Most of us became Christians with a quiet assumption tucked in the back pocket. We may never have said it out loud, but it was there: from here on out, God will clear the way. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5-6). We stitch that on pillows. We hand it to graduates. And we hear it as a promise of smooth asphalt.
But straight is not a description of the surface. It is a description of the direction. A straight road is one that goes where it ought to go. Nothing in that word says level, and nothing in it says easy.
Think about what a curve is actually for. A road bends to get around something — a hill, a river, hard ground, somebody’s property line. Avoidance is the entire purpose of a curve. A straight road refuses to go around. It goes through.
So what if the straight path is the harder one? What if the crooked path feels better precisely because it costs less, and bends politely around every hill God intended you to climb? And what if only a few people are willing to stay on the straight one once they find out what is on it?
First, the part nobody wants in the opening paragraph
Before we can talk honestly about the road, we have to talk about who is walking it.
Christianity does not open with “you are doing fine, let me give you a hand.” It opens with a verdict. You are a sinner. What you have earned is judgment. The wrath of God against sin is real, it is settled, and it is aimed.
Robin Schumacher wrote a column this week reaching back to July 8, 1741, when Jonathan Edwards stood up in Enfield, Connecticut, and preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards described his hearers as suspended over the pit the way a man holds a spider over a flame. He never finished the sermon; the crying out in the room stopped him. Schumacher’s observation is that we have since flipped the title over. We now hold God in our angry hands. He is the one who has explaining to do.
Notice what Edwards refused to do. He would not tell anybody how to be saved until he had answered the prior question: saved from what?
That question belongs at the front of this article for a practical reason. A man who believes he is basically a good person will read every hardship as a breach of contract. If God owes me a smooth road because I am decent, then every pothole is a broken promise, and enough potholes will end my faith. I have watched it happen at more than one funeral.
But start where Scripture starts — what I actually earned was judgment, and what I received instead was mercy — and the hard road looks like something else entirely. It is not a bill God failed to pay. It is grace with a purpose.
And understand what God is angry about. He is not angry that you are dirt. He is angry at what has been done to His own likeness in you. Kick a hole in a shed door and nobody cares. Kick a hole in a Rembrandt and men go to prison. The fury is never about the canvas. Vandalism is only a crime where there was something worth ruining.
Why He will not smooth it out
Scripture is candid about this and does not apologize for it. The Lord disciplines the one He loves. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, only painful, but later it produces a harvest of righteousness for those who have been trained by it (Hebrews 12:6, 11). God is willing for your life to be harder than you wanted it to be.
Now let me say carefully how I do not mean that. I have stood at too many gravesides to tell a widow that God arranged her husband’s cancer as a motivational tool. That is Job’s friends talking, and the Lord had some pointed words for Job’s friends.
Here is the better way to say it. God does not have to manufacture the difficulty. The narrow road is hard by nature, because it runs directly against the grain of a fallen world and against the grain of your own flesh. What God does is decline to remove the difficulty. He will not smooth it out, because smoothing it out would leave you precisely as He found you — forgiven, maybe, and entirely unchanged.
Ken Mishler handed me a formula fifty years ago that I have never improved on: Grace + Truth + Time = Change. Time is the leg we hate. We want the change without the calendar. But the reason it takes time is that it takes friction, and there is no shortcut around that. Nobody was ever sanctified in a recliner.
The road is narrow because it presses
Jesus laid it out with no fine print. Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many go that way. Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it (Matthew 7:13-14).
The word translated “narrow” comes from a verb meaning to press or squeeze — the same root that gives us the New Testament word for tribulation. It is not narrow the way a hallway is narrow. It is narrow the way a vise is narrow. Jesus told people that before they signed anything. He never once oversold the trip.
And He said only a few find it. I would add that of those who find it, fewer still stay on it. That is not pessimism. That is attendance history in every church I have ever served.
The American church has spent forty years building a wide gate with a narrow sign hung over it. We advertised the destination and hid the road. We told people that Jesus would fix their marriage, settle their finances, and calm their anxiety, and every one of those things may well happen — but we never mentioned that the way to life runs through a press. Then we act surprised when the crowd thins out at the first hard stretch. They are not backsliding. They are reading the contract we never showed them.
That is why our altars can be full and our transformation thin.
When you are the one on the table
Schumacher writes about losing his first wife to cancer when they were both young, and about buying C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed hoping for relief — then throwing it into the corner of his bedroom for months because he hated it.
Lewis’s argument in that book is the hardest thing he ever put on paper and, I think, the truest. He says a genuinely good God is in one respect more frightening than a cruel one. A cruel man might get bored and quit. But a surgeon who fully intends to heal you will keep on cutting, and the better the surgeon is, the less likely he is to stop — because stopping halfway would waste every bit of pain already spent.
That is the whole gear shift. It does not make the pain smaller. It changes what the pain means.
David said it plainly: it was good for him to be afflicted, so that he might learn God’s decrees, and in faithfulness God had afflicted him (Psalm 119:71, 75). Not in spite of His faithfulness. In faithfulness.
I will not pretend I have mastered this. Writing it is easy. Living it is another matter, as any honest pastor will tell you standing beside a grave he did not want to be standing beside.
Even if
Three Hebrew men stood in front of a furnace and a king, and their answer has never been improved on. Our God is able to deliver us, and He will. But even if He does not, we will not bow (Daniel 3:17-18).
Even if. That is the sentence that separates the two roads. Anybody will follow God down the smooth one. The narrow way is walked by people who have already settled what they will do if the fire does not go out.
So no, God is not going to make this easy, and He is not embarrassed about it. He is not building a customer. He is raising a son. Ease would have been cheaper for both of us and worth nothing to either of us.
The straight path is the one that goes through. That is not God failing to keep His promise. That is the promise.
Soli Deo gloria.
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