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Morning Meditation for the Season of Easter
May 9, 2026
Reading: Matthew 7:13-21
‘Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.
‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits.
‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord”, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven.
Meditation by Rebecca Northington
The RYG Bible Breakfast study group has been attentively reading the Gospel according to Matthew this spring. We have covered barely two chapters per week in our 45-minute block, which indicates how thoroughly the kids are wrestling with the text. They get especially caught up in the dichotomy of Jesus’s teachings. We are reading the Bible as a way to understand God’s hope for us and for who we can become. When we read Matthew this way, the kids fear that God expects us to be perfect, and they struggle to understand how to be disciples of Christ.
Love your neighbor AND Love your enemy (what if they hurt your neighbor?)
Be discerning AND Be simple like little children
Do not judge SO that you are not judged
But don’t be transactional….
Be wary of temptations BUT Treat others how you would be treated
To be discerning and yet not judgmental feels like a very fine line to walk for teenagers. If we are being honest, this is tricky territory for adults as well. How do you know who is a wolf in sheep's clothing? “You will know them by their fruit” For real? What fruit? How will we know them? These feel like impossible delineations!
I vividly remember my first encounter with Instagram somewhere around 2012. I was waiting in the elementary school carline when my niece sent me her Instagram handle. I remember texting back and forth with her trying to understand what it was this teenager was showing me, and getting an icky feeling in my stomach. It was innocent enough to start, just photos, no content really; but it felt like a trap. As Instagram evolved, you could curate or alter your photo to more optimally represent what you wanted to look like. As most of us know, this became a runaway train for comparison psychology, fomo, and algorithms. I immediately asked myself, how much should we be looking at ourselves, or at others? It felt unnatural, and unhealthy. Teenage girls are notoriously hard on themselves. How could this be a good thing? But as the app grew in popularity, it became clear that it wasn’t just about what you looked like, what clothes you had on, or what fabulous location you posted from. It also showcased who you were with, and consequently, who you were not with. A disastrous thing for teenagers, and honestly, a recipe for unhealthy thoughts across all generations. For me, Instagram is an opportunity to examine ourselves, our motives, and society at large. Is it a good tree? Does it serve us? Does it damage us? Is it a temptation, or does it in fact bear good fruit? I cannot answer these questions for others, but these are the questions we must ask ourselves, without judgement, and without malice.
We can be seduced by things and people, and it is confusing work to try to decipher when incredibly charismatic persons are using their “riz” for good, or for not. And in that discernment process, we are called to love that person regardless. This is also hard and confusing work. But it is the work that allows us to be whole and integrated and uncompromised in our own person. In a recent article by Daniel Goodman “When Kierkegaard Got Cancelled”, Goodman contends “By its very nature, the public is a phantom–an imagined collective whose approval can never truly be won because, in a real sense, it does not exist….What we seek cannot come from human approval alone…The highest form of individuality, then, is not to stand apart from others but the courage to ‘stand alone before God’...This, ultimately, is God’s design for us: to give us ourselves.” We may not always be able to decipher between good trees and bad, or wolves from sheep. We may have to learn from our failures. But I believe God’s wish for us is to stand before him, confident that we have tried to give people the benefit of the doubt; confident that when we encounter bad trees we have tried to love them anyway, confident that we don’t do these things in a transactional manner in order to get into heaven, but because we trust in God, and hope to find the narrow gate.
Prayer by Soren Kierkegaard
YOU HAVE LOVED US FIRST
Great Companion, You have loved us first.
May we never forget that You are love,
So that this sure conviction might triumph in our hearts
Over the whirling of the world,
Over the inquietude of the soul,
Over the anxiety for the future,
Over the fright of the past,
Over the distress of the moment.
May this conviction discipline our soul
So that our hearts might remain faithful and sincere
In the love which we bear to all those we love as ourselves
Amen
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