Matthew 7:13-14 "Heaven can be entered only through the narrow gate!
The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide enough for all the
multitudes who choose its easy way.But the Gateway to Life is small, and the road is narrow, and only a few
ever find it.
Many of our Christians reading the various posts on the Dove site are walking that Gateway to Life
that is small, and the road narrow and are among the few that will find it.But, there are a number of those that are on that broad highway, that I have much concern for.
Now is the time switch to that narrow road.A. W. Tozer's article below is a MUST READ ––to be certain how we stand with Our Lord.
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RECEIVING JESUS CHRIST INTO YOUR LIFE
By A. W. Tozer
Accepting Jesus Christ, receiving Jesus Christ into your life means that you have made an attachment to the
person of Christ that is revolutionary in that it reverses the life and transforms it completely.It is an attachment to the person of Christ. It is complete in that it leaves no part of the life unaffected. It exempts
no area of the life of the total man; his total being.This kind of an attachment to the person of Christ means that Christ is not just one of several interests. It means
that He is the one exclusive attachment, as the sun is the exclusive attachment of the earth. As the earth revolves
around the sun, and the sun is its center and the core of its being, so Jesus Christ is the Son of righteousness,
and to become a Christian by the grace of God means to come into His orbit and begin to revolve around Him
exclusively. In the sense of spiritual life and desire and devotion, it means to revolve around Him completely,
exclusively---not partly around Him.This does not mean that we do not have other relationships, we all do, because we all live in a complex world.
You give your heart to Jesus. He becomes the center of your transformed life. But you may be a man with a family.
You are a citizen of the country. You have a job and an employer. In the very nature of things, you have other
relationships. But by faith and through grace, you have now formed an exclusive relationship with your Savior,
Jesus Christ. All of your other relationships are now conditioned and determined by your one relationship to
Jesus Christ, the Lord.Jesus laid down the terms of Christian discipleship and there have been people who have criticized and said,
"Those words of Jesus sound harsh and cruel." His words were plain and He was saying to every one of us:
"If you have other relationships in life which are more important and more exclusive than your spiritual
relationship to the eternal Savior, then you are not my disciple."To accept Christ, then, is to attach ourselves to His holy person; to live or die, forever. He must be first and last
and all. All of our other relationships are conditioned and determined and colored by our one exclusive relation
to Him.To accept Christ without reservation is to accept His friends as your friends from that moment on.
If you find yourself in an area where Christ has no friends, you will be friendless except for the one Friend who
sticketh closer than a brother.It means that you will not compromise your life. You will neither compromise your talk nor your habits of life.
We have to confess that we find there are people who are such cowards that when they are with a crowd that
denies the Son of God and disgraces the holy name of Jesus, they allow themselves to be carried away in
that direction. Are they Christians? You will have to answer that.A Christian is one who has accepted Jesus' friends as his friends and Jesus' enemies as his enemies by an
exclusive attachment to the person of Christ.I made up my mind a long time ago. Those who declare themselves enemies of Jesus Christ must look upon
me as their enemy-and I ask no quarter from them. And if they are the friends of Jesus Christ they are my
friends and I do not care what color they are or what denomination they belong to.To accept the Lord means to accept His ways as our ways. We have taken His Word and His teachings as
the guide in our lives. To accept Christ means that I accept His rejection as my rejection. When I accept Him
I knowingly and willingly accept His cross as my cross. I accept His life as my life-back from the dead I come
and up into a different kind of life. It means that I accept His future as my future.I am talking about the necessity of an exclusive attachment to His person ––that is what it means to accept
Christ. If the preachers would tell people what it actually means to accept Christ and receive Him and obey
Him and live for Him; we would have fewer converts, but those who would come and commit would not
backslide and founder. They would stick.Actually, preachers and ministers of the gospel of Christ should remember that they are going to stand
before the judgment seat of Christ, and they will have to tell a holy Savior why they betrayed His people
in this way.Now, please do not go out and tell people that Mr. Tozer says you should never use those words,
"accept Christ." I have tried to make it plain that we should always invite those who are not Christians
to come to Jesus, to believe what God says about the Savior, to receive Him by faith into their lives and
to obey Him; and to accept Christ as their Savior if they know what it means, an exclusive attachment to
the person of Christ.Are you aware that many of the great preachers and the great evangelists who have touched the world,
including such men as Edwards and Finney in the past, have declared that the church is being betrayed
by those who insist on Christianity being made too easy. Oh, what a host of people have been
betrayed into thinking that they were converted when all that they did was to
join a religious group.I would say frankly that moral sanity requires that we settle this important matter
first of all, settling our personal and saving relationship with God. The way some
of us live, we ought not to be surprised when some concerned friend or brother
asks, "Are we Christians, indeed?"---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yours in Christ,
Paul N. F.