The Pilgrim's Progress

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August, two thousand Puritan pastors were forced out of their churches. Twelve years later there was a happy turn of affairs with the Declaration of Religious Indulgence that resulted in Bunyan’s freedom, his license to preach, and then his call as the official pastor of the non-conformist church in Bedford. But there was political instability until he died in 1688 at the age of 60. He was imprisoned one other time in the mid 1670’s when he probably wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress.

These were the days of John Bunyan’s sufferings, and we must be careful not to overstate or understate the terror he experienced. We would overstate it if we thought he was tortured in the Bedford jail. In fact, some jailers let him out to see his family or make brief trips. But we would understate it if we thought he was not in frequent danger of execution. For example, in the Bloody Assizes of 1685, three hundred people were put to death in the western counties of England for doing no more than Bunyan did as a non-conformist pastor.

Young Heartache and Fear

Bunyan learned the trade of metalworking, also known as a “tinker” or “brasyer,” from his father. He received the ordi-nary education of the poor to read and write, but nothing more. He had no formal higher education of any kind, which makes his writing and influence all the more astonishing. The more notable suffering of his life begins in his teens. In 1644, when he was fifteen, his mother and sister died within one month of each other. His sister was thirteen. To add to the heartache, his father remarried within a month. All this while, not many miles away in that same month of loss, the king attacked a church in Leighton and “began to cut and wound right and left.” And later that fall, when Bunyan had  

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turned sixteen, he was drafted into the Parliamentary Army. For about two years he was taken from his home for military service. There were harrowing moments he tells us, as once when a man took his place as a sentinel and was killed by a musket ball shot in the head.

Bunyan was not a believer during this time. He tells us, “I had few equals, especially considering my years, which were tender, for cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God . . . Until I came to the state of marriage, I was the very ringleader of all the youth that kept me company, in all manner of vice and ungodliness.

”Precious Books Came with His Wife

He “came to the state of matrimony” when he was twenty or twenty-one, but we never learn his first wife’s name. What we do learn is that she was poor, but had a godly father who had died and left her two books that she brought to the marriage, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety. Bunyan said, “In these two books I would sometimes read with her, wherein I also found some things that were somewhat pleasing to me; but all this while I met with no conviction.” But the work of God’s drawing him had begun.

John and his wife had four children: Mary, Elizabeth, John, and Thomas. Mary, the oldest, was born blind. This not only added to the tremendous burden of his heart in caring for Mary and the others, it would make his imprisonment when Mary was ten years old an agonizing separation.

“THY RIGHTEOUSNESS IS IN HEAVEN”

During the first five years of marriage, Bunyan was profoundly converted to Christ and to the baptistic, non-co-formist church life in Bedford. He came under the influence  

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of John Gifford, the pastor in Bedford, and moved from Elstow to Bedford with his family and joined the church there in 1653, though he was not as sure as they were that he was a Christian. It’s hard to put a date on his conversion because in retelling the process in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners he includes almost no dates or times. But we do know it was a lengthy and agonizing process.

He was pouring over the Scriptures but finding no peace or assurance. There were seasons of great doubt about the Scriptures and about his own soul. “A whole flood of blasphemies, both against God, Christ, and the Scriptures were poured upon my spirit, to my great confusion an astonishment . . . . How can you tell but that the Turks had as good scriptures to prove their Mahomet the Savior as we have to prove our Jesus?” “My heart was at times exceeding hard. If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear, I could not shed one.”

When he thought that he was established in the gospel there came a season of overwhelming darkness following a terrible temptation when he heard the words, “sell and part with this most blessed Christ . . . . Let him go if he will.” He tells us that “I felt my heart freely consent thereto. Oh, the diligence of Satan; Oh, the desperateness of man’s heart.” For two years, he tells us, he was in the doom of damnation. “I feared that this wicked sin of mine might be that sin unpardonable.” “Oh, no one knows the terrors of those days but myself.” “I found it a hard work now to pray to God because despair was swallowing me up.”

Then comes what seemed to be the decisive moment.

One day as I was passing into the field . . . 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 righteous-  

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ness; 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” (Heb 13:8.). Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God [about the unforgivable sin] left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God.

Under God, one key influence here, besides Pastor Gifford in Bedford, was Martin Luther. “The God in whose hands are all our days and ways, did cast into my hand one day a book of Martin Luther’s; it was his Commentary 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 the Galatians, excepting the Holy Bible, before all the books that ever I have seen, as most fit for a wounded conscience.”

