Desiring God Ministries presents the following message from
the Bethlehem Conference for Pastors.
In 1672, 50 miles northwest of London in
Bedford, John Bunyan was released from 12 years
of imprisonment.
Near the end of that imprisonment, he wrote
an add-on to his spiritual autobiography called
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which
he had written sometime earlier.
And in that add-on, he said something
from which I take the title of this
message.
He quoted 2 Corinthians 1.9, which says,
we had this sentence of death in ourselves
that we should not trust in ourselves, but
in God who raises the dead.
And then he wrote this.
This scripture I was made to see that
if ever I would suffer rightly, I must
first pass the sentence of death upon everything
that can be properly called a thing of
life, even to reckon myself, my wife, my
children, my health, my enjoyment, and all as
dead to me and myself as dead to
them.
And the second was to live upon God
that is invisible.
And there's the phrase that I chose as
the title for the message, to live upon
God that is invisible.
He discovered that if he's to suffer rightly,
he must live no longer upon wife or
children or health, but upon God.
He must live upon God.
And how good it would be if we
could learn to live upon God before we
have no choice but to live only upon
God.
For the day will come when this mortal
nature will fail, and the doctor will say
there is nothing more we can do.
And at that time you may be old
enough to have outlived your wife and children
and have nothing to live upon but God.
And so it would be good, it would
be good to learn this.
I think he spent his life learning it
from his early married life until he died
when he was 60 years old in 1688.
So I come to Bunyan with some predispositions
about suffering.
What has gripped me most about Bunyan in
the six or eight months that I've been
reading is his suffering and how he suffered
and how he responded to his sufferings.
And I want to know how to learn
from it.
What did it do to him?
What might do to us?
And I'll clue you in that I come
to him with significant experiences looking at the
world and looking at the Word.
And therefore I'm reading Bunyan through certain glasses,
and I'll tell you what they are right
up front so you'll know that whatever distortions
are there you can be alerted to them.
But I come right now in my 53rd
year with this particular church and these particular
sufferings and this world, I come with these
kinds of things on my mind.
The church in Indonesia with its church burnings.
Sudan with its systematic starvation of Christians and
the enslavement of many in the beatings.
China with its repression of religious freedom and
lengthy imprisonments and harassment.
India with mob violence resulting two weeks ago
in Graham Staines being killed along with his
two boys.
David Barrett's report in this month's missionary bulletin,
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, estimating 164,000
Christian martyrdoms this year.
Ten thousand people dead in the wake of
Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua and Honduras where one
of my boys will be heading in a
few weeks.
One thousand people killed in the earthquake in
Armenia.
Hundreds being slaughtered in Kosovo and Bosnia before
that.
Sixteen thousand people dying of or being newly
infected with AIDS, the HIV virus, every day.
2.3 million died in 97, 460,000
of them children.
8.4 million children orphaned by AIDS and
probably doubling in the next two or three
years.
Not to mention the suffering of my own
church, tuberculosis, lupus, kidney failure, heart disease, blindness,
and not to mention the emotional and relational
pangs for which a hundred people in this
church would gladly endure a clean amputation of
their right arm if they could be fixed.
So I come to Bunyan with suffering on
my mind, not to mention the Word.
Through many tribulations you must enter the kingdom
of God.
I send you out as lambs in the
midst of wolves.
Many are the afflictions of the righteous.
If they persecuted me, they will persecute you.
If they called the master of the house
Beelzebul, what will they call you?
To mention a few.
And so when I hear him say to
suffer a right you must learn to live
upon God who is invisible, I want to
know what that means, and I want to
experience that so that when my season of
suffering is intensified to the point of losing
all and dying, I will not lose my
joy.
Like Habakkuk, one of our wedding texts, says
in chapter 3 verse 17, though the fig
tree blossom not, though there be no fruit
on the vines, though there be no lambs
in the stall and no cattle in the
field, yet will I rejoice in God my
Savior.
You got to live on God if that's
going to come true.
The reason that's so important to me is
not simply because I I'm scared when I
think about dying.
Dying, the process of dying is scary to
me, but I believe God gets most glory
in the world when we maintain our stability
of faith and our joy of faith when
we have nothing to maintain that faith anymore
but God alone.
Then he really gets glory.
My little comment about signs and wonders would
be God can and does do them and
gets glory, but not half so much as
when, according to John 19 or 21 19,
we die well.
The world will be happy when it gets
well.
Doesn't take any spiritual reality to rejoice when
you get well.
And if you want to tack on God
did it, the world will say, fine, you
can say God did it, we say science
did it, but you love it, I love
it, and we know where your treasure is.
But they can't say that in the dying
hour when you're rejoicing.
Just can't say it anymore.
John Bunyan was born in Elstow, about a
mile south of Bedford, November 30th, 1628.
Same year that William Laud became the Bishop
of London.
Now that's significant, and the reason it's significant
is because you can't understand the sufferings of
John Bunyan if you don't understand the political
and religious situation that brought it about, or
a lot of it about.
William Laud, Bishop Laud, teamed up with Charles
I to resist the parliamentary pressures to gain
freedom for the Puritans, so that they wouldn't
have to bow to the Book of Common
Prayer, or experience Episcopal ordination, and so there
began to be a very dangerous cleavage between
monarchy, Charles I, and his religious lackey, William
Laud, and the Parliament, with Oliver Cromwell coming
onto the scene and being elected to the
Parliament in 1640, I think it was.
A civil war broke out between these two
groups, people loyal to the King, people loyal
to Parliament.
The one wanting religious freedom for people like
the Puritans, and not just them, and the
other saying that the Church of England should
be the state church, and there shouldn't be
nonconformity with any freedom.
Well, Oliver Cromwell was a great leader, and
there was a triumph, and Laud was beheaded
in 1645, and you need to hear that
with the kind of trembling as though you
heard that President Clinton was beheaded this afternoon.
Beheaded, not shot.
Beheaded.
You need to feel this, because this is
the atmosphere in which these Puritans are going
to be ministering.
People were beheaded.
Kings.
The King, five years later, was beheaded.
The King was beheaded, and then Cromwell reigned,
and Presbyterianism reigned.
The Westminster Assembly was gathered earlier.
It finished its work in 1646, and now
we had the Confession and the Catechism, and
it defined the Presbyterian life in England in
those days, and has to this day.
Great freedom was given.
