Reggie Weems’ Blog

What a blessed Sunday to hear from Tom Buck at Heritage Baptist this morning. We were fed the true Word of God and our souls were filled with the Lord’s overflowing mercies.  Three major points thrust into my heart as he preached. 

First, I should be troubled if I am comfortable in my sanctification and I should be comforted if I am troubled in the process.  What an oxymoron but how true of God’s work in our lives.  When we are strong, we are weak but when we are weak, we are strong.  When we are self-righteous, we have no righteousness but when we are depleted of any righteousness, we gain Christ’s true righteousness.  When we work to save our lives, we lose them and when we lose our lives, Christ saves them.  When we are troubled that we are not as sanctified as we would like to be, we are comforted in our salvation but when we are comfortable in our sanctification, we should be troubled that we are not growing closer to Christ.  For, anyone who ever came into contact with Christ was first troubled, then comforted, first convicted, then converted, first made aware of their sin and then saved from that sin.  What a glorious paradox. 

Secondly, it is the Spirit of God, through the Word of God, Who sanctifies us or conforms us to Jesus’ image.  Time spent reflecting in the Word is time spent reflecting on Jesus, Who, by that action, conforms us into His image.  Just as a man looks into a mirror and sees himself, when we look into the Bible, we see Jesus.  The more of Him we see, the more like Him we become.  The man looking into the mirror doesn’t make himself look like himself, it is just his reflection.  So, we cannot ‘make’ ourselves more like Christ but the Spirit of God can take the Word of God and create the life of God in us.  In this way, the law serves a good, holy and just purpose.  It reflects the character of God and shows me my shortcomings in the face of the God of glory (for all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory - Ro 3:23).  But the law cannot save me.  It only shows me that I need to be saved.  However, the Spirit of Christ can give me life -  Christ’s life, through His Word.  The Word provides light.  The Spirit provides heat.  Together they offer a power more potent than the sun. 

Thirdly then, sanctification is the means by which I can best love my wife, study for school, care for my children, serve my employer, care for my employees, invest my time, etc.  What?  Shouldn’t I rather, turn away from the Word and to  a study of these endeavors, in order to learn how best to be the best at each of them? Consider this. 

John Newton’s conscience was continually plagued by the thought that his love for his wife was idolatrous.  Newton felt his love for Polly to be inordinate.  He worried that he loved her more than he loved God.  Indeed he considered his passion for her an “idolatrous attachment” (quoted from Jonathan Aitken’s John Newton: From Disgrace to Grace.”)  Seriously, read “Letters to a Wife,”  a world-wide best seller which Newton published after Polly died.  (Men:  Don’t let your wives read it)  By the book’s publication, he intended to thank God for a godly wife, to honor Polly and demonstrate the wonders of a God-centered marriage.  “Letters to a Wife” contained letters that Newton had written to Polly throughout their “seven years of courtship and forty years of marriage” (JN:FDtG).  Many of Newton’s friends were teasingly angry that he published the book for it compelled them to rise to the ocassion of loving their own wives with equally ardent passion.

The key phrase is “a God-centered marriage.”  Newton enjoyed forty passionate years of marriage during which his love for his wife was so strong that he feared it was idolatrous.  What woman would not desire such human love?  What man would not want to love his wife so?  Yet it was out of his passion to love God, that Newton loved Polly. 

The month Newton died, William Jay visited him.  Jay recorded, “I saw Mr. Newton near the closing scene.  He was hardly able to talk; and all I find I had noted down upon my leaving was this:  “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things:  That I am great sinner and that Christ is a great Savior.”  (The movie, “Amazing Grace” quoted him saying those words to William Wilberforce)  Newton lived in a state of awe concerning God’s mercy toward him.  In response to that amazing grace and mercy, Newton authored his own tombstone.  It reads, “John Newton once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned and appointed to preach the faith he had long laboured to destroy.” 

That mercy powered his soul in unbridaled passion for everything with which God had graced his life, including his wife.  He loved her with the passion with which Christ loved him.  Simply put, his love for Christ was the source of His love for Polly.  He wanted her to experience God’s love, mercy and grace to the same extent that he had been blessed by God’s love, mercy and grace.  His passionate forty-seven year love affair had 2 Corinthians 3:18 at its core.  Gazing into Christ’s Word, He was transformed into the image of Christ, Who, through Newton, loved Polly with an undying, in fact, ever-increasing love.

