Sermon Tone Analysis

! To Live Upon God that Is Invisible

Suffering and Service in the Life of John Bunyan

1999 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors

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By John Piper February 2, 1999

 

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In 1672, about 50 miles northwest of London in Bedford, John Bunyan was released from twelve years of imprisonment.

He was 44 years old.

Just before his release (it seems) he updated his spiritual autobiography called Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

He looked back over the hardships of the last 12 years and wrote about how he was enabled by God to survive and even flourish in the Bedford jail.

One of his comments gives me the title for this message about Bunyan's life.

He quotes 2 Corinthians 1:9 where Paul says, "We had this sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God that raiseth the dead."

Then he says,

By this scripture I was made to see that if ever I would suffer rightly, I must first pass a sentence of death upon every thing that can be properly called a thing of this 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.

The second was, to live upon God that is invisible, as Paul said in another place; the way not to faint, is to "look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal."

The phrase that I have fastened on for the title and focus of this study of Bunyan is the phrase, "to live upon God that is invisible."

He discovered that if we are to suffer rightly we must die not only to sin, but to the innocent and precious things of this world including family and freedom.

We must "live upon God that is invisible."

Everything else in the world we must count as dead to us and we to it.

That was Bunyan's passion from the time of his conversion as a young married man to the day of his death when he was 60 years old.

In all my reading of Bunyan, what has gripped me most is his suffering and how he responded to it.

What it made of him.

And what it might make of us.

All of us come to our tasks with a history and many predispositions.

I come to John Bunyan with a growing sense that suffering is a normal and useful and essential and God-ordained element in Christian life and ministry.

Not only for the sake of weaning us off the world and teaching us to live on God, as 2 Corinthians 1:9 says, but also to make pastors more able to love the church (2 Tim.

2:10; Col. 1:24) and make missionaries more able to reach the nations (Matt.

10:16-28), so that so that they can learn to live on God and not the bread that perishes (John 6:27).

I am influenced in the way I read Bunyan by both what I see in the world today and what I see in the Bible.

I see the persecution of the church in Indonesia with its church burnings; in Sudan with its systematic starvation and enslavement; in China with its repression of religious freedom and lengthy imprisonments; in India with its recent Hindu mob violence and murder two weeks ago of Graham Staines, a 30-year missionary veteran with his seven- and nine-year-old sons; and the estimate reported in this month's International Bulletin of Missionary Research of 164,000 Christian martyrs in 1999.

I see 10,000 dead in Honduras and Nicaragua in the path of hurricane Mitch.

I see 1,000 killed by an earthquake last week in Armenia, Colombia.

I see hundreds slaughtered in Kosovo.

I see 16,000 new people infected with the HIV virus every day, with 2.3 million people dying of AIDS in 1997, 460,000 of these under age 15, and 8.4 million children orphaned by AIDS.

And, of course, I see the people suffering in my own church with tuberculosis and lupus and heart disease and blindness, not to mention the hundreds of emotional and relational pangs that people would trade any day for a good clean amputation.

And as I come to Bunyan's life and suffering, I see in the Bible that "through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom" (Acts 14:22); and the promise of Jesus, "If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you" (John 15:20); and the warning from Peter "not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you" (1 Peter 4:12); and the utter realism of Paul that we who "have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body" (Rom.

8:23); and the reminder that "our outer nature is wasting away" (2 Cor.

4:16); and that the whole creation "was subjected to futility" (Rom.

8:20).

As I look around me in the world and in the Word, my own sense is that what we need from Bunyan right now is a glimpse into how he suffered and how he learned to "live on God that is invisible."

I want that for myself, and I want that for my people, and I want that for you pastors and for your people, because nothing glorifies God more than when we maintain our stability and even our joy having lost everything but God (Hab.

3:17-18).

That day is coming for each of us, and we do well to get ready, and help our people get ready.

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John Bunyan was born in Elstow, about a mile south of Bedford, England November 30, 1628, the same year that William Laud became the bishop of London during the reign of king Charles I.

That connection with Bishop Laud is important because you can't understand the sufferings of Bunyan apart from the religious and political times he lived in.

In those days there were tremendous conflicts between Parliament and monarchy.

Bishop Laud, together with Charles I opposed the reforms of the Church of England desired by the Puritans.

Oliver Cromwell was elected to Parliament in 1640 and civil war broke out in 1642 between the forces loyal to the king and those loyal to Parliament.

In 1645, the Parliament took control of the Monarchy.

Bishop Laud was executed that year and the use of the Book of Common Prayer was overthrown.

The Westminster Assembly completed the Westminster Confession for the dominant Presbyterian church in 1646, and the king was beheaded in 1649.

Cromwell led the new Commonwealth until his death in 1658.

His main concern was a stable government with freedom of religion for Puritans, like John Bunyan and others.

"Jews, who had been excluded from England since 1290, were allowed to return in 1655."

After Cromwell's death his son Richard was unable to hold the government together.

The longing for stability with a new king swelled.

(How quickly the favor of man can turn!)

The Parliament turned against the Nonconformists like John Bunyan and passed a series of acts that resulted in increasing restrictions on the Puritan preachers.

Charles II was brought home in what is known as the Restoration of the Monarchy, and proclaimed king in 1660, the same year that Bunyan was imprisoned for preaching without state approval.

In 1662, the Act of Uniformity was passed that required acceptance of the Prayer Book and Episcopal ordination That August, 2,000 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 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 Pilgrim's Progress.

These were the days of John Bunyan's sufferings, and we must be careful not to overstate or understate the terror of the days.

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, 300 people were put to death in the western counties of England for doing no more than Bunyan did as a non-conformist pastor.

Bunyan learned the trade of metalworking or "tinker" or "brasyer" from his father.

He received the ordinary 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 15, his mother and sister died within one month of each other.

His sister was 13.

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 turned 16, he was drafted into the Parliamentary Army.

For about two years 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 shot in the head with a musket ball and died.

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."

He "came to the state of matrimony" when he was 20 or 21, 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.

They 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 10 years old an agonizing separation.

During the first five years of marriage, Bunyan was profoundly converted to Christ and to the baptistic, non-conformist church life in Bedford.

He came under the influence 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 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.