Jews were excluded from the island of England
in 1290, and not a Jew was allowed
to be in England, and they were welcomed
back under Cromwell in 1655 in particular.
He died.
1658, he died.
So that little period there, the Commonwealth, 1645
roughly to 58, great freedom for the Puritans
and other people in England.
When he died, his brother Richard tried to
do it, and he couldn't do it.
He was not a leader.
Now you know what happens when you have
weak leadership in a country.
There's a lot of chaos.
There begins to be instability, and what do
people want when there's instability?
At all costs, they want stability.
They'll take it with the king or dictator
or however they can take it, and so
they welcome back Charles II, the son of
Charles I, and it's called the Restoration.
The that's the year Bunyan went to jail.
So there's a correlation there because with the
restoration of monarchy came the restoration of Episcopalism
and the act of uniformity in 1662, which
in August of that year put 2,000
Puritan pastors out of their churches who would
not bow to Episcopal ordination or to the
Book of Common Prayer.
Now those were the days of John Bunyan's
life.
The 1660 and the next 18 years that
he lived to the end of his life
in 1688 were more or less dangerous, sometimes
okay, sometimes threatened, but never anything like we
have today with such security to be taken
for granted that you couldn't be assured that
there wouldn't be a bloody assize like there
was in 1685 where the sheriffs killed 300
Puritans.
As a boy he learned the trade of
tinker.
He used the phrase brazier in his will.
It means a metal worker, somebody who fixes
plows and yokes and other metal instruments with
forge and hammer.
That was his trade.
He was poor.
He had only a grade school education.
He said, I simply learned to read and
write.
He had absolutely no higher education and no
theological education.
His notable sufferings began as a teenager.
He was 15 years old.
It's 1644.
Remember the dates now.
Here comes this tremendous national upheaval.
A civil war is ready to break out
and he's 15 years old and his mother
dies and a month later his 13-year
-old sister dies.
And to make matters worse, his father remarries
within a month.
He turns 16 and he's drafted for two
years into Cromwell's army.
So within a space of two or three
months, he loses his mother as a 15
-year-old.
He loses his sister as a 13-year
-old and he's swept away from his home
as a 16-year-old now.
And he may or may not have seen
active service, but we know one story where
he was called upon to be a sentinel
and a man said, I'd rather take your
place, you take mine.
And the man was killed with a musket
ball through the head and so he got
at least that close to military activity.
This is a 16-year-old boy who
just lost his mother.
He comes home.
He is not a believer.
He writes about himself, I was the very
ringleader of all the youth that kept me
company in all manner of vice and ungodliness.
He married.
He was 20 years old, or 21, and
we never learned the name of his first
wife.
It's a remarkable thing.
She bore him four children and the first
one was blind at birth, Mary.
So his marriage, which might have been a
relief to him from the sufferings of the
earlier teen years, proves to enter with a
tremendous burden and the burden, of course, in
our day, we've had that happen in our
church, is great.
Then picture what it might have been for
a young woman who had all the burden
of a household and a blind daughter, baby
daughter, to care for, and then three more
children follow back-to-back, and then when
he's thrown into prison, she's ten years old,
and he said it was like pulling skin
from his bones to leave his daughter, blind
daughter, alone with his wife with no means
to care for them.
So he made laces in prison and things
like that.
But she brought with her to this marriage,
this pagan man's life, two books.
That was her entire bringing.
One was called The Plain Man's Pathway to
Heaven, and the other was called The Practice
of Piety, and she told stories of her
godly father, and he began to read these
books, and he began to be awakened.
Mary, Elizabeth, John, Thomas were the names of
his children, and in his first five years
of marriage, he was profoundly converted.
Now, the process of the conversion was agonizing,
and when you read Grace Abounding, get it
if it's up there.
It's a little short book, 120 pages.
It is very frustrating to read.
There are no dates in it.
You can't tell when anything is happening, and
you can't tell what he thinks is his
conversion, because it seems to happen several times,
and then he experiences these extraordinary temptations, and
then he thinks he's committed the unforgivable sin
and drops into despair and depression for two
years, and then he begins to come out.
But most of the biographers seem to make
this the decisive moment, and they're probably right,
so let me read you the decisive moment.
There were several good moments, but they seem
to be followed by drifting away, and I
don't know what he thought about those.
One day, he's about 25 years old here,
I suppose, one day as I was passing
into the field, this sentence fell upon my
soul.
He's been soaking himself in the Scriptures and
in these books, but feeling unconverted.
This sentence fell upon my soul.
Thy righteousness is in heaven, and methought withal
I saw with the eyes of my soul
Jesus Christ at God's right hand.
There, I say, was my righteousness, so that
wherever I was or whatever I was doing,
God could not say of me, He lacks
my righteousness, for that was just before Him.
I also saw, moreover, that it was not
my good frame of heart that made my
righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that
made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was
Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, today, and
forever.
Now did my chains fall off my legs
indeed.
I was loosed from my afflictions and irons.
My temptations fled away, so that from that
time those dreadful Scriptures of God, the ones
he's referring to there are the text about
the unforgivable sin and Esau and crying out
and not being able to get forgiven, those
terrible texts, those Scriptures left off to trouble
me.
Now went I also home rejoicing for the
grace and the love of God.
Now what are the influences?
If that sounds familiar, who's that sound like?
Another great person who had a conversion somewhat
like that.
Well Wesley, I'm thinking of Luther.
Okay, sounds like a lot of people.
The reason I mention Luther is because he
attributes so much to Luther.
Here's what he says.
The God in whose hands are all my
days and ways did cast into my hand
one day a book of Martin Luther's.
It was his comment on Galatians.
I found my condition in his experience so
largely and profoundly handled as if his book
had been written out of my heart.
I do prefer this book of Martin Luther
upon Galatians, accepting the Bible, before all other
books that ever I have seen as most
fit for a wounded conscience.
That's an amazing tribute, and he's not the
only one.
1655 now.
The matter of his soul is settled the
church, the nonconformist church in Bedford, pastored by
John Gifford, asks him to do some exhorting
in the fields, and behold a great preacher
is discovered.
Seventeen years was to pass before he would
be licensed and become the actual official pastor
of this church.
He gets out of prison in 1672, but
he became a very powerful preacher, and stories
are told to the effect that hundreds would
come from around to hear him from the
villages, and when he went to London, if
one day's notice were given, seven o'clock
the next morning before work, twelve hundred people
could gather.
