I BECAME A Christian on my very first day at college, before classes had even begun. Two clean-cut and athletic looking young men approached me with a survey. At the end was a leading question which unbeknownst to me was the whole point of the survey: “If you could know and experience God personally, would you be interested? Yes or no.”

Why not? I thought to myself, I don’t have anything else to do right now. So I said yes. They whipped out a small gospel tract and led me through it, page by page.

In that tract was a diagram showing two ways of life. In one life, Jesus was at the center and in control; that life was portrayed as well-balanced and orderly. The other had self at the center, calling the shots. That life, by contrast, was portrayed as chaotic. They asked which life I preferred; obviously, I chose the orderly one. The good news, as they presented it, was that I could have that life if I chose to believe in and receive Jesus as my Savior. On that day, I chose Jesus, and the rest is history.

But later, when I entered seminary and began studying Scripture more closely, I came to question that way of framing the gospel. First, there’s the question of how much is our choice and how much is God’s; who chooses whom?

And second, the diagram is misleading. Life is not necessarily made more orderly when we choose to follow Jesus. Ask the apostles, most of whom were martyred for the faith. Or go back further and ask the prophets. Ask Elijah as he fled for his life from a murderous Jezebel; ask Jeremiah as he watched the downfall and destruction of his beloved Jerusalem.

Orderly? Not so much.

Still, the vision of Psalm 1 is not to be denied. There is a way of righteousness and a way of wickedness. The former is the path of blessing, the latter, the path of destruction. There is life with God and life without; there is heaven, and there is hell.

What we need to remember, though, is that the psalm works both ways: choosing a path means choosing the destination toward which it leads, and conversely, choosing a destination means choosing the path that goes with it. Choosing Jesus — to the extent that it is, in fact, our choice — means choosing to follow him in his way.

That will come out again clearly in one of his later warnings in the Sermon on the Mount. For now, however, let’s consider what this means with respect to the teaching of Matthew 5. We may have said yes to the gospel to secure our eternal destiny, but in the Sermon on the Mount, we are called to embody that destiny in the choices we make today.

AGAIN, JESUS TOLD his hearers that if they wanted the kingdom of heaven, their righteousness would have to go beyond that of the scribes and Pharisees. Over and over in Matthew 5, Jesus challenges the teaching of the religious leaders in Jerusalem, and in Matthew 6, he criticizes their hypocritical example of piety.

To choose the kingdom of heaven is to choose Jesus; to choose Jesus is to choose his way. And that in turn means following the way of Jesus in the choices we make each day. What does that mean? Let’s think back to the lessons of Matthew 5.

At any given moment, for example, someone may say or do something to make us angry. That anger is, to some extent, an automatic reaction. But as soon as we notice it, we have a choice to make. Will we just blurt out whatever we’re thinking, saying demeaning and insulting things? That’s the broad way, the way of the world. But the narrow way is to curb the impulse and restrain our tongues. And what will we do when we remember that someone else is angry at us? The broad way is to say, “Oh, well,” and put it out of our minds. But the narrow way is to seek forgiveness and reconciliation.

What about covetous desire? Again, we live in a world in which desire of every kind is stimulated by people who want both our attention and our money. Will we just go along with it all, or will we choose to discipline ourselves?

Then there’s the question of our trustworthiness. We make promises, and those promises demand something of us. When it comes time to honor them, we can take the easy way out: convince ourselves that it wasn’t really a promise, or it wasn’t realistic, or we really shouldn’t have to, and so on. But Jesus’ more narrow way is to honor our commitments — and better yet, to become a person of such integrity and trustworthiness that promises become entirely unnecessary.

What do we do when we’ve been treated unfairly? The wide gate and the broad road is some kind of tit-for-tat retaliation. That’s what the world understands. But the narrow road is to adopt a generous spirit, not only forgoing retaliation, but giving more than expected.

And that in turn sets up the hardest choice of all: loving one’s enemies. In both Matthew 5 and Luke 6, Jesus makes it crystal clear: you get no moral credit for being nice to people who are nice to you, because everybody does that. That is the broad and well-traveled road. To love your enemies, to do good to them, to follow the Golden Rule and treat them as you would wish to be treated yourself — that’s the narrow way, the way of kingdom righteousness, the way of Jesus.

You’ve been told that you have an eternal destiny, and because of that, you’ve chosen Jesus. Amen to that. But that choice for the future entails choices for today, for the very moment in which you are tempted to hurl verbal abuse, lust after things that don’t belong to you, make empty promises, and retaliate against and hate your enemies. What will you do?

After all, it’s your choice.