United with Christ
1 Corinthians 1:26–31 (KJV),
For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: 27 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; 28 And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: 29 That no flesh should glory in his presence. 30 But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption: 31 That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.
And it was this passage of God’s word — along with many other passages from God’s word! — that changed the life of John Bunyan.
I read from the King James because they are the exact words that Bunyan himself read. He lived from the year 1628 to 1688, and he spent pretty much his entire life within a ten-mile radius of Bedford, which is an English town about 50 miles north of London.
And Bunyan’s story is different from both Augustine and Luther in that there was not a single passage of Scripture that changed everything for him. But instead, it was more like there were dozens of passages over years that impacted him.
He wrote a memoir about his conversion titled Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. It’s an amazing story about how he came to Christ, but nowhere in the book does he say “This was the precise moment!” There were lots of moments. Lots of turning points. Lots of breakthroughs. And a lot of valleys in between.
For Bunyan, his story is not this nice arc, but it’s more like a zig-zag. And I think that’s helpful for us because, if we’re honest, that’s a lot of us in this room. We’ve got messy stories! And that’s okay because it’s not how you start that matters most, it’s how you finish.
For the last two weeks, we’ve looked at some awesome starting points, but today we’re gonna look at a journey. A journey is the best metaphor to use when we think about the life of John Bunyan — and I know he’d agree with that!
I want to tell you the story of his journey in four episodes (and I’m gonna title each episode with a little quote from his memoir).
Episode 1: The Ungodliest Fellow
Bunyan was born in 1628, during one of the most unstable times in English history.
This is a lot to explain, but in short, King Charles I and Parliament did not get along, and the English Civil War erupted in 1642. Bunyan joined the Parliamentary Army when he was 16 years old, and he served as a solider for about three years.
Bunyan doesn’t say a lot about his time as a soldier but we know that God spared his life and he got married right after he finished his service. He was 20 years old, he was married, and he was “a wretched man.” That’s how he described himself.
When he was a boy, he was the worst kid in his town. He said that he would curse and swear and lie, and blaspheme the name of God — and he did it so much it was like second nature to him.
He had a very foul mouth, and the issue was not simply that he used a few un-choice words, but it was the whole way he engaged people. His entire talk was filthy and vile. And he knew it. He said that even as a kid, he would have nightmares about God’s judgment, but he still carried on in his sin, in open defiance to God.
Now, Bunyan’s wife was a Christian, and she had some influence on him. He went to church with her, and on one occasion, he experienced some conviction from a sermon, but then he shook it off. He admitted he was miserable in his sin, but said that if he forsook his sins he still wouldn’t be good enough to be a Christian. So he made this calculation: I’m damned if I don’t, and damned if I do.
He wrote:
I can but be damned, and if I must be so, I had as good be damned for many sins, as to be damned for a few. (15)
You can hear what he’s saying: if he’s damned so matter what, he might as well sin as much as he can, and so he did.
He said “I went on in sin with great greediness of mind” until one day … he was out in the town talking with some friends, standing in front of a shop window …
He said he was “cursing and swearing and playing the madman” — he was raising Hell — and there was a ‘woman of the house’ who overheard him (she was most likely a prostitute), and she told Bunyan that he cursed and sweared at a fearful rate so much that it made her to tremble. Bunyan wrote about it and said:
she told me “that I was the ungodliest fellow for swearing that ever she heard in all her life, and that I, by this doing, was able to spoil all the youth in a whole town.” (16)
That’s rich coming from this woman. And it hit Bunyan hard. And his response to this is fascinating. Keep in mind at this time he’s an enemy of Christ. He’s defying God. But listen to what he said about this experience. He wrote:
“While I stood there, and hanging down my head, I wished with all my heart that I might be a little child again, that my father might learn me to speak without this wicked way of swearing.”
I don’t know about you, but that’s sad. And it makes me think: I know that there’s a range of emotions that we should feel toward hell-raisers (like how Bunyan was), and one of those emotions should be pity.
He admitted that beneath his rough exterior, he was a man who wished he could be a little child again. He just wanted a fresh start. That’s a lot of lost people. A lot of people, if they’re honest, they just wish they could do it over. And like Bunyan, they despair, because they think it’s too late for any kind of change.