John Owen, the great intellect of the Puritans,
lived in London at this time, would hear
him every chance he got, and when the
King Charles asked Owen, why do you go
to hear a tinker preach when you have
all this learning, his answer was, I would
willingly exchange my learning for the tinker's power
of touching the men's hearts.
So you know this man had a tremendous
gift for preaching.
Ten years into his marriage, this unnamed woman,
his wife, died.
He's thirty years old, and he has four
children under ten, one of them blind.
Within a year he marries Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was a great woman also.
The year after that, he's arrested.
She's pregnant.
She has four children she inherited.
One of them's blind.
She's pregnant.
He gets arrested, and she miscarries and loses
the baby.
I have crossed out in my manuscript, but
I just feel like I can't pass over
this great instance in Elizabeth's life.
I just must pay tribute to the women
in Bunyan's life, though they had a hard
time of it, and he may not have
treated them entirely all the way he should.
But she goes to London to appeal.
Now this is a village woman, this woman
with no education, goes to the higher-ups
of London, and they put her off and
say, wait until the court comes to Bedford.
So she waits six months or so, and
the court comes to Bedford.
So you've got three judges.
She's going to go before these major judges,
because they've put her husband in jail, and
who knows what might happen to her?
And she has four children, and a recent
miscarriage to contend with.
Would he stop preaching, they ask.
My Lord, he dares not leave off preaching
as long as he can speak.
What's the need of talking?
There is need, my Lord, for I have
four small children that cannot help themselves, of
which one is blind, and we have nothing
to live upon but charity of other people.
Matthew Hale, with pity, asks if she really
has four children, being so young.
My Lord, I am but mother-in-law
to them, having not been married to him
yet two full years.
Indeed, I was with child when my husband
was first apprehended, but being young and unaccustomed
to such things, I, being smade at the
news, fell into labor, and so continued for
eight days, and then was delivered, but my
child died.
Hale moved with the other judges with pity,
moved with pity, yet the other judges hardened
themselves.
He's a mere tinker, Elizabeth.
Yes, and because he's a tinker and a
poor man, he's despised and cannot have justice.
One Mr. Chester is enraged and says he
will just preach and do as he wishes.
He preaches nothing but the Word of God,
she says.
Mr. Twisdon, in a rage, he runneth up
and down and doeth harm.
No, my Lord, it is not so.
God hath owned him and doth much good
by him.
The angry man, his doctrine is the doctrine
of the devil.
She, my Lord, when the righteous judge shall
appear, it will be known that his doctrine
is not of the devil.
Well, we'll break it off there.
You get a flavor for Elizabeth.
Otherwise she would not have been able to
last the twelve years that she did without
him.
Twelve years in prison?
Voluntarily, because all he had to say was,
I will no longer preach, and he could
have gotten out.
He was asked, will you recant?
Will you forswear?
Will you renounce?
His answer, if nothing will do unless I
make my conscience a continual butchery and slaughter
shop, unless putting out my own eyes I
commit me to the blind to be led,
as I doubt not is desired by some.
I have determined the Almighty God being my
help and shield, yet to suffer, if frail
life might continue so long, even till the
moss shall grow on my eyebrows, rather than
thus to violate my faith and principles.
So you see some of the stuff he's
made of as well.
It was a torment for his family, and
he often agonized over whether he was doing
right by them.
He said, the parting with my wife and
poor children hath often been to me, they
could visit him from time to time, have
often been to me like the pulling of
the flesh from my bones.
Oh, the thoughts of the hardship I thought
my blind Mary might go under would break
my heart to pieces.
And yet he stayed.
Twelve years later, 1672, he's released under the
Declaration of Religious Indulgence.
He's immediately licensed.
He's been functioning pastorally for this church, because
they joined him in prison a lot, being
arrested as well as visiting.
And so he was functioning as pastor in
some ways, but he was licensed immediately.
He bought and refurbished a barn for a
church, and that's where he ministered for the
next 16 years, until he died in London
in 1688.
The census figures seem to suggest that there
may have been a hundred and twenty nonconformists
in Bedford in 1676.
So perhaps he has a church of a
hundred and twenty people, plus people who may
have come from around the surrounding villages.
And God was merciful to him during those
16 years, because even though blood was being
shed by many Puritans in those years, he
escaped imprisonment, and indeed God spared him from
ministry until August of 1688.
He traveled up to London under two purposes.
One, to settle a dispute between a man
in his church and his father, where there
was a lack of reconciliation.
And he succeeded at that reconciliation.
And two, was for a preaching assignment.
But it rained so hard as he is
returning for one of the districts around London,
that he was soaked to the bone and
got a fever.
And on August 31st, 1688, at the age
of 60, he died away from his wife
and children, and probably they didn't even have
enough advance notice to know that he was
dying.
Let me try to sum up the sufferings
now that I've been recounting.
An almost simultaneous death of his mother and
his sister, the remarriage of his father, the
military draft at age 16, a first child
born to a happy marriage, blind, depression and
darkness for about four or five years in
his marriage as he struggles for the assurance
of his salvation or his conversion.
The death of his first wife, leaving him
four children, one of them blind, when he's
30 years old.
Twelve-year imprisonment, starting a year after that,
after he remarried to Elizabeth, with much difficulty
during those twelve years for them and him.
And then after the release, constant stress of
the uncertainty of the political climate.
One more imprisonment, I failed to mention, for
a winter and a spring in 1675, and
then a final sickness and death at age
60, far too early for him alone, probably
away from his family.
Not to mention ministry, marriage, parenting, controversy, criticism,
sickness, and the ordinary things that everybody endures.
So my question is, what did he make
of this?
What did it make of him?
And what might it make of us?
And the way I want to handle this
is by giving you five statements that I'll
try to unpack of the effect of Bunyan's
suffering on him.
Number one, these are the effects that I
see in Bunyan's life of his suffering that
we should appropriate for ourselves, and I'll try
to help us do that.
Number one, Bunyan's suffering confirmed him in his
calling as a writer, especially for the afflicted
church.
Now the biggest distortion that I have made
of Bunyan's life so far is that I
have not even mentioned his writings.
Now everybody knows that he wrote The Pilgrim's
Progress.
The Pilgrim's Progress is the most widely distributed
book in the history of the world outside
the Bible, written by a man with no
formal education.