John Newton’s life had one message; to make much of Jesus.  Tom Buck did the same at Heritage this morning.  He made much of Jesus.  He told us that God’s grand end in saving us was to conform us to the image of the Father’s Son.  And he not only told us what God was up to in our lives but also how God could accomplish it.  The Spirit of God, by the Word of God, would conform us to the image of God.  (And, by the way, what the world needs is more of God and less of us.)  In so doing, Tom took us to the singularly sufficient source for love of anything, our wives, husbands, children, grandchildren, church, work, hobbies, school…anything.  That Source is Jesus Christ Himself.  Both men, Newton and Buck, made too much of Jesus.  Then again, that cannot be done.                  

Every seventeenth century reader personally understood Bunyan’s rehearsal of his own spiritual pilgrimage, metaphorically set in the allegories of The Pilgrim’s Progress. As was commonly understood, Bunyan’s regenerative experience, early in the book, did not end the trauma from which he sought refuge, but only served to initiate the young convert into a world from which he must daily seek escape.  As such, he encountered such memorable places like the City of Destruction, the Valleys of Humiliation and the Shadow of Death, the Vanity Fair, the dungeon of Doubting Castle, the Giant Despair, the Wicked Gate, the King’s Highway, the Village of Morality, and finally, the Celestial City; as well as charismatic people like Worldly Wiseman, Talkative, Ignorance, Faithful, Hopeful. Bunyan himself encountered the house of Evangelist in the home of John Gifford, the pastor of the nonconformist church at Bedford, to whom he was introduced in 1651.  Every aspect of Bunyan’s own spiritual pilgrimage was clearly outlined in places and persons whose “names were changed to protect the innocent.”  But everyone knew exactly what he was writing about, for it was their own experience.  Thus, Bunyan’s allegories may be easily misunderstood as only autobiographical by modern readers, but every reader of his own generation easily recognized the horrors and joys of which Bunyan spoke out of his seventeenth Century, Puritanical, religious experience.  It was, in fact, “this strongly personal and experiential appeal that made Bunyan…attractive to those who found little solace in the more formal, liturgical worship of the established church.”[1]  He spoke the language of the common man in metaphors of their common experience yet his hope was to drive his readers, as he himself had been driven, to an uncommon, in fact, unique God Who alone could save him and them.            

“Just as the sinner’s despair of any hope from himself is the first prerequisite of a sound conversion, so the loss of all confidence in himself is the first essential in the believer’s growth in grace.”  - A.W. Pink

“Whenever and wherever the doctrines of free grace and justification by faith have prevailed in the Christian Church, and according to the degree of clearness with which they have been enforced, the practical duties of Christianity have flourished in the same proportion.  Wherever they have declined, or been tempered with the reasonings and expedients of men, either from a well-meant, though mistaken fear, lest they should be abused, or from a desire to accomodate the gospel and render it more palatable to the depraved taste of the world, the consequence has always been an equal declension in practice.  So long as the gospel of Christ is maintained without adulteration, it is found sufficient for every valuable purpose; but when the wisdom of man is permitted to add to the perfect work of God, a wide door is opened for innumeralbe mischiefs.”  -  John Newton in A Review of Ecclesiastical History (1769)

Read more on this work and its 21st century implications at www.reggieweems.blogspot.com. 

John Bunyan’s conversion experience was nothing less than dramatic, if not epochal (1650-55), yet not unlike the common religious experience of 17^th-century England.  He had “convinced himself that he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and so put himself outside of God’s mercy.”[1]  From the first mention of spiritual conviction until he gained the genuine assurance of his acceptance in Christ, not less than five grievous years passed.  “What kept Bunyan going was his fierce determination to be saved, his refusal to forget the promises, as Christian was to forget them in Doubting Castle, his refusal to despair.”[2]  The necessity of such an experience or its reality should not be diminished, yet it must be understood that Bunyan’s conversion is known to be remarkable, simply because he later wrote about it with such massive contrition in his autobiography, Grace Abounding (1666).  Otherwise, his conversion experience was in no way, singular, but in fact, common to his times. 

 He began, “I cannot now express with what longings and breakings in my soul I cried to Christ to call me.”[3]  He attempted to gain salvation by the merit of his works and so stopped swearing, gaming on Sundays and ringing the church bell, which he thoroughly enjoyed, for fear God would strike him with the bell because of his hypocrisy. 