Episode 2: “Most Fit for a Wounded Conscience”
Bunyan thought it was too late for him to be any different than how he was, but around this time in his life, he decided to try some “outward reformation.” His wife probably influenced him here. So he cleaned up the way he talked, he got sober, and this kinda became the buzz of the town. People noticed he was different … but, he said it was all outward; it wasn’t real; there were some sins that he would not let go … until one day, he’s in the town of Bedford, on the streets again, and he overhears a conversation between four women. They were just sitting outside in the sun, just talking.
And the names of these four women we will never know, but they were talking about their faith. It was a glorious unsupervised conversation. Bunyan was eavesdropping. And he said they talked like they had a real relationship with Jesus, and he had never heard anything like it before. He wrote:
… methought they spake as if joy did make them speak; they spake with such pleasantness of Scripture language, and with such appearance of grace in all they said, that they were to me, as if they had found a new world … (20)
Isn’t that amazing? These women were just talking. They had no idea Bunyan heard them. And it was was a turning point for him — it drove Bunyan to read the Bible, and really, he started to devour the Bible! He said this is when the Bible became very precious to him. And I think it was at some point around here that he was born again.
And one evidence of conversion was that he started struggling with doubts. He started doubting that he had faith. (And in general, only people who have faith doubt it — we can’t doubt a faith we don’t have.) And Bunyan had all kinds of doubts, and over and over again, he’d have a crisis and then, a verse of Scripture would bail him out. And it was seldom that this happened while he was actually reading the Bible.
Often, he’d be going about his day, plagued with doubts, and then a verse, he said, would “break upon my mind.” Or he said, “a Scripture would come upon me.” I could mention several examples:
Once it was Luke 14 where Jesus tells the story of the great banquet. The master of the house wanted a big party, but the first people he invited didn’t show up, so the master told his servant to go out into the city and invite “the poor and crippled and blind and lame.” And the servant did and he told the master, “still there is room for more.” That one sentence filled Bunyan with so much hope. He knew Jesus had room for him.
Another time it was 2 Corinthians 12:9, where Jesus tells Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you.”
Another time was John 6:37 where Jesus says, “Whoever comes to me I will never cast out.”
Bunyan saturated his mind and heart with Scripture, and the words of Scripture became useful in his battles. The Bible helped him on his journey. … And there was another book that helped him around this same time.
I want you to hear him talk about it. He writes:
“Well, after many such longings in my mind, the God in whose hands are all our days and ways, did cast into my hand, one day, a book of Martin Luther; it was his commentary on Galatians — it was so old that it was ready to fall piece from piece … [this would have been the early 1650s; Luther’s commentary was translated into English in 1575 — so the book was around 75 years old].
Bunyan said:
“I found my condition, in [Luther’s] 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.” (52)
This is key background info. Bunyan had been steeping in the theology of Luther, and namely, Luther’s teaching on justification by faith alone in Christ alone.
Episode 3: “Gold Was in My Trunk”
Now it was also around this time, in the early 1650s, that Bunyan started attending a small Baptist church in Bedford pastored by a man named John Gifford. Gifford was a guide for Bunyan, which he needed, because he still struggled with all kinds of anxiety and doubts.
He went through one dark valley after another, and then one day … he had another bail out, another breakthrough — and if this wasn’t his conversion, it at least confirmed his conversion.
He tells the story that one day he was walking through a field, and his conscience was weighed down and plagued by fear — he dealt with this all the time — and he said:
… suddenly 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, as my righteousness. … I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, not yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself …
Then he said:
“Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed, I was loosed from my affliction and irons, my temptations also fled away …”
And when he got home, he ran to his Bible to try to find that sentence that came upon his soul, and he landed on 1 Corinthians Chapter 1, verse 30 — the King James says:
“But of him [of God] are ye in Christ Jesus.”
God has made us to be in Christ.
God, by his Spirit, has brought us into union with Jesus through faith, and that means that Yes, Jesus is our righteousness, and more than that! — Paul says Jesus is our wisdom and our righteousness and our sanctification and redemption. In other words, Paul is saying Jesus is everything to us. All that Jesus is becomes ours because God has united us to him.
And it was here that Bunyan said “the Lord did lead me into the mystery of union with the Son of God.”
Up to this point, he said it was like he had been walking around with pocket change, only to discover that all along “gold was in my trunk at home.”
Union with Christ was gold to him.
Union with Christ is the central wonder of the gospel that unlocks all of its other benefits. Every saving gift we receive in the gospel, we receive by our union with Christ …
… so for our imagination’s sake … we should not think of ourselves as somehow standing apart from Jesus, and then Jesus merely hands us the gifts of the gospel.