It's been translated into 200 languages and is
especially popular in the third world, and reading
the history of The Pilgrim's Progress was mind
-boggling.
I'd love to tell you some stories about
13th century, I mean 18th century China and
the impact.
It almost became the first little red book
in China, but different course of events changed
all of that.
But what people don't know is that he
wrote 57 other books.
When you read the list in Christopher Hill's
index, there are 58 books.
Books on controversy like the Quakers and justification
and baptism, collections of poems, books for children,
children's literature, allegory like the Holy War and
the life and death of Mr. Badman, and
practical doctrinal expositions.
Most of them are simply practical doctrinal expositions
that would profit your own soul based on
sermons that he had written.
So he was a writer from beginning to
end.
He wrote four books before he went into
jail, so from age 25 to 27 to
32 roughly, and he had five books that
he wrote the year he died, and everything
else was in between, and he was always
writing in prison and always writing at home.
He was a writer through and through with
no theological degrees, no formal education.
He knew no Greek and Hebrew at all,
and yet his sufferings, his sufferings permeated and
gave the aroma to all of his writings.
Whitfield, George Whitfield, said this of the Pilgrim's
Progress, It smells of the prison.
It was written when the author was confined
in Bedford Jail, and ministers never write or
preach so well as when under the cross
the spirit of Christ and of glory then
rests upon them.
And I just ask you, brothers, have you
not tasted that?
Has there not been an intensity?
Has there not been a sweetness?
Has there not been a depth?
Has there not been an authenticity walking into
the pulpit after the winter seasons, whether your
own or another's?
I would generalize here and say that one
of the main reasons that the Puritans are
still being read today is that the fragrance
of heaven and the fragrance of hell are
on them, because they were written in a
century from 1560 to 1660, which was permeated
by persecution and suffering, and life was simply
hard in the 17th century, when it was
good.
Whereas in America and in the West today
we are chipper.
Church is chipper.
TV is chipper.
Books are chipper.
We're a chipper people, which means there's not
much to be read today worth reading, because
the smell of hell and heaven isn't on
it.
When you're walking along the precipice, like the
Puritans walked almost every day of their lives,
the precipice where there's no 9-1-1,
you've got to get your own water, there's
no vaccinations, there's no OBGYN, and you're always
walking along the edge and the precipice of
eternity, there's a smell about your preaching, which
is almost missing today entirely.
Thank God for books where we can bathe
our brains with something other than chipper theology.
Bunyan's writings were an extension of his pastoral
ministry to his flock.
That's the way he viewed them, and he
lived under constant harassment and danger, and that
fit him to minister well to others, which
leads me now to my second observation.
Bunyan's sufferings deepened his love for his flock
and gave his pastoral labor the fragrance of
eternity.
It deepened his love for his flock and
gave him the fragrance of eternity.
Bunyan and his writings are filled with affection
for his people.
He loved his little flock.
He wrote a book called Christian Behavior in
1663.
Compute.
He's in jail.
Three years he's been in jail, and here's
the way he closed the book, writing it
for his little flock.
Thus have I, in a few words, written
to you before I die.
He fully expected this was not going to
turn out well.
So you got to get this straight.
You don't overdo it and don't underdo it.
He wasn't tortured in jail.
He could do his little handwork and help
support his family, and he could have visitors,
but don't underdo it either.
People were being beheaded in England in those
days.
Kings had the right to do as they
pleased in those days.
There wasn't a lot of recourse, so you
never know when the door might swing open.
One of you went to England.
Who's it?
I forget who this belongs to, but this
says Bedford Jail, 1670.
It's a peephole on the door in a
cell that may have been John Bunyan's.
This is the actual thing.
1670, he had two more years to serve.
So if you want to touch this, I'll
leave it up here, and I thank whoever
it was who lent this to us, just
one of you, for doing it, but this
looks authentic to me, and you can look
through it.
There's no magnification, so you can see both
ways on this one.
We get to do the other way.
I'll put this here, and you can look
at it, but if you steal it, God
will judge you.
Now what made me think of that?
I lost my place here.
He's writing this to his people.
Oh, I said don't overstate the suffering and
don't understate it, because they could come visit
him, and it could be that they put
their finger right on that and looked in,
but he wrote to them.
Before I die, a word to provoke you
to faith and holiness, because I desire that
you may have the life that is laid
up for all them that believe in the
Lord Jesus and love one another when I
am deceased.
Though then I shall rest from my labors
and be in paradise, as through grace I
am comfortably assured, yet it is not there
but here I must do you good.
And so he writes these books for his
people.
Halfway through his imprisonment, he writes, I did
often say before the Lord that if to
be hanged up presently before their eyes would
be means to awake them and confirm them
in the truth, I would gladly consent to
it.
Bunyan gloried in the privilege of being a
pastor.
He loved the ministry.
It flowed from his sufferings.
He was jealous.
He was jealous for his people to prosper.
Now, loving your people is very much a
product of suffering, I think.
In America, we don't suffer much.
We are fun-loving folk, but you know,
you can be as fun-loving and as
happy-go-lucky and chipper as you want,
but as soon as somebody tells you you've
got cancer or as soon as you find
out your child is blind, you turn away
from the chipper pastors to somebody who is
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
I know there's a tremendous pressure on you
in many seminars to grow churches by helping
people feel chipper and good, and I think
perhaps your church may grow more slowly if
you're a serious person, and I don't want
you to be a somber or glum person,
but your people have got to know you
know what it feels like if they're going
to come tell you what it feels like.
There's got to be something they're detecting in
you that you've suffered.
Otherwise, they're going to go to somebody else
because the pain is too great to be
dealt with lightly.
And as soon as you share with somebody
a marital problem or a kid problem or
a health problem, you can tell within seconds
if they are connecting at any deep level
here.
And if they're not, the quickest thing you
want to do is just say, excuse me,
excuse me, I need somebody who understands.
And so your suffering is so important to
them.
You won't love your people as you ought
unless you suffer with Jesus.
He said, my heart has been so wrapped
up in the glory of this excellent work
that I counted myself more blessed and honored
of God by this than if I had
made me emperor of the Christian world or
the Lord of all the glory of the
earth without it.
He loved being a pastor to his people
and his suffering endeared him to them.
