed the golden rule. Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them. For this is the law and the prophets. And they would think that the words that were added in medieval times would be enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction and those who enter it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life and those who find it are few. I mean, that first phrase has to be one of the most congenial verses in all of scripture. You can find it crocheted and hanging in the front entrance of a home or written in a children’s book. I have never entered a home and seen hanging in anyone’s front entrance. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction. Yet, in Jesus sermon on the mount, he puts those together. He juxtaposes those two pieces. We have toh do a bit of work on the PowerPoint there. He puts them together and he says that neither of them’s out of place talking about either the golden rule or the narrow gate because if we we’ve been going through this sermon since really since last spring and uh Jesus talks a lot about character, the character of the kind of people who enter his kingdom. They’re people who are humble. They’re poor in spirit and they’re meek. They hold power under control and they’re merciful to other people and they’re pure in heart and they refuse to retaliate and they love their enemies and they honestly look at their own inner lives and they examine their lusts and their anger and uh the way they behave in their marriages and they’re people who are learning and yearning to be authentic on the inner side and never hi hide some kind of tire fire under some hypocritical hypocritical facade. So in line with all that teaching about character and integrity, this maximum of the golden rule fits in very nicely. We should treat other people as we would like them to treat ourselves. But we can’t ignore the other part of the story. Jesus is telling about the world and about our lives in this sermon. It’s a story about a kingdom that is coming and it’s fully it’s currently fully functional in heaven. One day it’ll be very visible and recognized on earth. And there’s a call for all of us to pray for that kingdom to come, to respond in obedience to the words of Jesus, to put them into practice. Jesus says it’s urgent that we do. And actually, he concludes his sermon on the mount with four quite unsettling apocalyptic images. He talks about people who are walking on this wide, comfortable, commodious road and suddenly they find it’s a literal dead end and it leads to destruction. And he goes from there to another image of uh people who pretend to be insiders, but they’re really outsiders. They’re false people. They’re false prophets. They’re wolves in the clothing of sheep. And like unfruitful trees, Jesus says their destiny is to be cut down and burned. Then he gives a third image of people who might think of themselves as insiders. They’ve been religiously active people, but they may be shocked to find that they’ve never had any real relationship with Jesus. Jesus will one day say to them, “I never knew you.” And they’ll be unexpectedly, maybe unceremoniously, excluded or expelled from the kingdom. And finally, the last image in the in the sermon on the mount is a picture of two houses and they appear similarly attractive and a great storm suddenly comes and reveals that one house has a stable foundation of rock and another house collapses in the sand. In each of those four concluding images, the wrong response to Jesus leads to catastrophe. Wide well-maintained highways come to a dead end and sheep are revealed as wolves and insiders are separated from outsiders and houses are collapsing. So to get the full story, the full narrative of what Jesus is telling us in his famous sermon on the mount, we need to capture both phrases equally that we’re looking at this morning. We can’t see one of them as warm and tolerant and inclusive and the other as cold and narrow and mean. Because the source of both phrases is the Savior who loves us. He desires all people to come to repentance and to enter his kingdom by faith. So let’s look this morning and see how the golden rule and the narrow road both reflect the good story that Jesus is telling. Jesus states what uh we call the golden rule as a way of summarizing or condensing the entire Old Testament law of God. He says, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you. For this sums up the law and the prophets.” Now, if you remember from earlier in the sermon on the mount, Jesus described his relationship with the law. He says, “I haven’t come to abolish it. I haven’t come to do away with the law.” He says, “I have come to fulfill it.” Jesus was a law observant man and he valued every syllable spoken by God the father in the old testament. He says that if we do to others what we would want them to do to us we will be law observant as well. Long ago in the 1980s a group of German engineers um envisioned the possibility of today’s music streaming services such as iMusic and Spotify. Their problem, their great challenge was to go about squeezing great amounts of digital musical content through those small bits of primitive first generation digital telephone wire. And it seemed absolutely impossible. Compact discs made their debut in 1982. And these German psychoacoustic engineers, they viewed the technology of the CD as ridiculous musical overkill. digitized music on CDs, they said, contained a great deal of musical information that was being ignored by the human ear. CDs use more than I’m going to nerd out a bit on this. CDs use more than 1.4 million bits to store a single second of stereo