Sometimes, in my mind, I can think that way: like the Father is here, and Jesus is here, and I’m here …and the Father is just funneling gifts through Jesus to me over here.
Wrong image. Instead, it’s more like the Father has given us to Christ!
He’s united us with Christ.
So it’s not that Jesus is here and then we are over here. But it’s that we are interlocked together in the center. And now every deed of Christ, every merit of Christ, every victory of Christ, belongs to me because I am in him. I have union with Christ!
And now all we can do — when we understand this — all we can do is to glory in Christ. This is why we boast in Christ alone. Because every saving gift we have is only found in him.
All glory be to Christ!
This is where we surrender everything to him … because once we truly surrender to Jesus all the glory, what’s left to withhold?
Episode 4: “I Will Venture for Thy Name”
Bunyan was baptized as a believer and became a member of the Bedford church, and that’s where he started preaching. He explained it pretty simply: he said he just wanted to show other Christians what God had shown him in the word. He starts preaching around 1655, at his church and in the area, and he starts writing some Christian books, but then on November 12, 1660 he was arrested because of his preaching ministry.
Things had changed in the English government. Charles II was now King, and he and the Parliament were against any dissenters from the Church of England. So they arrested Bunyan the Baptist in the middle of a church service.
He was 31 years old; his first wife had died two years earlier, and now his second wife, Elizabeth, was at home caring for his four young children, one of whom was blind. Elizabeth herself was pregnant, but not long after Bunyan was arrested, she went into preterm labor and the baby died.
And Bunyan spent the next 12 years of his life in that prison, and he suffered. He spent 12 years of his life in prison for preaching the gospel, and he also battled depression and he constantly feared execution.
He very much expected in those first years of his imprisonment that he would be put to death … because that happened a lot in those days. 11 years earlier, his side in the Civil War beheaded the King! They also beheaded the archbishop of the Church of England! Bunyan thought that he was going to the gallows.
He writes about this, that the thought of impending execution triggered all kinds of doubts for him. It was spiritual warfare. Bunyan said Satan constantly attacked him, and he became afraid that in the moment of his execution he would not feel comforted by God.
That was his issue.
He was not afraid of death, he was afraid of the experience, that in his final moments he would not experience assurance. He was afraid that Jesus would feel distant to him. He writes about this in his memoir — and it’s one of the most powerful things I’ve ever read.
Because Bunyan really wrestled with this. He said “I tossed for many weeks and knew not what to do.” It was a weight upon him. But then he comes to this amazing conclusion:
He says that if God gives him a feeling of comfort before his death, that’s God’s prerogative. But God does not owe it to him. And even if God does not give him a feeling of comfort, Bunyan said he would trust Christ anyway.
Bunyan realized that his faithfulness to Christ is not based on his felt comfort from Christ, but it’s based on Christ’s word. He said it doesn’t matter how I may feel, it’s my duty to stand on the word of Christ.
[So] I am for going and venturing my eternal state with Christ, whether I have comfort here or not … Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture for thy name.
Sometimes I wonder, in our Christian lives, if we withhold a deeper trust in Jesus because we think we’ve not felt enough comfort, or that we’ve not experienced enough peace. We might think that if Jesus just made us feel more blessed then we’d have more trust — basically, we try to determine our devotion to Jesus based upon our feelings.
But, what if we got to the place — feelings aside — where we just staked everything on Jesus because he’s worthy. This is when we are in the furnace of fire and we say: “I know God can deliver me from this, and he can make me feel better, but even if he doesn’t, I’m still with him.” I’m still with Jesus. I’m still gonna trust in Jesus because Jesus deserves my trust.
Look at him! Look at who he is! Look at what he’s done!
Get your eyes off yourself, and look to Jesus Christ! We trust him because he’s worthy.
John Bunyan is a help to us. His journey is an example, and may our lives honor Jesus the way his did.
That’s what brings us to the Table.
The Table
Jesus is everything to us. That’s the message of this Table.
We take the bread and cup to remember the gospel — that Jesus has died for us and has been raised from the dead for us, and we are united to him. That’s our only hope. It’s not our righteousness. Not the best obedience of our hands. But it’s Christ and Christ alone.
If he’s your hope, if you trust in Christ this morning, we invite you to eat and drink with us, and give him thanks.