Third observation, Bunyan suffering, open his understanding to
the truth that the Christian life is hard
and that following Jesus means having the face,
the wind in your face.
1682, six years before he dies, he writes
a book called the greatness of the soul
based on Mark 8 36.
What does it profit a man to gain
the world and forfeit his soul?
For what shall a man give in exchange
for his soul?
Now Puritans were good at taking a sentence
like that and writing a book about it.
They wrote books about sentences like that and
they're not throwing away words.
So he writes a book about that verse
and in it this is what he wants
to get across.
I'll quote, he's quoting Jesus now.
Follow me is not like following some other
masters.
The wind sits always on my face and
the foaming rage of the sea of this
world and the proud and lofty waves thereof
do continually beat upon the sides of the
bark or boat that myself, my cause, and
my followers are in.
He therefore that will not run hazards and
that is afraid to venture a drowning, let
him not set foot into this vessel.
That's his conception of following Jesus.
Two years later he wrote a book on
John 15 2.
Every branch that bears fruit my father prunes.
And this was his point.
It is the will of God that they
that go to heaven should go thither hardly
or with difficulty.
The righteous shall scarcely be saved.
That is they shall but yet with great
difficulty that it may be the sweeter.
So his whole mindset seems out of step
with 20th century American evangelicalism to me.
The essence of Christianity is hard.
The essence of Christianity is you gotta fight
like crazy, cut off hands, gouge out eyes,
deny yourself in order to live upon God
only.
Because we have, I mean, if it was
hard in the 17th century to learn to
live upon God only, think how hard it
is to get into the kingdom of heaven
today.
It is hard for a rich man to
get into the kingdom and everybody in this
room is filthy rich.
No exceptions.
I don't care if you didn't pay your
rent last month.
There are no exceptions.
We are rich.
It is hard in America to go to
heaven.
How many coats are in your closet?
Shoes.
How many running pairs of shoes?
Gloves for every occasion.
Every manner of possible electronic device to heat
your food.
Fast, slow, rough edges, soft edges.
Plumbing is in your house.
Sewage carried away flawlessly.
Pure drinking water.
Refrigeration, 911 at your beck and call.
I tell you, it is hard to go
to heaven in America.
Because who knows what you are leaning on
until it is taken away.
That's why 2 Corinthians 1.9 says, I
was crushed to the point of death so
that I might trust the one who raises
the dead.
In other words, everything was taken but resurrection.
And that's coming, brothers.
So I just plead with God now, get
you ready.
He wrote and carried to the printer in
his last year, The Excellency of a Broken
Heart.
Isn't that a beautiful title?
The Excellency of a Broken Heart.
And you know where it comes from.
It's based on Psalm 51.
And in it, this is his thesis.
Conversion is not the smooth, easygoing process some
men think it is.
It is wounding work, of course, this breaking
of hearts.
But without wounding, there's no saving.
Where there is grafting, there is a cutting.
The scion must be let in with a
wound.
To stick it on the outside or to
tie it on with string would be of
no use.
Heart must be set to heart, back to
back, or there will be no sap from
the root to the branch.
And this, I say, must be done with
a wound.
If you wonder why there aren't more fruitless
people, I mean, why there are so many
fruitless saints, seeming saints, it may be because
there was never a wound and the vine
isn't in the branch.
It's tied on and pasted on with a
quick booklet or prayer or aisle-walking.
And so there's no sap flowing.
And they're trying to do what you're supposed
to be doing.
Read the Bible and pray.
You're supposed to feel something in this worship
service.
And there's no light.
And it's scary.
The churches are full of that kind of
people all over America.
And some pulpits have preachers like that.
Bunyan was passionate for these things, and he
was patient with these things.
Listen to this beautiful, pastor-patient word.
And listen to his language.
I wish I had time to talk about
Bunyan's language.
He and Spurgeon are almost without peer in
their use of language.
And we need to learn from the misregard,
but I have to leave some things out.
You get a flavor of it here in
this beautiful word.
1678, a book called Come and Welcome to
Jesus Christ.
He was a wooer, a wooer of men.
Coleridge was right.
The Calvinism of John Bunyan is the sweetest,
most beautiful, most tasty religion in the world.
He that comes to Christ cannot, it is
true, always get on as fast as he
would.
Poor coming soul, thou art like the man
that would ride full gallop, whose horse will
hardly trot.
Now the desire of his mind is not
to be judged of by the slow pace
of the dull jade he rides on.
He's talking about his body here.
The dull jade he rides on, but by
the hitching and the kicking and the spurring
as he sits on his back.
Thy flesh is like this dull jade.
It will not gallop after Christ.
It will be backward though thy soul and
heaven lie at stake.
When you talk like that, let your speech
be seasoned with salt, that you may know
how to answer every man.
Work at your language.
Get provocative language into your great old truths,
so that people either scratch their heads or
scream or twinge or something, but don't go
to sleep on you.
And call you boring, the worst damnation of
a preacher.
Maybe not the worst, but pretty close.
He was a very balanced person.
One way to illustrate the balance in this
issue is he wrote a book in, I
didn't put the date down, doesn't matter.
He wrote a book in one year called
Saved by Grace.
Ephesians 2.5 was the text.
And the very same year, he followed it
with a book called The Straight Gate, based
on Luke 13.24. Strive to enter at
the straight gate, for many, I tell you,
will seek to enter in and shall not
be able.
Can you point to anybody in your church
that is seeking to enter the kingdom and
not able?
I just wonder if our gospel is a
biblical gospel when there aren't a few people
like that around.
We are so scared of having people like
that, we want to paste assurance on them
so fast, because you can't have people struggling
with assurance, you can't have people struggling with
their soul and saying, I want to be
saved, but I don't know grace in my
life, I have no spiritual affections.
We say to people, you don't need to
have any of those affections, and we got
to get people like that fixed so fast
that so much of the purity of experience
just seems gone.
There's no wrestling like these men wrestled with.
The way is hard, Jesus said, that leads
to life, and those who find it are
few.
Bunyan taught that to his people.
Number four, this is my fourth result or
function of suffering in his life, Bunyan's suffering
strengthened his assurance that God is sovereign over
all afflictions of his people and will bring
them safely home.
Now there have always been people who try
to solve the problem of suffering by denying
the sovereignty of God, that is the all
-ruling providence of God over Satan and over
nature and over human hearts and deeds.