 “What should a protestant Englishmen do to be saved? Who was to help them?  The Reformation had abolished priestly mediators. The Episcopal Church under Laud seemed to be reverting to popery.  The Presbyterian state church which replaced it had very little popular appeal. The Army guaranteed religious toleration, but could provide no agreed religious settlement…..Bunyan was driven back to the individualistic foundations of Protestantism, to Luther ‘an ancient godly man’s experience who had writ some hundreds of years before I was born.’  Bunyan regarded Luther’s Commentary on Galatians as second only to the Bible, ‘most fit for a wounded conscience’”[4] 

In an attempt to alleviate his burden and salve his conscience, “Bunyan began going to church twice each Sunday and his neighbors were amazed at the change in his life….”[5]  It was during this time that Bunyan was introduced to John Gifford, the nonconformist pastor of an Independent congregation in Bedford.  Through Gifford’s influence, Bunyan’s mind became “fixed on eternity.”[6]  Yet he knew that religion only damned him and could not save him. 

 However, once Christ showed Him the abundance and tenderness of His mercy toward sinners, Bunyan was forever captured by God’s amazing grace and love.  He wrote,   

 I remember that one day, as I was travelling into the country and musing on the wickedness and blasphemy of my heart, and considering of the enmity that was in me to God, that scripture came in my mind, He hath ‘made peace through the blood of his cross’ (Col.  1.20). By which I was made to see, both again, and again, and again, that day, that God and my soul were friends by this blood; yea, I saw that the justice of God and my sinful soul could embrace and kiss each other through this blood.  This was a good day to me; I hope I shall not forget it.[7]
           

Further evidence of his family’s lowly estate is evidenced in the fact that his father’s home contained only one hearth and was therefore, exempt from the heart tax in 1673-74.  To better estimate the family’s social standing even more, it should be noted that, of Bedford’s approximately two thousand inhabitants, sixty-one houses had one hearth, eighteen had two hearths, eight possessed three and the remaining ten contained anywhere from four to seventeen in each home.  Marriage did nothing to discourage or enhance is social standing but left it simply as it had always been.  Bunyan wrote of his marriage, “This woman and I came together as poor as might be, not having so much household stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both.”[1] 

 Bunyan’s mother died in June of 1644 and his sister, in July.  “Before yet another month had gone by over this twice-opened grave, his father had brought home another wife to take the vacant place.”[2]  Remarriage was common in the 17^th century.  Bunyan’s grandfather remarried three times, his father twice (Bunyan’s own mother was his father’s second wife) and Bunyan himself remarried once.  Yet perhaps because of the estrangement created by the marriage, the barely sixteen year old Bunyan enlisted in the army in November of that same year and spent three years in military service engaged in the English Civil Wars.  Upon enlisting, he was immediately quartered in a Parliamentarian levy at the garrison of Newport Pagnell, an area whose primary involvement in the war had already occurred prior to his arrival. 

 Because Bunyan’s wartime stories are primarily secondhand, it is unlikely that he engaged in active warfare although his unit did engage the enemy.  Once again, the invisible yet present hand of God intervened in the young soldier’s life.  “When I was a soldier, I with others, was drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it.  But when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go in my room; to which when I consented, he took my place, and coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel he was shot in the head with a musket bullet and died.”[3]  Nonetheless, his military service divinely provided the seed for a rich field of imaginative stories for The Holy War (1682), Bunyan’s richly descriptive allegory in which the town of Mansoul is besieged by the devil and his legions, is rescued by the army of Emanuel, only later to be continually undermined by further diabolic plots and attacks against Emmanuel’s rule.

 
 Military life also unveiled a world Bunyan would have otherwise never been privy to, through the likes of Cromwell’s Army, the Quakers, Seekers and Ranters, all of whom would play important, often controversial roles in his life as a pastor and author.  “The Parliamentary victory at Naseby in June of 1645 virtually ended the war; but more than two years elapsed before Bunyan was demobilized.”[4]  His tour of duty officially ended on July 21, 1647 and a war-weary, 19-year old John Bunyan returned to the small town of Elstow to begin what he must have considered would be an uneventful civilian life.       

  
Soon after his demobilization from the army, Bunyan married but “we know virtually nothing about his first wife, not even her name.”[5]  His first daughter, Mary, was born blind and baptized on July 20, 1650, prior to Bunyan’s 21^st birthday.  Yet even the joy of this first daughter’s birth brought pain to Bunyan upon the beginning of his lengthy imprisonment. 