sound. And to get music that they could stream, the engineers needed to take the musical information uh from 1.4 million bits per second down to 128,000 bits per second. So they had to take out 111 12ths of the musical content that was on a CD. So they had to figure out what can I safely take out and still leave the music sounding relatively decent. They began to play around with the human ear and uh find out what the brain was capable of processing. And so they looked at pitch frequencies to find the extremities where human hearing was being degraded. And they felt they could shave off those extreme ends of the pitch spectrum. And tones that were close in spit in pitch also tended to cancel each other out in the human ear. Especially lower tones overrode higher tones. So they found that for example if a violin and a cello were playing a near note, a close pitch at the same time, they could assign fewer bits to the violin because the violin wasn’t really being heard anyway. They discovered that the human auditory system cancelled out sounds that follow a loud noise. So if you’re digitizing music that had a symbol crash every few seconds, they could assign fewer bits to the milliseconds following the symbol crash. Even odder, they found that our auditory systems, we take a while to process things, the information that’s coming. And they found that again with a symbol crash, it disrupted our processing of what we’ just heard before. So they could cancel out the few milliseconds before the symbol crash as well. So it’s all very nerdy. And those the drummers are always messing with our brains like that, aren’t they? They’re they’re canceling out so much. And then chists are messing with all the hard work of the violinists. And got some mean-spirited people in this room. So that whole nerdy technological history, you can read about it. It’s a great book called How Music Got Free by a guy named Steven Wit. One other little interesting tidbit, the Well, no, I’ll get to that later. It just describes how they kept whittling and shaving music down to its core so they could get one 12th of the music that was contained on a CD. And they had they had some breakthroughs with things like the 1812 overture, a Tracy Chapman song. They had a track by Gloria Estan they were working on. One of the greatest acoustic challenges was compressing the sound of a simple human talking voice. As Leah would know, it has so many explosives and sibilance and glottle stops, highly complex to compress the sound of a basic human voice. As the algorithm progressed, yes, it could handle the 1812 overture. It couldn’t handle a basic newscast. So, eventually a number of these competing compression technologies got together for a competition that was graded against 10 benchmarks. There was a solo by jazz saxoponist Dornet Coleman, Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, a trumpet solo, a glock and spiel, a recording of fireworks, two bass solos, a castinet sample, a snippet of a newscast, and Susa Susan Vega doing her warm ac capella version of Tom’s Diner. And they hired a group of young, fair-haired, cleared Scandinavians to spend the day judging the various competitors, the various technologies. And it took a few years to sort that all out. And uh the one that eventually preva prevailed was the one developed by the German engineers and they called their project the MP3 music file. And of course that’s the format by which most of us consume our music today. So the last little snippet that maybe I shouldn’t add but I will. The thing that saved the MP3 was the NHL because they were out of money. They were out of investors. they were they were going down the drain and no other technology could um could replicate the applause of an NHL hockey game that they wanted to transmit over phone lines as opposed to satellites. So the NHL gave them the infusion of money that allowed the MP3 to prevail. So that’s it. And that’s a long walk, I know, back to what Jesus is telling us with the golden rule. But I like that story. And Jesus is saying to us that with the golden rule, it’s not shaving off any of that Old Testament content. It’s not like compressing a file into an MP3 file. Even more nerdy, Jesus says it’s a lossless format. It’s like a flack file or a zip file. You don’t lose any content if you compress all the requirements of the law of God into treating others as we’d like to be treated. The Apostle Paul says just as much in Galatians 5:14 when he says, “The whole law is fulfilled in one word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Or Romans 13, the commandments, you shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not covet. Any other commandment are summed up in this word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. So, love is is shorthand for the entire way that God wants us to live our lives in this world. The golden rule, or maybe we should call it the golden vision, because it’s a lot bigger than a rule. It’s like a cheat code for fulfilling or obeying all of God’s law. And it offers us a very refreshing new way of relating to the law of God. If after church this morning you leave your iPhone on your pew to go get a cup of coffee, what prevents me from taking it? Primarily the fact that I’m an Android phone user and uh I don’t want the hassle of of transferring all my stuff over to a new format. Also, if I get caught, it doesn’t look great on a pastoral resume if uh if I’m caught stealing your phone. And all of those are fairly I mean they’re reasons for why a person might not do it, but they’re fairly inadequate set of reasons for complying with the law. However, if a