A Preacher Is Born

So in 1655, when the matter of his soul was settled, he was asked to exhort the church, and suddenly a great preacher was discovered. He would not be licensed as a pastor of the Bedford church until seventeen years later, but his popularity as a powerful lay preacher exploded. The extent of his work grew. “When the country understood that the tinker had turned preacher,” John Brown tells us, “they came to hear the word by hundreds, and that from all parts.” Charles Doe, a comb maker in London, said (later in Bunyan’s life),  

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“Mr. Bunyan preached so New Testament-like he made me admire and weep for joy, and give him my affections.” In the days of toleration, a day’s notice would get a crowd of over a thousand to hear him preach at seven o’clock in the morning on a weekday. Once, in prison, a whole congregation of sixty people were arrested and brought in at night. A witness tells us, “I . . . heard Mr. Bunyan both preach and pray with that mighty spirit of Faith and Plerophory of Divine Assistance, that . . . made me stand and wonder.” The greatest Puritan theologian and contemporary of Bunyan, John Owen, when asked by King Charles why he, a great scholar, went to hear an uneducated tinker preach, replied, “I would willingly exchange my learning for the tinker’s power of touching men’s hearts.”

The Incredible Elizabeth Bunyan

In 1658, ten years after he was married, when Bunyan was thirty, his wife died, leaving him with four children under ten, one of them blind. A year later, he married Elizabeth, who was a remarkable woman. The year after their marriage, Bunyan was arrested and put in prison. She was pregnant with their firstborn and miscarried in the crisis. Then she cared for the Bunyan children as their step-mother for twelve years alone, and bore Bunyan two more children, Sarah and Joseph.

She deserves at least one story here about her valor in the way she went to the authorities in August of 1661, a year after John’s imprisonment. She had already been to London with one petition. Now, as recounted by Bunyan’s biographer, she was met with one stiff question:

“Would he stop preaching?”  

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“My lord, he dares not leave off preaching as long a he can speak.”

“What is the need of talking?”

“There is need for this, 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 the charity of good 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 full two years. Indeed, I was with child when my husband was first apprehended; but being young and unaccustomed to such things, I being smayed at the news, fell into labor, and so continued for eight days, and then was delivered; but my child died.

”Hale was moved, but other judges were hardened and spoke against him. “He is a mere tinker!”

“Yes, and because he is a tinker and a poor man, therefore he is despised and cannot have justice.”

One Mr. Chester is enraged and says that Bunyan will preach and do as he wishes.

“He preacheth nothing but the word of God!” she says.

Mr. Twisden, in a rage: “He runneth up and down and doeth harm.”

“No, my lord, it is not so; God hath owned him and done 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 the doctrine of the devil!”

Bunyan’s biographer comments, “Elizabeth Bunyan was  

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simply an English peasant woman: could she have spoken with more dignity had she been a crowned queen?”

Imprisoned from “My Poor Blind Child”

So for twelve years Bunyan chooses prison and a clear con-science over freedom and a conscience soiled by the agreement not to preach. He could have had his freedom when he wanted it. But he and Elizabeth were made of the same stuff. When asked to recant and not to preach he said,

If nothing will do unless I make of my conscience a continual butchery and slaughter-shop, unless, putting out my own eyes, I commit me to the blind to lead me, 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 mine eye-brows, rather than thus to violate my faith and principles.

Nevertheless he was sometimes tormented that he may not be making the right decision in regard to his family.

The parting with my Wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling of the Flesh from my bones; and that not only because I am somewhat too fond of these great Mercies, but also because I should have often brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries and wants that my poor Family was like to meet with should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all I had besides; O the thoughts of the hardship I thought my Blind one might go under, would break my heart to pieces.  

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Persevering in Bedford, Not London

Yet he stayed in Bedford. In 1672 he was released because of the Declaration of Religious Indulgence. Immediately he was licensed as the pastor of the church in Bedford, which he had been serving all along, even from within prison by writings and periodic visits. A barn was purchased and renovated as their first building and this is where Bunyan ministered as pastor for the next sixteen years until his death. He never was wooed away from this little parish by the larger opportunities in London. The estimate is that, in 1676, there were perhaps 120 non-conformists in Bedford, with others undoubtedly coming to hear him from around the surrounding villages.