 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.[6]

 
 One more girl, Elizabeth, and two boys, John and Thomas were the fruit of his first union, before his first wife died in 1658.  Not unlike his father or any man of his era, Bunyan remarried a year later to a woman with the name of his second daughter.  Elizabeth’s first great contribution to Bunyan’s future life was her spiritual dowry inherited from a godly father and two books, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety, both of which became conduits for the Holy Spirit’s convicting power.  In addition, she would serve as a constant encouragement to him during his ministry, especially during his imprisonment, caring for both he and the family left unattended and at a 17^th century world’s mercy.    
 
 

It is simply impossible to properly understand or appreciate John Bunyan’s life and ministry apart from a deep understanding of his times.  In the midst of such a religiously vacillating era, John Bunyan, Christian, husband, father, pastor, and author, was released in 1672, from the Bedford prison in which he had suffered as a prisoner for twelve years.  Located about fifty-miles northwest of London, Bedford had been Bunyan’s hometown since 1654, having been born of his mother, Margaret, in Elstow, a small village approximately one mile south of Bedford, in November of 1628.  Elstow’s religious affairs were dominated by a nunnery at least until 1558.  However, “The Puritan movement, like the Protestant before it, found a congenial home in Bedfordshire”[1]  Even in this, God sovereignly laid the groundwork for Bunyan’s divinely crafted cradle.    

 For instance, Elstow was located in England’s agricultural heartland, its economy depended primarily on a lace industry introduced by Huguenots, French Protestants, who fled France during for England Elizabeth I’s reign.  No doubt, Elstow’s annual, three-day, May fair undoubtedly provided a backdrop for Bunyan’s view of carnality, Vanity Fair in his Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), a work never out of print since its first publication.  At his grandfather, Thomas’ death, the elder Bunyan bequeathed half of his Elstow property to his son, also named Thomas, a brazier or tinker, by trade.  Bunyan’s great grandfather was a beer brewer; his grandfather “described himself as a ‘brazier’ and ‘petty chapman;’”[2] a profession inherited by his son of the same name and John Bunyan himself.  Not by coincidence then, but by divine design, John Bunyan inherited his ancestor’s genes and vocation, both of which served as pivotal markers throughout his lifetime.  In 1905 Bunyan’s own anvil, stamped with his name and the date of 1647, was discovered at St. Neots, a small town also located on the River Great Ouse, near Bedford.

 
 Although Bunyan’s family belonged to the Anglican Church, there is no indication that Bunyan’s father professed experiential Christianity.  “In 1663, when his father was still alive, he reflected ‘how happy a thing it would be, if God should use a child to get his father to the faith.’”[3]  Lacking any genuine religious inspiration, Bunyan wrote of himself, “It was my delight to be taken captive by the devil at his will:  being filled with all unrighteousness; that from a child I had few equals, both for cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God.”[4]   In fact, he was the “ringleader” of a group of idle young men given to swearing and breaking the strict Puritan Sabbath.”[5]  Yet just as tinker utilized his Bible in preaching and pen in writing, God used the days previous to Bunyan’s conversion to make the tinker’s ministry even more powerful.
 

Bunyan commonly referred to his impoverished upbringing and “was always inclined to make the most of his lowly origins”[6]  Whatever the true estate of his family of origin; there is no question that he inherited humble beginnings and such a lowly social standing certainly effected the young Bunyan, even limiting his formal education to less than a few years.  But just as Tyndale’s new English vocabulary (1494-1536) necessarily preceded Shakespeare (1564-1616), John Bunyan could not have been the prodigious writer of history before William Shakespeare and knowing neither Hebrew or Greek, Bunyan was entirely dependent on Tyndale’s English Bible for his study, preaching and writing.   He was born into a time in which the English language had literally been wholly prepared for The Pilgrim’s Progress, after the Bible, the second most often printed book in the history of the English language.  So the young tradesman learned metalworking from his father and received an education commensurate with his family’s social standing and income.  Such learning amounted to reading and writing but little beyond those basics.  All of this, divinely orchestrated wholly apart from the man himself, of course, only makes Bunyan’s writing, fame and enduring influence all the more astounding.  In future years, John Owen, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell and one of Puritanism’s most famous theologians, often retreated to the countryside to hear Bunyan preach.  When asked to explain the much-educated Owen’s fascination with the tinker’s religious rantings, Owen replied that “he would gladly exchange all his learning for Bunyan’s power of touching men’s hearts.”[7]