little bit of love for you ever slips past my defenses and gets past my little corrupt heart and I start thinking about how I would feel if my phone were stolen and I transfer that and I think what you might feel sad too if yours was stolen, it just takes all the fun out of stealing your phone and I just can’t do it anymore. See that golden vision presses against our heart and then we don’t have the freedom to steal from one another or lie to one another or covet something that another person has. It makes it increasingly difficult for us to break the ten commandments if a little love for one another starts getting into our hearts. So as com as commentator Scott Mcnite puts it, self-care leads to others care. And that cheat code of the golden rule, it can be very useful for us in figuring out the kind of ministry that God wants us to have to our city that Knox Church could have to this community. I we might conduct a little thought experiment and say, “hm, if I were a resident of old Strath Kona neighborhood, how would I want people in that old red brick building to treat me?” Maybe they could show some love and concern for the neighborhood by beautifying their property. Or maybe it’d be good for the neighborhood if they helped some of the vulnerable people we see out on the street. Maybe they’d enrich my life and and show some love for me by providing some cultural content, some art or some music. And if we think and plan and pray through that cheat code that God gives us for fulfilling his law, treating others as we’d like to be treated ourselves, maybe we could imagine what it’d be like to poke our head into this church for the first time as a as a student or as someone in deep need of friendship or prayer support or someone who’s been bererieved and needs a place to to mourn their loss. We put ourselves in their shoes. We imagine how they would be like, how we would be like to be treated by this church and that guides us into some of the services that we provide to others. So Jesus’ short phrase, whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them. It just opens up an unlimited number of possibilities for us to consider. Commentator named Michael Eaton says it’s a one-s sentence rule of thumb that will show us what to do in a thousand complicated situations. So that golden rule or the golden vision really handy portable tool that we can carry with us and effectively use in our relationships with others. It sounds very warm, very congenial, very useful. How then and why does Jesus transition so abruptly and jarringly then from the golden rule to the narrow gate? He says, “Enter by the narrow gate. Gates wide, the way is easy that leads to destruction. Those who enter by it are many. For the gates narrow, the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. That golden vision seems so full of love and tolerance, inclusivity. If everyone lived their lives by the golden rule, the world would be a much better place. But the teaching about the narrow gate and the hard road, is it really any less loving, any less a way to make the world a better place? Again, Jesus spoke both the golden rule and the narrow gate. Jesus is God. God is love. So, how can the narrow gate be any less loving than the golden rule? Our problem in seeing how those two phrases go together is because we somehow think that exclusivity must also mean lovelessness. Anything exclusive by definition has to be mean and uncharitable. But that’s just not the case. Every organization, every institution, every family, every form of human fellowship, it all has its own set of exclusive boundaries. Even organizations that we think of as highly inclusive and tolerant. Let’s say you’re a volunteer in a pro-choice organization and you campaign vigorously for the right of a woman to be able to obtain an abortion and you’ve been a contributing member for years and you’re devoting your time and your money to it. But more recently, you’ve begun to think about the issue a little differently. You go to the meetings, but you express new questions you have about when valuable human life actually begins. And providing certain protections for the unborn begins to make increasing sense to you. And that at the meetings among friends you’ve known for years, you begin to express some of the things that you’re you’re struggling with, you’re wrestling with. And at first they give you some quizzical looks. Maybe some surges of anger start coming your way and uh you feel less and less like an insider. And if you persist eventually you’re going to be asked to leave the organization because every organization has exclusive boundaries. Every group has its own tolerance limits and uh if or else they they lose their identity as an organization. So, if over time, uh, let’s say you’re you’re on a committee organizing for the Edmonton Pride Parade, typically considered highly tolerant, highly inclusive, but you begin to ask questions and you’re wrestling with the idea, the coherence or the validity of same-sex marriage, and no matter how sincere or friendly you are, no matter how much how long you’ve known these people, eventually you’re going to be asked to leave because you no longer operate within the boundaries of that organization. So to remain within uh to remain the group that they want to be, they have to exclude you. Is such exclusivity a sign that they don’t love you at all or care for you or want your best? Not at all. They’d love to have you rejoin them, but you’d have to come back under the umbrella of the boundaries of their beliefs. So being exclusive is just simply not the same thing as being unloving. Speaking of the narrow