Someone has said that the Bible is a medicine cabinet containing 66 different medicines. In other words, we can think of each one of the 66 books in the Bible as a specific medicine suitable for every human being in every generation bringing the perfect cure for every spiritual disease. (Illustration: it’s not like the medicine cabinet we had at home when I was a child, which was stuffed full of medicines that were at least ten years out of date and were far more likely to kill you than make you better.)

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Today is the second of two talks based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:13 and 14. In these verses Jesus tells us that if we want eternal life, then we must enter through the narrow gate. We saw last week that although the gate is narrow, Jesus’ invitation is open to all people in every generation. The gate is not therefore narrow in the sense that entrance is restricted to only a few spiritual fanatics. Definitely not!

Today we are beginning a short two part series called “Finding the narrow gate”, based on Matthew 7:13,14. Inspired by Tim Keller’s book: “The Reason for God” (C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity – 1942). Tim Keller is increasingly being recognised as a prophetic voice in the 21st century whom God has equipped to speak faithfully but with a fresh understanding of modern culture.

Most of you have heard of Chuck Colson. In the early 1970’s he was the White House Adviser to President Richard Nixon, and he was sent to prison as a result of his role in the corruption scandal known as Watergate. While in prison he was soundly converted to Christ and afterwards he founded Prison Fellowship Ministries, which shares the gospel with prisoners all over the world.

I have chosen as our key verse this lunchtime verse 58. “Therefore my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.”

In these very busy days, when people seem to be working harder and harder, one of the more encouraging trends is the growing interest people have in discovering the purpose of their lives. After many years when business people have been encouraged to embrace the ethic of over-achievement, this must surely be a good thing.

Orientation: where are we going? We have two more studies to do after this week and then we will have finished 1 Corinthians! We can hand out City Partnership T-shirts, with “I’ve been to Corinth” on the front, and when your friends ask you, “What was it like?” you will be able to tell them!

Imagine what it would be like to know in advance how people will remember you after you have died. One morning in 1888, Alfred Nobel, the man who invented dynamite, awoke to read his own obituary in the newspaper! The obituary was the result of a mistake, because the truth was that it was Alfred’s brother who had died and the reporter carelessly reported the death of the wrong brother.

Last week we spoke about worldviews. I suggested that Paul has spent fourteen chapters showing the Corinthians that the way they are living points to a defective worldview. They are Christians (Paul calls them “brothers” v.1 and “my dear brothers” in v.58), but they aren’t living victorious Christian lives because their knowledge of the gospel is defective.

Last year when we were studying “The Sermon on the Mount” we spent some time thinking about what it means to have a worldview. You might remember that we defined a worldview as, "a set of assumptions we hold about ultimate reality that so satisfies me that I will base my entire life upon it." A worldview is obviously closely related to a person’s faith; and yet it is slightly different because when most people talk about their faith they are talking about the fact that they are happy to identify publicly with the fundamentals and practices of a particular religion. So, most of us here today could say, "I'm happy for people to know that I am a Christian." Apparently 75% of the people in this country are in that category.

In a passage that is culturally rather remote for most of us, I have chosen as our key text for today just one verse, verse 33, “For God is not a God of disorder but a God of peace.”

Of course, peace is something we all want in our own lives and for the world at large. There’s nothing worse than living in the shadow of a peace that everybody knows is flimsy and is likely to fall apart at any moment.