There was one more imprisonment in the winter and spring of 1675–76. John Brown thinks that this was the time when The Pilgrim’s Progress was written. But even though Bunyan wasn’t in prison again during his ministry, the tension of the days was extraordinary. Ten years after his last imprisonment in the mid-1680’s, persecution was heavy again. “Richard Baxter, though an old man now, was shut up in jail, where he remained for two years more, and where he had innumerable companions in distress.”

Meetings were broken in upon, worshipers hurried to prison, “separatists changed the place of gathering from time to time, set their sentinels on the watch, left off singing hymns in their services, and for the sake of greater security worshipped again and again at the dead of night. Ministers were introduced to their pulpits through trap-doors in floor or ceiling, or through doorways extemporized in walls.” Bunyan expected to be taken away again and deeded over all his possessions to his wife Elizabeth so that she would not be ruined by his fines or imprisonment.  

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A Pilgrim Dies Away from Home

But God spared him, until August 1688. In that month he traveled the fifty miles to London to preach and to help make peace between a man in his church and his alienated father. He was successful in both missions. But after a trip to an outlying district, he returned to London on horseback through excessive rains. He fell sick of a violent fever, and on August 31, 1688, at age sixty, Bunyan followed his famous fictional Pilgrim from the “City of Destruction” across the river to the “New Jerusalem.”

His last sermon had been on August 19 in London at Whitechapel on John 1:13. His last words from the pulpit were, “Live like the children of God, that you may look your Father in the face with comfort another day.” His wife and children were probably unaware of the crisis till after it was too late. It is likely that Bunyan died without the comfort of family—just as he had spent so much of his life without the comforts of home. “The inventory of Bunyan’s property after his death added up to a total of forty-two pounds and nineteen shillings. This is more than the average tinker would leave, but it suggests that most of the profits from The Pilgrim’s Progress had gone to printers of pirated editions.” He was born poor and never let himself become wealthy in this life. He is buried in London at Bunhill Fields.

So, in sum, we can include in Bunyan’s sufferings the early, almost simultaneous, death of his mother and sister; the immediate remarriage of his father; the military draft in the midst of his teenage grief; the discovery that his first child was blind; the spiritual depression and darkness for the early years of his marriage; the death of his first wife leaving him with four small children; a twelve year imprisonment cutting him off from his family and church; the constant stress and uncertainty of imminent persecution, including  

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one more imprisonment; and the final sickness and death far from those he loved most. And this summary doesn’t include any of the normal pressures and pains of ministry and marriage and parenting and controversy and criticism and sickness along the way.

Writing for the Afflicted Church

The question, then, that I bring to Bunyan’s suffering is: What was its effect? How did he respond to it? What did it bring about? What difference did it make in his life? Knowing that I am leaving out many important things, I would answer that with five observations.

1. Bunyan’s suffering confirmed him in his calling as a writer, especially for the afflicted church.

Probably the greatest distortion of Bunyan’s life in the portrait I have given you so far is that it passes over one of the major labors of his life: his writing. Books had awakened his own spiritual quest and guided him in it. Books would be his main legacy to the church and the world.

Of course, he is famous for The Pilgrim’s Progress—“next to the Bible, perhaps the world’s best-selling book . . . translated into over 200 languages.” It was immediately successful with three editions in the first year it was published in 1678. It was despised at first by the intellectual elite, but as Lord Macaulay points out, “The Pilgrim’s Progress is perhaps the only book about which, after the lapse of a hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people.”

But most people don’t know that Bunyan was a prolific writer before and after The Pilgrim’s Progress. Christopher Hill’s index of “Bunyan’s Writings” lists fifty-eight books.  

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The variety in these books was remarkable: controversy (like those concerning the Quakers, and concerning justification and baptism), collections of poems, children’s literature, allegory (like The Holy War and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman). But the vast majority were practical doctrinal expositions of Scripture built from sermons for the sake of strengthening and warning and helping Christian pilgrims make their way successfully to heaven.

He was a writer from beginning to end. He had written four books before he went to prison at age thirty-two, and in one year alone—1688, the year he died—five books were published. This is extraordinary for a man with no formal education. He knew neither Greek nor Hebrew, and had no theological degrees. This was such an offense even in his own day that his pastor, John Burton, came to his defense, writing a foreword for his first book in 1656 (when he was 28.):

This man is not chosen out of an earthly but out of the heavenly university, the Church of Christ . . . . He hath through grace taken these three heavenly degrees, to wit, union with Christ, the anointing of the Spirit, and experiences of the temptations of Satan, which do more fit a man for that mighty work of preaching the Gospel than all university learning and degrees that can be had.

