Bunyan Bit No. 5: God’s Protection
Here is something that may surprise you Christians, if your eyes are awake enough to see: a person is assaulted with all hell’s power, and yet comes out the conqueror. Isn’t it amazing to see a poor creature, weaker than a moth, yet able to stand against devils and overcome not only them, but all the world, all the soul’s selfish corruption? And if this person does fall beneath the attack, watch and see what happens. Devils and guilt weigh this man or woman down, and yet they struggle back to their feet and walk with God again, persevering after all they’ve been through, walking onward in the gospel’s faith and holiness. Anyone who knows their own heart will be surprised; anyone who knows temptation, will wonder how this can be true; anyone who has experienced falls and guilt for themselves, will be amazed. Perseverance is truly a wonderful thing, and we can only manage it by the power of God; for He is the only One who ‘is able to keep us from falling, and to present us faultless before the presence of his glory, with exceeding joy.’
– John Bunyan, The Riches of Bunyan (p. 241)
Bunyan Bit No. 4: The Glory of God
God is the highest good — good as nothing else is but Himself. He is intrinsically happy; in fact, all good and all true happiness are to be found only in God, since they are essential to his nature. No one can be happy or experience any goodness unless God communicates His own glad goodness, and nothing pleases unless it is a vehicle for God. God is the only good worth wanting; nothing without Him is worthy of our hearts. Sound thinking about God grips our emotions, and those people who possess a share of God are happier, for God alone can, all by Himself, put the soul into a more blessed, comfortable, and happy state than can the whole world, more, in fact, than if all the created happiness of all the angels of heaven lived in one person’s heart. I cannot think what more to say. I am overwhelmed. The life, the glory, the blessedness, the soul-satisfying goodness that is in God, are beyond all expression.
– John Bunyan, The Riches of Bunyan (p. 23)
Bunyan Bit No. 3: God Will Not Fail You
It has been a while since I have posted some Bunyan! I’m submitting many wonderful passages from The Riches of Bunyan that will be automatically posting during the next few months. Enjoy!
God has strewed the way from the gate of hell where you used to be, you who are on your way, all the way to the gate of heaven where you are going, with flowers from His own garden. Look how the promises, invitations, calls, and encouragements, like lilies, lie around your feet. Be careful not to step on them.
– John Bunyan, The Riches of Bunyan (p. 249)
Bunyan Bit No. 2: Christ the Advocate
“There is someone to plead for you with the Father. He is Jesus Christ, the one who pleases God completely” (1 John 2:1). This thought will bring you relief when your faith is discouraged and afraid. Satan can take some of Christ’s other functions and twist them around to frighten us. After all, Christ, as a prophet, sentences sin’s crime, and Christ, as a king, has the power to execute that sentence. Satan, however, as our enemy, has enough cleverness to abuse both these aspects of Christ to overthrow the faith of the children of God.
Christ is our advocate. This realization will help you to pull off the mask that Satan has tried to put over Christ’s face, misrepresenting Him to you so that you will be weakened and frightened. This is one of the most common ruses that Satan uses against God’s saints; he loves to take a spark of truth, bringing fire from Christ’s truth, and use it to burn us. He tries to make Christ look as though His face is so angry and distant, that a person who is tempted and guilty will hardly be able to look up at God.
But when you think, “Christ really is my Advocate,” this heals everything. Children can sometimes be scared if their father puts a masks over his face, but if the father speaks with Daddy’s voice, then the mask is gone, if not from the father’s face, yet from the child’s mind. Despite the mask, the child will crawl into the father’s lap.
This is exactly what happens when Satan deludes the saints by showing them a disfigured image of Christ’s face. Let them just hear their Lord speak in His own voice — and when we hear Him speak as an advocate this is His daddy-voice — and their minds will be calmed, their thoughts settled, their guilt will disappear, and their faith will revive.
Is Christ Jesus the Lord my advocate with the Father? Then wake up, my faith, and shake yourself like a giant, rouse yourself and stop being faint: Christ is the advocate of His people, and as for sin and selfishness, the one thing, my faith, that you most often trip over, well, Christ not only died for that, and not only carried His sacrifices to the Father into the holiest of all, but what is more, He continues to uphold that offering as an advocate, pleading its power and worth before God and against the devil for us.
The modest saint is apt to be embarrassed, thinking how troublesome she is or what a lazy good-for-nothing he has been in God’s house all day. Go ahead and blush, but never forsake your advocate.
– John Bunyan, The Riches of Bunyan (p. 116)
April 29, 2008 | Filed Under Bunyan Bits | Leave a CommentBunyan Bit No. 1: Conscience
This is my first posting of the “nuggets” that I will be posting regularly from John Bunyan which I mentioned in my previous post. There are so many that I have already marked and highlighted; they are so good! So I just picked one of the ones I have read first and will post it as the first one. I hope you enjoy these “Bunyan Bits” as much as I am; I am eating them like a beggar with bread!
The conscience has its place in the soul, where it is like a judge to tell the good things from the bad, judging them accordingly (Romans 2:14). The conscience is the same as the law of nature (1 Corinthians 11:14), which is able to teach those who don’t know God’s Word that sin against the law is sin against God.
Now this conscience, a part of human nature itself, can control and scold those who will listen to it — but should we depend only on our conscience, making a god of it? How strange that people would make a God and a Christ out of their consciences, just because the conscience can convict of sin.
You say, If my conscience convinces me of sin against the law, then it will also help me fulfill the law. Friend, your conscience convinces you that you’ve sinned against the law, but follow your conscience, and it will only lead you under the law’s curse, for it is too weak to do anything else. It can never deliver you from the curse of the law, for if forgiveness came by obedience to the law, or by our conscience either, then Christ wouldn’t have needed to die (Galatians 2:21).
–John Bunyan, The Riches of Bunyan (p. 55)
April 24, 2008 | Filed Under Bunyan Bits | Leave a Comment
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