gate, Jesus says that his kingdom has boundaries of belief. The kingdom of God is no more. It’s no less exclusive than any other gathering of human beings anywhere else in the world. If we talk about tolerance and intolerance, every group has its tolerance limits or it wouldn’t have any identity at all. You can’t join a pickle ball club and try to get everyone to play tennis. Now Jesus is saying about the kingdom of God far more consequential than pickball or any other human organization. He’s talking about eternal life. He’s talking about heaven and hell and how much he desires people to go through the narrow gate and walk the hard path that leads to life. Very sobering to consider these words where he talks about how few people enter the narrow gate. Many people walk the road to destruction. That that reality though has always been given Christians the motivational urgency when it comes to spreading the message and sharing their gospel faith with others. proitizing or evangelizing. It’s not disrespectful. It can be done in a disrespectful way, but that’s the weakness of the evangelist, not the message. The message is that we found a medicine. We found a cure for the plague of sin that’s killing everybody. And because we believe that, then proitizing or evangelizing, it’s not disrespecting people. It’s showing them the ultimate respect. Telling people that unless they receive the cure that we have to offer, they’ll they’ll die spiritually. It’s not a rude or impolite thing to do. In his sermon, Jesus is directing people to faith in him, urging them all to enter the narrow gate and to walk that difficult path. Is he promoting snobbish exclusivity? I don’t think he’s charging anyone to attend his sermon on the mount speech. You don’t have to pay for it to be there. We think of an exclusive university program like medicine and to get accepted into into it, you have to be highly accomplished academically and pass an interview and have to demonstrate volunteer participation. You have to present yourself well. If you want to get into an exclusive country club, you have to pay a stiff membership fee and a dress code. And if you won’t comply or you won’t pay, you’re not allowed in. By contrast, would you really call an organization exclusive if it sends people all over the world risking their lives knocking on doors imploring people to join it for free? If critics of Christianity wish that we’d stop trying to get our other people to join and just restrict ourselves to our present membership, then they would be forcing an exclusivity on us that is it’s not who we are and it’s not who our leader calls us to be. So really Christ calls us to be the most inclusive exclusive organization around. To to qualify, you only have to admit that you’re unqualified. There’s no entrance fee to go through the narrow gate. In fact, the gate itself, Jesus says, is actually a person. And he says it in John chapter 10. He says, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who’ve come before me, they’re thieves and they’re robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them. I’m the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved. They’ll come in and go out, they’ll find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I’ve come that they may have life and have life to the full. I’m the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice and there there shall be one flock and one shepherd. See how Jesus describes himself as both the gate and the good shepherd. On the cross he laid down his life for his sheep, paid the penalty for our sins so that we could be received as fully forgiven functioning members of his kingdom. And Jesus says, “The good shepherd, I’m still looking for other sheep that are not of this current flock to bring them in and to fold them into my kingdom. And there’s no entry fee. The only thing that needs to happen is for Jesus to sign our application with his blood, with his name, and uh under his account, we all slide in. By just placing our faith and trust in what he’s done for us on the cross, we’re accepted into his kingdom. And as we enter, Jesus says that his sheep are going to hear. They will start recognizing his voice. We won’t follow the misleading voices of strangers any longer. He says, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them. They follow me. I give them eternal life. They’ll never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. My father who has given them to me is greater than all. No one’s able to snatch them out of my father’s hand. So Jesus has commissioned each one of his sheep, each of us, to go out and look for other sheep and tell them where the gate is. Just bring them to the gate. Borrowing from the words of one of my favorite commentators on this passage, Robert Plant, were to go out onto our city, saying, “Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.” Just just ask any boomer where that comes from. Maybe they’ll figure it out for you. Upshot of our passage this morning is that the Christian church is the most inclusive exclusive organization around. Jesus always wants outsiders to become insiders. So when he talks about the narrow gate and the difficult road that leads to life, he’s expressing his love just as powerfully as when he calls us to treat others as we’d like others to treat us. A golden rule narrow gate. They’re certainly not in competition with each other. They’re just equally bursting with the love of God. So we have some things that we want to pray for this morning in response to the word. Some things we want to pray for one another. And Irma is going to come and uh lead us through that.