But you know, it is remarkable, as I
read church history and biography and look around
the world today, it is remarkable to me
how many of the people who cherish the
full sovereignty of God over will and nature
and demons and bodies, the fullest expression of
the sovereign control of God are the people
who have suffered.
And thus, from an academic perspective, would have
the hardest time rendering an account of theoretically
how you can believe in such a thing.
And they have found the most comfort in
it.
And Bunyan was among that number.
He wrote a book called, Seasonable Counsels, Advice
to Sufferers, it was based on one verse,
and the verse was 1 Peter 4, 19,
which goes, Let them that suffer according to
the will of God, commit the keeping of
their souls to him in well-doing, as
unto a faithful creator.
And to watch him unpack every word in
that, is a thrilling thing.
Let me give you a taste.
He said, it is not, he took the
phrase especially, according to the will of God,
suffer according to the will of God.
He said, it is not what enemies will,
nor what they are resolved upon, but what
God will and what God appoints that will
be done.
No enemy can bring suffering upon a man
when the will of God is otherwise, so
no man can save himself out of their
hands when God will deliver him up for
his glory.
We shall or shall not suffer, even as
it pleaseth him.
God has appointed, I'm still reading Spurgeon, I'm
just putting the collage of text together here.
God has appointed who will suffer, Revelation 6,
11, a full number of the martyrs who
are appointed must come in.
God has appointed when they shall suffer, Acts
18, 9-10, Paul, nobody's going to hurt
you, yet.
John 7, 30, it was not his hour,
therefore he passes through the midst.
The time will come, God will deliver his
son over, till then nobody can touch him.
God determines where this or that saint and
good man shall suffer.
Luke 13, 33, it cannot be but that
a prophet shall perish outside Jerusalem, and on
the Mount of Transfiguration they discussed what kind
of suffering he would experience in Jerusalem.
God has appointed what kind of sufferings this
or that saint shall undergo, Acts 9, 16,
go tell Paul how great things he must
suffer for my name.
And John 21, 19, he says to Peter,
I will show you, or I have showed
you, by what death you would glorify God.
God has determined that Peter would be crucified
upside down.
Our sufferings as to the nature of them
are all writ down in God's book, he
says, and though the writing may seem unknown
characters to us, yet God understands them very
well.
It is appointed who of them should die
of hunger, who is to die by the
sword, who should go into captivity, and who
should be eaten up by beasts.
And that's almost a direct quote from Jeremiah
15, 2 and 3.
Now what was his aim in talking like
that to these saints who might well suffer
in that horrible way?
Let me insert a parenthesis here just to
show you how I deal with this.
I wrestle with this emotionally almost daily because
I read the newspaper.
I opened the newspaper up last week right
after the earthquake.
First I heard the news, 100, 200, 500,
700, 1000 people.
God, move your people, move your people now,
show your compassion, move.
I know you did it, why you did
it I don't know, except at least you
want this, that your church would move in
power and compassion.
There, move them, let's go.
And then I opened the newspaper.
Now I confess to having a little touch
of claustrophobia because when I was about 14,
I went into the woods across the street
from my house and with my friends dug
a cave straight down on a bank like
this.
And then when we got down, so it
was over our heads, we started in like
this, just digging like this.
And I can remember going down in the
hole, lying on my stomach, crawling into the
hole and scraping like this.
And then reaching my way back, pulling the
dirt out and putting it in a bucket
and sending it up.
Is that stupid?
I have nightmares about that to this day.
I'm usually awake when I have them.
And I opened the newspaper, you saw the
picture perhaps.
There's a collapsed building and the workers all
over it and they're pulling and here's one
little face of a man like this.
And he's just crushed underneath and his eyes
are just terrified looking at the man.
And I just trembled when I saw that
picture.
I just trembled.
If I were in that position and that
were on me and there were these big
beams going.
And at any minute you just might be
severed or back on your face.
You know what I think?
God's doing that.
That's why there's a problem of suffering in
the world.
It's not statistics.
It's a little girl in Texas falling into
a 12-inch pipe.
Remember that one?
The whole nation watched for days and they
bored a hole this way.
They bored a hole this way.
You're her dad and you stop and her
leg is trapped up like this and she's
what, two?
And for a while she's crying and crying
and crying and crying and crying.
Mommy and daddy and your heart is being
absolutely ripped and shreds.
Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God.
If you can't believe in the sovereignty of
God at a moment like that, just give
it up and quit the ministry.
And I admit, I mean I can say
this right now, but I admit if my
little Talitha experiences that this afternoon, I will
scream, oh God, oh God, oh God.
Come, deliver, why not?
And I will wrestle.
And I pray God will help me believe
because this is what the Bible teaches.
I just read this morning in my own
personal devotions in Genesis 4.
A lot of us are reading through the
Bible this way, I mean Exodus 4.
411, who is it that makes a man
blind or seeing or deaf or dumb?
Is it not I, the Lord?
I mean, you just have to quit the
Bible or believe in the sovereignty of God.
You can't have it both ways.
I don't care what theologians at Bethel or
anywhere else are saying, you can't have it
both ways.
You have to believe in the sovereignty of
God.
He says, I have handled this in a
few words, this issue of suffering, to show
you that our sufferings are ordered and disposed
by him and that you might always, when
you come into trouble for his name, not
stagger or be at a loss, but be
stayed and composed and settled in your mind.
So I just plead with you, get this
fixed before you have to be in that
crushed situation yourself.
I've had some wonderful testimonies in this church.
Let me tell you one.
This isn't in my manuscript, but it comes
to my mind and I'll risk it.
I just have four more pages here, which
could take a half an hour, but I'll
hurry.
A family came to our church.
In fact, she may be here, I don't
know.
You're welcome if you're here and you wouldn't
mind me telling this story.
Started coming in May, came to me last
November or so, tears, standing right there after
a sermon, saying we had to leave our
other church, we won't go into the details
about the problems, but we have learned more
about the sovereignty of God in these five
months or whatever it was than we did
in 20 years previous.
That week, I got a call from them
that the doctor wanted their son to come
quickly because something was very wrong with his
blood.
Well, here we are two months later.
He has leukemia.
He just had a bone marrow transplant on
the 12th of January, I believe it was,
and he's, I hope, going to make it.
So here's a family, got introduced to the
sovereignty of God in the most radical form,
and are tested immediately with a 21-year
-old son who now had to have his
bone marrow killed and have his brother Matt's
bone marrow replace his, which is an exactly
perfect match, 80 percent, not a very good
chance.