Bunyan’s suffering left its mark on all his written work. George Whitefield said 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.”The fragrance of affliction was on most of what he wrote. In fact, I suspect that one of the reasons the Puritans are still being read today with so much profit is that their entire ex-  

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perience, unlike ours, was one of persecution and suffering. To our chipper age (at least in the prosperous West) this may seem somber at times, but the day you hear that you have cancer, or that your child is blind, or that a mob is coming, you turn away from the chipper books to the weighty ones that were written on the precipice of eternity where the fragrance of heaven and the stench of hell are both in the air.

Bunyan’s writings were an extension of his pastoral ministry, mainly to his flock in Bedford who lived in constant danger of harassment and prison. His suffering fit him well for the task. Which leads to the second effect of Bunyan’s suffering I want to mention.

2. Bunyan’s suffering deepened his love for his flock and gave his pastoral labor the fragrance of eternity.

His writings were filled with love to his people. For example, three years into his imprisonment he wrote a book called Christian Behavior, which he ended like this:

Thus have I, in a few words, written to you 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 comfortably believe, yet it is not there, but here, I must do you good. Wherefore, I not knowing the shortness of my life, nor the hindrance that hereafter I may have of serving my God and you, I have taken this opportunity to present these few lines unto you for your edification.

In his autobiography, written about halfway through his imprisonment, he spoke of his church and the effect he hoped  

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his possible martyrdom would have on them: “I did often say before the Lord, that if to be hanged up presently before their eyes would be means to awake in them and confirm them in the truth, I gladly should consent to it.” In fact, many of his flocked joined him in jail and he ministered to them there. He echoed the words of Paul when he described his longings for them: “In my preaching I have really been in pain, I have, as it were, travailed to bring forth Children to God.”

He gloried in the privilege of the gospel ministry. This too flowed from his suffering. If all is well and this world is all that matters, a pastor may become jealous of prosperous people who spend their time in leisure. But if suffering abounds, and if prosperity is a cloak for the true condition of frisky, fun-loving perishing Americans, then being a pastor may be the most important and glorious of all work. Bunyan thought it was: “My heart hath 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 the emperor of the Christian world, or the lord of all the glory of the earth without it.”

He loved his people, he loved the work, and he stayed with it and with them to the end of his life. He served them and he served the world from a village parish with perhaps 120 members.

3. Bunyan’s suffering opened his understanding to the truth that the Christian life is hard and that following Jesus means having the wind in your face.

In 1682, six years before his death, he wrote a book called The Greatness of the Soul, based on Mark 8:36–37, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul? For what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”  

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He says that his aim is to “awaken you, rouse you off of your beds of ease, security, and pleasure, and fetch you down upon your knees before him, to beg of him grace to be concerned about the salvation of your souls.” And he does not mean the point of conversion but the process of perseverance. “The one who endures to the end, he will be saved” (Mark 13:13). He hears Jesus warning us that life with him is hard:

Following of me is not like following of 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 ship 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.

Two years later, commenting on John 15:2 (“Every branch that bears fruit, he prunes”), he says, “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.”

He had tasted this at the beginning of his Christian life and at every point along the way. In the beginning: “My soul was perplexed with unbelief, blasphemy, hardness of heart, questions about the being of God, Christ, the truth of the Word, and certainty of the world to come: I say, then I was greatly assaulted and tormented with atheism.” “Of all the temptations that ever I met with in my life, to question the being of God and the truth of his gospel is the worst, and the worst to be borne.”

In The Excellency of a Broken Heart (the last book he took to the publisher) he says,  

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Conversion is not the smooth, easy-going process some men seem to think . . . . It is wounding work, of course, this breaking of the hearts, but without wounding there is no saving. . . . Where there is grafting there is a cutting, the scion must be let in with a wound; to stick it on to the outside or to tie it on with a string would be of no use. Heart must be set to heart and back to back, or there will be no sap from root to branch, and this I say, must be done by a wound.

Bunyan’s suffering made him passionate about these things—and patient. You can hear his empathy with strugglers in these typically earthy words in a book from 1678 called Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ:

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, but by the hitching and kicking and 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.

It seems to me that Bunyan knew the balance of Philippians 2:12–13, “So then, my beloved . . . work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” First, he publishes a book called Saved By Grace based on Ephesians 2:5, “By grace you are saved.” And then in the same year he follows it with a book called, The Strait Gate, based on Luke 13:24, “Strive to enter at the strait gate; for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able.”

Bunyan’s sufferings had taught him the words of Jesus