And Bonnie said to me, I would have
gone insane without the sovereignty of God.
I hear those stories a lot, which is
one of the reasons I get worked up
about these things.
They are pastorally precious to me and to
millions of people.
He warns against revenge.
He warns against revenge of those.
Listen to what he says about the persecutors.
Learn to pity and bewail the condition of
the enemy.
Never grudge them their present advantages.
Fret not thyself because of evil men, neither
be thou envious of the workers of iniquity.
Fret not, though they spoil thy resting place.
It is God that hath bidden them do
it, to try thy faith and patience thereby.
Wish them no ill with what they get
of thine.
It is their wages for their work, and
it will appear to them ere long that
they have earned it dearly.
So we must learn to live upon God
who is invisible.
We need tribulation.
We need suffering.
He says, there is that of God to
be seen in such a day as cannot
be seen in another.
We are apt to overshoot in the days
of calm and think ourselves far higher and
more strong than we find we be when
the trying day is upon us.
We could not live without such turnings of
the hand of God upon us.
We should be overgrown with flesh if we
had not our seasonable winters.
It is said that in some countries trees
will grow but will bear no fruit because
there is no winter.
Let me beg of thee, he says, that
thou will not be offended either with God
or with men if the cross is laid
heavy upon thee.
Not with God, for he doth nothing without
cause, nor with men, for they are the
servants of God to thee for good.
Take therefore what comes to thee from God
by them thankfully.
Last point, number five.
Bunyan's sufferings deepened in him a confidence in
the Bible as the word of God and
a passion for Bible memory and Bible exposition
as the key to perseverance.
I'm going to read that again.
Bunyan's suffering deepened in him a confidence in
the Bible as the word of God and
a passion for Bible memory and Bible exposition
as the key to perseverance.
If you ask Bunyan, okay, if living on
God who is invisible is the key to
suffering rightly, what's the key to living on
God that is invisible?
He would answer living on the word of
God.
That's what he would answer.
One of the greatest scenes, and you know
which one I'm going to, in the Pilgrim's
Progress is the scene of Christian in the
dungeon of Doubting Castle with giant despair guarding
and hopeful at his side making the long
overdue discovery.
And the thing I want you to listen
to as I read it is where's the
key?
Where's the key?
Listen to the language carefully.
What a fool I've been to lie like
this in a stinking dungeon when I could
have just as well walked free in my
chest pocket.
I have a key called promise that will,
I am thoroughly persuaded, open any lock in
Doubting Castle.
Then said hopeful, that's good news, my good
brother.
Do immediately take it out of your chest
pocket and try it.
Then Christian took the key from his chest
and began to try the lock of the
dungeon door.
And as he turned the key, the bolt
unlocked and the door flew open with ease
so that Christian and hopeful immediately came out.
Did you ever get that before?
This is Bible memory, folks.
This is laying up the word of God
in your chest that you might not sin
and that you might get out of Doubting
Castle when there's no Bible in your hand.
It's too dark in the room or they
brought you to the hospital and you're waking
up and there's no Bible in your hand.
You go to your chest or if you
don't, where do you go?
How do you live?
How do you survive without the Bible in
your chest?
Oh, Bungen loved the Bible.
He loved the Bible.
He said, I have never had in all
my life so great an inlet into the
word of God as now in prison.
That's why he didn't begrudge God his suffering.
Those scriptures that I saw nothing in before
were made in this place and state to
shine upon me.
Christ also was never more real and apparent
than now.
Here I have seen him and felt him.
Indeed, I have had sweet sight of the
forgiveness of my sins in this place and
my being with Jesus in another world.
I have seen that here that I am
persuaded I shall never while in this world
be able to express.
He loved the promises of God revealed to
him in prison.
He said, I tell thee, friend, there are
some promises that the Lord has helped me
laid hold of that I would not have
out of the Bible for as much gold
and silver as can lie between York and
London piled to the stars.
You got one?
Which one would you pick?
I'd pick Romans 8 32.
I would not trade Romans 8 32 for
all the gold between here and Gaithersburg piled
to the stars.
Would you?
He who did not spare his only son,
but gave him up for us all, how
then shall he not?
Let me stick in through tribulation and distress
and persecution and peril and sword and famine
and nakedness.
How shall he not through all those things
give us all things with him?
Would you trade that for anything?
And if not, do you know how rich
you are and what a glorious calling we
have to build such priceless commodities into our
people?
Who would want to be a stockbroker when
you can broker Romans 8 32 for which
you wouldn't trade all the gold in Fort
Knox?
I think I should be done.
I'm out of time, but I have one
last paragraph here.
He so loved the Bible.
He said, let me die with the Philistines
rather than deal corruptly with the blessed word
of God.
I tell you, brothers, doctrine and right interpretation
matters.
I grieve at Christian leaders today who don't
think it matters, just can't get it.
Let me close with this paragraph.
You go home to your people now, go
home to your people filled with love for
people, filled with love for promises, ready to
suffer, filled with love for right doctrine, and
you woo your people.
You don't beat your people.
You woo your people.
You gotta out rejoice people.
You gotta win them up into God where
you're enjoying him.
You can't coerce them or lever them.
You gotta woo them and win them, and
here's the way you say it.
Bunyan wooing his people.
God hath strewed all the way from the
gate of hell where thou wast to the
gate of heaven whither thou art going with
flowers out of his own garden.
He means promises.
Flowers out of his own garden.
Behold how the promises, invitations, calls, and encouragements
like lilies lie round about thee, and then
he wouldn't be a Puritan if he didn't
add, take heed that thou not tread them
under thy feet.
That's not a chipper sentence.
That's a gloriously true sentence.
You say to your people, take heed.
Don't tread this promise under your feet through
unbelief.
Believe it.
Now, I will linger for maybe 10 minutes
to field your questions.
Yes, we all appreciate you very much, and
I'm just so thankful for your ministry to
me personally.
When you talk about John Bunyan and you
talk about the relationship between suffering and loving
your people, and I don't want to miss
out on the suffering that I need to
go through in order to love the word
and love the people God has given me,
but yet we do live in an affluent
culture, and I'm wondering, as I read your
book, Hungering for God, and as I've read
some other on fasting, I'm wondering if fasting
and as I try to understand how much
I have to mortify my own flesh to
pray, is that the suffering that I need
to go through as a pastor in order
to love my people and to love God
as his word, or do you think there
is something else?
It is definitely part of it.
I don't think it's the main part.
I think voluntary suffering is so dangerous because
it mainly will produce pride.
I believe in fasting with all my heart,
but it is unbelievably dangerous discipline because it
can produce as much vanity as it does
brokenness, but yes, you will discover your bondage
to food in a big hurry if you
do a three-day fast, and that's a
very important discovery to make, or if you're
hooked on television, or if you're hooked on
the newspaper, or if you're hooked on coffee,
or if you're hooked on sugar, or if
you're hooked on being a couch potato at
night, or whatever you happen to be.
Paul said, I will not be enslaved by
anything, and Jesus said, Cut off your hand
if you are, or gouge out your eye.
These men spoke.
I run knowing that if one tames and
I pommel my body, lest I myself be
a castaway, having preached the gospel to others,
where is that spirit?
Yes, yes, voluntary suffering, pommeling your body, getting
to bed when you should, getting up when
you should, getting the exercise you should, and
if somebody calls you on the phone, going,
whether it's late or early, and systematically building
fasting into your life, building study into your
life, getting discipline into your life, that's a
piece of it.
But I say all of that is, to
use Colossians 2, in one sense, useless for
the mortification of the flesh, and in fact
can become flesh through and through.
So just a warning, yes, but.
However, Paul says those who desire to live
a godly life will be persecuted, period.
So if we're not being, we're probably not
being godly.
The, I think we have domesticated sebaia, godliness.
I doubt that godliness means not going to
the wrong movies, or not committing adultery, or
not stealing and killing, mainly.
In other words, avoidance ethics, avoidance ethics is
probably not what Paul meant by those who
desire to be godly will be persecuted.
I think godliness is such a radical God
orientation that you are freed from the things
of this world for risk-taking big time
in love.
So we all need to be asking, where
am I taking any risk to love somebody?
They can be small risks, just like cold
turkey evangelism.
David Livingstone has that little sheet in your
white folder to say something about new efforts
in cold turkey visitation.
And what about making the hard phone calls?
The elder who's written you this nasty letter,
and you just as soon write him another
letter and never see him again.
What about the phone call?
What about the face-to-face contact?
What about tonight?
You talk about little levels of self-denial
will result in big levels of trembling for
us weak people.
I just think radical godliness will get you
in trouble, and then you won't have to
ask the question you just asked anymore, and
neither will I.
John, you said some hard things to us
today, and I wonder when I think of
reflecting on the victims, and God did it,
God did it.
The hardest cases in my ministry when I
emphasize things like that are talking to the
victims of sexual abuse, and I'm just wondering
what you'd say to them.
I don't have to say, would say to
them.
They are real people, and we've talked to
them.
What I say will depend on what they've
heard and where they are in that process
and in their own theological development and where
they've been here, and truth must be positioned,
not changed, but positioned according to people's ability.
And so, we must learn pastorally sensitive ways
to express our confidence in the sovereignty of
God.
It can get down to something as simple
as the choice of verbs.
God did it.
Let's suppose they ask, where was God?
That's the most common.
Where was God in those years?
When my daddy was doing that to me.
You could very callously and heartlessly say, right
there helping your dad.
Now, there may be a really far out
way that that would be an accurate statement,
but that would carry so much falsehood in
that moment that it would be a very
wrong thing to say.
But you might say, God was in heaven,
and He was in control of the world,
and He was then and is able today
in His power over all things to turn
everything for your good.
Now, she might at that moment say, let
me just re-say what you just said.
You're saying, God was in control at that
moment.
Is that what you're saying?
I'm saying, I tried to say it carefully
because it needs to be said carefully, because
God is a careful God, and God is
a big God, and God is complex, and
God can weep while He is doing things
over which He weeps.
And I would say other things.
And then I would ask her perhaps, would
you have it such that God was wringing
His hands and couldn't do anything, which means
He can't today do anything perhaps to really
help you.
But I believe that God is so sovereign
that today your life can be utterly redeemed,
utterly redeemed.
Venereal warts and all can be utterly redeemed,
and all the dysfunction in your life and
all the emotional terror can be utterly redeemed.
And the reason I believe that is because
I believe in the absolute sovereignty of God
with your life right now.
Your heart is in His hands.
He is a craftsman and can take your
heart.
And if I detected from her at that
moment some sense of, oh, that sounds hopeful,
that sounds good, I might say, and you
know, if that's true, then the same God
was in charge of the universe 20 years
ago or five years ago or whenever.
And then I would also say probably, depending
on where she is and what her theology
is, I would say, you know, I don't
have all the answers, and mystery abounds in
the universe, and I'm not about to give
an answer for why an earthquake landed on
Armenia and didn't bring this church down on
us today.
I don't have an answer for that.
I don't know why we haven't been swallowed
up right now, and they did.
I don't have an answer for that.
Or why you experienced that and why God
let your dad do that.
And if she said, oh, you said let.
You don't really believe let.
I'd say, I do believe let, because I
believe the way God exerts His causal agency
is different in righteousness and sin.
I think He ordains and superintends and governs
it all, and yet there's a more active
agency.
And then I might quote to her Lamentations
3, 37, where it says, he does
not, help me, see
it, that is, he does not willingly afflict
the children of men.
Now, I looked that up in the Hebrew.
Willingly is the word melevo, three Hebrew words.
You know them?
Tell me the meaning of the Hebrew word
mean.
From, leiv, heart, o at the end.
His, from his heart.
He does not from his heart afflict the
sons of men.
So I would say to her, you take
a text like that.
Now, this is in the midst of Lamentations
where women are boiling and eating their children,
and it's called the judgment of God.
And you say, right in the middle of
Lamentations is a statement, God does not willingly
afflict the children of men, and yet He
afflicts them.
What that means is, God is complex enough
so that He has levels of emotion.
Afflicting them is not His favorite activity, but
He does it.
He doesn't do it from His heart.
You know what His heart is?
His heart right now is your repentance and
the forgiveness of your dad.
Let's deal with that first.
Here's your flavor anyway.
I think we'll save the other questions for
tomorrow's panel.
So thank you so much for being here.
Enjoy your afternoon.
We'll be back here tonight.
In Him.